Abounding in Love, Part 2

Today on Summit life with Jeannie Greer.

I take myself.the stories in this situation were God declares his love to me and his name is as I am alive so I always will be. I do not change the law, but he demonstrated for me in the stories, the love that culminated on the cross. That is the declaration of his love for me. That's where he proclaimed his name there in religion Jeannie Greer. I'm your host Molly made a batch notice that the verses about God's love tend to get repeated and memorized passages like John 316 syrup form seminal feelings and they make us feel good about how fortunate we are today. Pastor Jenny explains that God's love for us has nothing to do with our worthiness or loveliness everything to do with God's compassion toward us. We are in a teaching series called the name. If you've missed any of the previous messages you can hear them online. Jeannie Greer.com. Today's message from Exodus 34 is titled abounding may or may not realize some of you got a guilty sword like some of your most of us if you have a minute group. You know what it's like to love somebody who doesn't love you back or somebody that's just not that into you. I think for me, one of the most mind blowing things in Scripture. One of the hardest really get my mind around is that we see God the Almighty God.

The self-sufficient creator, which means that he doesn't need anything theologians call that the society of God doesn't need anything require anything be happy he's happy in himself we see that God continually putting himself in that position we find him constantly reaching out to love people who don't love them back.

When he really has no reason to tell you this weekend that understanding that one thing about God will probably do more to change your life than any other realization, you could have in your life, I began this series with this statement by AW toes or what comes to our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us what comes in your mind what I say God is the most important and most defining thing about you because we can by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God. But when you come to see the steadfast love of God. It's going to give you a joy and a fullness and a freedom that will redefine you and all of your relationships that will transform you into being the kind of loving person you've always wanted to know that your goal, but you've always wanted to be all our deepest longings are for love our day. We know that just listen to the songs that we sing and listen to lots of movies that we put out we want we want love that's what our souls want from Exodus 30 467 Moses asked God if he can see God for who he really is a God put them into a cave in a mountain covers with his hand. God says this, Exodus 3319 dockable over there. I will make all my goodness. God says pass before you and I will proclaim before you my name galore. That's how I'm going to reveal my glory to you, it's my goodness, can be expressed in the name my Holiness were separate or divorce. Five the Lord descended, then a cloud and he proclaimed the Lord in Hebrew use the proper name of God, Yahweh literally means I am I am I am a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. Keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, the element that dominates this description of the name of God's love is presented here in this name like a many sided diamond.

So let's walk through to get several descriptions that all kind of turn the diamond of God's love and show you different dimensions of it, merciful and gracious God is angry at sin precisely because he loves us the same writer who wrote first John 418. God is love, also wrote first John 16 God is light and in him is no darkness at all. The light of God's presence exposes and drives out darkness.

God wants us to be filled with light and goodness of love like he is because he loves us his love is a purifying love, not being satisfied with only goodness in himself once goodness and loving those that he loves something like what I would feel for my children. This is how King David said Psalm 103 as a father has compassion on his compassion by the late raccoon as a father has raccoon when his children, so the Lord has raccoon among those who fear him, the depth and the length of God's love revealed in Scripture is shocking. In fact it is so shocking that God chooses to reveal to get to us through a series of stories rather than a set of propositions because there are some things that really cannot be explained adequately. They really have to be sensed and felt so when God begins to describe his love very quickly goes to illustrating that for you so that you can identify with it and understand what is talking about me show you what I mean. What start with the book of Jonah. Jonah says this chapter 4 verse one but it displeased Jonah exceedingly and he was angry.

He said Lord is this not what I said I told you this will happen when I was still in my country.

This is why verse two I made haste to flee to Tarshish, for I knew I knew you weren't gracious got a walk among God and I knew that you were rock, whom I knew that you were slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. Quote from exit 34, six and seven you will relent from disaster. I know it's Jonah finds God's love scandalous because God's love reaches out the people that Jonah knows are completely unworthy of God's mercy and his love is forgiveness because we think were Jonah in that story but note where Nineveh and you see in that when Jonah looked to these people and says they don't deserve forgiveness and love. God says that's how I feel about you I'm good comes the real Jonah and I'm in a dive for the real Ninevites and Jonah your Ninevites in this is how I love you.

Some things can't be explained.

They have to be felt experience.

That means if you ever had the experience of being really betrayed by by a son or daughter or parent or neglected by a friend or a spouse, but for whatever reason you can't stop loving them and you keep reaching out for them in that moment you get a glimpse of what God feels and what he is done with you.

