©2003 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship

04/25/04

Being Loved By God Pt.1

4/25/04 Being Loved By God Pt. 1

I think I have said almost everything I want to say

about my greatest surprises in life.

Almost...but not quite.

If this is your first Sunday with us,

or the first one in a long while,

I should warn you that we are nearing the end

of a series we began last January,

a series in which I have been using our times together on Sunday mornings

to attempt to put into words

a number of my greatest surprises about the Christian life,

things that, during the past 35 plus years,

I now see so differently

than I did in the early days of my walk with the King.

Along the way I’ve shared with you my discoveries about God Himself,

my discoveries about the true nature of the Church,

about the true nature of righteousness,

and sin,

and temptation,

and success,

and healing.

And now this morning

I want to move on to my surprise

about what it really means to be loved by God.

And this one has two distinct parts to it.

The first, and perhaps the most important part,

is my very slow and still ongoing deliverance from the mind of religion,

a deliverance that, for years, blinded me to the discovery

of what the central issue in our relationship with God really is.

I began where I think most of us begin,

by viewing my relationship with God

through the eyes of religion.

And the central issue in religion is not my discovery of God’s love for me,

but rather my expression of my love for God.

And I need to warn you

that where we are going during the next few minutes

is possibly the most volatile and potentially offensive area of true Christian thinking there is.

As long as the message we as Christians present to the world behaves itself properly,

as long as it conforms to the accepted standards of religious thinking,

as long as it remains primarily a call to its adherents

to strive more diligently for a better life,

to be more moral,

to be more compassionate,

to be more disciplined,

to be better and more responsible members of the human family,

as long as that is what we are offering it offends no one.

It stays within it’s proper religious boundaries,

serving as yet another voice in society

calling us to try harder and to do more.

Whether it’s Oprah calling her followers to do this for yourself because it’s a better way to live,

or whether it’s the “Christian” religion calling us to do this for God because we owe it to Him doesn’t really matter.

The fact that we may offer the added motivational tool

of telling one another that we should do these things

in order to show our Lord how much we love Him is really a nonissue.

Whether our call to improved performance

is driven by a desire to improve our society,

or whether it is driven by a desire to prove our love and faithfulness to God,

the bottom line is still the same -

the whole thing rests upon our efforts,

our ability to perform.

That is the heart and soul of the human religious spirit -

the call to strive harder,

to reacher higher,

to be better than we have been for the sake of our chosen leader, our “god”.

And whether that leader is Mohammad,

or Buddha,

or Mother Earth,

or the great global human family,

or America the Beautiful,

or Jesus Christ doesn’t really matter.

The religious spirit within us

doesn’t really care who we’re doing it for,

all that matters is that we are the ones doing it,

we are the ones reaching up to our “god”,

and the bottom line is always our effort for him

and our faithfulness in producing what is required of us.

And when I first came to Christ

I brought with me this same basic human religious spirit,

assuming that balancing the scales between me and my Creator was what I had been called to.

Christ had given me salvation through His death for my sins,

and now the question was, what was I going to give Him in return?

“He’s done...He’s done so much for thee,

what hast thou done for Him?”

Now, before I get myself in too much trouble here,

let me just say that

in true Christianity,

not the religious counterfeit that Satan has so skillfully created throughout the world under the Christian banner,

but in the real thing

it is indeed our response to the love of Christ for us

that transforms our lives.

But the truth is

none of us have ever experienced what it is to be personally loved by God

prior to our entrance into His family,

and even then,

even after we have accepted His salvation through trusting the death of Christ for our sins,

even then we have almost no true personal awareness of His love.

We know He loves the world.

We’ve read the verses that proclaim that,  JOH 3:16 "... God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life...”,

but we don’t relate to that God-love as being personal,

individual,

something that God feels for me personally.

I think our problem here comes from several sources.

First of all,

we have no previous experience with His love.

We’ve never felt it,

never personally experienced it in any way.

And second,

we bring with us the assumption

that there are conditions to His love,

that His love for us is in some way tied to our performance,

and we know all too well that there are still major flaws to our performance.

The thought that He would love us,

really, truly love us personally

just as we are,

simply because we are who we are

is utterly outside of our human experience or our understanding.

There must be reasons,

there must be conditions,

there must be things we can do that will increase His love for us,

or things we could do that would cause Him to love us less.

That seems absolutely reasonable to our minds.

And it is no wonder that we just naturally retreat back into a religious mind-set,

believing that the central theme in this whole Christian living thing

is our being able to show Him how much we love Him through our actions

so that He will then continue to love us

and keep us in the family.

