Latest / The Living Waters Podcast / Fleeing Hypocrisy, Faith in God, and Football that's Eternal - Highlight Episode 322

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Fleeing Hypocrisy, Faith in God, and Football that's Eternal - Highlight Episode 322 · The Living Waters Podcast

• 1:04
  Speaker 1: But we do have some guests in the house it's all my family and they bleed purple and gold for a reason.
• 1:11
  Speaker 2: Lakers, yeah, come on.
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: They are not just Laker fans, but they're more Clipper fans, but they are Minnesota Viking fans, which leads to the fact that we have another guest inside of our house.
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: It is Jordan Kanoshek.
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 1:31
  Speaker 3: How'd I do?
• 1:31
  Speaker 3: Wow, not very good, not very good, I'm just kidding.
• 1:34
  Speaker 3: That was perfect Was it really.
• 1:35
  Speaker 3: Yeah, perfect, great job, mark.
• 1:37
  Speaker 3: I grew up going to church.
• 1:38
  Speaker 3: I grew up hearing about Jesus dying on the cross for my sins, but I didn't know how that applied to me, and I wore a cross around my neck and I would be one who would profess to know God with my lips.
• 1:52
  Speaker 3: But my life was far from anything pertaining to God.
• 1:55
  Speaker 3: The verse that really comes to mind is when Jesus talks and says this is eternal life that they may know you, the only true God in Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.
• 2:03
  Speaker 3: So I knew about him, but I didn't actually have a relationship with him.
• 2:07
  Speaker 3: In fact, my life was crazy.
• 2:11
  Speaker 3: When I was 10 years old, I smoked pot for the first time.
• 2:13
  Speaker 3: I got arrested two times in middle school shoplifting, getting suspended from school, getting in fights but I had this desire to serve, which was a miracle for me, because I was a greedy kid.
• 2:24
  Speaker 3: I would have thought how much am I getting paid for this work?
• 2:26
  Speaker 3: But that thought didn't come across my mind.
• 2:28
  Speaker 3: And so, like many kids who come home from a mission trip or anything like that, you come back and you're on fire and as I begin to reflect, like, why is that the case?
• 2:37
  Speaker 3: And it dawned on me.
• 2:39
  Speaker 3: It's because you do the things that you should do as a Christian.
• 2:41
  Speaker 3: You spend time in God's word, you spend time in prayer, you spend time in fellowship, you spend time serving my affections, my desires, my motives, everything changed what happened you?
• 2:54
  Speaker 3: changed.
• 2:54
  Speaker 3: It dawned on me that I had become born again, that god took my stony heart.
• 2:59
  Speaker 3: He reached into my heart with his invisible hands and he took out that stony heart and he gave me a heart of flesh.
• 3:03
  Speaker 3: He gave me a heart that no longer loved my sin, but he gave me a heart that loved righteousness.
• 3:06
  Speaker 3: He gave me a heart that no longer loved my sin, but he gave me a heart that loved righteousness.
• 3:09
  Speaker 3: He gave me a heart that wanted to please him and honor him and obey him, and I just had this insatiable desire to want to grow in my relationship with him and to know him and to know his word and to begin to share my faith, begin to tell people about Jesus.
• 3:23
  Speaker 3: And I didn't really know how to do that, but I just said I need to do this.
• 3:29
  Speaker 4: Well, I would say something here that I just is oozing out of you, and that is the high-octane fuel of gratitude.
• 3:35
  Speaker 4: It's something that motivates me.
• 3:38
  Speaker 4: It's always motivated me.
• 3:39
  Speaker 4: When I saw my sin back 50-something years ago and then suddenly saw the cross, gratitude exploded in me and it never, ever dies down.
• 3:49
  Speaker 4: And I can detect that in you.
• 3:50
  Speaker 4: You've seen your sin, you've seen the cross.
• 3:52
  Speaker 4: You realize what God's done and what we have in store for us.
• 3:55
  Speaker 4: Earlier on, you mentioned someone saying do you believe what he believes?
• 4:02
  Speaker 4: And he says no, but he does.
• 4:03
  Speaker 4: Speaking of a Christian, that was David Hume.
• 4:05
  Speaker 4: A skeptic of the 18th century Saw a friend going to hear George Whitefield and he says you don't believe that, and the guy says no, but he does.
• 4:15
  Speaker 4: And that's because the man with an experience is not at the mercy of a man with an argument.