Some things can't be explained have to be experienced. Jonah felt that I got. That's why wasn't God was happy before he made us if you need us to be happy whatever happy after he had he destroyed us after we send, but God has so voluntarily wrapped up his emotions in our pain that he cannot be happy again until we are happy, diligent, JI Packer says this is amazing by his own free voluntary choice. God will not know perfect and unmixed happiness again until he is brought every one of his children to heaven by his own free voluntary choice. God cannot be happy again until all those that he loves have been brought safely to heaven.

I told my wife after we had her fourth child like you know I will become ever to be happy again in life to someone on ISA because at some point before kids one of them always is unhappy just the way God forgot one of them is always unhappy in them when they're unhappy that I feel unhappy and so brought the rest of our lives.

This is from a cycle through one of them will be unhappy at some point.

Therefore, I will never be happy again as long as I'm alive and dead.

Then I can be happy again right because that's how you feel about somebody that you love God says this is how I feel about you. That was Ms. Gomer's name in Hebrew means completion God's love and happiness cannot be completes any longer, until he saves us even if we are the greatest source of pain in his life, which we are.

And even if we brought that pain we are experiencing onto ourselves to the hymn writer says and can it be, and can it be that I should gain an interest in my Savior's blood died he for me who caused his pain for me who him to death pursued amazing love how can it be that thou my God should die for me. What is amazing is I look at the very things that I used to rebel against God.

God turned into my salvation. Donald Ray Barnhouse, an old global preacher you put it like this wasn't the pursuing love of God is the greatest wonder in the spiritual universe. It's not the stars.

It's not the makeup of the atom.

It's the greatest wonder is the love of God.

We see this love and work at the heart of Hosea, we wonder, is God really like that but he is think about it many years later, many years later, God would give man the trees of the forest and the iron in the ground he would give them the ability then to format iron and the nails in the fashion there is treason to a cross and then he would stretch out his hands upon that street and allow us to mail in there and so do we take our sins upon himself. This is our God, and there is nobody else like him.

By the way, Hosea comes from two Hebrew words are combined to me. God saves amazing love how can it be that thou my God would die for me died he for me who caused his pain for me who him to death pursued.

Is it possible that the very thing that I used to rebel against God.

Across was to become the instrument of my salvation. Amazing love. By the way, did you notice that both of those are old testament stories cannot take a moment to address one of the most confused twisted ideas of people have about the Bible. They think of is like two deities in the Bible. There's an Old Testament, God the father and he's a mean and grumpy deities always mad. He watches Fox news every night. He's ready to kill everybody in Jesus is like the sun went off to college at all these liberal ideas about grace. They came back to have his like that. Come on. These reports are better creative and funny in the Grand Canyon is also what will try to rescue them right. Nothing could be further from the truth. Jesus's greatest stories of wonder about the love of God are always about the love of the father. The father that is revealed in the Old Testament.

Jesus said this is the father thought about you. The cross was the father running after you.

The cross was the father exposing himself to scorn and ridicule and pain just so we could get us back in Hebrews 12 says, think about the pain and the ridicule even think about the fact that he was naked on a cross and think about the torture. All he was thinking about is I get my children back then it like Jeannie Greer will get right back to the teaching and just a moment but first let me tell you about our latest resource created exclusively for arsenic like listeners. The Bible calls us to honor our parents in one way that we can do that is by praying for them.

The five things to pray for your parents will help you to pray rich intentional prayers for your mother or father, whether biological or adopted working and retired trailer, married, or separated whenever their situation and we want to love them well. We need to pray, we are offering three of these five things to pray. But this month in a bundle how to pray for our parents praying for our children and how to pray for our community.

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Jeannie Greer.com.

Thanks for being with us today.

Now let's get back to the final limits of today's message thinking they some of the Trinity is hard understand a lot of things about it like I can explain to you name something I'm not sure I understand fully what I do know this, that in Christ death on the cross was in the father himself was suffering for our sins because God did not send somebody else to die for our sins, he did it himself is what makes the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Mormons are wrong is God and create a lesser being and say goodbye for them God that I will do it myself. We know that the father and the son are one being, but at the same time we know that the father and son are separate and that's where it gets confusing. We know that the father loves the son more than anything which makes the sacrifice even more painful because I'm pretty sure that I could give up my life for you more easily than I could give up. My son Adam's life for you. My my dad used to teach or want to program when I was in the fourth grade and I remember him telling the story reported is true, it might want those legends. I don't know whatever but he said the stories of God were to switch the railroad with it.

