©2004 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship

06/06/04

Being Loved By God Pt. 6

6/6/04 Being Loved By God Pt. 6

For six weeks now

I have been sharing with you

some of my greatest discoveries

about what it really means for a person to be loved by God.

It is, quite simply,

unlike anything we have ever anticipated,

unlike anything we deserve.

It is more personal,

more intimate than any other union our spirits will ever know.

I mentioned last week

that the first, and perhaps the greatest surprise for me in this whole thing

was the discovery that the love of God is always, only personal.

We are not loved by Him because we are a part of the group.

He does not love us because we have aligned ourselves with the forces of good,

or with the “right” church,

or with the “right” doctrinal statement.

We are not simply accepted by Him as a part of His love for humanity.

The love of God for each of us

is a love that comes to us

in the context of His full and perfect knowledge of each of us,

a knowledge that includes every action we’ve ever committed,

every thought that’s ever crossed our minds,

every attitude and underlying motivation within us

that we have hidden even from ourselves.

It is a love

that understands perfectly who we were designed by Him to be,

a love that knows who we could have been had our lives not been touched by our sin

or by the sins of others,

a love that knows, too, who we could be still

if we ever discovered and then trusted the depth of our God’s love for us.

It is a love that seeks to heal,

that seeks to free,

that seeks to restore what we have lost or thrown away,

a love that seeks always and only the best for us,

a love that never fails,

a love that never ceases to move us toward the richest human experience we could ever know.

The love of God for us

is a love that demands expression,

a love that eagerly seeks ways of communicating itself to us.

Have you ever noticed how,

even in human relationships,

when one person loves another,

the one who loves will create for the one they love

special names,

names that communicate a level of affection,

a depth of caring that can sometimes be communicated in no other way?

My wife, Sandee, is exceptionally skilled at this form of love communication.

When she loves someone

it isn’t long before they will find their own special name coming their way.

Did you know your God will do the same thing for you?

Some of you are sitting here this morning

still wondering if God even notices you or knows your name.

He not only knows your name now, the name your parents gave you,

He knows your true name,

the name He Himself has selected for you,

the name that will capture the heart of who you really are at the spirit level,

the name that will communicate the value you hold in His eyes.

REV 2:17 'He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes, to him I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, and a new name written on the stone which no one knows but he who receives it.'

For the past six weeks

we have been talking about the true nature of the love of God for us,

and in just a few minutes we’ll conclude this study

with my sharing with you the final two barriers

to our personally discovering the true nature of the love of God.

But before I do that

I want to take us to a few verses in the 139^th Psalm,

verses that express better than I ever could

what I’ve been trying to say these past few weeks

about what it really means for us to be loved by God.

I don’t know what concept of God you’re relating to right now.

I don’t know if your perception of Him

causes your spirit to want to pull back in fear and shame,

or if it causes you to want to run toward Him in delight

and fling yourself into His almighty arms.

I do know, though,

that your concept of Him

is the single most critical factor in your life,

and I also know that

the more your concept of Him

lines up with the way He really is

the easier it will be

for your spirit to respond to His love

and His leadership in your life.

I’m going to read the first 18 verses

of Psalm 139,

and I would like you to take your own concept of God

and set it next to the image of God that we have presented for us in these verses,

and then allow the Psalmist to show you

the mind and the heart of your Creator

in a way you may never have seen before.

These verses present us

with one of the best statements

about what it means to be loved by God

that I could ever offer you.

PSA 139:1-18

O Lord, You have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; You understand my thought from afar. You scrutinize my path and my lying down, And are intimately acquainted with all my ways. Even before there is a word on my tongue, Behold, O Lord, You know it all. You have enclosed me behind and before, And laid Your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; It is too high, I cannot attain to it.

Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend to heaven, You are there; If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, You are there. If I take the wings of the dawn, If I dwell in the remotest part of the sea, Even there Your hand will lead me, And Your right hand will lay hold of me. If I say, "Surely the darkness will overwhelm me, And the light around me will be night," Even the darkness is not dark to You, And the night is as bright as the day. Darkness and light are alike to You.

For You formed my inward parts; You wove me in my mother's womb. I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Wonderful are Your works, And my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from You, When I was made in secret, And skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth; Your eyes have seen my unformed substance; And in Your book were all written The days that were ordained for me, When as yet there was not one of them.

How precious also are Your thoughts to me, O God! How vast is the sum of them! If I should count them, they would outnumber the sand. When I awake, I am still with You.

Now, there is a tremendous amount of doctrine contained in this Psalm,

remarkable facts about the way in which God relates to us.

But what I want us to focus on this morning in David’s words

is not so much the intellectual truth

as the underlying message being communicated

about the intimate nature of the way God loves us.

