The Love Of God, Part 2

The second evidence is providence. And this is not so much a theological word as that He shows kindness. It’s God’s kindness to all men. As Christians, sometimes we get the idea that God loves us! But we get a little ticked off when He loves other people. We do! We really do. It’s us four, no more, club.

Matthew chapter 5 verses 44 and 45, Jesus speaking, Sermon on the Mount, “But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and He sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.”

The apostle Paul, same idea as he is speaking that classic Acts 17. And among all the intellectuals, he is giving his message on Mars Hill. And he says, verse 24, “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and He doesn’t live in temples built by hands. And He is not served by human hands, as if He needed anything, because He himself gives all men life and breath and everything else.”

God gives all men, the most evil people, breath and life and everything else. “From one man He made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and He determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek Him and perhaps reach out for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us.”

I would just remind you that the evidence of God’s love is He shows His kindness to all people. He loves, not just those who are righteous. He loves the unrighteous. He loves the evil. Why? He is longing and creating and giving rain and joy. Non-Christians have great weddings, non-Christians have babies, non-Christians fall in love, non-Christians have great promotions, non-Christians develop new patents, they are scientists, they are artists, they have this creative DNA, given by God, and they experience the joys of life.

And it’s all intended so they would say, “Ah, ah! Who gives this all to me?” That they might reach out and touch Him and find Him – why? Because they matter. Because He loves them.

The third way that God expresses His love is through the incarnation. He is literally proactively pursuing you. Jesus’ mission statement is in Luke 19:10: “For the Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost.”

John 4, we have the woman at the well. And, “Should we worship on this mountain or that mountain? And she has had five husbands and is shacking up with someone now. And they have a spiritual conversation and Jesus breaks every cultural taboo and He says, “I’ve got living water for you. I’ve got life for you. It’s not when you clean up your act,” she was totally rejected by her culture. That’s why she was out during that time of the day.

And then what does He say? The Father is seeking, literally, study the word, is pursuing those who will worship Him in spirit and in truth. Jesus came, He left all the glory of heaven, myriads and myriads and myriads and myriads of angels worshipping Him, He takes on human flesh, lives on a dirty planet, is rejected by men, his life explains what the Father is like, why? To pursue you! We don’t know what God is like. He is invisible. What is He like? How does He think? How does He treat people that are desperate? How does He treat people that have been so wicked, so perverted, so sinful, especially then, five husbands and living with someone?

What would God think of someone like that? He would think, I would love to give you some living water. I would love to forgive you. See, what I know is you were looking for love in all the wrong places. You were looking to fill the hole in your heart with men and you found that five couldn’t do it and probably the guy you have isn’t doing it now.

You were looking for significance and you were looking for security and you were looking to be whole. What you didn’t know is you were looking for Me! But you just couldn’t see Me and you didn’t know about Me and I want you to know, I have a free gift for you that is available now, not if you do something, not because you will do something. Because I love you.

That’s how God feels. And He pursues us. He made you for Himself, you were the object of His love well before you came to Christ, and He is pursuing you. That’s why Jesus took on human – that’s the incarnation! He took on human flesh so He could come and pursue you for relationship with Himself. That’s how much He loves you. Let’s get this moving from our head down to our heart.

The fourth way that He reveals His love is through discipline. We don’t really like this one so much. Hebrews 12:6 says, “Because the Lord disciplines those He loves, and He punishes everyone He accepts as a son.” The word punish there, literally, it’s not the idea of a punitive idea, nearly as much as this is the idea of He harshly corrects or brings about correction for a desired result. And I don’t like it and you don’t like it. But it’s an evidence of His love.

The fifth way He reveals His love is by the Holy Spirit. He supernaturally pours His love into our hearts. Romans 5:5 says, “And hope doesn’t disappoint us, because God has poured out His love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom He has given us.”

This is that Spirit. The moment you come to Christ, you do understand what happens. You are an unbeliever like I was an unbeliever, you understand the gospel, you realize Christ died in your place for your sin. You repent. That means you have a change of mind and you recognize what is true about you and you say, with empty hands, “I want to receive the free gift, by faith, of grace.” The moment I receive Jesus Christ, put my trust in His work and His resurrection, the Spirit of God enters my life.

Ephesians 1: I am sealed with the Spirit, I am adopted into God’s family, I am baptized into this thing called “the Church,” spiritual gifts are deposited in me, I have an inheritance that will never change, and I am now a part of God’s family. And the Holy Spirit takes up residence in me. That’s why I am His temple.

And then what He will do, the Spirit of God, remember He says to the disciples? “You can’t take in everything, but the Spirit, when He comes, will lead you into all truth.” That’s the last night.

