Live Free with Josh Howerton - What Do You Want? | Ep. 240 | Friday, January 5, 2024

Episode Date: January 5, 2024

If Jesus was standing in front of you and asked, “What do you want?” What would you say? Jesus asked this of His first disciples, and they chose to leave everything and follow Him. Whether you are looking for acceptance, truth or hope, Jesus is the one worth following because He is the only one who can satisfy our deepest longings. 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? Welcome to the Daily Drive podcast. My name is Mike Bro, and I am super excited that you would tune in and spend just a few minutes a day hanging in God's word.

Some of you are just winding down your Christmas break and you're maybe headed back to school to work next week. Some of you are already back at it full tilt. Some of you might be listening to this in traffic or maybe you're on an elliptical machine or you're sitting by a fireplace sipping some hot chocolate wherever you are. Thanks for joining us on this pursuit. of knowing God better. Hey, we kicked off the week. We kicked off the new year in the Gospel of John. It's one of the four biographies of Jesus in the New Testament. They're called the Good News or the gospel. And man, it really is. As the Angels of Christmas said, it's good news that causes great joy for all the people. So we're walking through the Gospel of John for as long as it takes.

Now, we won't cover every verse, but we will highlight a bunch of them and we'll throw a spotlight on the greatest person who ever lived. His name is Jesus. And we've already seen that Jesus was fully man and fully God, that John says he is the eternal word, who is the beginning. He's the creator of everything, and this same creator humbled himself and became one of us. And he came not only to lay down his life and restore the broken relationship with God, he came to show us what God is really like. Jesus came into a world that had such a skewed perception of God. God. Many saw him as an absentee father or this unreasonable dictator or a hard-to-please boss. The religious leaders had painted him in a certain way so that they could personally profit

and a whole bunch of people just made up their own little G. God. So Jesus shows up in the darkest of times to show us what God is really like. And John writes this to give us a picture of what Jesus is like. So we're still in chapter one. We're going to move on to chapter two. week but right after the baptism of Jesus which we talked about before John writes about how his first disciples came together I don't know whether you've been watching that mini-series called the Chosen I think it is fantastic and it's fresh and it's real and it really makes me want to get the know Jesus better it also depicts the early disciples as messy people like me I love the character

characterization of Matthew James and John the Sons of Thunder Mary Magdalene Thomas Peter I mean it's it's It's so good. And here in John chapter one, he recalls the way it all kind of started. When John the Baptist declared, look, there's the one I've been talking about, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. A couple of John's followers standing nearby started going after Jesus. Now, Andrew was one of them.

He eventually grabs his brother Simon, who was renamed Peter by Jesus. Then there's Philip. Then there is this really kind of hard to convince dude named Nathaniel, and then the rest followed later. But I love the simplicity of verse 34 when the first two start following after Jesus. It says this, Jesus looked around and saw them following. What do you want? He asked them. I just think that's a great question.

I think Jesus was asking them and asking all of us. What do you want? I mean, what is it that you're after? I was leading a little Bible study a few years back, and I asked the guys in our group, question. We were studying the gospel of John, and we were going verse by verse through it. And we got here, and I said, hey, well, what is it? When you started following Jesus, what is it that you were looking for? And a bunch of these guys had, most of them had no church background. They were brand new to

the reading the Bible, brand new to learning about Jesus. So I asked him to think about it. Then I ask him, just text me or write me or an email or whatever, just send me your response. And man, And there were so many raw and honest things that they had to say. It was so cool reading through some of the stories and some of the things they said about it. But I noticed three things that kind of rose to the top of the list. And most of these guys had come out of really tough backgrounds. And they said the first thing we were after was acceptance. We're after acceptance because we never felt like we belonged anywhere,

that we didn't fit in, that we weren't good enough. We didn't think there's anybody thought that we were actually worth it. And it just seemed like Jesus was the kind of God that accepted people as is, and then started changing them. The second thing that they said, we were after truth. Yeah, we needed something real, something genuine, because there's so many fake things in the world that promise what they cannot deliver. And we found Jesus to be the real deal.

He really is the way, the truth, and the life. He really is somebody solid that you can build your life on. And the third thing that kind of rose to the top in their responses was this. We were looking for hope. Because, man, we were so broken. We were wondering if we could ever recover from all the brokenness, all the pain, all the addiction, all the guilt, all the shame. We were afraid to die with all that regret inside.

We just needed some hope because, man, you can't survive without hope. And we found it in Jesus Christ. Acceptance, truth, and hope. Isn't it what you're after? He offers it all. So maybe today see Jesus look over his shoulder and look at you and just ask you, what do you want? What are you after? Come and follow me and see what I can do in your life.

Hope you have a great day and a great weekend. I'll catch you back here on Monday. 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.comte.combe.