No One Could Love You More

We're back with you. Today. We're going to begin a series that's actually rooted in something that Scott talked about his last Sunday here on the 13th back in September. He talked about that passion we should have, we all should have, to not just be saved. We want to be saved.

We're not arguing with that. Thank you, Jesus, for the cross. But that cross ushered us into much more than just eternal life in heaven and eternal life even now. It brought us into a relationship where we're born of the Spirit, to new life in Christ, where God wants us to actually know Him.

That is a huge undertaking to know Him. Now today we're going to be introducing that topic, and we're going to spend several weeks just talking through what does it mean to know Christ in the various aspects of what we do know about him, and how we can know him more fully and how we can understand him more fully. In Jeremiah, chapter 9, this is not the sermon topic, but it's right there where we're going. He says, let the wise, not the wise man, boast of his wisdom, or the strong man boast of his strength, or the rich man boast of his riches, but let him who boasts boast about this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth. For in these I delight, declares the Lord.

So he's saying to us, this is not a peripheral issue. This is not something that's just sort of Christianity 301 or 401 or graduate degree. No, this is fundamental. He wants us to actually know him and to understand him, and we'll see more about that as we unfold this. But the passage that will sort of launch us into the series is in Philippians, chapter three.

So if you want to read along there, I'm just going to read just a few verses from this particular passage. Just verses 7 through 11. Paul talking to the church there in Philippi, he says, whatever was to my prophet, I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things, I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. I want to know Christ.

You could stop right there, couldn't you? I want to know Christ. I want to know the power of his resurrection, the fellowship of Sharing in His sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so somehow to attain to the resurrection from the dead. Let's pray together, Father, make that what we want. And then open our minds and our eyes and our hearts to see who youo are and not settle for anything less than the fullness of who you are.

Lord, we pray this because Christ has made it possible for us to do these things, to know you, to experience life forever. In your name, we bow humbly before you. In his name. Amen. Now, one of the privileges of being able to come to Southbridge for Kathy and me is that as we walked in the door, we already knew several of you.

That was the kind of a treat for us. And then some of you, we know you through your parents who used to be a part of our church in Raleigh, and some of you, we've met through other associations in the kingdom, around the city and various places, through schools and FCA and, you know, campus stuff off, whatever. But one of the. One of the fun things is to play that do you know Game, you know, oh, you so do, you know. And then you've got to start doing that Rolodex thing now.

Now, children of Rolodex is something that used to have names in it before your iPhone did. So some of you are going like, I still don't know what that is. Look it up on chat gbt. You can find out. But anyway, and so you start thinking through it.

I know that name. I think I know that name. I think I. Well, maybe I knew his parents. No, but probably by this time I knew his grandparents, you know, and so we're looking through all this stuff and.

And the truth is that sometimes you're going like, yeah, I don't really remember. And maybe I was close friends for them for a while. I really knew them. But other times I just had met them and couldn't really say that I knew them. There's a big difference between just having met somebody and knowing them.

A guy challenged me years ago. He said, sometimes just take out a notebook and start writing down people that you've met through the years. It'll probably surprise you the various kinds of people that you've met along the way. And that's great, but did you ever know? No, I shook his hand one time, but that's not the same.

So when people say, do you know Christ?

How do you answer? Well, I met him.

I prayed to receive Christ one time when I was a kid, or I prayed to receive Christ just a few years ago, or I Prayed. But no, that's not what I ask. Do you know Christ?

That's what we want to be talking about over the next several weeks. How do we know Christ?

Proverbs 9, 10. It's sort of a repeat of Proverbs 1, verse 7, and Proverbs 2, 5. It's all this idea that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding. We want to gain the knowledge of the Holy One. That is what we're trying to get at during our time here, during these things.

There are a couple things in that passage that talk about the fear of the Lord on the one hand, and the knowledge of God or knowledge of the Holy One on the other. And they kind of work in a reciprocal way with each other. Because what happens is without reverence for God, there's not going to be any knowledge of God. See, he is holy, and we're not until we meet him through Christ. So we have to have this reverence, this fear of God.

