Live Free with Josh Howerton - Follow God’s Voice | Ep. 114 | Thursday July 13, 2023

Episode Date: July 13, 2023

In this episode, Pastor Mike Breaux dives into three foundational principles for understanding God's will. First, we learn that God's will is more about the person we are becoming than what we do or where we go. Second, we discover that God longs for us to desire Him more than His answers for our life. And third, we emphasize that our role is not to find God's will but to follow God's voice. 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.com. church slash daily drive. And now let's dive in to today's devotional. Hey, welcome to the podcast. My name is bro and thrilled to be hanging with you for a few minutes Monday through Friday where we just dive into God's word together, get to know him a little better. And if you're new to the podcast, man, welcome. We're all on different mile markers on our spiritual

journey. And whether you're just starting out or you've been walking with God for a while, man, just super grateful to have you along. And we've been talking about finding God's will for our life in recent days. to learn about how God leads us and speaks and guides us to the right places. But more importantly, how He shapes us into the right kind of people for those places. Now, we've already shared two foundational principles for understanding how this whole God's will thing works. And the first one is this. God's will is much more about who we are than what we do or where we go. Who we are becoming as people is much more important than what career path we choose, what school we decide to attend,

or what city we plant our roots in. We talked about how if you look up the scriptures with passages with the phrase, God's will or God wants or God's desire, that it's almost always about the kind of character he wants to shape in us. God's will is much more about who we are than what we do or where we go.

Principle two was this. God longs for us to desire him more than his answers for our life. We talked about how you and I make just being with him our number one passion, when we do that, that's when we begin to sense his answers and direction for our life. It's out of that intimacy that God really leads. He wants to lead us, and he will lead us, but he longs for us to desire him more than his answers for our life. So let me just give you

one more foundational principle for today. Here it is. Our role is not to find God's will, but to follow God's voice. Our role is not so much to find God's will, but to follow God's voice. there's so many people out there. I run into them all the time, saying, man, I'm not looking for a sign. I'm looking for a sign. And I've known people who go around like unscrambling headlines and license plate numbers. They look to cloud formations and horoscopes and fortune cookies and song lyrics. I mean, you name it, just looking for a sign trying to find God's will. Our role is not to find God's will, but to follow God's voice. Again, I think we make finding God's will way too complicated. It's like a

Sudoku or like a Where's Waldo puzzle. I just love the simplicity of the account of Jesus calling his first disciples. You can find it in Matthew 4. He says this as Jesus was walking beside the Sea of Galilee. He saw two brothers. Simon called Peter

and his brother Andrew. They were casting a net into the lake for they were fishermen. Come follow me, Jesus said. I'll make you fishers of men. At once they left their nets and they followed him. These guys didn't know where they were going. They had no clue as to the specifics of the plan,

but they knew Jesus did, so they heard his voice, trusted his heart, and they just followed him. And you know, a whole lot of stress left my life when it became enough for me to know that there is a master plan for my life, and I know where it is. Now, I don't have it.

It's not in my house, it's not in my office, it's not on my laptop, not in the bed of my truck. It's not in my mind. It's not in my weak and clumsy hands. But there is a master plan for my life, and I know right where it is. It's in the capable and loving hands of my father. And I just trust him with it.

I was in a Walgreens a while back trying on some of those new readers. Anybody else need those things? They have a little sign there on the rack of glasses to stand back 14 inches, and you can try different pairs on this better, worse, better, worse. This was much, much clearer. You've seen those clareton commercials right? where everything on the screen is foggy and dull, and then everything is suddenly cleric and clear.

We have a tendency to tell God, God, I'll trust you. But things are a little foggy right now. I sort of kind of want to walk by faith, but I just need a little HD. I need a little clarity. You know what a while back, I stopped praying for clarity, and I started praying for a deeper trust. Not that praying for clarity is wrong,

but just for me personally, I knew that by craving clarity, I was really just trying to eliminate some of the risk that trusting God requires. You see, my job in this world is not to go out with a magnifying glass and sip through the haystack of this world, to try to find, see if I can try to find the needle of God's will for my life. My job and responsibility in this deal is to surrender to his higher ways, to surrender to his better wisdom, deeper love,

and follow the leadership of God as he gives it to me throughout the day, to obey him and walk in step every single day with his word, with his guiding eye, with his voice as he gives leadership to my life, in the big things and in the little things. That's my role. That's your role. I mean, some of us get so stressed out, trying to sift through life to see if we can finally discover God's will,

when all along he's never asked us to do that. He's asked us just to follow his lead. In the Gospel of John, chapter 10, Jesus had been talking about giving leadership to people who will follow him, and this is what he said, My sheep, listen to my voice. I know them, and they follow me. He said, my sheep don't go out and try to search for my will.

My sheep are really good listeners, and they know when I'm speaking, and they hear the things I'm saying, and they follow where I lead them and what I ask them to do. Now, you know, sheep got some good things going for them, and they got some bad things going for them. One of the bad, that, sorry about that, they have going to resist it, have going for them, is they don't see real well.

I mean, they could use some readers from Walgreens like me. However, they hear extraordinarily. So shepherds would begin to sing or begin to speak, and as he began to walk, and while he walked and sang and while he spoke, all the little, I don't see very well sheep, would hear his voice and just start trickling along behind him as he led them. And as a result, they would end up in places that he always intended for them to get to, because they followed his voice.

Denny Crum recently passed away. He was a great Hall of Fame college basketball coach who led those amazing Louisville Cardinal basketball teams. He was the disciple of John Wooden. So he was also the kind of coach that has soft-spoken, kind, calm, demeanor. He wasn't a yeller. My buddy Bob Russell was invited one time to sit on the bench at a University of Louisville game. And he sat there amazed how the players could hear Denny Crum's voice in the middle of thousands of screaming fans. I mean, this calm demeanor, this conversational tone, they could all hear exactly what he was saying.

Why? Because he heard him every day in practice. You see, the key is to be so dialed in in a relationship with God and to His Word that we can hear his voice above all the noise when he talks to us. And we can trust him and just follow him. Let me leave you with a couple of verses today. Proverbs 3, 5, and 6, one of those verses I call tattoo worthy. A lot of people have this one. trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding and all your ways

acknowledge him, and he will make your path straight. So how about today we say, Father, I'm committing my path to you all day long today, in every encounter today, in every moment today, in every challenge, every big adventure I got on my schedule, I just want to walk with you. I'm going to lean into your wisdom today, and I will listen well. I will trust your leadership. I will surrender to your transforming power, and I will cooperate with you today as you mold me into the right kind of person so that wherever you might leave me throughout this day, I will know that I am in the center of your will. Have a great day to day. See you next time.

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.