Highlands Fellowship Experiencing Life with Jesus: Total Dependence Transcript
0:00 Well, hey everybody, and welcome to Highlands Fellowship. It's so good to be able to worship Jesus with you today. So whether you're in Marion, Bristol, here in Abingdon, watching online or on TV, I wanna say I'm so glad that you're here. And if you're here with us for the very first time, a big welcome to each one of you, and we really do hope that Highlands feels like home, because as we like to say around here, Highlands is home.
And today, we're starting a new series that I believe could be one of the most important series that we've done. And the reason I say that is because this series really is about why we exist as a church. Our mission here at Highlands Fellowship is really pretty simple: we exist to help people experience life with Jesus. That's why we're here. That's what we're about. It's what we try to accomplish every time we get together. It's why we preach. It's why we worship. It's why we do small groups. It's why we make disciples. It's why we invest in students and children. It's why we love our communities. It's why we go on mission trips. It's really why we do everything that we do, because we believe that there is nothing more important than helping people discover what it actually means to experience life with Jesus Christ.
1:16 And I think this is so important, because sometimes Christianity can become about a lot more than just following after Jesus. It can become about just going to church, or knowing the right things to say, or trying to be a good person, or following a list of rules. It can become about having the right political opinions, or belonging to the right denomination. But Jesus didn't come simply to give us a religion. Jesus came to give us life. So in John 10:10, Jesus said, "I have come that they may have life and have it to the full."
1:55 So here's what we're gonna do, and here's what we're gonna talk about over the next several weeks: what does it actually look like to experience life with Jesus? Not just knowing about Jesus, not just believing certain things about Jesus, but actually experiencing life with Jesus? Because there's a difference, right? You can know a lot about somebody without actually knowing them. You can read their biography. You can know where they grew up. You can know their accomplishments. You can even know some facts about their life. But that's very different from having a relationship with them, and I think sometimes that's what happens with Christianity. Sometimes we know the stories. Maybe we know the songs. We know the Bible verses. We know what we're supposed to say and how we're supposed to act. But Jesus didn't invite us into a life where we simply learn information about Him — no. He invites us into a relationship with Him where we truly follow Him, and we're learning to walk with Jesus through every single part of our lives.
3:09 And that's really what I want us to wrestle with during this series. What does it look like to have Jesus involved in every single part of our lives? What does it look like to follow Jesus when things are going well and when things aren't going so well? What does it look like to trust Him, or to hear His voice, to surrender our lives to Him, to deal with our relationships differently, to handle our money differently, to respond to struggles differently? Because when you really begin to experience life with Jesus, Jesus begins to change the way that you live. It's about becoming the person that God created you to be through the transforming work and power of Jesus Christ. Romans 12:2 says, "Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind." There's transformation that takes place when we begin to live life with Jesus, and I'm really excited about this series, because I don't want to simply talk about Jesus. I want us to experience life with Jesus.
4:23 So over the next few weeks, we're gonna take a look at what this actually looks like. And today, we're gonna start with something that I think is foundational to experiencing life with Jesus, because before we can talk about what God wants to do through us, we have to understand that He wants to do something in us first, and that's where we're gonna start. Because life with Jesus begins when we stop trying to manage our lives on our own and actually learn what it means to depend upon Him.
4:57 So look with me at Proverbs 3:5-6. It says this: "Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight." I love this passage, because the author of Proverbs gives us a picture of what it looks like to live life in total dependence upon God. "Trust in the Lord with all of your heart, and lean not on your own understandings; in all your ways submit to him." That's what dependence looks like.
5:35 But do you wanna know why we don't like to go there? It's because when you depend upon somebody, it puts you in a vulnerable place. It really does. It means that you aren't in control anymore. It actually removes the control from your hands, and it places it in someone else's hands, and if we're honest, we don't like that. We don't like that at all.
5:58 But the author of Proverbs says that if you truly want to depend upon God, it starts with trust. You have to make the conscious choice in your life to trust God with all of your heart, to surrender to Him, to submit to His ways, to trust that His wisdom is actually greater than yours, and that His plans are better than your plans. And when you choose to trust God, it really changes where you lean. You see, most of us, when we struggle, or we have something that we need to conquer in life, we lean not on God's understanding, but we lean on our own, right? We lean on our own wisdom and on our own strength, our own abilities, and our own capacity to take care of the issue. We try to figure it out on our own. We try to control it. We try to fix it.
