Back To Your First Love

You can sit in church every week and still feel your love for God go cold. That’s the tension we lean into as we open Revelation 2:4–5, where Jesus names the problem plainly: we stop loving Him and each other like we did at first, and we need to turn back and repeat the first works.

We talk about what it looks like when faith becomes routine, why prayer has to be bold enough to act like we already see God moving, and how gratitude for what He’s done can reignite spiritual fire. Along the way, we get honest about valleys: sickness, loss, doubt, and the quiet kind of drifting that happens even to seasoned church people. This is a Christian sermon-style podcast conversation centered on spiritual renewal, prayer, healing, and coming back to your first love.

Then we bring it down to everyday life where it counts. We draw a hard line between love and lust, calling love an action and a lifestyle instead of a feeling. We dig into why relationships break when there’s no clear definition, no standards, and no shared mission, and we connect that to the same issues that can divide a church: money, intimacy with God, and communication. We also challenge ourselves to choose humility and reconciliation, even when we feel like we’re not the one who started the problem.

We close with Scripture from 1 John 4 and Ephesians 1, reminding ourselves that love comes from God because God is love, and He loved us first. If you need a reset, a rewind, or a reason to hope again, press play, share it with a friend, and then subscribe and leave a review so more people can find it. What does “first love” mean to you right now?

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Transcript

Mothers Honored And Opening Scripture

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Now, before we get started into the word today, everyone who is not a mother have a seat. Everyone who is, stepmothers are included in that. Take a stand. We have a special gift for y'all. If you'll just continue to stand as soon as you get your gift, we want to say thank you for everything that you do, everything that you endure, your prayers, your correction, whatever. Whatever it takes to make it through the week, mama's got it. Thank the Lord for our mothers. Amen, fellas. You may be seated if you've had your gift. Or if you know what I'm gonna do, and you can remain standing, but don't confuse them. Hold on, let's just hold on. Bunch of people will get gifts. While they're finishing up that, we're gonna go back to our key text from last week. We started a new series, and that is from Revelation chapter 2. Revelation chapter 2, verses 4 and 5. So if you want to turn there while they're handing out the gifts, has everybody got one? Everybody who's a mother, have you got one? If you haven't, say I need one. Oh, there's one. The tallest woman in here, and y'all missed her. Now we'll blame them. All right, if you will stand for the reading of God's word. We got some things to do today, to say today, and I'm excited for the word of God. Are y'all excited? At the very end, we're gonna wrap this up. We're gonna start it with some scripture, and we're gonna end it with some scripture. Can we do that in church? If you don't want that in church, you're at the wrong church because we preach the word up in here. So look at Revelation chapter 2, verses 4 and 5. It says, But I have this complaint against you. Like I said last week. What a way to start off an encouraging chapter. I have this complaint against you. Uh it reminds me a lot of when I would do something wrong and my mother would sit me down. You're acting dumb, son. I have this complaint against you. You don't love me. Turn to your neighbor and say, Love. You don't love me or each other as you did at first. Look how far you have fallen. Turn back to me and do the works you did at first. If you don't repent, I will come and remove your lampstand from its place among the churches. Father, we thank you so much for your presence here today. I pray that every person that is here or watching online, that God, you make your presence so known. Spirit of the living God, fill the room today. Fill the hearts of your people. Those that do not know you and are far from you. I pray by the end of this service, they cannot wait for me to shut up to get down to the altar and give their life to you. That is the reason we are here. Father, we thank you and we praise you for the things that we have prayed for and not yet seen and the answers on the way. In your name we pray. Amen. You may be seated.

Pray Like We Already See It

SPEAKER_00 3:33

I don't know about you, but I've been noticing in the past several months that there has been a stirring amongst the people of God. Where faith that was not there has all of a sudden begun to rise up in ways we have not seen in a long time. Now I want to challenge you with something, as I often do, and this is not a part of my message, so I hope that you take it home with you. If you're taking notes, write this down. Notes are your tupperware so you can take home and chew on it during the week. The church is called to pray as if we already see it. Are we, as the church, praying for healing, praying for people, and when we pray, we know that God's ear is turned. I don't know about you or your situation, but I know that when my wife prays, God listens. If you ever see me tell her to pray, it's because I don't have words and I know that she has something. We need to be people that when we pray, believe, and speak, we know. We know that something in the atmosphere is going to change. Because when we bear the name of Jesus, all it takes is the mention of his name and things, demons tremble at his name. And I believe the spirit of infirmity that has made its place in this house is going to be rebuked and leave in Jesus' name. I am ready and excited to begin to see and hear testimonies of people who have been healed because people at a church prayed and believed, and we saw. Faith without works is what? And God ain't coming back for a dead church. Now let's get back to our message.

