Why We Need a Role Model // How to Live an Extraordinary Life, Pt 1

A Different Perspective Official Podcast

Let’s face it, we all model our lives on something … or on someone. We just do. The sad thing is when we pick the wrong role model, it can take us in a terribly wrong direction. So where do we find the sort of role model that will lead us to live … and extraordinary life?

Hey, beginning of a great new week, love it, love it, love it and welcome to the program today. Over the coming few weeks we're going to be looking at how to live an absolutely extraordinary life. I mean we all wish we could, some people are, some people, well, and some people not so much right?

But just stop and think about this for a minute, what if you and I could live a totally outrageously extraordinary life? I mean a life that really impacts other people for the right reasons instead of the wrong ones; a life that people would remember with fondness, with gratitude; the sort of life that will have people queuing up at your funeral to deliver your eulogy. Let me, no me, I want to tell people about the impact he's had or the impact she's had.

And I know there's one or two people listening to me rabbiting on thinking to themselves, 'Yeah well that would be nice but ..." You see it's always the "but". Well here's my challenge, no "ifs", no "buts", no "maybes", do you want to live an extraordinary life, yes or no? And if the answer is yes then let’s have a chat.

So what stops us from leading an extraordinary life? We can blame all sorts of things. We can blame our circumstances, we can blame our parents, our DNA, our personality type, the place or the family or the time we were born into and grew up in, the bad things that happened, and okay, just perhaps maybe a few of the mistakes we've made along the way.

But who we are, the abilities and limitations we've been given, how tall we are, the colour of our hair or our skin, how smart we are or aren't, all of those things are things we just can't change. I mean I can't change who I am and you certainly can't change who you are but what we can do is make the most of what we've been given.

The problem is with a lot of self help rhetoric, a lot of the motivational speakers, all that genre of stuff is that what they tell you is you can be whoever you want to be, you can do whatever you want to do, you can have whatever you want to have and my answer to that is, well actually no you can't, it's just not true.

I mean I'd love to be a great artist but I can't draw or paint for nuts. I'd love to be a great photographer but I just don't have the eye for it. I'd love to be a basketball player but you know what, I'm too short. I'd love to be ... Do you get it?

It doesn't matter how positively I think, how hard I strive, how focused I am, I am never ever, ever going to be tall enough to be a great basketball player. Forget the fact that I'm just a little bit old for it anyhow.

So it's not about being or doing or having anything our little heart desires, I mean come on that's fairyland stuff, it's about being realistic about who we are, what we're capable of and saying to ourselves, you know something I want to make my life count given the obvious constraints, we all have them even though they're different, I want my life to count. I want my life to make a positive difference in this world because if it's not then we're sort of living a meaningless existence, an unfulfilling life.

I'll tell you what I think the biggest reason that most people don't live lives that count, it's because we've modelled ourselves on wrong principles, on wrong beliefs and on wrong behaviours.

We go to school to learn how to read, how to write, how to do arithmetic but there doesn't seem to be a formal school to teach us life, how to live, how to be affective, how to be gracious, how to forgive. That bit of learning, the most important bit of learning of all when you think about it, is pretty much left to chance in most cultures and so we pick things up by, I don't know, watching our parents and mimicking them. Some of that's good, some of it's not which is why the bad traits like anger and abuse get handed down from one generation to the next and on to the next.

We watch our teachers, we pick things up in the school yard and on television and advertising billboards and somehow that all goes in the blender and out pops who you are, who I am, good, bad and sometimes frankly ugly. I mean that's about it and when you look at things that way it's just a little bit scary. No wonder we're not living lives that count, lives that make a positive difference in this world.

We've picked up some good habits and lots of bad habits, some good attitudes and lots of wrong ones and the bad stuff we've picked up, that's the stuff you might hear Christians talking about and calling it sin, that bad stuff holds us back from realising our potential to do good, our potential to make a difference, our potential to experience the satisfaction of using who we are and what we have to help other people.

Okay so what's the answer? Do we need a classroom? Do we need teachers? Do we need a curriculum on how to be the best person we can be? Yeah well maybe in small doses and in a sense that's what these programs are about but you know that old Chinese proverb,

Tell me and I'll forget, show me I might remember, involve me and I'll understand.

That's exactly what Jesus did and you know what, He's still doing it with His disciples.

Consider those first twelve disciples, they hung out with Him for about three and a half years, He taught them, He listened to them, He dealt with some of their wrong stinking attitudes, He admonished them, He encouraged them but above all He involved them.

See they got to watch Him to see how He responded and He reacted, what He said when He was kind and gentle, when He was tough as nails, when He protested and when He was silent. They got to model themselves on Jesus.

Hey now there's an idea do you think? What if instead of soaking it all up without thinking, what if instead of assimilating selfishness and loneliness and all that stuff from our culture, what if we deliberately followed Jesus around for a while and watched Him and listened to Him and let Him guide us and involve us and teach us and disciple us and mould us and shape us into something that looks a lot like Him? Hey now that will be cool.

Well my friend that's exactly what we're going to be doing on the program over the next few days and indeed over the next few weeks. See often we'll take on a little thing that Jesus said or did. We'll study it, we'll read the passage, we'll go over and over and over it again in the Bible. We'll learn from it, we'll squeeze it, we'll turn it upside down and then we'll move on.

But what if we took a look at His life, how He lived His life and soaked it up on the basis that there simply is no better role model on any planet in any galaxy in any universe than Jesus? What if we looked at some of the really familiar stories perhaps from a different perspective, from a slightly different angle, as a student looking to his mentor?

What if we saw when Jesus was angry and we thought 'now Jesus was angry, why was He angry, how did He handle anger, how did He speak to people? Wow I could learn something from that. Jesus was silent when He was accused, why was He silent, what can I learn from that?'

See that would be cool and you know the amazing thing that happens when we start doing that is that all of a sudden Jesus starts involving us in His work, all of a sudden He starts discipling us. He starts teaching us and He starts speaking to us through what's going on in our lives because that Jesus isn't dead. He's alive and anyone, anyone who would believe in Him and follow Him, to that person He sends His Holy Spirit to be our counsellor, our advocate, our guide, our personal life coach.

Want to know how to live an extraordinary life? Just take a look at Jesus.