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How Well Do You Know Jesus – Better Questions, Better Relationship With Jesus

Jason Koeppe — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 06:18:29 +0000

“Why me?”

You hear people ask questions like this all the time. Or…

“What did I do to deserve this?”

Maybe you’re even one of them? I know I used to be and still lapse back into THINKING this type of thing every now and then when things get really tough. But after reading a book by Andy Andrews called The Traveler’s Gift and digging into the Word a bit deeper, I’m convinced that the questions we ask ourselves not only set us up for failure or success in any given situation, but they also point to how we view and understand our relationship with God. Let me explain by giving you some examples from scripture.

Our Questions Reveal How Well We Know Jesus

When Philip asked Jesus, “show us the Father…” Jesus replied…

“Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.”
(John 14:9)

See how Phillip didn’t fully understand WHO Jesus was and what His relationship to the Father was? Jesus goes so far as to ask him “Don’t you know me, Phillip?”. On the surface that seems pretty harsh, but even illustrates this further with “even after I have been among you such a long time?”. While grace abounds, it’s clear Phillip asked the wrong question here based on Jesus’ response.

So does God expect us to know everything? Nope. That’s grace in action. But knowing Jesus as well as is possible is the point. Heaven and eternal life is not the point. Eternal life with Jesus is the point. Oh how I hope I’m wrong with what I’m about ready to say, but say it I will. I fear so many people have said a prayer, started going to church, serving, singing and tithing thinking they are all set. But while all those things are good, if done without seeking to make Jesus the all consuming passion and joy of your life, I fear some of them may be the ones he says “I never knew you” to. I can’t think of anything more awful than hearing those words on that day and nothing better than “Well done good and faithful servant”.

Let’s look at some more examples.

Consider the woman at the well.

The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.)

Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

“Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his flocks and herds?”

Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” (John 4:9-14)

This is such a beautiful picture of so many wonderful things and so much can be said about this passage of scripture, but let’s focus on the questions. She asks Jesus “How can you ask me for a drink?” thinking why in the world is this teacher even talking to me. Jesus says [paraphrased] “If you knew who I was, you’d be asking me for eternal life”. So let’s pause right there. Jesus says “if you knew…who it is that asks you for a drink…”.

Do you see it? She’s got the same problem that Phillip had but with a better excuse. She doesn’t know who she’s talking to. But notice, even though she’s still not clued in, her questions get a bit better cause she starts asking about who she’s talking to (in the “are you greater than our father Jacob” part).

Our Brains & Questions

Your brain is amazing. And it’s because it’s so amazing that it does some slightly peculiar things. One of those things is racing ahead and trying to constantly serve up answers to questions you ask or someone asks you. But sometimes our brains can get stuck in a rut. To illustrate this, try this easy test suggested in 101 Ways To Generate Great Ideas, Timothy R.V. Foster:

What do you call a funny story? – joke

What are you when you have no money? – broke

What’s another word for Coca Cola? – Coke

What’s the white of an egg? ——————–

So this is an easy one right? Well it is if you said albumen. It isn’t yolk, it’s albumen. Were you tricked? Most people are. The brain likes to race ahead, because it THINKS it already knows the answer. You see your brain will always try to answer the question you ask it…even when the answer it serves up is wrong.

So when you ask self defeating or God limiting or earthly prospective (vs heavenly perspective) based questions like “why me”, you’re brain is going to work hard to serve up an answer. But if it’s the wrong question to ask in the first place (and as a christian it most certainly is because of our knowledge of God), your soul, mind and heart don’t really WANT an answer to THAT question. As a matter of fact, in general, they take your focus completely off God and put it squarely where it doesn’t belong…which is onto you.

Peter asked Jesus in John 21:21 “Lord what about him” in reference to how another disciple would die based on Jesus, one verse earlier, telling Peter how he was going to die. His focus was completely on himself and not on Jesus and His perfect plan. By the way, in the next verse Jesus answered, “If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you? You must follow me.”

How much better it would be if we set our brains on a quest to answer a question with a heavenly perspective…such as, “Lord is there something I need to learn from this”, or “Lord, can you teach me how to make you my all consuming joy and passion in life”? The brain would be on a quest to find the answer to empowering questions that bring life. See the difference?

Pilate asked Jesus what is truth when “it” (Jesus) was standing right in front of him. The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” But… the good Samaritan reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?” Martin Luther King, Jr.

So instead of asking the self defeating or God limiting questions like “Why me?”, train yourself to begin asking “Why NOT me? Adversity is preparation for greatness”. Just remember that when you ask Jesus a question His focus is on you fulfilling His purposes and will not your own. As we live our daily lives as believers I pray your focus and mission would become one with His for your life. Then and only then will we truly live.

Know God More – How It Started

Jason Koeppe — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 08:21:22 +0000

How To Know God More

How I Started To Want To Know God More…And Why You Should Care

A little over 2 weeks ago, this blog came into being and my first post was born. But if we go back a bit before then, it will help lay the foundation for what God has been doing in my life and how you can recognize it when He does similar things for you.

