Closer – Growing Closer To Jesus

This podcast is presented to you by Pastor Jason Burns and Access Church in Lakeland, Florida.

For more information, visit Access.tv.

Now to start this whole year off, I want to start with a series of messages called closer.

And here's the whole point.

I want you to get closer to Jesus.

In fact, here's my request: make it a priority for these next four weeks to be at church, to come to revival nights, to join us every single day intentionally for 22 in 22.

And let's see what God does for us.

Now, to get us started with this new series, um, a few years ago, four years ago, I had this weird weekend kind of coming up at my house.

My wife had to be out of town for a couple days and no big deal.

And then she had already made the decision for my two boys, my oldest sons, to go away to my in-laws' house for the weekend.

And so for the weekend, it was just gonna be me and my then three-year-old daughter Ella.

And I need you to know something.

Like I like to turn every ordinary moment into a moment that's extraordinary.

Like my goal as a dad is to create so many memories that my kids look back at their childhood and they say, I loved, I loved being a kid in the Burns family.

And so because everyone else was gone, I said to Ella, I said, girl, let's not stay here at the house.

Let's let's go do something.

And we started what became a fun tradition.

Now you need to know in the Burns family, we have this weird tradition of naming everything.

My car has a name, my refrigerator has a name, my pillow has a name, like everything in our house has a name.

And so when Ella and I were gonna go on vacation, we said we need to name it.

Now, in that season, little Ella was three, and she came up with cute little nicknames for my wife and for me.

For my wife, she called Liz Mommy Snuggles.

It was the cutest thing ever.

And I don't know why she called me this, but this name, it blessed me.

Ella called me Daddy Handsome.

And I loved it.

I don't know why.

It just as a dad, it just filled my heart with such joy, and it probably put way too many dollars on my credit card, but that's a different issue.

And so we were trying to decide what we were gonna call this little one or two night getaway.

And Ella goes, I know what we'll call it.

I got it.

We will call it Daddy Handsome Elocation.

And all these years later, we still go every year on Daddy Handsome Elocation.

Well, this particular year, four years ago, Ella decided she wanted to go to Orlando and she wanted to stay at a Disney hotel because she was three.

I got us like the cheapest, cheapest Disney hotel because she was three.

She probably will never remember it.

But we had a blast.

The last day we were there, we drove into Orlando and we went to a place called the Orlando Eye.

It's the big Ferris wheel in Orlando.

And next to that Ferris wheel, there's an really cute aquarium.

And so we decided we were gonna go.

And I said, Ella, are you excited?

She said, Yes.

I said, Are we gonna see fish?

And she said, We're gonna see all of them.

I said, Are we gonna see sharks?

And she said, yes.

Like she was so excited to see all of these fish.

But then the strangest thing happened when we walked into the aquarium and she saw all of the fish.

And when she realized how close she could get to them, there was this look of terror in her face.

In fact, this is the only good picture I have of Ella from that aquarium.

Look at the skepticism in her eyes.

Look how nervous she looks.

I'm assuming these are jellyfish or something.

This is the only picture I have from that day.

But when she realized how close she could get, she got nervous.

And I tried everything I possibly could.

This aquarium had something cute.

In some of the fish tanks, there was an area you could crawl underneath.

And then the glass from the aquarium had a bowl that you could kind of step up and you could stick your head in, and you could get like just inches away from the fish.

And I begged her.

I went underneath and stood in one.

I begged her and she wouldn't do it.

I remember there's a part where you can walk through a tunnel, and the tunnel has a curved glass above you, and sharks swim above you.

And it was an awesome, awesome moment.

I loved it.

It's like, Ella, let's go.

And so I picked her up.

And when she saw how close the sharks were, she buried her face in my neck and was trembling in fear because she felt like she was too close.

You know what's interesting is for so many people, really Christians, we have the same kind of response and reaction when it comes to God.

It's like we love God and we love a lot of things about him, we love his character and his nature.

But if we're just honest, it's like there's this fear in us, or there's this skepticism in us.

And what it tends to do is it tends to keep us from getting too close to God.

It's like we're afraid if we get too close, he'll ask us to do something or to give something or to serve someone we don't want to serve.

And for whatever reason, many of us have unintentionally decided that we don't want to get too close.

