Live Free with Josh Howerton - A Good Father & Good Gifts | Ep. 128 | Wednesday August 2, 2023

Episode Date: August 2, 2023

God's will for our lives doesn't have to be as complicated as we often make it out to be. Pastor Mike unpacks how waiting actively and living dependently on God can lead us to make wise decisions and live a deeply fulfilling life. We can trust our Heavenly Father! For more information, visit lakepointe.church/dailydrive

Thanks for tuning in to today's Daily Drive with Lake Point Church, a daily dose of God's word for your morning drive. When the word, not the world, becomes the majority of your week, your life will start to change. For that reason, our prayer is that God will speak to you through today's devotional. For more digital content to feed your faith, visit lakepoint.comit. Church slash daily drive. And now let's dive in to today's devotional. Hey, what's up everybody? I'm Mike Bro, and welcome to the Daily Drive podcast where we've been learning in recent weeks that God is not silent. He does speak and he does lead and he does have a great adventure kind of plan for our lives, a master plan full of hope and deep fulfillment. And hopefully we're beginning to see that maybe this discovering God's will thing is not as complicated as we try to make it. Maybe it's not like an escape room or a thousand piece puzzle or some secret code that only a hand. handful of chosen ones can crack. We've been learning that it's not for a select few, but for ordinary people like you and me that God has a plan for every one of our lives, and discovering

it is far simpler than we think that it is. We've just been learning some principles together that help us relax and listen and wait and not get so stressed out about all the decisions that we face. And it's been freeing to learn that God's will is a whole lot less about going and doing, and much more about you and me just being. We've been learning this week that God is never in a hurry. We read in Psalm 37 that we need to rest in the Lord and wait patiently for him to move. And we talked about how waiting is not necessarily a passive thing.

Rather, we are to wait actively and live dependently. And to wait actively and live dependently means you just keep on doing the right thing at the job you're currently at, in the home where you now live, at the school you're enrolled in now, the relationship you are in at the moment, you work and move and relate with honor and dependability and goodness and faithfulness. You just bloom where you plan it.

You surrender to his leadership all day, every day, in all the little things. You talk with him all day long in every situation. You dive into the river of his mighty wisdom and wherever the flow takes you during the day. You distrust him. I think if you will spend some time just soaking in those principles

and asking the Holy Spirit of God to stamp those in your mind and your heart and you begin to actually live that way, your anxiety levels will go way down and you'll start to live with a sense of freedom and purpose and peace that you've never known. Now, I say purpose, because God really does have a plan for our lives. He's not uninterested in what you do or where you go.

He wants to help you and me make wise decisions that will lead us down super-productive paths. He wants you to unleash the unique personality, give some passions he put within you to make a difference, some ripples, if you will, in this world. He wants to fill you with deep satisfaction that you are making your life count while you're on this planet. In our next episode, I want to start unpacking some ways that God does give us leadership and direction, some ways to discern where he might be leading us. And before we start doing that, I want to offer up one more biblical principle that I hope will further simplify the way that you think about God's will for your life. It's found in that verse we saw yesterday, where it says, trust in the

Lord and do good, dwell in the land, and cultivate faithfulness. And here's the verse we saw yesterday. Delight yourself and the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart. Now we said that that's conditional promise. There's a part A, delight yourself in the Lord, then a part B, and then he will give you the desires of your heart. But I'm guessing when some of you hear that, you say, yeah, right. Sure seems like God doesn't care about my desire. at all. And you know what? That's a lie that the enemy has been perpetuating since that day in the Garden of Eden. Starting with Adam and Eve, he's been whispering to men and women, God doesn't want you to have the best, God don't want you to really be happy. God's holding back on you. You need to take control of your own life.

You could be your own God. And from that day forward, the enemy has been trying to convince people that somehow God is a very twisted kind of God. He spins the lies saying, the way God really gets his kicks, is trying to find creative ways to make you people miserable. So there's no use telling God what you really desire, because if you did, he'd give you exactly the opposite. If you've been hanging with us for a while, then you know that the truth about God is that he longs to be our Father. He wants to give us good gifts, and if he holds something back,

it's just because he knows it was not the best for us. He has hopes and dreams and plans for us. He wants to lead us to places and purposes where we feel fully alive, and deeply satisfied, that's the truth. And this is one of those verses that assures us that if you and I will walk with God, if we'll talk with God, trust in God, if we would make the primary joy of our hearts to know him, pursue him, open up our lives to him, love him, if we will make him the delight of our hearts, then he will give us the desires of our hearts.

And we all have passions in us. God put them there. So I invite you to come back tomorrow and I'm going to give you a simple principle that's helped me pursue the passions that God put inside of me. Until next time, just simply delight yourself in the Lord. That's the main thing anyway. Have a great day. See you back tomorrow. Thanks for tuning in today.

For more biblical teaching and worship, join us for our church online live weekend services on Saturdays at 6 p.m. and Sundays at 9.30 and 11 a.m. Central Standard Time. Also, if this podcast was helpful to you, would you be sure to rate, review, and share this podcast to help get the word out. For more information about all digital ministries of Lake Point, visit lakepoint.compt.combe.