©2006 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship

07-16-06

Feeding The Hunger, Healing The Soul Pt. 6

7/16/06 Feeding The Hunger Pt 6

OK, this morning we are going to return to a passage in Ephesians,

a passage in which Paul tells us

that the key to our understanding what it means to build true, deep love relationships

is our looking at the pattern for relationships

that we see being modeled for us in God’s relationship with us.

EPH 5:1-2 Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children; and walk in love, just as Christ also loved you...

Do you want to know what it means to love?

Then look at the way God relates to you.

And before we move back into this passage

and see what sort of things Paul talks to us about,

let me just say that I do understand

why it is so hard for us to hear what’s really being said in this passage

because of two huge lies we bring to this whole area of love.

The first lie involves a counterfeit love offered to us by Satan

in his efforts to keep us from the truth,

and the second involves our belief that certain relationships in our lives

are of necessity exempt from these principles.

And let me see if I can explain what I mean.

There is nothing in human experience

that has the power to impact our lives more deeply

than the true love relationships we build.

They will affect the way we spend our time,

the way we spend our money,

and both the short and long-term priorities we bring to our lives.

They will deeply impact our decision-making processes

and cause us to restructure our most deeply held values in life.

And they will also certainly impact us on the feeling level.

There is nothing in all the world

that feels better than discovering that another human being knows us honestly

and truly, deeply accepts us, loves us in the face of that knowledge.

And there is nothing in all the world

that brings more emotional pain

than being rejected by a significant person in our lives.

True love relationships are not primarily emotion.

They are deeply rooted in our choices

and as such they can and will at times supercede what we may be feeling at the moment.

But even though they are not primarily emotion,

still they will affect us at an emotional level

more deeply than anything else in our life experience.

When I first started thinking about what love is

and trying to understand what it means from a truly Christian perspective,

during the early days of my thinking,

when I first realized that true love is primarily not feeling

but rather a choice or series of choices we make in our actions toward another person,

I went through a time when I was so overwhelmed with this new discovery

that I threw out the feeling thing altogether.

I even preached some great sermons on love choices

suggesting that our feelings have nothing whatsoever to do with true love.

That was more than thirty years ago now,

and a whole lot of living,

and whole lot of added thinking

has brought some changes to me since then.

The truth is that true love - the real thing,

the stuff that we hunger for at the soul level,

the stuff that has the ability to bring real healing within us

and has the power to truly shape and direct our lives for good under the guidance of the Spirit of God,

that kind of love

involves every aspect of our being.

It is deeply rooted in our choices,

but it also profoundly affects our emotions at all sorts of different levels.

It has the ability to draw deep feeling of compassion out of us.

It can motivate us to feel anger at times

with incredible intensity.

The most intense anger I’ve ever felt in my life

came at two points during Joni’s early adolescence

when, at two separate times, men did not treat my daughter correctly.

One was a teacher at the Jr. High School,

and the other was a neighbor.

And you would not have recognized your preacher in either of those conversations.

True love will motivate us to feel and display courage we didn’t know we possessed.

Though many of you who don’t know me outside of preaching will not believe it,

I am by nature and temperament a rather shy, quite, inhibited fellow.

If you ask Ed about some of his earlier impressions of me

I think he’ll probably tell you that there were times when he thought I was sort of a squish.

But there are times when I have heard myself saying,

“I will do anything within my power in defense of this person”,

and seen myself follow through with those words

because of the power of love.

What I’m saying here

is simply that true love can and does affect us at every level of our being.

It is rooted in our will, but it deeply impacts us at the feeling level as well.

And we shouldn’t be surprised at this

because we see exactly the same thing being modeled for us

in the way God loves us.

And, if you’ve been with me up to this point,

you know that is the central theme of this whole study-

to know love, to understand love

is to understand how God loves us.

Obviously His love involves His choices toward us,

beginning with His choice to create us in the first place

knowing that it was a choice that would ultimately lead to His own death in our place for our sins.

John 3:16 For God so loved that He gave...

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

Those are choices,

decisions He made about us

because of His love for us.

But it isn’t just choices.

It is also a kind of love that is rich with emotion.

God feels things about us.

God feels things about you.

LUK 7:13 And when the Lord saw her, He felt compassion for her, and said to her, "Do not weep."

MAT 14:14 And when He went ashore, He saw a great multitude, and felt compassion for them, and healed their sick.

MAR 6:34 And when He went ashore, He saw a great multitude, and He felt compassion for them because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and He began to teach them many things.

Listen to this description of God’s relationship with you.

PSA 56:8 You have taken account of my wanderings; Put my tears in Your bottle. Are they not in Your book?

Can you hear the depth of God’s feeling in that statement?

He remembers,

in fact He records your tears.

He knows the pain that caused them

and shares that pain with you.