You remember the very last night? He said, “I am with you now, but it is better that I go because I won’t just be with you, I will be in you.” And the Father will come and I will come and just as I am in the Father, and the Father is in me, so We will come and We will be in you” – how? “by the Holy Spirit.”

And so, the Spirit of God, dwelling in us, will take the Word and you have had it happen. He pours out the love of God. I remember late one night, I was dating a girl that I was sure I was going to marry. And her life was going this way and she was a believer and my life was going this way. And it was a lordship issue and it wasn’t some big breakup. I just knew that she was convinced that we were supposed to, after college, get married and she was an only child and lived in this little town outside of West Virginia on the Ohio River and then live right next to her parents.

And I felt the call of God on my life. But I’m telling you, I loved her. And I was heartbroken. And so I said, lordship, I mean, lordship is doing what is right whether you feel like it or not. It doesn’t have a whole lot to do with how you feel. Most of the best obedience in my life, I’m telling you, I didn’t want to do. But I don’t feel bad about it, Jesus didn’t want to do His either.

In the Garden, I don’t hear Jesus saying, “Father, thank You. This is the hour which We planned on from the foundations of the earth. I am really excited about this one. High-five the Holy Spirit for Me, hey! Let’s go!” What I hear is, “Father, if there is any other way, if there is a plan B, in the mind of the Godhead, let’s go with it now. Nevertheless…”

You demonstrate your love for God – what, how? Obedience. John 14:21. “He that has My commandments and keeps them, He it is that loves Me. And he that loves Me would love My Father.” And then what happens? “And We will come and We will reveal,” or manifest, “Ourselves to him.”

And so we go our separate ways, and one night, we have broken up, but I am used to, for a couple, three years. Home basketball game, hair is wet, come up the stairs, and she is always there right on the rail. She grabs my arm, I feel like a special guy, go over to the student union, get a Coke, da-da-da, just a great relationship.

Well, we break up for three or four or five months and I’m praying, I’m going, Oh, God, change her heart. Help her to see a vision for the world, and I’m crying and I don’t want to see anybody and I’m in my pity party and, Oh, God, it’s so hard to follow You. There will never be anybody like this as good, ever, ever. Ooooh! I’m not kidding.

I was whiny, wimpy! And I was depressed, a guy like me loses weight, you’ve got problems. You know? And so I’m praying and I’m believing God is going to do something. He’s going to bring her back to me. So I come out of the locker room, hair is wet, we lost another game, that wasn’t good. And I come up the stairs and there she is. And I’m thinking, Yes! God! Thank You so much!

So I come up the stairs and then she’s got that look like, there is something wrong about this. And I said hi and I said her name. “Hi, how are you doing?” And there was this, sort of this, a little standoffish. And then a guy came up the stairs, it was another guard on the team. Ladies, you don’t know, but guys, you know how you talk in the locker room and you kind of know the score, where guys were at, what they do, why they do it, all that jazz? And this dude is a snake. Okay? He’s a snake.

And he walks right by me and he goes out the door and they go out arm in arm. And I remember walking across campus, being as mad at God as ever. Boy, I was mad, I was so mad! I told God, Either You speak to me, You speak to me tonight or I’m out of here! I cannot believe You would do this to me! And I went over and I went over and I said, Okay, I’m going to, okay. I’m going to read right where I’m reading and You’d better speak to me. I’m serious!

Literally, the words came to me, I feel like a beast inside. I just, I mean, I was so angry and so disappointed. And so I read Psalm 71. He didn’t speak. Okay. Psalm 72. He didn’t speak. I figure you ought to keep reading where you are. You know? You start jumping around you’ll try and make God speak to you.

I opened Psalm 73. I’m telling you, I read Psalm 73 and I have never audibly heard the voice of God that could not have been the Holy Spirit pouring out His love more clearly, more powerfully, in all my life. It was scary. The very thoughts that I had, the very phrases out of my mind, the things that I said, the very core issues, I read Psalm 73 and I wept like a baby in my room. God understood. And He had a plan.

You see, one of the ways God will love you is the Holy Spirit will be poured out, and the way He will do it is that sometimes He’ll do it through His Word. Sometimes, I was in India shortly – and it was such a dark time in the middle of the night and spiritual opposition and all this tsunami and I couldn’t sleep. And there is all this spiritual warfare going on.

And in the middle of the night, I just started, I put on my tape player and I just started to sing. God, I just feel so alone and so far away and this is so scary. And I just began to sing and the Spirit of God just came into the room and poured the love of God and I just felt like He put His arms around me.

I have been in an ICU before where I thought, Oh, one of my boys is going to die. And I begged God and I pleaded with God and the Spirit, you have been there, you have had these, haven’t you?