Back To The First Love

SPEAKER_00 5:23

Sorry. But I have this complaint against you. You don't love me or each other as you did at first. If you were here last week, you know we started a series, kind of 80s theme, not really because it has any significance in the word of God, but anybody saying back to the future? Okay, you may not remember anything I say in the message, but you will remember back to the future. And you'll be like, now what does he say about going back? Back to the first. We need to begin to repeat the first. Last week I told you and I described some of you who were 80s babies, or you grew up in the 80s or the 70s and the 90s when the Walkman was getting real cool and popular, and everybody had one. They had the little metal thing that went across your head with the little foam earpieces that would hurt after listening for so long. But man, you didn't care. You looked cool. And as I explained this to you, it brought a nostalgic memory back over you. And you could you could place yourself back to that place where life was just good. If you were younger then, you probably didn't have a whole lot of cares in the world. Where when you would put those on, for me it was a place of escape. For my parents, it was torture because I would sing out loud. And then my dad made a stupid mistake of getting me a drum set. Electronic drums weren't available to us back then. I remember that Christmas, there was this curtain. It was up in Missouri, and they have basements up there, and there was this red curtain that was going across. And my dad pulls it back at Christmas time, and there's a full set of drums. Beat up pawn shop CB700s. If you know anything about drums, they ain't great. But they got a deal, and man, I made them wish they never got them. This is why the first drum set we ever got, Tristan, was electronic, amen. And we taught him how to use headphones. But when you talk about things of your past and you begin to speak about things that once was good in your life, because some of us here today are going through valleys right now where your life is terrible. You may be going through loss, you may be going through sickness. You may right now not even believe that God exists. There are seasoned people in the church that maybe have come to church their entire life and never actually believe what they came and listened to. But it's because here in East Texas, that's what we do. We're in the Bible belt, we believe in God. We don't follow anything He has for us, but we believe in Him. And so I want to focus on love, love, love. Last week was Be Kind Rewind. Go back to the beginning. I had a historical moment where I held up a VHS. And then we talked about a tape where you put the pencil in it, and somehow the pencil, not going down a rabbit hole here of you know conspiracy theories, but that pencil fit perfect in that tape. And you could just spin that thing and rewind it. You'd have to find exactly on the tape where the song was that you wanted to hear. You'd stick it in, play it, then you go and rewind it just a little bit more until you found the song that you wanted to play for your lady. New romantic. You remember the boom box you put that had double, was it D batteries, C batteries, whatever it was, they were massive, and so was the boom box. They put it over their head. Every romantic movie in the 80s and 90s had it. Every single one. It missed something. Anyone ever make a mixtape for your girl? Listen to this, baby. And back then it took hours to do this. So you knew the love was real when you took the time to put it on a cassette tape. You couldn't just make a playlist and share it or put a YouTube playlist together and just share the link. You had to go and do some work. Yeah, or wait for the song to come on the radio and then push that record button. Sometimes you can spend days just waiting for that song to come in. Just so you can show how much you love them. Good, I love you. Listen to the tape. It says what I can't say with my words. Fellows, come on. It says what I can't say with my words. It tells you how I feel. That was just a cop-out, though. We didn't really have to do much. Except for make a tape, and then it could say what we needed to say. And boy, them dudes can write some love songs, and we didn't have to say it. We would use somebody else's words, lyrics, and music to wrap them around our finger. It was good back in the day. Now we're calling things in school that are digital bullies. Y'all don't know what a bully is. But be kind of somebody says swirly. Oh man. You watch any of them old movies too, they have them on there. Swirlies at all. They'll teach you some things. But we use the same key scripture, and to launch this point, we want to rewind. We want to go back to the beginning as the scripture says here, and we want to repeat our first works. Why is that important? Because when you repeat and you go back to where God brought you from, what we called a minute ago, that sense of nostalgia becomes a sense of appreciation and new love and new vigor and new fire for God. And it reminds for me personally, it reminds me that anything that I ever do or accomplish in my life is from Him and not from me. That anything that God that I have been blessed with in my life is directly from God. This little baby that she's carrying right now, when we wasn't sure if we could, and then she called me in there and had two tests, and she said, Am I reading this right? I started doing a praise dance. Y'all think I dance up here? I was stupid. And she was like, Well, what do you want to go get another one tomorrow? I said, Let's go right now. CBS is open. But I understand that the blessings that we wasn't sure if we can even have children, and God ended up made I cannot describe to you. If you if you're a parent, mothers, you understand this. I don't know how she felt. I never asked her, but me, man, when I saw that little flutter on the screen, it was a little heartbeat. My heart started jumping too. When I realized this is something that I have made, and Jesse was talking to me a couple days ago, and she said, I don't, because this is her first one. I don't understand, but I love her so much already. There's something about a love of a parent that you can't break, that you can't destroy. I should not be in relationship with my parents for all the things I did in their life. But now they both talk to me and text me regularly. Even go as far as to say they're proud of me. When they have no reason, because of all the things I have done, love overlooks a multitude of sins. Only through the salvation of Jesus Christ can we remember that that is why we are where we are today. Some of you right now in this place, you're looking for mental, physical, emotional, spiritual healing. And right now, you feel like you may be in the darkest time of your life. Let me tell you from somebody who's been through some serious dark times that you are not dead and he is not done with your life. That where you are right now is just the beginning. Just the beginning of where God wants to bring you to. When you begin to submit to his purpose and his will in your life, I'm telling you, when you give it all to him, he blesses it, he multiplies it, and he hands it back to you better than you ever could have done the rest of your life.