So we keep God at arm's length.

Well, let me tell you something about God.

When it comes to your relationship with God, the narrative of Scripture is that there is a God, the God who hung the sun, the moon, and the stars, the God who created water buffalo, the God who created all the fish in the sea, the God who created beetles and roses and all kinds of flowers, the God who dreamed up the world and with his words spoke it into existence.

He created you and me.

And check this out.

He pursues us.

He longs to be close to us.

The narrative of scripture is a God who pursues us.

In Luke 15, Jesus tells a story of a father with two sons, and it's called the story of the prodigal son, maybe the most famous story Jesus ever told.

And the end of the story is fascinating.

The one boy has left and he's realized he's hit rock bottom and he realizes he messed up.

And he comes back to his dad, and Jesus says the father is standing waiting for his son.

And when he sees his son, he runs after him.

He hugs him, he kisses him, he throws a party in his honor because he loves his son.

The picture there is so simply this that if we will take one step closer to Jesus, he comes running after us.

I love this quote from this brilliant theologian, Oswald Sanders.

He says this.

He says, We are as close to God as we choose to be.

Well, we're not as close to God as he chooses for us, we're as close as we choose to be.

So the onus is on us to make this decision that 2022, this brand new year, I'm going to pursue after God with everything I have.

And check this out you set the limits, you set the boundaries, you get to be as close to God as you choose to be.

So how incredible for us would it be if we made this decision to go after Jesus?

Now to do that, we have to ask ourselves this really difficult, really pervasive, really honest question.

Here's what it is.

How close are you to Jesus?

In fact, I almost want to add a word.

How close are you actually to Jesus?

Well, like if you were to be honest with yourself, how close are you right now?

And then there's this follow-up question that requires sheer honesty and transparency of our soul.

But the second question is, how close do you want to be?

And as we kick off this new series, as we kick off this brand new year, I want to ask you to just make this decision.

2022 is going to be the year that I get closer to God than I've ever been.

It's going to be the year that I pursue Jesus and I pursue what it means to actively become a disciple of Jesus.

And it changes everything.

In the book, the book of John, chapter 13 through 17, that there's this interesting story.

John 13 · chapter mention

John he recounts what many of us would call the Last Supper.

Some people call it the Lord's Supper.

Other traditions might call it the Lord's table.

And it's this interesting story of Jesus and his disciples having a meal right before all the events that happen, before he's taken, arrested, accused, basically hung on a cross, before he rises from the dead.

All this stuff happens literally right before it.

And it's it's this famous story.

In fact, many people have heard of it.

We when we take communion, we remember what Jesus did for us there at this table.

But John 13 through 15 records it.

It's this famous story.

In fact, Da Vinci painted this picture of it.

It hangs in a chapel in Milan to this day.

And it's interesting.

This is like it's it's old, it's it's kind of losing some of its luster.

But what's fascinating about even the picture is that scholars, people that are art majors and people that who understand art, they they argue over what da Vinci saw when he saw this.

Because you've got Jesus here in the middle of the table, and then you've got the different disciples, but they're all grouped up in groups of three.

And we don't know exactly what that means.

You've got some of them with different hand postures.

We don't exactly know what all of it means.

And so many brilliant people have argued over what it means.

I look at this and I just wonder, why were they all on the same side of the table?

Literally makes no sense, but but here they are.

And this is the picture.

Jesus is there, and the story in John 13 starts with Jesus washing the feet of his disciples.

It was this act of sacrificial, selfless love, and he does this for them.

And then there's a lot of conversations in this meal that are recorded in those four chapters.

Jesus says to Peter that Peter would eventually betray him, and he does.

Jesus says to his disciples that there was coming a day, and they had no idea that it was literally like hours away, but there was coming a day when he would be nailed to a cross, where he would die for the sins of the world.

And all of this transpires there at this meal.

And right smack dab in the middle of it.

John chapter 15, Jesus gives us this new picture of what it means to actually follow him.

John 15 · chapter mention

Well, like if you want to be actually close to Jesus, he gives us a really clear picture of what it looks like.

Here's what he says: John chapter 15, verses 12 and 13.

John 15:12

He says, My command is this, love each other.

Now there's more to it than this, but we could stop here.

In fact, we could build a whole series on these three words.

