Live Free with Josh Howerton - His Image Not Ours | Ep. 362 | Tuesday, June 25, 2024

Episode Date: June 25, 2024

To know who you are, you need to know who God is. Once you can see Him and His character we can then see who He says we are. When we see who we are in Him, we can be free. Free from chasing and scheming for the next little hit of success. In freedom, we don't have to keep up because He is enough. 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. And now let's dive in to today's devotional. Hey, what is up, everybody? Thanks for joining us on the Daily Drive today. I'm Mike Bro, and honored that you would spend a few minutes with us. We are simply trying to draw closer to God through what we do here together, and it doesn't matter if you're just starting this pursuit

of knowing God or you've been doing it a long time. We're all on this journey together, and I just think that's a very cool thing. Recently, we've been looking at five easy ways to wreck your life. There's this journal that's tucked in the Old Testament section of the Bible, written by a wealthy, powerful king named Solomon. It's called Ecclesiastes, and it is the unvarnished, regret-filled account of how he wrecked his life, and now he wants to encourage all of us, don't do the same things that I did. We've already seen how he said to us, if you want to wreck your life, let pleasure drive you. Just let your appetites and desires not God lead your life. You do that and guaranteed. A train wreck is getting ready to happen. And then he said, and while you're out there riding the pleasure train,

go ahead and let success consume you. Let performance define you, spend every waking hour in the comparison trap, and you'll really screw things up. Talk about an identity crisis. And here's the deal. If you live there long enough, you will eventually start doing whatever it takes to win. And most times whatever means,

whatever is at the sake of your character. If you have to cheat, if you have to lie, If you got to mislead, defraud, use, abuse, power up, or manipulate, you do it. And you think, well, hey, it's just the cost of doing business, right? That's what it takes to be successful in this competitive economy, right? Maybe. But not in God's economy. When we get so consumed with chasing this image that the world says we have to achieve,

we will do whatever it takes. We'll begin to neglect the important stuff, the inside stuff, the character stuff, and that just screws up everything. I began to think about this several years ago, and I put a little diagram in a book I attempted to write called Identity Thief. It's not on the New York Times bestseller list. I'm not even sure it's still a seller. But I thought it might be helpful to illustrate this chasing after the win idea in regard to success.

I want you to imagine with me the drawing of a cycle with these three words. Image at the top, then idolatry, then identity. So you start with image at the top. this world's definition of success. You say, this is what you have to look like. This is what you have to be like, dress like. This is where you need to live. This is what you need to drive. These are the places you're supposed to belong to and the crowd you're supposed to be seen with. And as we run after that image we put at the top, we find that it starts to consume our life and all of our energies, our time, our affection, our attention, our resources, our dedication.

All of our thoughts are set on that image. And what God may want for, our life really isn't given a second thought because honestly all of our worship and devotion and affection is spent bowing down to the image. The Bible has a word for that. Let's move counterclockwise on the cycle to the word idolatry. That's the worship of anything other than God. We become a worshipper of the image. We chase after it at all cost. We are saying more than anything else. That's what I want and life. And when all of our focus, our worship, our devotion goes there, it leads to a real identity crisis. Let's keep moving counterclockwise on the cycle, because now our identity is all wrapped up in what we have, what we wear, what we look like, who we hang with,

what we do, how much we make, how well we perform, and our thinking gets all to store it. We can't see ourselves as God sees us because honestly, he's like way down the list of things we worship, really like number 25 on the list of things we're chasing after. And as a result, we can become these envious, competitive, self-absorbed, stressed out, insecure approval-seeking people. And when it all comes crashing down, and I'm telling you, it always does, you have no idea who you really are. Because you never really got to know who God is.

If anything, he's just the guy you expect to help you achieve the image that you're bowing down to. Does that cycle make sense to you? ever lived there before that's what happened to solomon that's what happened to so many of us we chase after some kind of image and it throws us into idolatry which ends up stealing our identity and pulls us far away from the deep satisfaction that only god can give it's a terrible cycle to get caught up in it's this picture of Habel the chasing of the wind here's the way it ought to work think with me again three words identity now at the top start at the top with identity Get to know who God is.

Chase after him. Get to know his true character, not some distorted view, but what his word says about him. And as you do, you'll also get to know who you are in his eyes. And you will reclaim your true identity. Because when we embrace our true identity as a much-loved child of God, and let's move clockwise down on this cycle, it leads to intimacy. You get to really know him. And really what makes his heartbeat,

And a lot of those approval and security issues, they get resolved. It decreases our hunger for power or the applause of other people because we already have the applause of heaven. We're no longer obsessed with being first, tops, recognize, rewarded, famous, or known. We're already known. We're already accepted. You're free to love and be loved. You start to be able to focus on so much more than yourself.

You begin to see a different definition of success, which isn't even close to the image that you used to chase in worship, and your heart starts to beat after the same things that God's art beats after, and life starts to make sense, and purpose starts to surge through your veins, and you begin to reflect still moving counterclockwise the right kind of image, his image.

So what do you say we get caught in that cycle today? Because when I get to know God, I get to know me, when I grasp the deep, deep love of God for me, when I embrace the truth that God accepts me through Jesus Christ as I am, when my eyes are open and my heart pierced by this truth, I can accept myself as I am and just do the best with what I got and stop running and comparing and competing so hard. And man, I hope you have a great day resting in that today,

and I'll 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 5 p.m. and Sundays at 9.30 and 11 a.m. Central Standard Time. For more information, visit lakepoint.com. Church slash daily drive.