Love Is Action Not A Feeling

SPEAKER_01 13:37

So we're talking about first love.

SPEAKER_00 13:41

Is it on the screen? See kind of the back to the future colors. Back to the first. We're going to our first love. Some of you here today know exactly what it means, and you really understand what it means. When I say first love, something comes to your mind. You have an idea of what that means to you. And you really understand what that looks like. And then the other people haven't figured it out quite yet. We haven't figured out what real love was or meant. If you're like me, any hard heads in the building? I have to learn the hard way. I had to go through divorce and almost losing my son to realize what love, to be able to cherish love in the way that I needed to. There's something very unique about love. Listen to this. You think you have it or that you have had it until you actually get it. Now, I don't know about you. Tristan goes through this. He gets a girlfriend or whatever. I tell I used to tell him, I made him so mad. I was like, he said, I got a girlfriend. I said, No, you don't. He gets so mad acting like he's 46. And he was 12 years old. Like, bro, you've never paid a bill. You don't know what love is. Love is when you act like an idiot and I still pay for you to eat. That's love. When you do something stupid, get kicked off the bus, or you get an ISS at school, and I still pay for your clothes and water for you to take a shower. That is love. You don't understand what love is, young man. But love is so unique that even as children, we think we know what love is. You get a little girlfriend, little boyfriend when you're a kid. Start getting little boy crazy, little girl crazy. Everybody's your girlfriend. Tristan said that when he was like eight. I'm like, what are you talking about? You have a girlfriend? He just had a friend and she happened to be a girl. He didn't understand the context of what that actually means. He's beginning to understand it more now. And then I hear him on the phone, I love you. I said, Boy, I'll snatch that phone up. Why? Because love is not a word, love is an action. Matter of fact, take it a step further, like Jesus always would. Love is not just an action, it's a lifestyle. It is something beyond the now, and it looks to the future and says, No matter what you do now, I'm still gonna be here later. This is why we have destroyed houses, fractured, dismantled by the enemy, because we think love and lust are the same. We think because we get along with somebody that we love them. You find out if you do love them when you don't get along with them. She is my best friend, but sometimes she gets on my nerves. Anyone got a couch? Because love isn't how I'm feeling at the moment, it's based on what I know to be true.