I can remember one point during the first year or two of my Christian life

when I reached the point where I just knew with certainty

that I had messed things up so often,

I’d failed at what I believed my God was requiring of me so many times

that I was just certain God must have washed His almighty hands of me it total disgust

and kicked me out of His family.

I can remember the tremendous sense of loss I felt

when I reached this conclusion.

I’d been kicked out of the body

because I simply didn’t have what it took to make a go of it.

I wasn’t an “overcomer”.

I was a wash-out,

a failure,

a reject from the kingdom of God.

But even though I was sure I’d lost my sonship,

I decided that I was still going to do my best to try to live like a Christian anyway

because I knew it was the only approach to life that really worked.

That’s the way the human religious mind works -

it creates a performance standard that we feel we must meet

in order for God to then respond to us with love and acceptance.

It took years before I gradually began to realize

that once again I had the whole thing upside down.

From the very beginning

it never has been about me trying to show God that I love Him,

it has been about Him trying to show me how much He loves me.

It’s funny how it is.

You’d think that the discovery of God’s personal love for each of us

would be the easiest and most natural and welcome discovery in life.

But in truth it is the most terrifying

and potentially devastating discovery we will ever make

because it shatters all of life as we know it.

Once the truth of the nature of God’s love for us

finally breaks through into our spirits

it becomes the most demanding, compelling, transforming force in human experience.

Paul made a fascinating statement in his second letter to the Corinthians.

He said, “2CO 5:14 For the love of Christ controls us...”

That’s what it does.

It controls.

It consumes.

It blasts through our lives

and destroys life as we have known it.

And the reality of His love

brings with it devastating implications.

For one thing,

it means that all that stuff He’s said to us about life

was motivated by His love for us.

It means it’s not just an interesting collection of moral platitudes

and philosophical concepts,

but it’s all true.

It couldn’t be otherwise if He really does love us.

It’s no wonder the human mind gravitates toward man-made religious systems

in which the emphasis is on us loving God,

on us showing Him our sincerity,

our devotion,

our faithfulness.

We can control that.

We can keep that in check.

We can keep our lives within reasonable and respectable bounds

while maintaining “balance”

and the proper social boundaries on our religious expressions.

Two weeks ago on Easter morning

our little church

along with thousands of other churches in the world were filled to the brim

with people who were offering their annual nod toward God.

I understand that perfectly.

That’s reasonable,

that controlled,

the sensible.

But the discovery of the living reality of the magnitude of our God’s love for us

simply doesn’t allow for that kind of reasonable, controlled, sensible response.

It becomes the compelling force that confronts us

when we stumble out of bed each morning,

and the backdrop against which

we evaluate the quality of our lives each night.

And in my own personal pilgrimage

the first, and I think the most difficult step in this whole thing

was my Lord bringing me to the point

where I finally understood

that it has never been about my expressing my love and devotion to God,

it was always about His seeking to reveal His love to me,

because to the degree that He was successful in doing that,

to that degree everything else would fall into place.

There were several statements in Scripture

that were of tremendous help in this transition.

One of them was a single verse in Romans 5:5,

a statement found in a remarkable passage

in which God shares with us the seven birthday presents given to us by Him

the day we enter His family through faith in Christ.

As we would expect,

one of those presents is the gift of His Holy Spirit.

But Paul does a remarkable thing with this gift.

He doesn’t just tell us that God has given us the gift of the Holy Spirit,

but he also tells us WHY God gave the Spirit.

He reveals to us

the one over-arching goal that the Spirit seeks to accomplish

through everything He does for us, in us, and through us.

He says,

ROM 5:5 ... the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.

The Spirit has been given

in order to pour out within our hearts

a constant, growing awareness of the reality of God’s love for us.

This is just a tiny bit off track here,

but that, by the way,

is one of the most powerful and effective bits of knowledge we will ever have

for our being able to discern the difference

between the influences of Satan in our lives

the influence of the Spirit of God.

When correctly understood

everything the Holy Spirit does

will lead us into a deeper awareness of God’s love for us.

If what we are learning,

or feeling,

or thinking,

or experiencing is not intensifying our awareness of God’s love for us,

then it is not from the Spirit of God.

Even at those points in our lives

when God’s Spirit is dealing with some area of disobedience

He does it in a way that brings us a deeper awareness

of how much He cares for us

and how much He longs for us to know true freedom of spirit in life.

God’s Spirit convicts

for the purpose of showing us the path to freedom.

Satan condemns

for the purpose of defeating our spirits

and blinding us to the truth about who we really are in Christ.

God’s Spirit aims at our actions and their underlying causes,

Satan aims at our self-concept,

telling us lies designed to crush us in spirit.