And then based on that fear of God, we get to have the true sense of the knowledge of God. And then the knowledge of God will actually increase and deepen our intimacy with God. They work together. And so with that in mind, what we're gonna do is start this series on knowing Christ and being able to know who the Lord is and be able to understand more about Him. And that's a whole theological course that would last two or three years.

So we're gonna try to summarize that and pick and choose certain things about Jesus that we can talk about. And so as we start looking at that today, I was trying to think, where in the world do we start? I mean, from eternity past to eternity. He's Lord, he's always the same. So just pick a starting point anywhere.

So today we're going to start with Christ to be known to us as the Beloved One. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life. Why? Because God loved the world. The love of God in Christ is a great starting point for us.

So let's move over to the particular passage for today. That Philippians passage is for the series, but today we want to look in Ephesians chapter three, and let me just read a few verses for you there, because this is his prayer, Paul's prayer for the Ephesians. This is what he longs for. And just to be honest with you, I know I won't be here A long time. But for the time I'm here, this is my prayer for you.

This is what the leadership, the pastors, the elders, the deacons, the leaders in various small groups. This is what we're praying. This is what he says. For this reason, I kneel before the Father from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives his name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.

And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power together with all the saints to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ. And to know this love that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. That's what we're shooting for. Do you know that Jesus loves you? We teach it to our children early on.

We used to. Some of you still remember that song, Jesus Loves Me. This I know. Some of you remember that. Some of you are going like, no, I don't remember that song.

We got to give you a Christian education. Jesus loves you. That's a starting point. And some of you think, come on, man, get. Get some substance here.

Get some. Some meat to this bone. If you don't think the love of God is meat on the bone, I don't know what you've been eating. This is serious stuff. This is what he's talking to us about.

Now. When a child comes into the world, God puts together sort of a security system around that baby, and that that baby is coming into a world where there's a natural, automatic place where that child is loved.

And you know what a cute little baby that is. No, they're not always so cute. When you see them firstborn, you're kind of going like, oh, wow, we're waiting for nine months, and wow. But not Mama. Not Mama.

He puts a love of a mother for that baby that is undeniable. There's something about that maternal instinct, that maternal love for that child, that that is the security. It just is sort of wrapped around that baby. That that baby knows that that baby is loved. And so that's inviolable.

And as people will say, there's no greater love than the love that a mother has for her baby. And when that's right, that's very right. And when it's wrong, like with the Clancy case recently, when a mother murders her three children, that's why we all recall, recoil in horror. How could that possibly Be, this is security. This is a place where the love is supposed to be secure and settled and established and no one should challenge that.

And how in the world could anybody in any planet think that that's okay? And yet a jury was able to say, well, you know, and it became a debatable issue and people are still trying to sort it out.

But from the, from the start, from the get go, from the time when God creates each one of us, he sends us into a world where Mama loves me. You may have the face that only a mama could love. You may be unlovable to everybody else on the planet, but Mama has, particularly in the south, the ability to say, well, bless his heart. You know, that means he's a rascal or a rogue, but he's got his heart blessed and Mama's taking care of him. And so when they say, well, there's no greater love than that for a mother, for her baby, the scriptures challenge that to the core and says, no, no, no, her love is only an approximation of the depth of the love of Jesus for his own.

You are deeply loved. And when we come to know the love of Jesus Christ, what happens is that there's a significance, there's a profoundness about it that causes us to be able to rise up and want to sing songs of praise, wants to sing in celebratory words of this greatness of the love of God in Christ.

All the love songs out there, all the romantic songs, husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, all that stuff, those are nice. But there's something about the love of God in the face of Christ that absolutely changes things. So what we're gonna do is walk through this this morning and just kind of. I don't think I've got to prove this to anybody. Anybody here think, I don't believe that at all.