6:52 But when you fully depend on God and you trust in God, the Bible says that you will lean in the opposite direction of yourself. You will actually lean on God's understanding. You will trust His wisdom, His strength, and that He will provide for you. You will trust that even when you can't see what He's doing, He's still working. Isaiah chapter 55 verses eight and nine reminds us that God's thoughts are not our thoughts, and His ways are higher than our ways. There are going to be moments when God doesn't make sense to us. There are gonna be times when His way doesn't look the way that we would want to do something, or the way that we would have chosen to do something, and that's where trust becomes real. Because it's easy to trust God when His plans look like our plans. His plans, when they look like ours, we're good with that. The real test, though, of dependence actually comes when God's plan is different from ours. Can I trust Him then? That's the question.
8:00 And when you lean that way, Proverbs says that you submit to Him. You follow Him in every area of your life. That's what total dependence looks like, and that's exactly what we see in Jesus.
8:19 Jesus lived His life in total dependence on the Father. Everything that He did, He learned that He needed to lean on God and trust in His Father. Jesus said in John chapter 5 verse 19, "The Son can do nothing by Himself. He can do only what He sees His Father doing." I mean, think about that. Jesus, the Son of God, He lived with this posture of total dependence upon God the Father. And throughout the Gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John — we see Jesus getting away from the crowds. We see Him praying. We see Him seeking the Father.
8:55 Before major moments in His ministry, Jesus actually withdrew, and He would spend time with God. Mark chapter one verse 35 says, "Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up. He left the house and He went off to a solitary place, where He prayed." Jesus understood something that we need to learn. You cannot continually pour out without continually being filled. Jesus didn't get away because He was weak. No, He got away because He understood where His strength actually came from. He didn't withdraw from the crowds because He had nothing else to do. No, He withdrew because there was always more to do, and He knew that He couldn't do it apart from the Father.
10:12 And as we look at Jesus's example of dependence, His example of getting away from the crowd, His example of refueling, His example of trusting the Father, I want to ask you two questions. And these are two pointed questions that I think every one of us needs to wrestle with as we think about life with Jesus and what that really looks like. Because if our mission at Highlands Fellowship is to help people experience life with Jesus, then we have to understand that life with Jesus isn't just about believing in Jesus — it's learning to trust Him, and it's learning to live like Him. And Jesus lived with this total dependence upon God the Father.
10:29 So the first question is this: what is getting in the way of your total dependence on God? What are the things in your life that are actually keeping you from fully surrendering or fully submitting to God? What is keeping you from relying on Him? What excuses have you come up with?
10:55 And I think for a lot of us, the first one is pretty simple. We feel like it's a lack of time. Our lives are very busy, and we go from one thing to the next. We have our work and our families. It's the extracurricular activities. It's the hobbies. It's all the things that fill our days, and honestly, we would love to depend upon God, but we look at our schedule and we say, "You know what, God? I barely have time for me, let alone you." Maybe you think time is what's getting in the way of your dependence upon God.
11:33 Or it could be laziness, right? Maybe you know that you need to spend time with God, but you just don't make it a priority, and you won't get up and do it. Or maybe you think that there are simply more valuable things in life, things that you want to chase after much more than knowing God and following after Him and depending upon Him.
11:56 Maybe it's self-reliance. Maybe you go through life with this attitude: "God, thanks for the offer, but I've already got my life figured out. I can figure this out on my own. I can handle my own business. I appreciate that you're trying to be there for me, but I've got this. I'm good." And because you rely on yourself, why would you even need God? That's the danger of self-reliance. It doesn't always look like rebellion against God. Sometimes it simply looks like living as though you don't even need Him.
12:29 But I'll be honest with you today. I believe that most of what's getting in the way of our total dependence upon God is our willingness to allow sin in our lives. Listen, sin is what separates us from God — not by God trying to separate Himself from us, but we separate ourselves by giving into temptation and committing sin.
12:57 So let's get real. What sin are you committing that you've been excusing in your life? Is it pride? Selfishness? Impatience? Anger? Being judgmental? Envy? Jealousy? A lack of self-control in your life? Gluttony? And listen, these are just some of the respectable sins that we just put up with in church all the time. But there are also other sins that our culture has said, "You know what, just turn a blind eye to those things, because everybody's doing it, and if you aren't doing it, you just need to say something like, live and let live, right? You do you, and I'll just stay out of it."
13:42 Guys, there is an order to things that God has set up for us to follow, and we need to dig into God's Word and find out what that order is and follow what He's taught us. And when things get out of order, man, it jacks up our lives.
14:19 And what we watch and allow into our minds, it affects us in ways that we can't even begin to imagine. But here's the thing — I don't want you to trick yourself into believing that some of the shows that everybody's watching out there aren't just as bad as some of the more obvious struggles we all know about.