Do you recall that account of Jesus

as He stood outside the tomb of His friend, Lazarus?

JOH 11:32-36 Therefore, when Mary came where Jesus was, she saw Him, and fell at His feet, saying to Him, "Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died." When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, He was deeply moved in spirit and was troubled, and said, "Where have you laid him?" They said to Him, "Lord, come and see." Jesus wept. So the Jews were saying, "See how He loved him!"

And that last phrase is crucial to our understanding of our God...See how He loved him!

It was a love rooted in His choices,

but a love that also deeply affected Him at the feeling level.

And let me just say here

that, if our understanding of God’s relationship with us

does not allow for that kind of feeling on His part toward us,

then we do not yet know the heart of our God.

Would your God stand before your tomb and cry?

Or more to the point,

does your God cry with you

for those wounds inflicted on you so many years ago

by a father or mother who didn’t love you,

or by an uncle or brother or neighbor who abused you?

He cannot yet put all things right,

but He can and does go with us through all things,

and He feels them with us,

and He can and does bring healing and redemption into our lives

as we allow Him into our pain.

But the point I started to make with all of this

is that true love - the real thing -

is grounded in our choices

but it affects every aspect of our being

and it certainly affects us at the feeling level.

Which is the doorway through which Satan brings in His lie.

For, you see, there is a kind of human relationship used by Satan

that is truly fascinating and remarkable.

When Scripture talks about this kind of lie

it calls it a “passion relationship”,

and every time it’s mentioned

it is given to us as a warning.

Now, typically when we hear “passion relationship”

we think of it as being synonymous with a sexual relationship,

and we do this, I think,

because most (but not all) of the time

the passion relationships in our lives

exist with a person to whom we also respond sexually.

But when God warns us about passion relationships,

even though if we give free reign to these relationships they will often become sexual,

still they are definitely not synonymous.

God Himself is the One who invented sex,

and He thinks it’s a really great thing

when it exists within the pattern He designed for it,

within a marriage relationship in the context of a lifetime commitment.

But when He warns us about the passion relationship,

he is not warning us about sex.

He is warning us about a powerful counterfeit love

that is used by Satan

to rob us of the true soul intimacy and love relationships

that God seeks to bring into our lives,

those love relationships

that can bring deep healing to our souls.

So how can we recognize the counterfeit?

Well, maybe I can describe it best

by telling you first what it says to us,

and then by telling you how it will play out in our lives.

And let me say first

that all passion relationships enter through our emotions.

They are absolutely emotion-based.

And that, by the way,

is why I spent so much time this morning

talking about how true love also affects our emotions.

You see,

I certainly don’t want to suggest

that because our love relationships affect us emotionally

they are, therefore, really passion relationships.

But the lie,

the counterfeit love given to us by Satan

is, at it’s core, pure emotion.

And what it promises,

what we feel when a passion relationship enters our lives

is that we have finally found the one person in all the world

who instantly knows us fully and accepts us totally at the soul level of our being.

They alone have the power to meet that deep love hunger within us

and they can do it simply be existing

and no cost is too great, no consequences to severe so long as we can have that relationship.

It is emotional heroine.

It is the ultimate relationship fix

that promises instant and eternal soul intimacy,

a person who will take us exactly as we are,

no matter what,

demanding and expecting no performance, no changes,

and then they will immerse us in love.

“Every now and then I know you'll always be the only one who wanted me the way that I am
Every now and then I know there's no one in the universe as magical and wonderous as you
Every now and then I know there's nothing any better, there's nothing I just wouldn't do

Turn around bright eyes, every now and then I fall apart

And I need you now tonight
And I need you more than ever
And if you'll only hold me tight
We'll be holding on forever
And we'll only be making it right
Cause we'll never be wrong together
We can take it to the end of the line
Your love is like a shadow on me all of the time
I don't know what to do and I'm always in the dark
We're living in a powder keg and giving off sparks
I really need you tonight
Forever's gonna start tonight

Once upon a time I was falling in love
But now I'm only falling apart
There's nothing I can do
A total eclipse of the heart

There’s nothing I can do...a total eclipse of the heart.

Do you see it?

That’s a great statement of the passion lie.

...you'll always be the only one who wanted me the way that I am...

...there's no one in the universe as magical and wonderous as you...

We'll be holding on forever

And we'll only be making it right

Cause we'll never be wrong together

We can take it to the end of the line...

There’s nothing I can do...a total eclipse of the heart.

And right now I have finally gotten the attention of some of you,

and others have just turned me off

because what I’m describing

is what every movie, every song, every love story is selling as true love.

It is what we’re all told we’re suppose to find -

absolute acceptance by another person

just as we are,

just because we exist.

Now why in the world would I tamper with that?

Why would I even dare suggest that it’s a lie?