I don't believe Jesus. No. I think we're just going to kind of reaffirm what we know this morning. But when you walk out of here this morning, I pray, I kneel before the Father, that you might know what you might not have felt when you walked in the door, that you are loved more deeply, more profoundly, more significantly, more, more everlastingly, more unconditionally than the world could ever possibly convince you of. And Jesus wants to say, let me look you in the eye and stare straight down into your heart and tell you I love you.

Let's get started. Let's think about this. What does it look like? How do we know? And how can I say his love is for me?

Well, this love that Christ has for us exposes the heart of God to us. It just unveils it for us. It reveals it in a way that we need to know. The sad truth is there are in this room today, and I'm very sorry about this, but I know it's true. In a crowd of this size or any small group of folks, even a large group of folks, the truth is that there are some people here who were never told.

I love you, my mom or dad, anybody ever told you that.

And that's heartbreaking for those of us who had the privilege of being told that. But the reality is, man, that's a painful thing to remember. That doesn't mean they didn't, they just didn't say it. And part of some generations, particularly the one preceding ours, you should, you know, you just didn't say those kind of things. It was just sort of assumed, you know.

I loved you the day I married you, my dear. And if I ever change my mind, I'll tell you. But I don't have to tell you again. No, no, you need to figure out how to do that. You need to know how to tell your kids you love them.

And so some of us have not had that. And so God wants us to understand. Look, here's the thing. I want you to know I'm not like that. I go out of my way over and over and over and over again to tell you how much I love you, how profoundly you delight my heart and how I rejoice over you with singing whenever I think of you.

When I was a kid growing up and even going back with my kids to my parents house when we go back on holidays, my dad had one of those deep gospel quartet type of voices, you know, James Earl Jones sounds like a soprano beside my dad. And Kathy's dad was the same way. He used to scare the guys that came. Kathy dated the daylights out of them. And they'd come in there somewhere at the door, you know, they're going like, oh, not no more, I'm leaving.

You know. But hey. But my dad was deep as he was. I just like, that's just dad. That's what they do.

But when all of our boys, all the brothers and I were there and we were with our families, my dad would just kind of be walking around the house, you know, just singing and singing and rejoicing that we're all home. Why? Because he loved us. And the delight in his sons cause him to overjoy with overjoying spirit. Just sing.

That's what it talks about in the scriptures, in Habakkuk, in Haggai, it talks about the fact that he rejoices over us with singing. Can you imagine? Now, I can't picture God with a soprano voice. I'm sorry, ladies, I just. I can't picture that.

But I just hear the. Hear the voice of God saying, I rejoice over you with love. Now, Ji Packer, as one of my heroes in the faith, he wrote a book called Knowing God, which gives you an idea of where he was going. A whole book on the attributes of God, the characteristics of God. And this is what he said.

When we looked at God's wisdom, what he did is he just took different attributes and different chapters. He said, we looked at God's wisdom, we saw something of his mind. When we thought of his power, we saw something of his hand and his arm. And when we considered His Word, we learned something of his mouth. But now, contemplating his love, we get to look into his heart.

That's what we're talking about this morning. If we finish today and it's a clinical exercise in education and information. I have failed miserably to take you into the presence of the God who loves you. So what does he say? He said, I want you to see this, that my heart of affection toward greater than just merely knowledge.

Do you know God? Do you know Christ? Well, I know. And then you recite the creed, or you recite the statement of faith, or you recite the simple things that great. But in verse 18 of chapter three, he says, we need to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge goes beyond just our head.

We gotta go beyond that. We need to be able to move far beyond that. There are too many who are too content with just information about Jesus. They can spell all the doctrines correctly, they can cross all the T's, dot all the I's. They get it completely right as far as that goes.

But the love of Christ is not in them. They don't know that love of Christ. It hasn't stirred their souls. We want our souls to be stirred by the love of such a great God. There was a Puritan writer, wrote back in the 1600s, a guy named Thomas Brooks.