You... are intimately acquainted with all my ways....You have enclosed me behind and before, And laid Your hand upon me....If I take the wings of the dawn, If I dwell in the remotest part of the sea, Even there Your hand will lead me, And Your right hand will lay hold of me....When I was made in secret, And skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth; Your eyes have seen my unformed substance; And in Your book were all written The days that were ordained for me, When as yet there was not one of them.

This, my friends, is the nature of God’s involvement in our lives,

this is the way He relates to each of us.

At the time of our conception

He skillfully formed each of us as His unique creative works,

and even before we were born

He ordained the days allotted to each of us.

And then, in those last two verses,

David allows us to look into the very heart of God

and what we see there

is so absolutely other than what we expect.

How precious also are Your thoughts concerning me, O God! How vast is the sum of them! If I should count them, they would outnumber the sand. When I awake, I am still with You.

What do you think God is thinking about right now?

The war in Iraq?

The political climate in Washington D.C.?

The unrest in the Middle East?

Did you know He’s thinking about you?

How precious also are Your thoughts concerning me, O God! How vast is the sum of them!

Been to the beach recently?

If I should count them, they would outnumber the sand.

And then there is that final phrase, When I awake, I am still with You.

Back in 1998,

during my daughter’s first year in college,

we were studying this passage

and I used my daughter’s correspondence with the tooth fairy

to illustrate what I see God saying to us in that phrase.

Joni’s first year in college

was the most difficult year for all of us

that our family has ever gone through.

The girl she was suppose to room with that first year

decided not to come at the last minute,

leaving Joni with a room by herself,

in a foreign country,

not knowing anyone in her new world.

It was a time of intense emotional isolation and loneliness for her.

When she was a little girl in pig tails,

back in those few years

when her baby teeth were falling out

and she was putting them under her pillow for the tooth fairy,

after the tooth fairy had taken one of her teeth

she decided she wanted it back.

So she took the money she’d gotten for her tooth,

and then wrote a note to the tooth fairy asking if she could buy her tooth back,

and then she put both the note

and the money under her pillow.

The tooth fairy returned that night

and returned her tooth,

and let her keep the money as well.

But then Joni got the exciting idea

of writing to the tooth fairy every night.

She adopted the tooth fairy as her pen-pal.

Each night she put a letter to the tooth fairy under her pillow,

and each morning she looked for the fairy’s response.

This went on for several days,

until the tooth fairy got so far behind

in collecting other children’s teeth

that the correspondence had to stop.

About half way through Joni’s first semester in college

Sandee went down to visit her for a weekend

and brought me back a gift from my daughter.

It was a tiny wood canister

with the label ‟Tooth Fairy” on the front.

Inside was this note:

‟Dear Tooth Fairy,

I haven’t lost a tooth for a bit, but I thought I’d say ‛Hi’. I’m giving you this little monogrammed box as a token of my appreciation for all your years of worthy service. I’m hoping you’ll visit college campuses. I love you. Joni Sue.”

In response to that note

Joni received the following e-mail from the tooth fairy:

Dear Joni,

Thank you so very much for the wonderful wood tooth container. I am using it on my travels each night now to put children's teeth in as I collect them. It makes it so much easier to keep track of them,

especially the very small ones.

I have missed my visits to you very much, though I must confess sometimes I slip by and take a peak at you when you're sleeping and give you a little kiss on the forehead even though I know you no longer have

any teeth for me. I have such fond memories of our correspondence years ago.

You asked if I ever visit college campuses. Yes, I do sometimes visit college students when they have a tooth that is knocked out or pulled out and they remember to put it under their pillow. That doesn't

happen very often, though. When you had your wisdom teeth pulled I stopped by and checked to see if you might have saved them for me, but I guess the dentist must have beat me to them.

I must be honest, Joni - I have gotten into the habit of stopping by your room quite often at nights recently. On nights that are not extremely busy I will sometimes sit with you for several hours. I must say I do love the stars you have put up on your ceiling. They are so pretty and they give me just enough light so that I don't bump into things and wake you up.

I love you very much, my little one, and treasure my friendship with you more than you could ever imagine.

With much love,

The Tooth Fairy

I share that with you

because it helps me to understand that last phrase in Psalm 139:18

...When I awake, I am still with You...

and what God is seeking to tell us

about the nature of His love for us.

You see,

as much as the Tooth Fairy wanted to,

he could not spend all night,

every night sitting in my daughter’s dorm room that year.

But our Lord could...and did.

In that one phrase David is talking about

the true security of spirit

that can only be found in the center of the love of God.

David is saying to his God,

“Every night I close my eyes

and in my mind I leave You,

and I leave this world,

and all of its pain and confusion for a few hours,

and I sleep.

But YOU do not leave me.

You’re still there.

You still care.

and When I awake, I am still with You.

That is part of what it means

for us to be loved by God.

So why is it so hard for our spirits to hear His love?

Why, is it that so often what we hear,

rather than causing us to reach out to Him,

to trust Him,

to rest in His love for us,

causes us instead to cower in the shadows from our Creator,

fearing His rejection and disapproval?

