Watching Jesus and His Wilderness Experience - John Maxwell

hi i'm john maxwell and i'm excited to be with you at passion city church so louie and shelley thank you very much for having me i'm excited about how god has used you not only in atlanta but around the world in your ministry and to be able to be one of the seven voices on your series is a real honor so thanks for having me as i think of 2020 i am now kind of calling it the wilderness year and you can obviously know why that would be because this is a very difficult time of course 19 racial division a lot of uncertainty a lot of questions we're all out of our comfort zone and when you think of the wilderness you think of a place perhaps that you're not familiar with it and there's a tendency for you to get lost there's a tendency for you to go in circles not make much progress and i want to talk to you about this time that we're going through but i want to encourage you in the message to watch and follow jesus as he models for us or shows us how to handle our wilderness experience now in a moment we're going to go to luke chapter 4 where jesus had a wilderness experience but before we do that if you go over to hebrews chapter 11 that's the great faith chapter men and women of faith who did awesome things for god many of them were amazing in their victories many of them of course were martyrs for their faith but when we get to chapter 12 all of a sudden we find two things very interesting the men and women of faith in chapter 11 of hebrews are now in the stands and they're basically cheering us on as we run the race so they're watching us run the race because this race that we're in has no finish line it's eternal and so they were part of the race now they are watching cheering us on and we're part of the race so they're watching us encouraging us and i want you to know that that in your faith journey you have those great people encouraging cheering you on but we're also encouraged as we get into hebrews chapter 12 to watch jesus to model after him how he ran the race so let's go into hebrews chapter 12 for a moment i'm reading out of the message do you see what all this means all these pioneers who blazed away all these veterans cheering us on it means we'd better get on with it strip down start running and never quit no spiritual fat no parasite sins keep your eyes on jesus who both began and finished the race that we're in study how he did it because he never lost sight of where he was headed that exhilarating finish in and with god and because he never lost sight of the race that he was in he could put up with anything along the way cross shame whatever covet 19 adversity difficulty remember everything worthwhile is uphill and now he's there in this place of honor right alongside of god and when you find yourself flagging in your faith go over that story again item by item that long litany of hostility that jesus plowed through and that will shoot adrenaline into your souls as the crowd of saints are watching us run this race we're encouraged to watch jesus because he succeeded in this race and one of the things i want us to observe from our lord today is how he handled his wilderness experience and there are three things that i i want to share with you quickly as we go into the wilderness experience i i want you to know three things about going into that the first thing is that you will be tested i'll come back to that the second thing is the testing is good for you it's good for me so we'll be tested but that testing is good for us in luke chapter four verse one now jesus full of the holy spirit left the jordan that's where he was just baptized of spiritual high in his life and he was led by the spirit he was led by god into the wild and for 40 wilderness days and nights he was tested by the devil you see one of the values of testing is it shows us the validity of our faith of a faith that has never been tested cannot be trusted but a faith that has been tested and has passed the test can always be trusted when i was 51 at our literally company's christmas party i had a heart attack and for a couple of hours it was kind of touch and go whether i would even live and i always wondered as a christian if if when i came came time for me to die if i would have what you know christians called dying grace or peace at that time and i always wondered i wonder if that will happen to me and during those couple of hours that were kind of uh just really come and go on me i in fact i told the doctor i said am i i asked him am i dying he said well you aren't yet but you will die if we can't stop this heart attack i had such incredible peace i had a calmness a sereness about us myself i laid there and and i i was absolutely finding out the truth about dying grace and dying peace in fact today when i think of death i look at i think i've already been there i i know i know that i have the grace i know i have the peace to die now why am i so confident in my faith because it has been tested and it passed the test well jesus was tested in three areas when he went into the wilderness he was det he was tested in his humanity luke chapter two through four he ate nothing during those days those 40 days and when the time was up he was hungry and so the devil playing on his hunger gave him the first test since your god son command the stone to turn into a loaf of bread jesus answered by quoting deuteronomy it takes more than