Well, because it is, and because I want you to know the kind of true love relationships in your life

that have the power to heal that love hunger within you,

and as long as you’re hanging on to a lie,

or the hope of a lie

you can never know the truth.

And the truth is

those feelings always end,

because that’s what feelings do.

And if you are in the grips of a passion relationship right now

you’ll absolutely refuse to believe what I just said.

You’ll convince yourself

that I simply do not understand what you feel,

and that there is no way

what you feel right now could ever end.

But it will

because that is the nature of emotions.

They always ultimately end.

Judy Freisen...

my Junior year in college.

That particular encounter with passion

couldn’t have lasted more than month or so.

But once it hit, I knew that just being in her presence

was all I needed for total happiness for the rest of my life.

That particular episode

came over me like a thunderstorm,

and it ended as quickly as it came,

and when it ended I suddenly realized I didn’t even like her very much.

We couldn’t even carry on an intelligent conversation with one another.

But wait a minute!

Isn’t this passion thing

the way many or most dating relationships start in our culture?

Well, I’ll just say that most of them begin

with the potential of becoming passion relationships.

And don’t those relationships often end up in marriage?

Yes.

And don’t many of those marriages last for a lifetime?

Yes they do.

So what makes the difference?

Why do some people wake up a month or a year or two years after they marry

and look at the person next to them

and declare, “I don’t love you any more!”

and then walk out of the relationship,

while others just keep growing together forever?

What I’m about to share with you now

I have been thinking about for a good part of my life.

You see, this whole love thing simply fascinates me.

We all enter this world in a love vacuum.

We desperately need and long for love,

and yet we are utterly dependant upon others,

and especially our parents,

to teach us what it means to give and receive love.

And the truth is that rarely does that process work well.

Our parents favor one child over another,

to the detriment of both,

or they create an environment in which “love” and “acceptance”

are given in exchange for performance.

When the child performs well

the child is accepted,

and when he or she does not

then “love” is withheld until the performance is improved.

And then, of course,

our parents are busy trying to meet their own love needs as well

which complicates the whole thing all the more.

And the truth is that all of us enter our adult years

with some huge blind areas of ignorance

or more often outright lies

about how to build true, enduring love relationships.

And given the desperate need we have for these relationships,

and given our level of ignorance and confusion,

it’s no wonder it becomes one of the biggest areas

in which our Lord seeks to bring healing into our lives.

So in just a few concise statements

let me give you the basic principles I want us to see here,

and then in two weeks

we’ll move into that passage in Ephesians

and see exactly what they mean in practical terms.

Every relationship we enter into

carries with it the potential of becoming either a healthy, productive relationship

that can help to meet both our love needs and those of the other person,

or a destructive relationship

that turns into a passion relationship,

or into bitterness,

or into some kind of co-dependant relationship,

or into an adversarial relationship of some sort,

or any of a variety of other unhealthy forms of human interaction.

And just as a bit of an aside comment here,

let me acknowledge an obvious fact of human existence,

that each of us are uniquely wired in such a way

as to make it easier for us to give and receive love

from certain types of people than from others.

I use to spend a great deal of time wondering why that was.

I have long since simply accepted it as a fact of human experience.

Now, when we enter into any human relationship,

given the intensity of our need for love,

we bring with us into that relationship

the potential of allowing that need within us

to become the dominant, driving force in that relationship.

In other words,

unless we understand the true nature of love,

rather than making the choices in that relationship

that will allow it to grow into a true, healthy love relationship,

we allow our feelings to become the driving, controlling factor in the relationship.

And where there is the potential of a passion relationship developing,

it is at that point that it becomes a true passion relationship.

When we find ourselves thinking, “If loving you is wrong,

I don’t want to be right”,

at that point we have believed the lie.

Now, what God does for us

is to reveal to us the protective framework

in which all true love relationships will exist.

He knows we desperately need love relationships.

He knows that within ourselves

we honestly don’t have a clue as to how build them.

And he knows that the enemy of our souls

will, at vulnerable times in our lives,

be telling us that, if we just follow what we feel,

it will deliver what we hunger for.

And so, God does two things for us.

First, He models for us true, perfect, pure love

through His own relationship with us.

And then He explains for us in careful detail

exactly where those protective boundaries are in human relationships,

those boundaries that, if we stay within them,

will allow every human relationship we enter into

to become as rich in love as it can potentially be.

And how about those people who start out their dating

with a potential passion relationship

and end up building a strong, durable marriage?

It happens because, rather than allowing their feelings to be the driving force in the relationship,

they begin making choices toward one another

that keep the relationship within those protective boundaries,

and as a result build a relationship with one another

that allows their feelings to ebb and flow without destroying the true love foundation.

Now next time we are in this study

we’ll look at that passage in Ephesians,

because it is in that passage that Paul reveals to us

in one of his most concise statements

that protective framework that will make love a living reality in our lives.