SPEAKER_01 17:12

I don't not cheat on my wife because I just love her.

SPEAKER_00 17:21

I I say I love you by everything that I do, everything that I run from, everything that I don't go to to try to trap me, that's love. This is why people end up in situations they don't need to be in because they they mix up. If you if you look anywhere right now on social media, on the news, anywhere, they're mixing up love and lust. They're mixing up love and identity. They're thinking that you have to accept me because I feel a certain way. Love isn't based on feelings. You think you have it, or that you have had it until you actually get it. And most of the time, if you've ever been in love, you realize that you didn't get a hold of it, it got a hold of you. It changes the way you see things, it becomes a new filter that Jesse was talking the other day. Uh, y'all, y'all, if y'all don't know this, fellas, I'm trying to help you. When women get pregnant, they get larger. Did you know that? And so, as a husband, I make sure that she knows no matter what her body changes into or what she goes through, I love her no matter what. That she is beautiful to me, that I adore her for just being willing to carry my child. That who she is is not to me, is not based on what her body does. Matter of fact, when you get way later in the years, you begin to realize very quickly that the body don't really do much for you anymore. It's more about companionship. That's love. It's funny because you see people when they're older, and they usually, of course, they ain't wasting any time, they get married pretty quick sometimes, and they they're walking around and they're like, I just I I found a companion that I could walk with and talk with and share my innermost desires with and share who I am with. Because love is not lust, because the lust roots are shallow, and when the storm comes, that plant gets pulled up every time. Because we all get older, and gravity comes for us all. Some of y'all didn't want to say amen to that because you that hit too close to home. Gravity's coming for you if you don't know. Young people, it's coming. I got this morning, I got the shower, and I was like, what is wrong with my back? I'm about to hit 40, y'all, and my body's breaking down. It all comes for us eventually. If I'm laid up in the bed and I can't move much, I hope to God she still loves me. If these arms don't get bigger and they only get smaller, my bone density goes down, I'm I get flabby everywhere. Some of y'all like, amen. Because it comes for a song. Life happens. Matter of fact, I'm not I'm very surprised that I don't look older than I am because of what I put my body through. You just thought you knew, and now that you're in it, there's no doubt that you got it. I thought in my first marriage, now this is real. I thought when I first met my first wife, I was in love. I thought that I knew exactly how my life was going to be. I had a picture in my mind of how it was going to be. But the way we define love can make or break you. You see, we apply this same thing to our spiritual walk when we define love between us and God. That we get so fickle and shady with God, and we we try to. What we do is the same thing we do when we first get in a relationship, and you like the way that they look. We like how God feels, we like how church looks, we like how church makes us look, we like how church makes us feel. We're in the Bible Belt. We go to church, we love God, we sing, we praise, and we go our separate ways, and we cheat on God the rest of the week. Because we have a lust relationship with God instead of a real relationship based on love.

SPEAKER_01 22:01

But true love when we understand the potential that the worldly love has nothing.

SPEAKER_00 22:11

Let me say it a little more consciously understand. The worldly love got nothing on what God has for you. The acceptance, the relationships, some of us are still dragging along relationships we should have cut ties to years ago. Some of us are still dragging along personality traits we should have cut ties to years ago when we came to Jesus. The world doesn't understand what actual love is. That's why they keep trying to redefine it and twist it up.

SPEAKER_01 22:37

I don't know if you know this, and we may get kicked off the line.

SPEAKER_00 22:43

But a man is supposed to be with a woman and a woman with a man. That is the way God designed it. It doesn't matter anybody else's opinion. This is not a pastor's opinion. This is not connect church's opinion, and only us have a we have a trademark on it. This is God's law, God's rule. That love is not based on how we feel or how we think things should look. So we're going to look at some scripture about what love is. Let's break it down a little bit.