bread to really live and one of the testings that we have during covenant 19 is in the weak areas of our life the our tendencies are our areas perhaps to sin and and jesus went through that and and pretty much jesus shows us how to pass that test and that is that he was just basically saying i live bigger than my hurts i i live bigger than my my weaknesses he was tested in his loyalty in verses five through eight and this was the second test and he put the whole earth on display for jesus and he said all that you see before you it's all yours in their splendor to serve your pleasure he said i'm in charge of them and all of them and and can turn them over to whomever i wish if you'll worship me they're yours the whole works and jesus refused again back in his refusal with deuteronomy worship the lord your god and only the lord your god serve him with absolute single hardness in other words the loyalty of jesus was being tested psalm 27 1 says the lord is my light and salvation whom shall i fear the lord is the strength of my life whom shall i be afraid of during this difficult time in your life you don't run from your problem you run to your source and you can see in the wilderness experience of jesus he constantly kept running to his source his loyalty was tested who are you going to serve his his humanity was tested he was weak he was hungry would you like to turn these these these rocks into bread and thirdly his identity was tested the third test the death that literally took him up to jerusalem put him on top of the temple and said if now notice that phrase if you are god's son jump it's written isn't it that he has placed you in the care of angels to protect you they will catch you you won't so much as stub your toe or on a stone yes said jesus it also read don't dare tempt the lord your god his identity was tested you see jesus knew who he was but he also knew whose he was you see at his baptism there are only two times that god ever vocally told others about his relationship with his son baptism in the mount of transfiguration and at at his baptism as he was being baptized the voice of god said three things this is my son chosen and marked by my love the light of my life now jesus that day heard what every child should hear from their parent this is my son in other words jesus said i belong chosen and marked with my love i am loved delight of my life i am special jesus just heard those words of identity i'm loved i'm special i belong and then he was put into the wilderness you and i will have our identity as people of faith tested during difficult times it's okay because this testing is to find out if our faith can be trusted the last part of this going into the wilderness that i want you to know is that the testings will not stop luke 4 13 says that completed the testing the devil retracted temporarily lying in wait for another opportunity scott peck in his book the road less traveled has a very interesting introductory paragraph to that book here's what he said life is difficult this is a great truth one of the greatest truths it is a great truth because once we truly see this truth we transcend it once we truly know that life is difficult once we truly understand and accept it then life is no longer difficult because once it is accepted the fact that life is difficult no longer matters this is huge again i'm going to repeat don't run from the testings run to the source i just want you to know that life is difficult and when people say when's covert 19 going to be over i'm not sure you're not sure but when it's over there'll be another challenge there'll be another test i share with people all the time that everything worthwhile it's all uphill everything there's no such thing as a worthwhile life that coast every dream you have every desire that you have in your heart your your your hope to to to be a a good parent your hope to to be a good child you're you're hoped to be a a faithful follower of christ it's it's all uphill it's all uphill and what i want us to understand is that testing never finishes we are constantly in the process of being tried and tested and it's okay because it makes us stronger it gives our faith validity wow you see i think the wilderness place is a place where leaders learn to lead i think it's a place where leaders are made you see the right response to a difficult experience makes us better in fact here's the way it works it makes us bigger on the inside than the outside it makes us better on the inside than the outside so going into the wilderness experience it's a fact you'll be tested the testing is good for you and the testing won't stop now let's come out of the wilderness experience let's again watch jesus as he comes out of the wilderness experience what can we learn by observing here's number one when you come out of the wilderness experience if you have passed the test you will then experience a new level of living you will climb higher when you come out of the wilderness experience you will get better when you come out of the wilderness experience you will become bigger on the inside when you come out of the wilderness experience when we talk about seeing the light at the end of the tunnel yes there's a light at the end of the tunnel oh happy day but let me tell you something there's a new level that you'll live on at the end of the temp at the end of this dark time we're now in verses 14 and 15 of luke chapter 4. look