He's another one of those guys that you read him and you just think, I don't know anybody who thinks like that anymore. Just brilliant. But here's what he says. A little knowledge, little knowledge that divinely affects the heart is infinitely better than a world of that knowledge that just swims in the head but never sinks down into the heart that never goes to the bettering, to the warming and the defecting heart. Therefore, strive not so much to know as to have your heart affected with what you know.

For heart affecting knowledge is the only knowledge that accompanies salvation, that will possess thee of salvation. You need to have more than just here in your head. Got to get it here in the heart. We're so big in our day about, well, you know, it's fact, it's faith, it's not feelings. God didn't give you feelings for no reason at all.

We can actually feel the sweetness of his love. Do you feel the love of God this morning? Do you feel loved? Well, no, but I know it. Yeah.

Well, our prayer for you is that you feel it and as you come to terms with it. So it's more than just mere knowledge, but it's also more than the mighty deeds that he does. There's a whole movement that goes around the world and comes back every generation or so of people who are into power, evangelism and power this and power that. And what they want to do is talk about God as the God of power. And the God who does all kinds of miraculous things and signs and wonders are the currency of that world.

And God saying, look, it's not just about the power. There is power there. But it's the powerful love of Christ that really makes a difference. Otherwise we've come like a bunch of pre pubescent little boys trying to impress girls with their feats of strength and hanging from trees and jumping things that they should never jump on a bicycle and doing all kinds of stuff. And the girls are just kind of like, could you just learn how to actually talk to another person?

Could you actually learn how to just be nice instead of pulling my hair? Could you, you know, love tap with a closed hand? That's a. That's called abuse. You know, I mean, learn how.

Learn how to do something besides just show your deeds. No words that matter. A good buddy of ours, a guy who married us, a guy named Gary Chapman, he wrote a book called the Five Love Languages. Languages, ways that you need to learn how to speak in a way that your person, that you're communicating love to, understands the language that you're speaking. God's fluent in all of it.

So he says, it's not just deeds of power, not just mighty things I've done. It's those quiet moments when it's just me and you and I just whisper my affections. I don't shout them across the room when we're Together, that's when I draw you close.

You know how much I love you. You know how much I delight in you.

There's no power in that. There's a great power in that. Of a different nature. Well, it's more than also the material blessing that we use so frequently to measure whether somebody loves us.

It's one of those five love, language, gifts. Receiving gifts tells us that, you know, well, they really love us because they gave us a really nice gift. Well, somehow or another, we translate that into the Christian world. If God really loved me, then I would be more materially blessed than I am. How could he love me?

And he loved them, and he gave a whole bunch of stuff to them and a little bit to me. How is that love? Because he knows what's best for you and he knows what he wants to convey about his love to you. That shows him what you need to understand that you are being well cared for by your heavenly Father. No, we don't find how much he loves us based on how much we're materially blessed by him, how much good health we have, what kind of great pension or retirement we're looking forward to, or all those other things that we consider material blessing.

That's not how God measures it. He wants us to understand. I want the information to become intimacy. You know who I am. You know what I'm like.

I love you. Therefore, I don't need all the other stuff to prove it. I sent my son to die for you. Is there a greater love than that? Anything can beat that.

No. So his heart of affection is more than just those kind of things, but his heart of affection toward me is more extensive than the deepest human loves. We know. A lot of times we try to compare what we know about love from a human perspective. This horizontal before, we kind of try to figure out the vertical.

Do I really understand love? Well, we normally put it in terms of things that we can recognize. The love of a mother for a baby that we mentioned a while ago. Yeah, that's tangible. You can see that.

You can just look in the eyes and recognize it. The husband and the wife relationship. I was doing a wedding a few years ago, and the mother of the bride actually got tickled on the front row. I mean, she's sitting there just kind of. Which is very dignified.

Very dignified in the middle of a wedding. But her daughter, who was getting married, had never really had many boyfriends going through her life. Beautiful girl. Great. She just didn't date very much and she didn't have a lot of guys that she was, you know, basing her relationship with this guy on.