Define Relationships With Clear Standards

SPEAKER_00 23:12

If I have a possession or something, but I don't understand the full potential of what I possess, I don't fully grasp it, that thing cannot fully be utilized to the fullest. We do this constantly with our relationships. We can't fully define them. So we end up living in semi-fulfilled marriages and we end up divorced. It changes things when you can see the full picture and actually define the marriage that you're in. This is, if you look at it in the same context, the relationship and the discipleship that we believe in in our church. If you can't define your relationship with God, how can you live it out? We want to be able to define what we believe. If you're single, you need to be able to define what you're looking for. Because if you don't know what you're looking for, you'll take anything. If you don't have a standard, you'll receive and accept anything. If you're married to be healthy in your marriage, you must be able to define so that you can be clear on what your marriage needs to look like, what your relationship needs to look like. If you don't have the same goals, the same mission, the same mindset, that's why I preach over and over again at this church that we need to have mature Christians in Christ. Because if we don't have mature minds in Christ and we don't have the same heart seeking after God and wanting his purpose and his mission to be the center of the church, then we won't be on the same page and there will be division in the house. The same applies in your relationships, and let's go deeper and personal in your marriage. If you ain't on the same page, if you ain't digging the same mission, if you ain't with the same vision, then you'll have a house divided. Because there needs to be clarity in your goals and your ambitions and in your values. And as married couples, most of you probably know what the top three issues are in relationships money, intimacy, or lack thereof, communication. Sound familiar? Apply those same three issues and it applies to the church. We don't want nobody to tell us how to tithe and give our money. Don't preach about tithes, or I'm not coming back. I told y'all before, this ain't my principle. You think we're after your money, give it to another church for three months and watch God work in your life. We don't need your money here. This is something I'm trying to help you with. Intimacy. We don't want to be intimate with God. We don't want to have that closeness and be vulnerable with God because then the spirit will change us. We don't want to be changed. I just want to come to church and be who I am. Or let's let's frame it up a different way. I want to live in my truth.

unknown 26:04

Come on, man.

SPEAKER_00 26:07

Same song, different tune. You know what I mean? Communication. You want to see a church divided? Nobody will talk to each other when they hurt each other. When there's complication and there's division and there's hurt, there's pain, there's a blow up somewhere, and we won't talk to each other, there's no communication in the church. The devil can find the cracks in the foundation and he will separate God's people. Why is that dangerous? Because if the devil can separate you from the herd, there is strength in numbers. And if he can get you by yourself, getting you feeling alone by yourself, make you stop coming to church, you get mad at somebody. Stupid people are outside of the church, and stupid people are in the church. We're all different people with different personalities. What do you expect? God doesn't make everybody perfect, but we should be willing to strive and communicate with each other to fix relationships. A lot of times, my mother taught me this. When I was a child, I told you earlier, my my father and mother they got me drums. And my dad was a preacher my entire life. And so what he we what he ended up doing is he got one piece of the drum at a time, and he would bring it to church and let me get better on that piece. It started off with a snare, that's the one in the center. And he would add pieces as I would get better. So it was a period of training. And about the time I got all the drums set up there, it started about when I was six. And this little girl. She needed to know I had some serious skills. In a matter of seconds, this board member at the church comes up on the stage, grabs the sticks out of my hands, and breaks it over his knee and throws it at my feet and says, I told you to stop. And of course, being a big, strong young man, I was, I began to cry. Yo, hush, I was under 12. All right. It was traumatic. And I went home that night, and you know, people saw it. My parents didn't see it at the time, but people saw it. Uh they told my parents. So my mother set me down that night.

SPEAKER_01 29:40

She said, Stephen, I want you to understand something. I'm gonna teach you a lesson that you'll you'll remember the rest of your life. She said throughout life, people's gonna hurt you, things are gonna break.