at these words jesus returned to galilee powerful in the spirit wow news that he was back spread through the countryside and he taught in their meeting places to everyone's acclaim to everyone's pleasure you see jesus faith his faithfulness had been tested he had passed the test now here's what i want you to understand about this new level of living that you're going to be on when you come through the wilderness experience faith doesn't make life easier faith just makes life and makes you stronger that's what i want you to catch [Music] faith doesn't remove your problems faith makes you stronger to deal with your problems faith doesn't take away adversity and difficulty faith just gives you muscle spiritual muscle to go through that difficulty i've been doing an amazing amount of teaching during kova 19 the companies to congregations just trying to help them kind of understand this wilderness experience like i'm doing today and one of the things that i want to share with you i think that's just absolutely huge i don't want you to miss is this everything you want but you don't have right now okay everything you want but you don't have is outside of your comfort zone in fact that's the reason you don't have it if what you wanted was in your comfort zone you'd be comfortable enough secure enough to go get it but why don't we have things that we want why don't we have things that we need because it's outside of our comfort zone so what did kova 19 do what does the wilderness experience do it takes us out of our comfort zone and this is a beautiful thing because the moment that we are outside of our comfort zone we might as well now go get the things that we've wanted or that we've needed that we've never ventured out before we've been kicked out of the comfort zone nest and so wherever you are right now take advantage of your uncomfortableness take for in fact i covet 19 is a detour and i hate detours i'm the kind of person i like to know the straightest route i like to get to it as quickly i'm kind of like a let me get right down to business i'm in no nonsense i want to get to where i want to go i don't like detours well a crisis like covent 19 is a detour now here's what i'm saying to you don't despise the detour you're going places you've never gone you're seeing things you've never seen you're experiencing things you've never experienced in fact take the detour tour and take your time on it and embrace it and learn from it and be teachable in it because i promise you the detour tour has some blessings for you that you would have never had if you'd have kept going down the same path you see it takes us out of automatic and once that we come out of automatic we begin to learn and grow and be vibrant this is so beautiful you begin to experience a whole new level of living secondly after you come out to the wilderness you become confident in your purpose in verses 16 through 20 we see that jesus was exactly that way after his time of testing jesus came to nazareth where he had been reared and as he always did on the sabbath he went to the meeting place and when he stood up to read he was headed the school of the prophet isaiah on rolling the scroll he found the place where it was written god's spirit is on me he's chosen me to preach the message of good news to the poor set me to announce pardon to the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind to get the burden and the batter to set the burden and the battered free to announce this is god's year to act coming out of this wilderness experience jesus had a sense of mission a sense of purpose that began to be more clear and more strong than ever before and that's exactly what's happens to you and me when we come through adversity i mean if you're still alive it's because god isn't finished with you yet he still has a plan that has not been fulfilled and what i want you to know is you're going to come out not only walking on a higher level because you make the right choices during combat 19 you're going to come out with a higher resolve and clarity of purpose of why you're here in fact while you're in the wilderness let god impress upon you your purpose your reason for being and coming out of the wilderness experience you not only experience what i call a new level of living your faith is so much stronger you not only are confident in your purpose and your mission in life but thirdly you possess a moral authority we see this in the life of jesus again our example in verses 21 and 22. when our lord finished reading isaiah he rolled up the scroll he handed it back to the assistant and he sat down and noticed this phrase every eye in the place was on him intent then he started in you've just heard scripture make history it came true just now in this place all who were there watching and listening were surprised at how well he spoke but they also said isn't isn't this joseph's son the one we've known since he was a youngster is it isn't this the carpenter's kid isn't this was it that little jesus that just spoke up there ah we we never imagined him to speak with such authority we never imagined to speak with such conviction and clarity well you see jesus has just gone through his wilderness experience he's he knows who he is he's got his identity he's just been successful he's just he's just had a spiritual victory over the evil one you see moral authority is so much higher than position and title i i when i