So about 6 months ago, give or take a month, we had some friends over to the house who were in the mortgage industry and we were discussing business among other things. Now before I go on, you should know that prior to this point, I have not been one to care about financial matters enough to even know the basics of the markets, industries or anything else for that matter as it realtes to finances. So given that backdrop, they share these amazing videos that they’ve recently seen and how we should watch them too…right then.

So being a sucker for drama and loving “a good God video” I obliged and hooked the computer up to my TV. We all sat down and he played me this video (the video is broken up into small chunks to have them on YouTube so the video we watched is made up of the following videos):

Something Amazing Happened To Me

So what’s the short version of what happened to me? I was deeply affected. And the reason is because I have always clung to the famous statement in Matthew 24:36 when Jesus was discussing the signs of His “coming, and of the end of the world”: ”

But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.” (Matthew 24:36)

But after watching this I became convicted not of the date of the return or even so much of the specific teachings here, but rather that God wants us to be watchmen. He doesn’t want His church to be asleep as I had been. And that most of all that I needed to wake up and start to treat my spirituality differently; take it more seriously, dig deeper with God and most of all, know God more than I did at that moment.

It was around the same time I started watching Perry Stone and became extremely interested in the Jewish feasts (diving appointments) and how much the scriptures seemed to come alive when you knew the customs, history and most of all the Jewish feasts and their meaning. I realized how very little I actually knew about my Lord and saviour, the bible and the signs and times we lived in.

Time To Get Serious For God

It was then I made the decision to get serious. I decided that there was no reason my DVR couldn’t be just as helpful for me to watch 24 and Lost as it was to watch Perry Stone, Sid Roth and John Ankerberg (just three shows I picked out that deal with the supernatural and prophecy). It was then that I made the decision that set me down the road I’m on now.

Now if I’m being honest, I will admit that I got a tad bit attached to the dates mentioned above in the video and started speculating…not in a serious way but just “what if that’s when Jesus comes back” type of thing. And it was distracting…mainly cause it caused me to look to Mark Biltz for more answers and Perry Stone and not to the Word of God. But shortly thereafter I stopped worrying so much about the exact dates and more about being awake with my eyes wide open and that led me to another interesting passion/hunger.

Put simply, I wanted to know God more, to know more of God, to press into the things of the Lord and the Kingdom of God, to seek Him and to Find Him and for Him to find me!

Oh Man Did God Wow Me!

And ya know what I did, He did. Example? My buddy Dave and I go to a local festival together and before we get there, we pray for opportunities to pray for people and possibly to pray for physical or emotional healing. Not more than 20 minutes after that prayer closed, we were at the festival sitting down to eat. Two ladies (a mom and a daughter) sat down in the only two seats left around us and within 30 seconds after introducing themselves proceeded to tell us that the daughter had just lost her husband to cancer the week before and she was very sad and lonely. WOW!

So we prayed for her, rejoiced in God and moved on down the fairway…only to find literally 5 minutes later a squad attending to a woman in a wheel chair about 100 feet ahead. Again, we prayed for the woman and God moved and was powerfully present as we prayed for her physical healing, she was touched and we were astonished at God and how awesome He was to us. Finally in that one day right after that, we saw a demonstration of a sheep dog hearding (not sheep but chickens) and how they do it. Too much to go into here, but suffice it to say, seeing it in action is very symbolic to our faith.

Now this is just one example and a very powerful one at that, but God started to move. So you would have thought I would press in even harder right? I wish I had. Truth is, I let the world distract me and take me away from God, quiet times and devotionals and prayer more than I should have for several months. My job started to consume me in more ways than one (not so much the actual work, but the stress of dealing with the company).

Finally, on June 5th, during a men’s retreat with my church and several of my close buddies, God worked on some stuff with me (too much to go into on this already long post, but things I will be sharing here). Not the simplest and most basic of which was a journaling method for my devotional time and bible study time with God. I LOVE it and have been using it ever since. In doing the journaling, I started to formulate the idea for this blog and wondered would this be anything anyone else would even like to read or care about.

Now at the same time, I started attending a home group doing a study on the prophetic with a book and workbook called You May All Prophesy. Very good book to teach you how God speaks, why prophesy is important and help you understand all the myths surrounding prophesy. Another guy in the group also attended and was deeply affected by the mens’ retreat and we wanted a way to make sure we didn’t lose momentum with God and also to make sure we could hold one another accountable to some degree. I told him about the idea for this blog, he liked it and WHALA, Live2Worship.net is born and the How To Find God, But Are You Looking post is up along with the Why Live2Worship.net page?

How Can All This Help You?

So why did I share all that. 2 reasons really.

So that you’ll know, no matter what God chooses to do to me, for me or through me that less than a year ago I was just an average american who was too busy, too stressed, too broke and too passive, but Christian nonetheless.
So that you’ll see how God prompted me to raise it up a few notches, how He blessed us when we stepped out so that you might know if/when He does that for you and what the appropriate response is (and not cause I always chose it).

Ok, this post was really long, but it gives you nice backdrop to all this that’s happening on a daily basis. BTW, had some REALLY cool things shown to me by God last night, today and tonight. Will be sharing those things really soon. Till then..Live2Worship!