And let me ask you the question: how are you doing at loving each other?

How are you doing at loving people that think differently than you, vote differently than you, that see the world through a different worldview and lens than you?

How are you doing it?

If you're not doing well, then I just want to say to you that you're maybe not doing a great job of following Jesus the way he invites us to follow him.

But Jesus, he clarifies it.

He doesn't just say love each other, because that could mean all kinds of different things to all different kinds of people.

He takes it a step farther and he says, love each other, and here's how you do it, as I have loved you.

He clarifies it.

This is all theoretical.

He hasn't died on the cross yet, but he's he's inviting them to love each other, to be willing to lay down their life sacrificially, the way he did for us.

And so when Jesus is talking in these verses, in this first verse, it's he's painting for us a picture with his words.

But then he takes those words and he literally turns it into a picture.

It's like if there was an epitaph on a painting of Jesus on the cross, it would literally be this from the next verse.

He says, Greater love has no one than this to lay down one's life for one's friends.

He says, This is what real love is.

Real love isn't just words, it is action.

Real love is not just feelings and emotions.

Real love is actually demonstrated.

This is the picture of what love really is.

And then there's this word at the end.

There's this simple little word, just a few letters that has resounding impact to our souls.

He says, to lay down one's life for one's friends.

Jesus, the son of God.

Jesus, who was there at creation, Jesus who laid his life down for us, who was buried and rose again from the dead for us.

Jesus, the son of God, invites us to be his friends.

This is a different level of intimacy.

This is a different way of thinking about and processing the world, that the God of the universe longs to be close to you.

He longs to be your friend.

So let me ask the question again: how close can we come to Jesus?

I think for a lot of us, we we hear this question and we have a wrong idea.

A lot of us we confuse these two ideas.

So the first one is many of us think that this question means to know Jesus, and others think it means to know about.

Some think it means to know, and others think it means to know about.

Let me explain what this means.

You can know a lot about someone without actually knowing them.

In fact, if you're into celebrity in Hollywood, you might know a lot about a musician or a celebrity.

You might, um, if you asked me about the Dallas Cowboys, I know a lot about the Dallas Cowboys.

I know where they went to college, I know what their stats are, I know a lot about them, but I don't, I don't know them.

You may know a lot of facts about who's dating who in Hollywood and who broke up.

You may know a lot of tabloid drama, but you just know about them.

You don't really know them.

And what Jesus invites us to do is to move past knowing about him and to press hard into actually knowing him.

To not just have a head full of knowledge, but to have a defined relationship with him.

As we read through scripture, it's fascinating because there's all different levels of not just knowing about, but actually knowing Jesus.

And I want to look at six of the levels really quickly.

And as we look at these, I'd like to invite you to determine where am I on the list?

As we study the life of Jesus, there were six different levels of people who know him.

There were the crowds, these were the multitudes of people.

The next where there were the 5,000, these were the ones that Jesus fed.

Then after this were the 70, these were the people who followed Jesus and served faithfully.

Then there was his 12, these were his disciples.

They were with him everywhere.

And then out of out of those 12, there was this inner circle, the circle of three, Peter, James, and John.

They were his best of the best friends.

But then there was this last one.

There was the one.

This is John.

As John writes the gospel of John, he often refers to himself as John, Jesus' beloved, or John, the one Jesus loves.

Now, how cool is that?

Like, how cool would it be to literally write a book of the Bible, but when you refer to yourself, you don't refer to yourself as John or me.

You refer to yourself as the one Jesus loved, the one close to Jesus.

I love that John does this.

There's this interesting moment in the book of John, written by John, where John says that when Jesus rose from the dead, he and Peter raced to the tomb.

Literally, they they were on a foot race.

They raced to see who could get there first.

And it says, And the one Jesus loved got there first.

I love that so much.

The Bible's funny.

That's literally a double burn.

He's like, there's Peter, just Peter, but then there's the one Jesus loved, talking about himself.

And then the double sick burn was, and he beat Peter.

I love it so much.

So as we look at these different levels, these six different levels of closeness or intimacy with Jesus, I want to ask you, where are you on this?

And let me explain these just a little bit further for the sake of clarity.

That the first group of people that we meet is we meet what we call the crowds.

Other parts of scripture call them the multitudes.