teach leaders i talk about what i call moral moral authority in leadership it's it's it's it it it's based upon who you are it's based up upon what you have overcome i i teach that respect is earned on difficult ground once you go through the testing the first person you respect is yourself because you know what you overcame you understand very quickly the adversity and how the how that you not only overcame but how that you now feel stronger because you've you've had to flex those spiritual muscles within your life again there's a moral authority that's given to you that just kind of uh it takes you to a new level of respect and influence with others which is beautiful because what we're to be is in our life is to be salt and what we're to be in our life is to be light okay i have um over the years i i have a practice i'm going to share with you in fact i would encourage you to maybe engage that in your life every month for 40 years i have what i call a learning lunch uh very simple i find somebody bigger faster better smarter more successful than me and that's not hard to do and i just asked him if i could take him to lunch for an hour and a half and and you know i've had hundreds of these and uh it's a learning lunch i i don't even have lunch i do the learning they have the lunch i i buy their meal because the reason i want to spend an hour and a half with them is i want to ask them questions in fact i have seven questions specifically that i want to ask because i want to sit at their feet and i want to learn from them and i have i have a what i would call a very teachable spirit and i just say okay i want to get better and i think i'm going to get better with you uh marco our ceo of the maxwell enterprise our companies basically loves and loves to teach on the power proximity the the fact that when you get close to somebody when you get close to greatness when you get close to bigger people what's beautiful about bigger people is they really make you feel bigger than than you've ever felt before just like to be honest with you smaller people reduce you bigger people than large you and so while we're having the learning lunch they're eating i'm asking the seven questions now one of the questions i ask as i look to them i say what is the greatest lesson that you've ever learned in your life and i've had hundreds of answers to that question but there's one thing over the years regardless of the person the background the profession there's one thing that that answer always has in common it has hundreds of times when i ask them what's the greatest lesson you ever learned they always not sometimes not most time they always go to a difficult time in their life they always go to a time when when they failed greatly a time when when adversity almost overcame they they go to the darkest hour of their life and out of that darkness they find a principle a truth a practice that has absolutely positively change their life now this is huge because i can promise you if you and i could go out five years and look back at 2020 we're going to find that this was a time not only of wilderness but it was a great time of creativity it was a great time of advancement because every opportunity is disguised by a difficulty that's why so many times we don't seize the opportunity because all we see is the adversity but inside of that is the opportunity it's it's where creativity is in fact what i'm saying to people all the time when they kind of give up hope and i say there's always an answer in fact to be honest with you there's usually more than one answer and during these dark times the time that you're going through right now it it's the time that presses our soul with it it's the time where we want to you know deliver me when's it going to be over when can i get out of it but let me just say stay there stay on the operating table let god finish the surgery hold steady because i i know i know in your life that i know in my life there are great lessons to be learned during this time we don't curse the darkness we bless the darkness we embrace the darkness again we don't run from our problem but we do run to our source and when i ask what's the greatest lesson that you've ever learned in your life i promise you they'll open up and begin to share with me something they learned in a very difficult time perhaps it was with their children and how they became a better parent out of it wow in fact i was in a conversation in one of my companies i have what i call an executive call where every month i i i put on the call with some other people that are in this club uh a high-level executive many of them you would know if i called in my name and uh and they give us 20 minutes of their uh what they're doing right now as a leader and then i um i pull some leadership principles out of what what they're doing and then i ask them leadership questions and then we open up the lines so that the executives can ask i was i was talking to the ceo of the second largest tech company in the world and a pretty marvelous and amazing leader but he was very open and very candid about some of his greatest failures and and greatest mistakes his is his his decisions that didn't turn out well so when i had my time to ask him the questions i i called him a name and i asked him would would you like to go back at some of your darkest hours and some of your biggest failures and some of your greatest losses would you would