• 4:20
  Speaker 4: When you're truly born again, you've truly seen your sin, you've truly been made a new person in Christ.
• 4:26
  Speaker 4: There's no denying that it's an experience and that gratitude is so essential to drive us to reach the lost.
• 4:33
  Speaker 4: Amen, wow, thank you.
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: You know, I remember meeting Tony Dungy and he was across the table, the same size as this about, and I saw down he was wearing his Super Bowl ring and I commented on it and I said, oh, you're wearing your Super Bowl ring and without me even asking to be able to see it, he took off his ring and he bounced it across the table over to me.
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: He didn't even know who I was.
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: I picked it up and I was just thinking this man was not playing or coaching for a perishable crown right, that his goal, his desire, was to coach for an imperishable crown right.
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: I like in Matthew 16, it says then Jesus told his disciples if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow me, for whoever will save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: Or, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, when Christ calls a man, he bids him to come and die right that there has to come a moment.
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: There has to come a time and a point I remember.
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: I mean I never played college ball, right, but I remember when I played high school ball and I had torn a ligament in my knee.
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: Now we won our league, but it's high school and I still.
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: I found my identity in the sports that I played and when the coach told me that I was done for the season, I remember crying like a little baby inside the doctor's office, thinking you don't understand.
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: You know I've got all these plans.
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: You know I wanted to run in the Olympics and run the high hurdles.
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: I had a teammate of mine who ran in the Olympics as well and we're talking to each other just going.
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: This is what we're going to do.
• 6:21
  Speaker 4: This is so great, but when I became a christian I lost my competitive edge.
• 6:22
  Speaker 4: We talked about the atmosphere in a crowd of 80 000 people.
• 6:24
  Speaker 4: It's, I've been in a crowd of 80 000 people.
• 6:26
  Speaker 4: I'll never forget it.
• 6:27
  Speaker 4: It was, uh like was called the commonwealth games, the mini olympic games.
• 6:30
  Speaker 4: The roar of the crowd was magic.
• 6:33
  Speaker 4: You cannot duplicate that on an 80 80 inch flat screen tv.
• 6:35
  Speaker 4: It's just not there.
• 6:35
  Speaker 4: The roar of the crowd was magic.
• 6:36
  Speaker 4: You cannot duplicate that on an 80 80 inch flat screen tv.
• 6:37
  Speaker 4: It's just not there.
• 6:39
  Speaker 4: The spirit of that and that is so appealing to humanity.
• 6:42
  Speaker 4: But that to me, is just a tiny fraction of what you feel when you're truly worshiping god.
• 6:48
  Speaker 4: And that sort of adulation is for god and not for human beings, because it doesn't matter how much people compliment you and say you're great, you just get to sleep at night alone.
• 7:01
  Speaker 4: You close your eyes, you're alone.
• 7:04
  Speaker 4: And the only way you can get that satisfaction I don't like to say it is through trusting in Christ, because I don't want to preach a man-centered gospel and say come to Jesus, because he'll give you satisfaction, because they've got to come through the door of genuine repentance, genuine contrition, to find that completeness that you find in Christ.
• 7:23
  Speaker 5: The telos is this idea that the Greeks believe that each one of us was created for a purpose.
• 7:27
  Speaker 5: So, if you think of like and telos is the perfect version of that thing.
• 7:31
  Speaker 5: So I use the example of a watch.
• 7:33
  Speaker 5: The telos watch is the watch that tells time on time all the time.
• 7:38
  Speaker 5: It's never a second early or a second late.
• 7:40
  Speaker 5: It never dies of batteries, and all other watches are created to be like the telos.
• 7:47
  Speaker 5: But all other watches will fall short.
• 7:49
  Speaker 5: They run out of batteries.
• 7:50
  Speaker 5: They're early, they're late, whatever the case.
• 7:52
  Speaker 5: And so the question is what is the telos of man?
• 7:56
  Speaker 5: And the telos of man is Jesus Christ.
• 7:59
  Speaker 5: He lived the perfect life.
• 8:01
  Speaker 5: He lived the life that we should have lived when we think about how we were created to be.
• 8:06
  Speaker 5: The Heidelberg Catechism what is your only comfort in life and death?
• 8:09
  Speaker 5: That I am not my own, but I belong to Christ.
• 8:13
  Speaker 5: I have been created to glorify and enjoy God forever, but I fall short of my created order by glorifying myself, by glorifying creaturely comforts, by glorifying sin, whatever the case might be.