And these were the people who literally followed Jesus everywhere, but they kept their distance, that they followed because they wanted to see what he was going to do.

They wanted to see.

So the crowds are the people who they live in the place of watching and listening, but from a distance.

They heard the miracles, they heard he was teaching about God, and they wanted to know about it.

So they watched and they listened, but from a distance.

Now it would be easy to look at that list of six levels of intimacy and think to yourself, well, that's the worst.

But but every relationship with God starts somewhere.

Think back to the first time you came to church.

If you weren't raised in church, when you came, if you came to church as an adult, maybe it was weird.

Maybe you heard a lot of questions, maybe you heard people singing songs and it talked about him or how he loves us or how we love him.

And it was all just new.

It's new language to you.

Every relationship starts somewhere.

And so there were people who, before they took a step closer, they started in the crowds.

They just watched to see what Jesus was going to do.

But then there's another level.

Like imagine these as concentric circles that get closer and closer to him.

The next level beyond the crowd is the 5,000.

You might know the story, it's recorded in a couple of the gospels of Jesus feeding the 5,000.

What's interesting is scholars believe that it was way more than 5,000 because 5,000 people would have represented only the men.

So if you added the women and children in, it might have been 15 to 20,000 people.

But these were people that they had moved a step closer.

They were there to listen to Jesus.

They were, they were intentional about it.

And they were there from the place of feeding and healing.

They were there to get what they could get from him.

And again, all of us need stuff from God at times.

And there's nothing wrong with praying and saying, God, I need you to meet my needs.

I need you to heal me.

I need you to provide for me.

Nothing wrong with any of that.

But that if that's as close as you ever get to Jesus, you're missing out on the relationship and the intimacy that he offers.

Well, well, beyond the 5,000, as you get closer to Jesus, there is the 70.

And the 70 are the group of people who they work and they serve.

They were literally with Jesus.

They follow Jesus.

They serve him.

They met his needs.

They went before him to prepare the way.

They were there to clean up after.

They were just there serving him.

And a lot of us come to church, and after a while of being a skeptic in the distance, we start to ask, well, what's in this for me?

And then this step is a step of action.

It's not just what do I get, but it's also what can I give?

How can I serve?

How can I meet needs?

This is a great place to be, but it's not a great place to stop.

And then as you get closer to Jesus, it moves from 70 to the 12.

And the 12 were his disciples.

These were the ones who were with him literally everywhere he went.

They left everything and they followed.

They lived in the place of leaving and following.

To do this, they'd have to leave their families.

They'd have to leave their careers.

They'd have to leave their security to follow after Jesus.

And they were so close to him.

There was this ancient phrase said about disciples of rabbis.

It was, may you be covered in the dust of your rabbi.

Essentially, what it meant was, may you be so close to them that the dust that they kick up from the ground gets all over you.

May you be so close to them that you don't just learn about them, but you learn to become like them.

And I really believe that this is a great place to grow to where you're literally becoming a disciple, a lifelong learner and a lifelong student of what it means not just to know about Jesus, but to actively knowing him.

Remember though, Jesus had the 12 that were with him everywhere, but then there was a closer level.

There was the three.

These were his boys.

This was Peter, James, and John.

And the three, they live from the place of joys and suffering.

What that meant is they were so close to Jesus that Jesus shared his highest moments, but he also confided in him, in them, his lowest moments.

Jesus literally told them the best of the best of the things that were happening in his life, but in his moments of pain and suffering and loss, in his moments of confusion, in his moments when he's like, God, where are you?

Have you forsaken me?

These were the ones who were invited into those conversations.

This is a place of sincere intimacy, but it gets even closer.

And I want to invite you to step this year closer.

Don't just get to the three, but get to the one.

And the one was John.

And this is a place of sacrificial love.

This is a place where you start to realize that everything you have is not just for you.

You don't live to accumulate more stuff.

You live to give, you live to bless, you live to serve.

You literally realize that everything I have, God, you gave to me, now I give it all back to you.

You have my whole heart, my whole life.

The interesting litmus test, whether or not you're the one, is do you have stuff or does your stuff have you?

Most of us live in a world where our stuff has us.

But when you start to realize that you have stuff, but it doesn't control you, it's really all about you following Jesus.

That's when this whole world and this whole life tends to make sense.