And so at the wedding she was absolutely just goo goo eyed. She's just like, you know, and just like, you know, kind of giggling and stuff, which was totally not like her at all. And her mom's thinking like, that girl is smitten. She is absolutely smitten. And you get the idea that sometimes we only know the smitten kind of love between husbands and wives.

And we're not sure how much deeper it goes than that or you see parents for their children and children for their parents. You see love in human context a lot of different places. But the reality is that he wants us to be able to comprehend verse 18 again in chapter three. We want to be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth of the love of God. We want to be able to see the whole multi dimensional picture of that love of God.

Now Thomas Brooks again, the guy's worth quoting twice. So I'm going to put him in here again. He says about. He says, the more I know him, the more I like him. The more I know him, the more I love him and the more I know and the more I desire him, and the more I know him, the more my heart is knit unto him.

His beauty is taking, his love is ravishing. His goodness is drawing. His manifestations are enticing. And his person is, is enamoring. Now that's a good word from the 17th century.

Enamoring. His lovely looks please me. His pleasant voice delights me. His precious spirit comforts me. His holy word rules me.

And these things make Christ to be heaven unto me. You hear a lot of folks saying, man, I just, I'm looking forward to heaven. Well, heaven has come to earth in the person of Christ. If you don't love Jesus here, you're going to be miserable in heaven because it's going to be all about him all the time. There won't be a 24, 7, because there won't be a 24 or a 7, but there will be eternal demonstrations of that sweet great love.

So God wants to help us understand that this is the picture in Christ of the revealed love of God coming for us. John, Chapter one. The Word Christ, the Word of God, the Logos, the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. And we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth to as many as received. To them he gave the right to become children of God, we get to spend eternity with this one who loves us that deeply, that profoundly and reveals all these things to us about who the Father is.

But we got to go a little bit further. God's love not just exposes his character to me, but explains his faithfulness to me. Why would God be faithful to someone as unfaithful as I am? And I don't know you that well, but as unfaithful as you are. Because the scriptures tell me that you're like, I am totally depraved until we're totally saved in Christ.

So what happens? Well, we look again for human connections. And in a world where marital unfaithfulness is absolutely epidemic across the globe, we wonder, why in the world do some marriages not experience that when it's everywhere around us? And the answer is pretty simple. Because there is this simple matter of the love for one another that would do nothing to damage the sweetness of that love.

I wouldn't mess that up for anything. I would not be brain dead stupid enough to do anything, would touch the sanctity of this sweet love that we have together as husband and wife. Wife. And all you husbands, wives, better be saying amen. Because that's what he wants us to understand.

And so God wants us to understand that, listen, here's the deal. I am faithful to you not because I have some covenant obligation. That covenant obligation arises out of my character. That covenant obligation was engaged in with me because of my everlasting, unconditional eternal love for you. That's what it's about.

So he says, that's why I'm faithful to you. Why would God always be faithful to me? Because he is always loving toward me.

And he wants to express that faithfulness in practical ways. So he's always good to me. We sing about the goodness of God. It's because God is good and he's good to me. And he's good to me all the time.

Faithful in however goodness is expressed there. He's always gracious to me because he knows that I am going to mess up. And I need a Savior who gives me grace and mercy instead of my just deserves. I cringe when I hear people inside say, all I want is what's coming to me.

No, all I want is a Savior who is willing to be gracious to me, recognizing what I'm like and what he has made me in Christ and how he sustains me in that he is always good to me. He's always gracious to me and he's always generous to me. His grace abounds to me. Favorite life, verse 2 Corinthians, chapter 9. He says, and he is able to make all grace abound to you, so that always having all sufficiency in everything, you may have an abundance for every good deed.

That's enough alls and everythings and abundances to last a lifetime. He is so generous to me. And so he doesn't just love me, he effusively pours out his love upon me. That's what the scriptures tell us in Romans 5, verse 5. Hope does not disappoint because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit whom He has given us.