SPEAKER_00 30:00

But if you'll always submit yourself and not be prideful, and you apologize even when you think you're not in the wrong. I don't know about you, but that sounded like stupid information to me. I mean, am I the only fleshly person in here that says that that's somebody does something wrong to me and I go apologize to them? At the time I didn't know the scriptures, and I didn't realize that she was actually teaching me scripture where the Lord says that if you are giving an offering to me and someone has done you wrong, you go and you fix the relationship. When I read that as an adult, the light came back on. Because that's what love does. Love does not wait for someone who has done you wrong to come and ask for forgiveness. Why? Because most of the time it won't happen. But here's what I know when you submit yourself and you humble yourself before someone else, it it breeds more humility. There has never been a time in my life that I applied this principle to my life and the other person did not reciprocate. I'm not saying it will always happen. I guess I've had a pretty good track record in this and got lucky. But sometimes asking someone to forgive you when you're not the one that done wrong. Think about this. What was the one of the some of the last words out of Jesus' mouth on the cross? Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. Like I said, there are stupid people outside of the church, and there are dumb people inside. And the cool thing is, you don't know who you are. So y'all just like nervous laughs, like, is it me? Yeah, guys. Because the Bible doesn't call us to be right, the Bible calls us to be humble. The Bible tells us that we need to fix things, not because the other person asked us to, but because we know that's what Christ did for us. I don't know if you know this or not, but your sins is the one that put Jesus on the cross. My sins are the one that put Jesus on the cross, and yet Father still sent him down to die for us in spite of our sin. In spite of who I am, in spite of who I've been, he still sent his son to die for me. Now, if you're like me, that doesn't make any sense. But if we're supposed to be who Jesus was and live our life according to his example, how much more should we go to people who have done us wrong and try to fix the relationship? Even if it doesn't work out, you're not called to make it work, you're called to be obedient. Sometimes you have to let the Spirit of God work on it while you just do your part and you lay it at His feet and you walk away. And you may never ever hear out of their mouth, I'm sorry or please forgive me. But a lot of times, majority of the time, you going and asking for forgiveness, it doesn't take care of the issue with them, but it releases you. It brings a freedom to your spirit.

Humility Forgiveness And The Source Of Love

SPEAKER_01 33:39

Like everything in life that's good, love can get complicated. Anybody ever had complicated love? That ain't the kind I like.

SPEAKER_00 33:49

I'm a very simple guy, I'm very straightforward, and sometimes a little too blunt. My wife has to pull me back and tell me. Love can be complicated. Love can be messy, love can be irritating. Love can be in your face when you want to be left alone. But like everything that's good in life, it's complicated. And since we're in church, let's see what God has to say about love. Can we do that? Now, this will apply to everybody here between you and God, and in you and your relationships. Some of you need to cut ties to old relationships because it is contaminating the well of love in your life. Some relationships, if you keep holding on to them, will do nothing but contaminate what God's purpose is for you. Those of you trying to look for a way out, I did not just tell you to go get divorced. God wants us to work, put work to it. Put your hand to the plow, get behind it, and put some sweat on that brow and do something. This is throughout the scripture. Faith without works is and you can't get love working right in your life if you ain't doing nothing. So, what does God say? Look over in 1 John chapter 4. 1 John chapter 4, 7 through 21. It says, Dear friends, let us continue to love one another. For love comes from where? It's not on the screen. Y'all actually had to look this one up. From God. Now, this means, and it makes it very evident and obvious why the enemy is out trying to pervert love. Because it's something that comes from God. The enemy cannot create, but he can sure pervert. Love comes from God, and anyone who loves is a child of God and knows God. But anyone who does not love does not know God. For God is most of you probably know that scripture. God is love. So when they try to pervert it and say love, and it's distorted and ugly and messy, and everything that God is not, that means that it is not love. God showed how much he loved us, verse 9, by sending his one and only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him. This is real love. Not that we love God, but that he loved us and sent his son as a sacrifice to take away our sins. Dear friends, since God loved us that much, we surely ought to love each other. No one has ever seen God, but if we love each other, he's echoing what Jesus said before he ascended to the Father, is they will know God by the love you have for each other. Verse 12 No one has ever seen God, but if we love each other, God lives in us, and his love is brought to full expression in us. Verse 13, and God has given us his spirit as proof that we live in him and he in us. Furthermore, we have seen with our own eyes and now testify that the Father sent his son to be the savior of the world. All who declares that Jesus is the Son of God have God living in them, and they live in God. We know how much God loves us as we have put our trust in his love. Says it again, God is love, and all who live in love live in God. And God lives in them. And as we live in God, our love grows more perfect, so we will not be afraid on the day of judgment, but we can face him with confidence because we live like Jesus here in this world. Such love has no fear because perfect love expels all fear. If we are afraid, it is for fear of punishment, and this shows that we have not fully experienced his perfect love. We love each other because he loved us first. If someone says I love God but hates a fellow believer, that person is a liar. For if we don't love people, we can see. Listen to this. How can we love God who we cannot see? Verse 21 says, And he has given us this commandment. Those who love God must also love the fellow believers. What a beautiful display of what love is. So what does it say? That if we're not loving each other, we don't love God. If we're not displaying and showing the love to the people who don't know God, then God is not in you. Because that love that he gives you, that is him, should be flowing out of you. Turn over to Ephesians chapter 1, 3, and 4. Ephesians chapter 1, verse 3 and 4. It says, All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms because we are united with Christ. Even before he made the world, God loved us and he chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes. God chose you before you were ever born. He chose to love you first. Now flip it around and let me ask you this: what are you doing to show and display God's love to show that you love him in your life? There's a lot of people that won't come to church because of church people. It's because we have been failing in the church to display the very simple basic thing of the love of God. This is basic 101 Christian stuff. But we become so seasoned and so high and mighty and self-righteous that we forget that He first loved us. So who are we to stop passing that on to others? Because they will know God by you displaying the love that comes only from God. Because love is not based on circumstance. Love is not based on seasons, love is not based on situations, love looks past all the things that people can say and do to you, you still love them.

