Living the Life ... by Giving Your Life!

Hi, I'm Tony Kostas … and welcome back to the Led Into Love podcast – where you can discover what it means to not only know God, but to live with him in a love relationship that will transform your life forever!

In my first episode, I talked about the personal relationship that you can have … and need to have … and must have with God, if you're to know Him at all. 

And I shared about my own relationship with God – how I came to know him. I shared how He then subsequently led me into a love relationship with Him – that no one ever taught me about, no one ever encouraged me to seek after – and what it is to be led by Him into this love relationship, and how that becomes everything … has become everything to me. 

And it's the very reason why I belong to Him … the very reason why I live for Him … the very reason why I love sharing my life with Him! 

But do you know that He loves sharing His life with me, and He wants to share his life with you? 

I've often said to people that if you were the only person alive on earth when Jesus came, He would have come and died just for you!  

Now that can sound like a bit of an extreme statement to make a point about how valuable you are or how loved you are. But the fact is, it's the truth! 

It's easy to think of God and other believers … if you're a Christian, and you're a person who gathers with other believers and you worship.  And you know that there are Christians around the world that worship God and pray to Him, and we call ourselves ‘the Church’ – ‘the Church’ … the Body of Christ. 

Or maybe you're identified with a particular Body that calls itself a Church, and you think of God as some sort of rock star or celebrity up there on the stage – or suspended in the sky somewhere –  that you all gather, and you adore Him, and you get excited about Him.  All of which is reality, but you don't expect to ever have an intensely personal relationship with Him. 

And yet that's at the very heart of any real relationship with God. 

When God made Adam in His own image, He poured Himself into this human that He created – this person who was the fulfillment of God's desire to have a love relationship with someone that He could be heart-to-heart with. He made Adam to be so close to Him. He made Adam to live forever in that relationship. 

Now, I won't go into all the details that, if you're a Christian, you already know. 

Adam sinned and turned his back on God and brought great destruction on God's plan for Creation … God's purpose for the human race. 

Which is why Jesus came – to undo all that. You most likely know all that. 

But the point of it is that, having come to God … having made your response to Him because of what Jesus did … having discovered what it is to be forgiven – to be born again … to have God come into your life and change you from the inside – the danger is that you then settle into what's called ‘the Christian life’. 

You live differently. You do some things you never used to do, and you don't do other things that you did do. And your life has Christian overtones, and you're serious about it. But the relationship that God wants to have with you is intensely personal, and I mean intensely personal in a one-to-one way. 

He wants to share all of Himself with all of you, because He wants you to have all of Him. 

You know that, in the Bible, it talks about Jesus when He came on to this earth … God in the form of man – but not God really, in the sense that Jesus laid down the advantage of being God to come and live as a man like you and me. 

And yet it says that “in Him…” (if you know the verse)… “in Him dwelt all the fullness of the godhead of God bodily”. In other words, God was dwelling in Jesus … but in the way that He wants to dwell in you! 

When Jesus said: don't fear, because God has even the very hairs of your head numbered, He wasn't exaggerating. He wasn't trying to make some kind of an attention-getting point. He was speaking the truth! 

God knows you intimately – way, way more intimately than you know yourself. And He wants to relate to you. Not just as someone standing alongside of Him, but someone that He has poured His life into, and someone that He has drawn into Himself. 

I don't want to talk like this is some mystical thing … because it's not! It's just the reality – because, as a human being, you are actually created to be a spiritual being. You have the ability to live in total oneness with God!  And even though, because of Adam, you were born without that ability – but you were born with the potential for it, and God has given it to you … if you know Jesus. 

If you don't, then you need to know Him now!  And you need to draw Him into your life, by opening yourself to Him and recognizing how much you desperately need Him. Because this is the only way that you can ever live as the person that you are made to be. 

But listen – and this is very important – relationship with God is something that will require all of you, just as it required all of Him to send Jesus … then for Jesus to come and to lay down His life for you – to literally die for you!

But He didn't just die. He rose from the dead, so that you – by responding to Him and embracing what He's done for you – would receive a new life that is like a resurrection from the dead … because until you know Him, you are spiritually dead. You're dead on the inside and you're trying to make sense of life. 

But when you know Him, then you have the privilege of living in this wonderful existence that He alone can give you. 