15:15 But what we have to understand when it comes to dealing with all of this sin — not just the ones that you have a problem with, but all of the sin in each of our lives — is that we live in a fallen world, and there is spiritual warfare that is going on all the time, and life is not just gonna be easy, and we can't just deal with sin, or just be okay with sin, and think that's just okay. We've got to be in constant battle and fight off the temptations that are put in our way. But if we have decided to truly follow after Jesus with our lives, we've got to look at what God says in His Word is sin and submit to what He says — not what we want, not what we desire, not what the world says is permissible. The Bible, God's Holy Word, and the life of Jesus Christ are what we are called to live by.
16:15 Now, if you don't wanna believe the Bible, or you wanna take some of what it says when it's convenient and then leave some of it out, that's a decision that you're gonna have to make. And it doesn't mean that I don't love you, and it doesn't mean that you aren't welcome to attend. You are, and I do love you, and I want God's best for you. But we can't continue to allow our culture to rewrite what it means to be a follower of Jesus and rewrite what sin is and what sin is not. Listen, God's Word speaks to sin, and sin is sin, and Jesus gave His life on the cross, and He died on the cross to forgive us of the sins that we commit. And it was serious to God, it was serious to His Son, Jesus, and it needs to be serious to us.
17:03 And so let me go ahead and address something right now, though. For those of you who are gonna come up to me after the service and give me a pat on the back for addressing some of the more difficult sins we all deal with, before you do that, please examine your life. Examine your life and ask God to reveal to you any sin that is creating a barrier between you and God as well. Because as I mentioned, there are so many that I didn't mention, we have to understand that there's sin in our lives, and we can't be looking at the plank in somebody else's eye when we have a plank in our own.
18:12 And really, when it comes to all of these things — how we spend our time, self-reliance, all types of sin — it reveals something about all of us. It reveals our priorities. Because here's a principle that I think is worth remembering: what you prioritize reveals what you truly value. Our priorities give us a window into what we value in life. What gets the best of our time? What gets the best of our energy or our attention or our resources? Well, that tells us something about what matters most to us.
18:26 But listen to me, the best thing that we could possibly have is intimacy with our Heavenly Father. That's the best thing for us in this life. And Jesus modeled this for us. He loved people. He served people. He worked. He ministered, right? He had responsibilities. People were constantly asking things of Him, but He never allowed the demands around Him to replace His dependence upon His Father. He made time for the Father. And if we're going to experience life with Jesus, we're going to have to learn to do the very same thing, because total dependence doesn't happen by accident. You have to make room for it. You have to recognize what is competing for your attention. You have to be willing to look at your life and say, "God, what have I allowed to become more important to me than you?" And then you have to be willing to do something about it. You have to be willing to remove whatever is getting in the way so that you can fully surrender and fully submit and fully rely on God.
19:45 And that's why I wanna ask you a second question, and it's this: are you spiritually prepared for the purpose God has for you? Because here's what I believe — God has a purpose for your life. You're not here by accident. Your life matters, and God wants to use your life to make a difference in the lives of other people and ultimately point people to Jesus Christ. But here's the thing about purpose: God doesn't just call us to a purpose. No, He also prepares us for the purpose He's called us to, and preparation requires dependence.
20:29 You see, we live in a culture that tells us to constantly give, constantly produce, constantly accomplish, constantly keep moving, and we can bring that same mentality into our relationship with God, but God wants to work in you before He works through you. And sometimes we get so focused on what we're supposed to do for God that we forget that God is trying to develop something in us. Think about an athlete who's preparing for the big game, right? They don't just show up on game day and expect to perform at their best. There's preparation, there's training, there's discipline that goes into this. There's time that's spent developing strength and endurance. Why? Because you prepare before the moment comes. And I believe that God does the very same thing in our lives. There are things that God wants to do through you that require Him to first do something in you, and that's why total dependence matters. Because you can only give out what you have allowed God to put in. You can only pour out what you have already received.
21:44 And if you're constantly giving, constantly serving, constantly helping, constantly leading, but you're never getting alone with God, eventually you're gonna find yourself empty, and that's not the life that Jesus has modeled for us at all. If Jesus, who was fully God and fully man, needed to get away from the crowds, needed to step away from the needs of the people, needed to spend time alone with His Father, how much more do you and I need that? Jesus understood that getting away wasn't wasting time. It's not wasting time. It was preparation. So before Jesus would step into moments of ministry, He would actually step away with the Father. Before the crowds, there was solitude. Before the pouring out, there was the filling. Before the ministry, there was communion with the Father. And I think we need to recover the rhythm of Jesus Christ in our own lives, because maybe the reason that you're exhausted isn't simply because you're doing too much. Maybe you're trying to do too much without allowing God to fill you and to strengthen you. And I believe God is inviting us into a different way of living.