He just pours it out. And he is not ever fearful of running out. I've got to meet out just a little bit here and a little bit there, and I've got. Whoa, whoa. I loved David a whole lot yesterday, so I'm gonna have to just love him a little less today, so I'll have enough to go around.

No, he's boundless supply. He has no limitations. He doesn't have to ration it. He just pours it out. And that's the blessing of what he's saying to us here.

I am always generous, always blessing, always pouring out my love. Now, sometimes I've been in conversations with parents and saying, you know, we're trying to pray through whether we want to have another child. Well, what's the discussion here? What's the basis of the conversation? Well, we've got two kids already.

We got one, or we got three, or we got 12. I don't know what it is, but we don't know if we want another one because, you know, we love our dear little bunch so completely and absolutely and abundantly. We're not sure we have the capacity to be able to love another one in the same way.

We'll just bring another one in the world and hate them. That's okay. That's fine. No, of course not. You don't have the capacity to do that because you're not called on to do it yet.

When the baby comes. There's no. I don't know if I like this as much as the other ones. No. There's a sense in which God does abundantly provide for us so that we can abundantly provide for those that he gives us to love.

So he is generous to us so that we might move to the next point of what we're going to talk about being generous with his love toward others. So he has loved us. He has loved us with an everlasting love and knowing his love for me unlocks the key for a lot of these things to begin to be experienced in our lives. When you're feeling depressed, when you're feeling let down, when you're feeling disappointed, when you're feeling like nobody cares, nobody understands, nobody knows. The trouble I've seen, nobody knows but Jesus.

Well, that's true. But he does know and he does love you. And he does want you to know the full extent of his love. He wants that. Now implication number one is that because of that, he wants you to return that love to him.

You're supposed to love him back. You got that? It's not a one way street. He loves you. Now what are you going to do?

Well, I'm going to love him. Matthew 22, Jesus, that great commandment. He says, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind. And you have to love in kind. In other words, I've loved you and showed you what it looks like.

Now in kind. You're supposed to love me back the same way I just loved you. Well, Jesus, how did you love me? Well, you did it sacrificially. What is my love for Christ costing me?

If nothing, then you need to revisit how your love is in kind with the love Christ has had for you. What about that ultimate full extent of his love? Is there anyone you love more than Jesus then that becomes an idol in your life and you've got to get rid of the idols in your life and love Christ above everything else with your whole heart. He has loved you with his whole heart. His love for you is holy and pure.

He has no tainted motives. He has no impurity in the way he loves you. It's just pure, perfect, holy love. Do we love him in that same way? Or do somehow or another our motives for loving get mixed up and we start loving him in terms of seeing him as this divine bending machine.

If we love him the right way, then he'll give us what we need. No, no, it's holy and pure love. We don't expect anything in return. We just love him with our whole heart, soul, mind and strength. That it's unconditional, it's enduring for all generations.

We've got to love in kind with the way he loves us. And we've got to love in keeping with his commandments to do that very thing. Did he tell us we should? Oh yeah. If you love me.

Well, John, chapter 21 in this conversation with Peter, if you love Me, you're going to tend my lambs, you're going to shepherd my sheep, you're going to feed my sheep. If you love me, you're going to do something that reflects that you do. So let's see it in action.

He says, if you love me, you're going to do what I say. Keep my commandments. It's in John 14. If you love me, the love of the world will not be in you. First, John says, but love for his kingdom and his righteousness will take priority over everything else.

Well, we gotta love him back. When he loves us, we've just got to love him back. And we've got to learn how to do that and we've got to learn how to express it. And one of the sweet ways he gives us is these corporate gatherings like this. When we get to worship him and we sing to him.

And we lift our voices in praise and adoration. And we get to do that when we pray. And when we get to do that in our family worship. And we get to do that in our private, personal worship times, we get to express to him, my Jesus, I love you. I know you are mine.

