Beyond Belief: Going Deeper with Jesus

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Last time I was here, I talked a little bit about the ministries that I ran. I was ordained in the Lutheran Church, had churches in central Louisiana, east Tennessee, downriver Detroit area, and then returned to my hometown of Decatur, Illinois. I told you all about that. I didn't tell you much about my family. Jennifer and I, my wife Jennifer, we have been married for 28 years, and we have five children and nine grandchildren. And so we have our lives filled with love and kids and grandkids and texts and phone calls. I'm going to tell you a little bit about them later on, but it's just a privilege to be here. And as I said last time, we talked about Jesus and his ability to look at disciples. Anybody remember what the Hebrew word was for disciples? Anyone? Talmudim is the Hebrew word for disciples, and Jesus called his talmudim, his disciples. He said, I believe you can be like me. I believe you can do the things that I do. And every once in a while, like water walking Peter, they actually would do what they saw their rabbi do. They would actually reflect the kind of life that Jesus would demonstrate right in front of them and what they thought and what they said and what they did. But unfortunately, I fear that many, sometimes even of us, Jesus claiming believers, we don't always see Jesus as our rabbi, as our teacher, as our example that demonstrates for us how to think, how to act, how to speak here and now. I fear we don't always see Jesus as an example for us of how to live an amazing kind of life here and now. Or if you will, I think sometimes many have relegated Jesus and what he did here on Earth as kind of a cosmic travel agent. And he has simply arranged for us a ticket somewhere else. And that's all. Oh, but he did so much more than that. Let's pray and then we'll talk more about that. Heavenly Father, we are here, none of us by accident. We are here to hear from you. And I pray, Lord, that's exactly what we do. Whether I say it or not, I pray, as John talked last week, that the Holy Spirit will use words, whether said or unsaid, to speak to each one of us and show us the path, the way, not only to eternal life, but an amazing life here and now. That's my prayer in Jesus' name. Amen. Sometimes, not so much these days, but I would get asked, why did you become a pastor? And actually, the answer was very simple. Early on, college years, actually, when I graduated from high school, my intention was to be an airline pilot. That's what I wanted to do. And I actually went to college and I learned how to fly and started all that. It just wasn't it for me. And basically, I came upon the idea that, well, here it is. I've been given the greatest gift in the world. It's the gift of eternal life. Jesus has offered me, for free, a life forever with him. He died on the cross. He placed himself in my place to pay for the sins that I should have paid for. And he offers me this for free. I don't have to earn it. I don't have to deserve it. It's not conditioned upon my behavior or my goodness. It's simply me trusting that he did it all for me. And with that, when I realized that, I had a decision to make. And the decision was simply this, do I keep that gift to myself or do I give my life to transmitting that gift, to giving that gift away as many times and as much as possible? And that's why I became a pastor. So that I could tell people from week to week, every week, that God loves them, that God forgives them, and he offers them eternal life forever with him because of what Jesus did. And that's a great thing, and I've done that my entire ministry. But here's the thing, that's not all there is to Jesus, right? I mean, if that's all Jesus came to do, he just would have come and announced John 3, 16, God so loved the world, whoever believes in him will not perish but have eternal life, and boom, gone. But there's more to it than that, isn't there? And that's what I want to talk to you about this morning. Somebody who got that was a college professor and theologian. His name was Dallas Willard. Anybody ever heard of Dallas Willard? Okay, a couple of you. Dallas Willard was a professor at University of Southern California and also Fuller Theological Seminary in California. He died in 2013, but he authored many books. One that drastically changed my life in ministry was a book called The Divine Conspiracy. And if you ever get your hands on it, read it, every word of it. So I've been kind of a student of Dallas, and he really defined this whole thing about discipleship within the church. And I'm going to put a bunch of his quotes up here on the screen before we get to kind of the lesson of Jesus this morning, but this is what Dallas said. The idea of having faith in Jesus has come to be totally isolated from being his apprentice, his talmudim, and learning how to do what he di...