23:07 So what does this really mean for us? I think it would be a huge failure, a huge failure, if we walk out of here and six weeks from now, at the end of this series, nothing has changed in you and nothing has changed in me. I don't want this to be another sermon that we hear, we may take a few notes, and then we just move on from it. I really want this to change how we live. And so I want to challenge you to live in the rhythm of Jesus, and it starts as we get away from the crowd.
23:47 We've got to get away from the crowd. So I want you this week to schedule some time — and we have a card for you that, as you came in, was in your seat, and it has some next steps on there for you. But one of the things it does is it says: start with a quiet time, 10 minutes a day. And I would say put it on your calendar. Yeah, you can call it "get away with God" if you want to. I mean, call it whatever you want to. But this is not a time where you work on your hobby. It's not a time to scroll through your phone. It's not a time to listen to music on whatever playlist you have. No, this is a time for you to be with God, just you and Him. Open up your Bible, pray, sit quietly, listen, talk to God, and let Him speak to you through His Word.
24:38 There has to be a time, like there has to be a time when you simply spend some time with God. Because there are things in our lives that aren't wrong necessarily, but they are keeping us from what's most important, and that's why Psalm 46:10 says, "Be still, and know that I am God." And I think it's interesting that out of all the things that the psalmist could have said about knowing God, he said, "Be still." Get quiet. Get alone. Step away from the noise. And really, we have lost the art of quietness in our culture. There's always something playing. There's always something buzzing, another notification, another email, another conversation that we've got to have. And sometimes God is saying, "Would you just be still for just a moment?" What would that look like in our lives? Turn off your phone. It won't kill you. I promise. It won't kill you. Put your laptop down. Turn off the TV. Dismiss everything for just a few minutes and just be with Jesus.
25:47 And what's fascinating about the phrase "be still" is that it carries the idea of letting go, and that fits perfectly with what we're talking about today, because total dependence requires us to admit, "I can't do this on my own." The Apostle Paul learned this in 2 Corinthians chapter 12 verse 9, where God tells Paul, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." And then Paul's response is in the last part of the verse, where he says this: "Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me." That right there is the upside-down kingdom of God. It's different than the world, right? And we think strength means having everything together. But God says sometimes strength begins when we finally admit that we don't. Sometimes the most powerful thing that you can say is, "God, I need you." And when you're still, when you're quiet, when you stop trying to control everything, and you begin to recognize something is wrong in your life, and then you recognize something that you've forgotten already, and that is that He is God — that's an important place to be.
27:12 So we've got to get away from the crowd. And then the second thing that I would challenge you to do is this: find your rest in Him. Find your rest in God. And it doesn't matter who you are today. Maybe you go to work every single day, every single week. Maybe you stay at home. Maybe you're a teenager in school, or maybe you're in college and you're writing a bunch of papers all the time. Maybe you're retired. But here's what I know about every single one of us — is that there are times in our lives when we are tired, weary, burnt out, frustrated, overwhelmed, and sometimes just completely exhausted. And the one thing that we often need is the simple word rest. But when I look around, it seems like nobody knows where to find it. I mean, you turn on the news and it doesn't look like we're living in a culture that knows what rest looks like. If you look around at Christians, a lot of times you don't see it there either. We're tired, we're anxious, we're burnt out. We're carrying things that we were never, ever meant to carry. And I think part of the problem is that we've forgotten where to find true rest.
28:36 Because when you're tired, what do you naturally go to? Well, you think, "I need to take a nap," or "Maybe I need to go on vacation. Work is stressing me out. If I could just get away for a week and go onto the beach, then I'd be rested when I got back." And there's nothing wrong with a nap. There's nothing wrong with a vacation. There's nothing wrong with having hobbies that help you decompress. We need physical rest. But here's the reality: physical rest and spiritual rest are not the same things. You can sleep for 8 hours and still wake up anxious. You can take a week off of work and you can still come home carrying the same burden that you left with. You can get away from your job and still not get away from what's happening on the inside of you, because your soul needs something deeper than a break.
29:27 And Jesus gives us the answer. Matthew chapter 11 verse 28 says this: "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest." Three simple words: "Come to me." When you're tired, come to me. When you're weary, come to me. When you're burdened, come to me. When you don't know what to do in life, come to me. When life is overwhelming, come to me. When you've been pouring out everything in you and there's nothing left in the tank, He says, "Come to me." And then what does Jesus promise? He says, "I will give you rest." That's the invitation of Jesus.