But that means a total relationship, where you can expect Him to speak to you – you can expect Him to guide you – you can expect Him to be everything to you that you need. 

But on the basis that He has all of you … because He wants to be glorified in your life!

This is not just becoming a Christian. It's not even becoming a better Christian. It's not learning more about your Bible. It's not being able to do anything for God … become active in the church. Not any of those things. So many of those things are the trappings of Christianity, but they're not the essence of what it is to belong to God. 

To belong to God is to know Him for who He really is!

And how do you get to know Him for who he really is? Do you study more about Him? Do you read more books about Him? Do you listen to more preachers? Do you go around gathering information – trying to find out every little way that you can add to yourself, so that you can be everything that a Christian … or everything that a child of God … or everything that a believer in Jesus … can be? No!  You move into your relationship with Him … and you get to know Him in the way that He wants to be known to you. 

Jesus promised that those who believed in Him would get to know God, because God would reveal Himself to them (that's you and me) … that God would reveal Himself to you. You should expect to know Him like that. 

When Jesus came, he gathered as His disciples very ordinary people. They were not theologians, they were not spiritual leaders, they were not elite in any way at all. And the things that He said to them … and then the things that He said to the people that gathered to hear Him preach, or speak, or teach … and even the people that He talked to very personally – discovered that He had come to give them the gift that only God can give anybody. And that's the gift of eternal life. 

I don't mean the life you're going to have in Heaven (that's part of it). I don't mean like a ‘ticket to Heaven’ – a free pass so that you live forever – I mean eternal life.  That is: the life that Adam lost becomes yours when you enter into this relationship with Him. 

And what does that mean? That means that, well – to use a common term – the sky's the limit.  But actually, there's no limit! 

Now, that can sound sensational. It can sound extreme.  And I guess a lot of people would question it.  But if God is who we say He is … and if to know God is what it must be (otherwise you're not really getting to know God) … if intimacy with God is reality (and, believe me, it is!) … then how else can your life be, but one in which you are free? 

Not to go off and do your own thing – but free to live in such an abandonment of your life to God that you don't want to live without Him … you don't want to live apart from Him. That God becomes your security. He becomes your wisdom. He becomes your strength. He becomes your life. He becomes your purpose. 

That’s way, way more than just being ‘a believer in Jesus’. It's way, way more than being a ‘good church member’. But it is what is meant when Jesus said: “I have come, that you might have life and that you might have it more abundantly”. 

Now, Jesus spoke about the people that He longed to gather together – as a shepherd seeing sheep scattered on a hillside, or sheep that had been put into a pen by people that didn't really care about them but just penned them up to use for their own ends. 

Now, what He said were words with a real cutting edge to them – because He was talking about the religious system of His time, when people had religious leaders who were very knowledgeable, very authoritative, and claimed to know the ways of God and gathered people together, to perpetuate a religious system. Unfortunately, humanity … mankind … is very good at creating systems. And mankind is very good at creating religious systems! 

Jesus came to reveal to the people of this world – and He's here to reveal to you, that you are loved by Him so intensely … so totally … so completely. And His desire to be committed to you is so great that He, Himself, wants to be known by you. 

He wants to you to know what is on His heart … what His desire is. 

When Jesus was talking as the Shepherd who was going to come … no, not ‘going to come’ … the Shepherd who He was and what He wanted to do … and He spoke about these people that He was gathering, and wanting to gather, He said: “My sheep hear my voice”. He said: ‘when I speak, they know who is speaking’. 

In those days, when there would be shepherds and small flocks of sheep (as there are still in different parts of the world), then the sheep … their total security … has to do with their shepherd. He's the one who they trust. 

Sheep are helpless creatures. Sheep are easily afraid. Sheep need leading. They need feeding. They need protecting. 

And Jesus said: “I have come for the lost sheep of the House of Israel”. It was the lost sheep of a people – the Israelites – who were meant by God to be His people, but who actually were being used and misused within a religious system! And some of them were just, like, without a shepherd. 

Some of them were scattered. It says Jesus saw the people like sheep scattered on a hillside. But He said that there is also good shepherds and bad shepherds. In fact, He went beyond that, and He said there's not just the good and the bad shepherds, but there's also the thieves … who want to break into the sheepfold and steal and kill and destroy! 

Sheep are very vulnerable. You’re vulnerable if you start to respond to God, and you do not allow Jesus to be your Shepherd! Of course, you're totally vulnerable if you haven't even done that – because you weren't created to live without God. 