For you all the follies of sin. I resign, my gracious redeemer. And we go on and we just sing in his presence. We love him. We do what he says.

We demonstrate his character. Well, we return his love to him is the first implication of him loving us. The second is that we love, demonstrate his love to the others around us. He brings people into our lives and says they need to see, feel and touch the love of Christ. And you are my hands and my feet and my tongue and my eyes and my ears.

And you're the one that I'm sending to show them what that looks like. So what are you supposed to do? Well, first, John 4. Dear friends, let's love one another. For love comes from God.

Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Then verse 11. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one's ever seen God. But if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

We just have to love the folks around us. Well, who are we supposed to love? Well, let's talk back to the husbands and wives things. Yes, that marital love. Clearly there about that.

Parental love for our sons and daughters. Yeah. And then daughters and sons for the parents. Yeah, we got that. Then there's that pastoral shepherding kind of love that the disciples and the inquirers have for One another.

We're loving each other here. We're not blood related, but we're blood bought related. So we have a responsibility to love each other. We ought to get that word out to some of the bloggers. Just a thought.

Who are shooting arrows and machine guns at other believers because they think somehow or another that that's good and right in the eyes of God. When God's saying, why don't you try loving them?

Why don't you try demonstrating the love of Christ toward them? What about that? And then you got that fraternal love that you have with just your friends and neighbors, and then you have that unconditional love that he asked for us to give to our enemies and to the unlovable.

Could you maybe edit this sermon to take that part out? No, because that's. You gotta love them too. And so years ago, one of our kids was in Sunday school class and the teacher asked the question, now, boys and girls, how many people love you? She's getting to, jesus loves you.

But she says, how many people love you? And they're going around the class, who comes to our son? He went, 27.

What has he been doing while they're going in a circle? He's going like mom has to, dad has to. Brother, brother, brother. Grandparents are gonna. 27, 27.

Now that's a secure little boy. That is one secure little boy. And some of you gonna ask, which of my sons is it? That's why I said one of my sons, because you'll never know which one it was. But what is it that God's saying to us?

I want you to know, without any question before you move a muscle in the next little while, that you are loved with an everlasting love and that you matter to him in a way that no one else can possibly understand. And you are just beginning to get a grasp of what that looks like. He wants us to be in that kind of relationship with him so that when we say, I know Jesus, what we're saying is, I know Jesus as the lover of my soul.

Well, that sounds so shallow and elementary. Try living in that love and tell me it's shallow in elementary. It transforms everything about us because we get the sense that we are a part of this holy purpose of God. Every act of obedience, every thought that we have taken captive to him, all of that begins to say to us, with unqualified joy, christ as my beloved changes everything. Because I live for him who died for me, so that I may live in his love for all eternity.

Are you ready to experience some of that. Some of you are kind of not sure about what I just said, and some of you are going to have problems with it, and you're going to have 10 different reasons as to why you don't think that applies in your situation. You've been wounded deeply enough that the love of Christ is going to have to penetrate some of the scar tissue there for you to be able to experience it. He is sufficient to do that surgery in your heart. So let's pray together and ask God to make us a beloved people who know the fullness of the love of Christ.

Father, we bow humbly before you because how could we come boasting with arrogance or with self righteousness or anything else that depends on us when you have so wonderfully, gloriously told us that we can know you? And in knowing you, we get to be introduced into the wide breadth of the fields that are pouring out the testimony of your love for us in ways that radically change the way we view ourselves when we realize we're of such value to you. Our Heavenly Father Father for the man or the woman or the child here today, the youth who are here who really don't know Christ yet as Savior, Lord, this is not possible for them to know you as the Beloved One, the lover of their soul, until they have met you at the cross and have experienced forgiveness for sin and walked into the newness of life in your name. And so, Father, we pray for any of those who are here today who have not actually even come to meet you yet, so that in meeting you they can then move forward to get to know you. So Lord, we pray these things for the glory of Christ in us, for his sake.

Amen.