30:14 And maybe you're here today, and you're tired emotionally and spiritually. Maybe you're carrying something that nobody else knows that you're even carrying. Maybe you're watching online and you're thinking, "Well, that's me. I'm weary, I'm burdened, I'm stressed, like life is just pouring down on me." Can I tell you today that Jesus sees you, and He's not just standing over you saying, "Try harder"? He's just saying, "Come to me. Be in relationship with me." And what's beautiful about the rest that Jesus offers is that it's not just circumstantial rest. It's rest for your soul. It's the kind of rest that says, "I don't have everything figured out, but I know the one who does." It's the kind of rest that says, "I don't have to carry everything because I know the one who's carrying me." It's the kind of rest that comes when I stop leaning on my own understanding and I start trusting in God.
31:20 And that's where this whole message comes together. Listen. Total dependence means trusting God with your whole heart. It means recognizing that your way isn't always the best way. It means surrendering your plans to His plans. It means getting away from the crowd so that you can actually hear from Him. It means finding your rest in Him so that you can be prepared for what He wants to do through you. Because God has a purpose for your life, and He wants to prepare you for it. But preparation doesn't always look like doing more. Sometimes preparation looks like being with Jesus. Sometimes God is preparing you in the quiet — He's strengthening you in the stillness, and He's teaching you to trust Him before He ever asks you to step into something bigger.
32:14 The most important thing that God wants to do through you tomorrow requires Him to do something in you today. And maybe you've prayed this before: "God, I can't do this. I can't do this without you. God, I need you more now than I ever have before." And you've spent some time with God. You've been still before Him, just a moment of quietness. And God reminds you, "I'm right here. I've never left you, and I never will." And I know we say we need God more now than ever, but maybe God reminds us, "No, you've always needed me this way. Always." Sometimes it takes crazy moments and difficult circumstances for us to remember what should have been obvious to us all along. We need God all the time — not just when things fall apart, or when we're desperate, or when we don't know what to do. We need God in the good times and the bad. We need Him in the messy and the magnificent. We need Him when we're strong and when we're weak, when life makes sense, and when it doesn't make any sense at all. We need Him every single day and in every single moment.
33:37 And as we go through this series, I don't want us to simply just learn more about Jesus, but I want us to learn to live with Jesus. Because our mission here at Highlands Fellowship is to help people experience life with Jesus. And if we're gonna experience life with Jesus, we have to learn the rhythm of Jesus: we trust Him, we depend upon Him, we get away with Him, we find our rest in Him — and then He sends us back out into the world, and He walks with us to live out the purpose that He has given to each and every one of us.
34:12 So this week, here's the challenge. Get away from the crowd, okay? Put it on your calendar. 10 minutes a day at a minimum as we're developing this habit, and hopefully it becomes more — just you and God. And then find your rest in Him. Stop trying to carry everything yourself. Stop leaning on your own understanding. Come to Jesus. And you may be asking God, "What is it that you want me to do?" And God may be saying to you, "First, just come be with me. Just come be with me." That's total dependence, and that's life with Jesus.
34:38 Would you pray with me today? God, we thank you so much for your Word and your grace and your goodness to us, and your desire to be in a relationship with us. You didn't come just to give us a religion. No, you came to save us from our sins, to make us right with God the Father. And so my prayer is that you would continue to work in us in a way that we really can't do ourselves. We have total dependence upon you. Help us to release the things that we've been holding onto, turn them over to you, not to be taken back up again, but we release them and give them to you for good and trust you with the outcomes. God, as we work through this series, my prayer is that we would totally depend upon you, and we would learn how to experience life with your Son, Jesus Christ, to live each and every day, each and every moment with you right with us, leading the way as we go.
And if there's somebody here who has never given their heart and life over to Jesus Christ, my prayer is that you would depend upon Him completely today. You would give yourself over to the Lord and say, "God, I admit that I'm a sinner, and I fall short of your standard. And I believe that you sent your Son, Jesus Christ, to die on the cross so that I could be forgiven of my sins, that He was buried, and that He was raised again on the third day, defeating death, hell, sin, and the grave, so that we can all live in freedom as we follow after Him. So today, I commit my life to you, God. My life is no longer my own. It was bought with a price. It was bought by the blood of your Son, Jesus Christ, and I want to follow you with everything in me." God, help us to totally depend upon you. We thank you for all that you've done in our lives and all that you will continue to do as we experience life with you. It's in Jesus' name we pray, and everybody said, "Amen."