Back in the old days we had to manually switch the tracks of a train want to go to different track and so is being operated that the switch on this bridge. I'm standard day nothing really out of the ordinary. There's a big passenger train coming down with hundreds of people on high speed barreling down this this track and there was a get on this right track. Nothing on the ordinary when all of a sudden the sky gets an emergency message that there's been a bad mistake of the previous station and there's another passenger train that got put on the same track. Also coming out about 75 miles an hour also filled with hundreds of people there no more than 2 miles apart. There's no way they can stop they will collide. You have to switch this track immediately, so the father looks out to switch this train coming on this one to the Stryker here when he sees that his seven-year-old son has gotten down into the gears in the machination of this. This track and he knows that he pulled that lever is most likely going to crush his son. His son came here and there is no time to react and so he has to make a split-second decision, do I crush my son or do I save these hundreds of people's lives in the last minute.

He does what he feels like he has to do because the amount of people me straight. He pulls that lever crushes his son and his train goes by at full speed filled with people on this train were laughing and and eating well oblivious to the fact that this guy just crushed his son so they could stay alive. I member my dad telling us the story in a one and I remember him doing it with tears in his eyes and remember me thinking what he do that to me if I was in that I don't know all there is to understand about the Trinity, but I know that there's something about the fact that God gave up not only himself, that God gave his only son, that suddenly helps me to see the kind of love that we are talking about, that God willfully endured so that you and I could be saved. Henry now and in the book the return of the prodigal sons is perhaps the most radical statement of Jesus ever made in his life. Luke 630 6B merciful the rock whom the way that your father in heaven, has been to you as I have been to you. This is how I want you to be to others, so I have three questions for you or they are number one want you believe in the steadfast love of the father.

Do you believe in it. You see in the stories they're all about you. You are none of that. He beyond everybody's comprehension came to forgive. First Peter says the Angels were confused by they want to look into it they can understand that I got. What would you have to be people. These people don't deserve to be forgiven. These people deserve judgment and their amazed by its you are Nineveh you were Gomer that he won't but he can't let go, like Gomer, you stood there naked and ashamed and he walked out and bought you back and he closed you, not with your robes or prostitution people back on his robes of righteousness. You are the prodigal son, for whom he stands daily on the gates of heaven longing for you to come home for whom he slew not the fatted calf but himself at the cross. He closed not with a garment that you had purchased, but one that was purchased by his blood, and there are times that you cannot feel the love of God must be honest.

There many days I cannot feel the love of God and on those days when I cannot feel the love of God. I take myself back to be stories in this situation were God declares his love to me in his name and he says I am is how I am, so I always will be.

I do not change, and I know the beloved. He demonstrated for me in the stories and the love that culminated on the cross. That is the declaration of his love for me. That's where he proclaimed his name. I told you the probably the greatest demonstration of the love of God happened on the night before Jesus died, he goes into a garden called Gethsemane were he just wants to spend a few moments alone with his father before the greatest trial of his life with the most odd thing begins to happen in Luke's telling of the story. Gethsemane Jesus begins to be terribly afraid. The word is horrified.

It's the same word that we would use if you saw your family massacred in front of your eyes feel something in the garden driving nails in his hands. What causing that emotion. It was so terrifying. Jesus said he almost died from it. Jesus did not exaggerate is not a figure speech you literally almost that the young begin to sweat great drops of blood.

A medical condition. The doctors call IMA try doses which is where your under such emotional strain that the capillaries in your face, burst your extremities burst in your little begin to bleed out of your course. What was it that Jesus Christ would cast out demons and raise the dead and walked on water. What did he see that terrified them so badly he almost died. Luke gives you a clue because Jesus calls out of the father's name three times in those verses and not a single time. Is there an answer.

What's happened is God is already begun to turn his face away from his son Jesus goes to experience the radiant radiance in the fellowship of the father that is known from all eternity and all he's met with silence.

The crucifixion began in the Garden of Gethsemane a long time before the first nail went into Jesus's hands.

Here's a question.

Why did God give Jesus that vision. There why not wait until the next day when Jesus would be on the cross to show them all that, why give him a glimpse of it in the beginning that's Jonathan Edwards questioned the theologian to give you his answer.