you like to go back and have another shot at it in other words would you like to have a do-over you know what to do over it you'd like to go back and do it over his answer was so surprising he said well first of all john i've had a lot of failure i've had a lot of disappointments i've had a lot of losses but i wouldn't change any of them i said you're kidding me no no he said i'm not kidding you know he said i i if you're asking me do i want to do a do-over i no i i want to leave them as they are and i said talk to us about this and he said well it's obvious again i've had a lot of dark times a lot of adversity a lot of failures but he said it was in those very difficult hours it was in that wilderness experience that i learned my life's greatest lessons he said that's where my character was developed in fact it was out of that conversation that i began to teach a principle on being bigger on the inside than you are on the outside being better on the inside than you are on the outside and as i shared that as he shared that with me he basically said i wouldn't do any of them over because they have made me the person i am today and if i could go back and do them over i would have lost the lesson if i lost the lesson i wouldn't have what i have on the inside i would i wouldn't be the person of character and strength that i am today so he said no he said i've had hurts a lot of questions a lot of losses a lot of wilderness but i'll take it just like it was because it's made me a better person that's what i'm believing for you at passion city i'm believing that this is going to make you a better person that you're going to truly be better on the inside than the outside that you're and by the way when you're better on the inside then you're on the outside when you're bigger on the inside than you're on the outside it's only a matter of time till the outside gets big but it comes from always the inside the character of our lives it's what makes our lives great and life-changing to ourselves and to others now as i wrap up my time about watching jesus in the wilderness years there's just one other thing i want to focus in on jesus and watching him also because he had other wilderness experiences on the cross a wilderness experience sin separated him from his heavenly father until he would utter aloud my god my god why have you forsaken me traumatic so when you think of do-overs you and i have all kind of mistakes and messes in our life that we perhaps said i'd sure like to have another shot at that i got it i got it but when it comes to sin when it comes from what alienates us from our creator our heavenly father we can't go back and do those over we can't go back and fix them i mean even if we could do a do-over with our sins we can't do a do-over with our sin in fact the only reason jesus went to the cross was because we couldn't fix ourselves we needed god to fix us through his death and resurrection so we don't get a do-over in the area of our sins because jesus has already taken care of that and now all we need to do is trust him as our savior and ask him to come into our life so what's absolutely beautiful is when you and i look at our sinful mess-ups in our life all we have to do is trust him in fact jesus said i stand at your heart's door and i knock if you open your heart's door i'll come in that's what he wants to do he wants to do that for you now so you don't have to be in the wilderness of a sinful life anymore you can be brought out into the light and you can have the incredible joy and fruit of the spirit in your life and the life that you really have always wanted to live but you can't do it on your own so i'm going to ask you to pray with me right now for many of you you're saying wow i've tried to go back and do some of that stuff over and it doesn't work no no no it's already been done jesus died for your sins the price has already been paid now you just have to receive him into your life so pray with me would you please lord jesus thank you for dying on the cross for my sins thank you for paying the price i know i can't go back and change my sinful life only you can do that but what's beautiful is you want to do that so right now in your heart pray with me my friend i ask you to come to my life forgive me my sins i want you as a friend but i need you as a savior thank you for hearing my prayer amen if you just prayed that prayer with me if you just put your faith in jesus i want you to text the number that is on the screen right now for you and the reason i want you to do that right now is because the passion team is ready to reach out serve you touch you and help you on this incredible spiritual journey that you're going on and by the way if you prayed that prayer jesus just brought you out of the wilderness my name's john and i'm your friend you

Channel: Passion City Church

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Keywords: louie giglio, passion city church worship, louie giglio sermons, passion city, giglio louie, city church, passion, giglio, passion city church sermons, Atlanta, temptations, passion church, louis giglio, cumberland, john maxwell, wilderness experience, wilderness experience sermon, maxwell, john maxwell leadership, john maxwell motivation, covid 19, passion city church, atlanta, jesus, Worship Matters, W2O2R2S2H2I2P

Id: Ybr0TugQLHQ

Length: 33min 59sec (2039 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 07 2020