• 8:29
  Speaker 5: And the beauty of the gospel, of course, is that God means to redeem us, back to being more like his son, the telos, or making us be who he intended us to be.
• 8:41
  Speaker 5: So many of us are living our lives in the way that like I'll explain it to people on the street If I tried to use a watch as a hammer, nothing good would come of it.
• 8:50
  Speaker 5: The watch would break.
• 8:52
  Speaker 5: The goal of hammering the nail would not come about.
• 8:54
  Speaker 5: We so often are living our lives outside of our telos.
• 8:59
  Speaker 5: We are our watch trying to be a hammer.
• 9:01
  Speaker 5: And that gets back to the question I want to ask you, jordan Earlier.
• 9:04
  Speaker 5: I asked you to say what does it mean to find your identity in football?
• 9:09
  Speaker 5: Now tell me what does it mean to find your true telos, your identity in Christ.
• 9:16
  Speaker 3: There's a verse in 1 Corinthians 8.6.
• 9:19
  Speaker 3: It says Yet to us, there is one God, the Father, from whom all things and we exist for him, and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and we exist through him.
• 9:30
  Speaker 3: And so when I realized that I am not my own, that I've been bought with a price the precious blood of Jesus when I realized that I've got to wear some great titles in life I've been able to put on a college uniform, I've been able to put on an NFL uniform, three different teams, four different teams but the greatest joy that I get to have is I get to be an ambassador of the Most High God.
• 9:55
  Speaker 3: I get to be an ambassador of Jesus Christ.
• 9:56
  Speaker 3: So that's the greatest hat that I've ever worn and the greatest hat that I ever will wear, and that is a stewardship that I hold very highly, and it's not something that I take lightly.
• 10:08
  Speaker 3: You know.
• 10:09
  Speaker 3: I tell people often that to be a follower of Jesus is a great privilege, it's a great honor, but it's also a great responsibility.
• 10:17
  Speaker 3: And I get to bear the name of Christ, and so I live like a hypocrite for so much of my life that I no longer desire to live that way, so to be able to put my identity in him, knowing that those moments of running out the tunnel are fun, but the reality that I am a child of God, made possible through faith in Christ.
• 10:40
  Speaker 3: There's no greater joy than that.
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: That's awesome.
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: Somebody's listening who wants to enter into professional sports or their profession, whatever that may be.
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: What words of advice, what counsel, what challenge perhaps would you give to them?
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: In other words, like if you could go back in time and you could talk to a 17, 18 year old Jordan right, Knowing the future, knowing all that you know right now, what advice would you give to that person?
• 11:06
  Speaker 3: I think, answering this question, it kind of brings me back to what Ray and Oscar were just talking about, and I can't help but think about the woman at the well when Jesus approached her and he said whoever drinks of this water will thirst again.
• 11:19
  Speaker 3: But whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life, and so, drinking from the things of this world, you will thirst again.
• 11:31
  Speaker 3: There's only one who can truly satisfy that thirst he is the bread of life.
• 11:36
  Speaker 3: He who comes to him will never hunger and he who believes in him will never thirst.
• 11:40
  Speaker 3: And so I would say work hard at that, enjoy those moments, but never let it be at the altar of your relationship with Jesus Christ.
• 11:50
  Speaker 3: Cherish that Bottle, that Bottle that Represent him, honor him, glorify him in all that you do.
• 11:57
  Speaker 3: As Mark said earlier.
• 11:58
  Speaker 3: Jesus said Let your light shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.
• 12:04
  Speaker 3: Let it not be about you, let it be about Jesus Christ, because all of our names will perish, not in the stat book of eternity, but there's one name that has been given among men by which we must be saved and there's one name that will endure forever, and it's the Lord Jesus Christ.
• 12:23
  Speaker 3: So let that be the name that we play, for, that we work for, that we do all things for, amen.
• 12:29
  Speaker 2: Thank you for tuning in to this week's highlights from the Living Waters podcast.
• 12:33
  Speaker 2: Friends, we value your time, so we've created a bite-sized version of our podcast for listeners who want to get equipped.
• 12:40
  Speaker 2: Without the jokes and fellowship.
• 12:42
  Speaker 2: Be sure to check out the full episode every Thursday where we dive deeper into the topic.
• 12:48
  Speaker 2: Until then, you can watch the full podcast episode available now on livingwaterstv.