Well, a second key passage

in my growing discovery of what God has really called us to in Christ

was that remarkable prayer of Paul’s

at the end of the 3^rd chapter of Ephesians.

We spent several weeks on it when we were studying that section of the book,

but for now I’ll just read it

because it says so perfectly

what we need to understand.

If you weren’t with us when we were studying the passage in context,

let me just say that this prayer

comes immediately after Paul has revealed to us

the incredible purpose God has for His people here on this earth,

describing for us how Christ is now

living out His life through us each day.

We are the literal body of Christ on this earth.

And then, in view of this remarkable relationship established between us and our God,

Paul drops to His knees and prays

that God would accomplish within us

what must be accomplished

if we are ever to fulfill the role given to us.

And listen to what he prays.

EPH 3:14, 17-19 For this reason, I bow my knees before the Father, ... that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fulness of God.

He doesn’t pray that we would love God,

he prays that we would comprehend how much He loves us.

He doesn’t pray that we would show our love to God,

He prays that we would have eyes to see

the love that He is pouring out on us.

Why is that?

I have now reached a time in life

when I have in my extended family

quite a number of grandnephews and nieces.

Nearly all of my nephews and nieces have grown up and married

and now have children of their own...in some cases quite a lot of them.

For the most part I don’t know my grandnephews and nieces very well at all.

I see them at family gatherings,

but they’re always in a pack, playing with one another,

and our love for one another on both sides

has been sort of a generic family thing.

They don’t really know me,

and I don’t really know them.

They love and accept me as one of the old people in the family,

and I love and accept them as the children of some nephews and nieces that I love very much.

But a few months ago I started building a friendship with one of the pack.

He’s just a little guy, 7 years old,

and I decided he and I should be friends.

At first I’d just make it a point to talk with him whenever I saw him,

to let him know I noticed him as person,

and was glad to see him.

Then I arranged with his parents

to pick him up from school a couple of times,

and he and I went up to my house and worked on wood projects.

One time we made a rubber band powered paddle boat

and ran it in the bath tub.

Another time I hid small plastic jungle animals all over the basement,

and then we made rubber band guns

and went for a safari hunt on our hands and knees,

looking for lions,

and tigers,

and gorillas,

and zebras.

At first I think the main attraction to our times together

was mostly that he got to do something special

that his brothers and sister didn’t get to do.

But it wasn’t long before an entirely new

and far more powerful motivation for our times together began to grow inside him.

A couple of weeks ago

Sandee and I were over at his house for a family gathering.

Sandee and I were in the kitchen talking with his mom

when my young friend walked into the room.

He gave Sandee a hug,

and then he turned and saw me,

sitting on a stool about ten feet away.

For several seconds he just stood there, staring at me.

I didn’t say a word,

I just watched him and waited to see what he would do.

Then all of the sudden,

he broke into a big grin,

came running over to me,

climbed up into my lap,

put his head on my shoulder,

and his little arms around my neck,

and hugged, and hugged, and hugged.

I don’t know for sure what was going on in his mind

during those few seconds when he was standing there, looking at me,

but I think it was at that point

that he finally realized that Great Uncle Larry doesn’t just love him as one of the family,

Uncle Larry really, truly loves him,

and I believe that discovery

will profoundly alter our relationship with one another for the rest of our lives.

When we first come to our Lord

I think most of us see ourselves in His family

a lot like my young friend saw himself in his relationship with me in our family.

We may know we’re part of the pack,

accepted by God because of our faith in Christ,

but in truth we’re not altogether sure He even knows our name

or notices whether we’re there or not.

At that point in our relationship with Him

we see our obligation being one primarily of fulfilling our duties in the family,

and, of course, showing our Heavenly Father respect.

But the primary focus in our thinking

remains on us - our duties, our responsibilities.

We may even think that,

if we fulfill them well

then our God will become more aware of us,

He’ll notice us,

and maybe even like us better.

But the truth is,

from long before we ever noticed Him

He has been reaching out to us,

calling us to Himself,

seeking that one discovery on our part

that has the power to change everything forever,

the discovery that it isn’t just “the children” that God loves,

it is us, you and me.

And with each of us

the point He is seeking,

the point at which everything truly does change forever

is the point at which our eyes finally meet His,

and we finally understand what He has been trying to tells us from the very beginning,

that He has always loved us with an everlasting love,

and we climb up into His lap,

and put our head on His shoulder

and wrap our arms around His neck,

and hug Him,

and allow Him to hug us, and hug us, and hug us forever.

We need one more week on this one,

so we’ll pick it up here next week.