But you can come to Him, you can experience Him … and you can stop way short of this intimate, personal relationship with God, which is the only way that you can know Him. 

God guarantees to speak to you in a voice that you can hear, and a language that you can understand. There's no mystery in having God speak to you. He longs to! He loves to! He wants to reveal Himself to you … if you want to be His. 

When you give yourself to Him, and give yourself completely to Him – and make Him alone your security … Him alone the one that you love … Him alone the one that you care for … Him alone the one that you want to live for … and you trust Him with your life – then God makes Himself known to you.  Way beyond you just becoming part of some religious system where you learn to believe certain things, involve yourself in certain activities, be thankful that you've left behind a different life, and now you can gladly say you ‘belong’ to God. 

This is not just ‘being a Christian’. It's not just ‘being born again’. It is being a child of God. And beyond that, it's being made into a son of God – someone who knows what it is to be surrendered to the Holy Spirit. 

In the Bible, there's a lovely verse that says: “…those who are led by the spirit of God, they are the sons of God”. Now, there's nothing short of that, that can possibly lead you … take you … in God's way. 

You don't learn God's way by just studying the Bible. 

You don't learn God's way by reading inspiring stories of other people or by hearing inspiring sermons. 

It's got to happen between you and God! 

It's got to happen continually! 

It's got to be an ongoing thing. 

And that's not hard work. In fact, it's the opposite of hard work! 

You remember how the Israelites were called by God at the time when they were slaves in Egypt? 

God sent Moses to them to lead them out of Egypt, out of their slavery, to take them to the land that He had promised centuries before to their forefather Abraham … The Promised Land. 

And in taking them there, God's purpose was that they would be free to live the lives that He'd always wanted them to live … with Him in their midst. 

He said: “I will be their God and they will be my people.” It's what He longed to have. It's still what He longs to have – a people that are His people!

But how those people struggled with their own self-centredness. 

They wanted God to look after them … but they didn't want to miss out on anything that they thought was important. 

More than that, they never trusted God. At least, in that early stage in the wilderness, they did not trust God to provide for them. 

They thought God was terrific when things were working out well, but they certainly didn't think that when things were not working out well. Like when they ran out of water and ran out of food and said, ‘What's going on? Why isn't God looking after us?’ 

And then, when they got to the banks of the river Jordan and just over the river there was the land that God had promised them.  And Moses, who was leading them, got them to send one person out of each of the twelve tribes of Israel – twelve men to go as spies into that land, to check it out, to see for themselves what it was that God was going to take them into. 

And (you probably know the story) when they came back, ten of them said: ‘It can't be done! The cities are big, the people are giants. They'll eat us! We couldn't possibly take that land.’ 

Two of them, Joshua and Caleb, said exactly the opposite. They said: ‘We can do it because God is with us. We'll eat them. They won't eat us!’ The other ten said, ‘They're going to eat us up’! 

Now, unfortunately, the majority won and the people said: ‘We can't go in!’

They missed out!  That whole generation that left Egypt missed out on going into the Promised Land. God would not then take them in because they refused. 

Even though they changed their minds the next day, God said: ‘Too late. You said, no’. They had to wait another 40 years until that generation died out, and the new generation that had been born in those 40 years in the desert went into the Land. 

The reason why they didn't go in was because they didn't believe God! 

Everything that I'm saying to you right now about relationship with God … about the intensely personal aspect of it … about having a total relationship with God that makes you into a son of God – a relationship with God in which God will speak to you, will lead you, will be your God … in which you will discover that the real reason why Jesus came – which is so that you will have God's life in you and your life will be about God – cannot happen without faith. 

There's a very simple, categorical, statement in the Bible that says: “…without faith it is impossible to please God”. 

Impossible!  Not just difficult … not more complicated … not ‘it takes longer’ … but it is impossible!

Faith simply says: “I believe God”.  And how can you have faith unless you know what God wants you to believe? And how can you believe unless God can show you what He wants … what He wants you to believe? 

I'd love to talk to you more about faith.  And I will in the next episode – because I so want you to know this life that I have found … this life that I relish … this life that I have. Not as some special thing just for me … the very life that Jesus came to give you … if you will come to Him to have life. 

But for now …I'll see you in the next episode!