The final way is through His Son. Jesus reveals the nature of God’s love for us through His Son. Jesus modeled compassion, grace, and truth.

Right? Just the life of Jesus. He shows us the Father’s love by how He responds to children, by how He feeds people, by how He has compassion on Jairus’ daughter, by how He stops with the widow and it’s her only son and He raises him from the dead, by how He forgives.

He reveals His love by His teaching and He explains, if you want to know how Jesus feels about people, Luke 15. “Why are you hanging out with those sinners and those bad people?” And so He tells them a parable and He tells them the three familiar stories: lost sheep, lost coin, lost son. You know the story.

And the picture is the Father waiting for the Son to return, to do – what? He goes out every day, Is he here yet? Is he here yet? Is he okay? It’s the picture of someone pursuing and seeking and searching and the sheep comes back on the shoulders and the coin is found and there is a party, and the son returns and there is life.

His teaching told us about the love of God. And His death demonstrated the extent of God’s love. “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down His life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for one another.”

“But God demonstrated His own love for us,” Romans 5:8, “that while we were yet sinners” – there is no performance, we are His enemies then, right? “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”

Do you sense the need to just get some of these truths soaking?

An object’s value is always determined by the price paid for it. To God, you are worth the price of His Son’s death in your place.

God loves you. How do you receive it? You must respond to God’s love in three specific ways. One, you receive it by faith in your heart.

John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever,” you need to be a whosoever. You need to be one of those people who receive it.

John 1:12 says, “Yet to all who receive Him, Jesus, to those who believe in His name, He gave the right to become children of God.” If there is anybody that has never received and jumped into the liquid ocean of love, of the God I have described, just receive Him. Just say, “Lord Jesus, I want You. I get it. Come into my life.”

The second thing to experience God’s love is we must believe it by faith in our minds. You receive Him by faith in your heart, and then we must go through the journey that I have been talking about, of believing it, by faith in our minds.

1 John 4:13 through 16 says, “We know that we live in Him and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent His Son to be the Savior of the world. If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in him and he in God. And so we know and rely on the love that God has for us.”

Did you hear that? We know, objectively, and we rely on God’s love. How do you know and rely? How does it work? Let me give you three really specific ways.

The way you begin to get this process operating, where it moves from here in your head, to your heart, is you saturate your mind in the truth of God’s love for you.

I have put a very, very important passage: Romans 8:28 through about 39. It’s the passage about, “Neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities, nor things present nor things to come. Nothing can separate you from the love of Christ.” Nothing.

So, you saturate your mind with God’s truth about this. And that is why I talked about whether it’s 3x5 cards or being in the Scriptures or praying these back to the Lord.

Second, ask God to help you grasp His love for you. I don’t know what you pray or who you pray for, but the apostle Paul, in Ephesians 3, gives us a great example. When he is praying for a group of people, what does he pray? He says, “God, I pray for this group of people right here. What do I pray? I pray that You will strengthen them in their inner man so that they could, by faith, grasp the extent of Your love for them.”

What is he praying? “God, I want You to do something to take it from here down to here.” Ask God. Pray for yourself, Lord, help me grasp that You love me. Lord, I want to even feel it. Lord, help me to take all those messages and false kinds of loves and all the baggage that I have and wipe it away. Please help me experience and know Your love. Do you think He will answer that prayer? You know for sure it’s His will. So, you saturate your mind with truth, you ask Him.

And then, third, refuse to seek love in cheap substitutes. This is the woman at the well. And it’s all of us in here, to some degree or another. And 1 John 2:15 and 16 says, notice the word, “Do not love the world or the things that are in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the boastful pride of life, it’s not from the Father, it’s from the world. But he who does the will of God abides forever.”

And those are the three things that trip everybody up all the time. There is a sensual lust, there is the desire for more stuff, and there is the desire for ego to be a somebody. God says, “Refuse them.”

And what seals the deal is after you receive it and believe it, we must bestow it, by faith, through our wills. See, the way you really get is to give.

And there is a command. This isn’t one of the options. John 13, remember? The last night with the disciples, “A new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another,” – how? “just as I have loved you.” How is that? Sacrificial, unconditional, by giving.

And then there is a calling. Jesus laid down His life for us, we should – what? Lay down our lives for one another. And then there is a promise, “Give and it will be given unto you, good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running back into your lap.” So if you love with a teaspoon, you get a teaspoon of love back. You love with a tablespoon, you get a tablespoon back. You love with a gallon jug, you get a gallon jug back. Stick that tanker into the ocean, and start going, whoooo! And your life might get downright scary.