It was so we could see Jesus go to the cross voluntarily, knowing full well what he was about to experience so that his love for us would be put on display even more, God wanted us to see Jesus see what he was about to go through. See very clearly so that when he walked out of that garden and set his face to the cross, we would know he did not do it. It did not taken by surprise.

He knew exactly the price that he was going to pay and he was going to do it because you wanted to purchase you and that means that there are times when I don't sense the love of God. I don't feel good for me. There are times I look at my circumstances and I'll say forgot if you love me why miss having but I know that my soul has found a restingplace. My soul has found an anchor. It is found the place that I can run into and it is the name of God, because the name of God was declared to me throughout the Bible, the name of God was demonstrated for me at the cross and I know that if Jesus would not turn his back on me and literally hell itself is squeezing the life of out of him.

I know that he will not turn his back on me now if you are the kind of person that has to determine God's love based on whether your business is going well and your families going well based on how you feel you will be unsettled every day of your life when you come to understand that it is based on the settled work of Calvary that God says I am not. I was, I am means I don't ever change how I am yesterday today and forever. Then you will find an anchor for your soul but will let you weather any storm because that is the one thing you will be sure of is that God's love has been forever settled and demonstrated.

I a.m. I always will be. And I never change. Do you believe in his love for you. Some of you say I believe in his love, but it's more like God sentimental and I'm also what can happen in your life is something to really reveal the journals suddenly wake up one English or Nineveh in your don't and then at that point, you're not gonna have your positive self-image to go back to it's only to be what God declared in the cross, your life can fall apart and you need an anchor that anchors the finished work of Jesus on Christ the solid rock I stand all of the ground is sinking sand. Number two had you embraced his love for you and your braces offer you receive this more next week, but he's not a forces love on you.

You gotta choose to receive it. Salvation is a gift is found in a personal relationship with Jesus. It's not just believing in him that he's there it's trusting him personally for yourself is what we say personal relationship with you as you ever received him personally, as your Savior. If you're a believer are you renewing yourself in the reality of this love daily. Romans five Paul says the ministry of the Holy Spirit is to shed abroad. God's love in our hearts on cheddar balloon is poured out it's not a little tiny word is the same or the choose when the Holy Spirit came at Pentecost. It's it's a flood. We're talking about is this understanding that God just pours out his love and there's the sense of intimacy because you know you belong to God the Holy Spirit that that's not special when you get every once in a while it's not what happens once a week in church is to be the daily reality of the believer and the Holy Spirit gives it to all those people who ask. Are you living with the sense of that love was and I promise you if you are not living in the awareness of that love. There is no possible way that you feel any connection to God, so you don't love God, you also section of God and what you need is not me standing here yelling at you about you love God more. You can't your love for God will always be based on the perception of his love and his tenderness toward you. There is number three last one.

Had you sensed his love in you. For others since his love in you. For others, I often say this, but there's just no way to experience the magnitude of rock mercy to be the recipient of of of Walker noon the grace and stress remain the same but we always say that those who really believe the gospel will understand and they always become like the gospel. Why, because you can experience that kind of power and just remain the same selfish, self-centered, unforgiving, stingy person that you've always been that kind of mercy and grace when it impacts you transforms you online is about the transfer power of the gospel life Jeannie clear so Pastor JD to pray, for instance. And what if our new resources. This month we learn how to pray for our cities and communities that important and what is he going to teach that I start with the assumption Molly that a lot of us another pray and basically it comes out goblets all the missionaries in everyone everywhere.

Amen we don't exactly know what to pray and so for me in my own life. Having a clear out of categories and praying for and in scriptural instruction about what to pray for those things has been very very helpful. It is in an integrated, essential part of my quiet time every day while reviewing this bundle of three prayer books as just as a way of helping you this month. This particular one on cities your city that you live in the small town is full of people with needs.

This will be pray for the lost and you're sitting pray against the injustices.

There also help you celebrate good things out of your city prayers on the best ways of discipling yourself in the Scriptures position. Pray lightly about about the world that you live in is how to pray for your city book that's a part of. Two others are forgiving about your kids and autograph your parents something I think will really really help you, that in this final prereqs comes with our thanks when you donate to support this ministry today suggesting getting level. $35 or more. Every penny you donate is to advance the gospel through this ministry today and asked for your set to Frank fax: eight 663-3520 even easier to get on our website here Molly motivates next week were coming to the uncomfortable topic. God explained that his wrath is doctrine to be swept under the rug.

Maureen reality ever why that's true unfunded light to