So there's six levels.

And I want to challenge you.

Identify where you are, and let's take a step closer to Jesus together.

Now, Jesus was teaching one time, and he gives us this really interesting, really challenging picture of what it means to actually follow after him.

The book of Matthew records it this way, and that this is Jesus stepping all up over your toes.

He said this, Jesus said to his disciples, Whoever wants to be my disciple, my follower, someone close to me, they must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.

This is Jesus' words.

Jesus, like if you want intimacy, if you want to be closer to me, if you want to actually know me and not just know about me, you have to do some stuff.

And I want to look at three calls, the calls to becoming closer.

The first one is found right in this verse.

Jesus said, Whoever wants to be my disciple, Jesus invites us a little bit closer.

And the closer call in these words is the call to intimacy, to not just knowing stuff, but to knowing, not just knowing about, but actively knowing him.

It's a call to intimacy.

The second level is this, right in those same words of that verse, you have to be to be his disciple.

Here's what it is: you must deny yourself and take up your cross.

It literally is an invitation to surrender.

This closer call is to surrender.

Jesus, I lay down everything, including my life.

I'm willing to give everything to follow you.

I surrender control of me.

I die to myself and my selfish desires, and I surrender control of me to you.

Here's the final thing right from the verse Jesus says must deny themselves, take up the cross, and follow me.

This is a closer call to.

Loyalty.

It literally means, Jesus, for the rest of my life, you have my whole life.

For the rest of my life, I'll pursue you.

I'll get closer to you as much as I possibly can for the rest of my life.

I'm yours.

This is what it means to be closer.

So let me end with these questions.

Question one is How far have you followed him?

How far have you followed him?

How close are you to him?

He invites us closer.

And I'm just asking you, how close are you to him?

In the same verses we read earlier from John 15, the next two verses are fascinating.

Here's what Jesus says: He says, You are my friends.

There's that word again, this level of intimacy.

If you do what I command, it's not about your feelings.

You have to do what he asks you to do.

He says, I no longer call you servants because a servant does not know his master's business.

Instead, he says, I have called you friends.

For everything that I learned from my father, I have made known to you.

How close are you?

Do you understand that he invites you to be his friend?

So here's the questions to end today.

How close can you come to Jesus?

And here's the one that's personal.

How close do you want to come to Jesus?

I said it earlier, that beautiful quote from Oswald Sanders.

You are as close to God as you choose to be.

So how incredible would it be as we kick off this new year, as our hearts are flooded with New Year's resolutions and all these ideas of how we can make our life better.

Forget all that stuff for a moment.

Your life will be better.

This will be your best year ever if it's your best year spiritually.

God, let me make it easier for you.

It'll be your best year ever if you make it the year that you decide to get closer to Jesus.

Let me pray for us.

God, thank you so much that you love us, that you didn't create us and leave us alone, but you created us to pursue us, to know us, to be near us.

And God, our desire as we kick off this new year is not to be content just knowing about you.

We want to know you.

We want to get closer to you.

God, over this next month, as we pursue you through 22 and 22, or 22 days of prayer, as we pursue you at our revival nights, at our times of prayer together as a church family, God, my prayer is that at the end of this month, we'll look back and realize that this year is going to be different because we made the decision to draw closer to you.

Maybe you're tuned in today and you don't know if you're right with God.

I don't know if that means you've never started a relationship with him, or maybe you've wandered so far away from it that today's the day that you need to decide to start anew with him as we start 2022.

If that's you, I'm gonna ask you to pray this with me.

And here's all you have to do: make the decision to surrender your life, to surrender control to him.

It's as simple as this.

Just say, Jesus, today, I give you control of my life.

I invite you to be the Lord of my life, to forgive my sins.

Jesus, I believe that you are the Son of God.

You died on a cross to pay the price for my sins, and because of your sacrifice, my sins can be forgiven.

And because you rose again from the dead, I believe that you have the power to make my life new.

So, Jesus, I surrender control of my life to you, and from this day forward I'll live for you.

I love you and I give you my life.

And it's in your name I pray, Jesus.

Amen.

Hey, if you just made that decision, what an incredible way to start this new year.

Our whole church exists to help people take the next step in their relationship with Jesus, and that is an incredible first step.

Congratulations and God bless you.