In the past few weeks

I have shared with you two of what I consider to be

the four most common barriers to our being able to hear His love correctly.

The first one we looked at was our strong natural human resistence

against seeing ourselves honestly apart from the redemptive work of God in our lives.

It’s all so different than we think it is,

and if we have never felt loved by God,

really, truly, personally loved by Him,

it may be because up to this point

we have refused to allow His Spirit

to show us ourselves honestly before Him.

As long as we are determined to hide behind our performance,

telling ourselves that we are just as good as the next guy,

we can never understand the depth of the love of our God for us when He says,

ROM 5:8 God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

And then last week we looked at the second common hindrance to hearing the love of God,

the Father concept that we brought with us out of our childhood.

Until we work through it under the guidance of the truth given to us by God through His Word and through His Spirit,

we bring with us into our adult years

a strong tendency to believe that God is a lot like our dad

only a whole lot bigger.

And given the fact that every father who has ever lived

has, in some crucial areas, fallen short of perfect fathering,

we all have areas where our perceptions of God are flawed.

And last week we spent our time looking at several things

that can help to reverse that pattern.

And now, to complete this study,

let me share with you the final two barriers I want to mention.

The third in the list

will come as no surprise to those of you

who have listened to me teach for any length of time.

It is the force of the religious system we bring with us

into our walk with God.

And this barrier is not limited exclusively

to those who have been involved in structured or organized religion prior to their union with Christ,

though it is true

that frequently the more intense our religious background has been

the more difficult it is for us to see past it

and hear what our God is really saying to us.

Interesting, isn’t it,

that the very structures on this earth

that claim to exist for the express purpose

of leading us to God

are the same structures

that are sometimes the greatest barriers to our being able to hear His voice clearly and correctly.

The problem, of course,

is that all human religious structures

are created as tools with which man then attempts to reach out to God,

and as such they are built to at least some degree

upon the premise that our acceptance by God

is linked in some way to our performance for Him.

Several years ago

I was in a conversation with a man who told me

that, if he doesn’t come away on Sundays feeling guilty about something in his life,

he just doesn’t really feel as if he has been to church.

And, even if we come out of a past

in which personal church involvement played a very small role,

still we all have within us

a natural religious spirit

that tells us God loves good people and is very upset with bad ones.

Good people go to heaven,

bad people go to hell.

And what makes us good...or bad?

Well, our actions, of course.

But the great flaw in this whole religious mentality

is that there is nothing any person can ever do

that will allow us to bridge the gap between us and God.

We simply cannot get there from here.

Religion can do its best to call us to higher ground,

to prod us with fear,

or with guilt,

or with a sense of shame into improved performance.

It can promise us great riches for faithfulness,

or threaten the disobedient with judgment and condemnation,

but it can never produce in any human being

a sufficient level of holiness

that will allow that person to stand in the presence of God.

Which is, of course,

the point of everything God is saying to us through Christ.

And when we hear what He is saying correctly

we will realize that not only is the Good News of Jesus Christ not a call to religion,

it is the greatest anti-religious statement of all time.

It is not us reaching out to God,

it is God reaching out to us at the point of our greatest need,

our greatest helplessness.

COL 2:13-14 When you were dead in your transgressions ... He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions, having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross.

But my point here with this third barrier to our being able to hear the love of God

is that, the more intense our religious mind-set,

and the more fervent our religious heritage is,

the more difficult it may be for us to separate God’s love for us

from our performance for Him.

And my fourth barrier to our being able to hear the love of God

is really simply an extension of the third -

if we continue to hold to the performance-based understanding of God’s response to us,

we will never experience the living personal reality of the love of God for us.

This whole thing is so very different than I ever thought it would be.

Here I am, a preacher,

a person whose entire life

is deeply intertwined with the presentation of the truth about God to my world.

Don’t I want those who listen to me

to live lives that are growing in practical righteous living?

Don’t I want you to grow in your ability to be good

and to do good in the world your God has selected for each of you?

More than I could ever express!

But I also know

that as long as you continue to believe

that God’s love for you

is in some way linked to your progress in being good and doing good,

you will never know real peace with your God,

you’ll never hear His voice speaking to you the depth of His love for you,

and you will never discover the kind of changes in your performance

that can only come through our spirit’s response to the discovery of His love for us.

I began my walk with God

believing that being loved by God

was basically my receiving from Him

His affirmation and approval

in response to my performance for Him.

It wasn’t until I hit a point in my relationship with Him

where I had no performance to offer,

where I knew with absolute certainty

that I could never reshape myself into anything that even remotely resembled my Lord Jesus Christ,

and then, at that point discovered that He loved me right where I was, just the way I was,

in my sin,

in my helplessness,

in my failure,

only then did I begin to discover His love in a way that had the power to transform my life.

ROM 5:8 But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.