A Mother’s Love And Saying Yes

SPEAKER_01 40:50

I cannot understand I will never be able to understand the love of a mother. Like I want to punch Tristan so many times in the throat.

SPEAKER_00 41:07

And I know I had to know, I had to know my dad wanted to do the same to me because he is a little me. Lord help the world. But my mother always came to my aid and was on my side. No matter how stupid I was, it was like she was my defense. No matter how far out there I went on drugs and drinking and disappearing and didn't just show back up, I would hear her in the other room coming to my defense because my father was wanting to kick me out. There's something about the love of a mother that will look past our stupidity. And here's the cool thing. What my wife said, and I get it, I love that baby too. But I will never have the attachment to that child like she does because she is growing that child in her. She is literally right now attached to that child in a way that I will never understand. Let me bring it home to you. This to me is a raw, real example, the love of a mother of the love of God that he has for us. That he designed us, he created us, he purposed us for each one of us to have relationship with him. That he always comes to our aid, he always comes to our defense, he is always there. He's never early, seldom early. He may be early sometimes, but he's never late. And he's always on time. He has never failed, he has never left me in a place where I could not just call out to his name and he would come to my aid. As a child, when I would fall down, my dad, my poor guy, he'd be standing right there, and I'd still cry for mama. There's something about the connection between a child and a mother that I cannot grasp or understand.

SPEAKER_01 43:12

There's something about the love from the father to his children that I don't understand.

SPEAKER_00 43:23

Because I guarantee you, a hundred percent across the board, nobody in here deserves his love. None of us in here deserve Jesus to come and lay down his life for us. None of us in here deserve salvation. And yet, just like a mother, there is nothing that child has to do to earn the love. I go back and I'm looking forward to this again. It's gonna be pretty awesome. When I held Tristan for the first time, a complete stranger. But I immediately loved him. And there was nothing that little boy can do to make me love him less. How much more does the father care and love us? So much so that he is willing and able to meet you exactly where you are. All you have to do is call on his name, and the Bible says he will show up. Then he will show up in spite of your mess ups, in spite of your stupidity, that we all can do sometimes. He says, if you just call on my name, you will be saved. All it takes is for you to say yes to Jesus and every sin you've ever done or will do. He says that all you have to do is ask for forgiveness and it will be forgiven. I've done a lot of stupid things in my life. And for a while I didn't apologize. My mom was the first one to say, don't worry about it. It's all forgiven. I spent, I don't even know how many thousand dollars. She made a mistake and gave me a credit card when I was young. And I would go and just blow money and make up whatever excuse, and still, she would still let me have it and pay off my debt. Jesus is the exact same way. No matter what we have done, no matter what we're going to do, Jesus forgives us and he says, All you have to do is come to me and I will pay off your debt. Before we were born, before we ever even sinned, Jesus said, I will forgive you.