So Loved // Receiving and Giving

It is a privilege to be here again.

This is home, you know.

I spent almost twenty-two years standing in this place, and uh I my heart never left here.

And so my heart is just filled with so much joy to be here with you again.

And this is the second time I've been able to speak.

Uh, I just wanted to tell you so much joy is in my heart as I see the next generation carrying forth the work of the kingdom, you know, to see my son up here.

Josh is my son, for those who don't know.

Yeah, and uh so many of my family, my children are around here too.

And I just think, Tiana, I want to tell you, the Lord, the Spirit of the Lord has already delivered the message for the day through you.

I thought I would just say, okay, if we all got it, we can go home.

That's exactly what I want to talk about.

But before I do that, I want to I want to talk about Luke since he's not here.

Oh, and not behind his back, but I can't tell you what a joy and a privilege it is to sit here and listen to Luke week after week.

I I knew him when he was just moved out of Fort Wayne and came to our discipleship school.

And I had one of the pastors on staff tell me as they were finishing the discipleship program, that staff person came and said, You have to find a way to keep Luke.

Whatever you have to do, you got to find a way to afford his salary and keep him on staff.

He's that's who he is, and I want to tell you, it is played out to be so true.

Um, you know, I just appreciated his humility, his gifting, and the way he conducts himself and carries.

I just love hearing him speak.

And so I just wanted to take a moment and tell you whenever you have an opportunity to tell him how much you appreciate him, would you do that?

Because, you know, it's not that easy doing what he does.

Let me tell you, I've been there many years, decades.

Um, when we started him in the teaching rotation, uh, he uh had a week in which to speak, and after he spoke, he came to me and he said, How do you do that every week?

And uh it's because when you're going to speak, you live with it all week.

I mean, you and you get up in the middle of the night and you write notes and you pray, and you know, I mean, you just like, oh God, please give me something for them.

You know, so I just I just can't say enough about how much I appreciate him.

And I just would ask you to do that too.

Um now one of the reasons I like Luke is because he's a teacher.

I mean, he'll go line by line and he unpacks it, and I go, wow, I never thought of it that way.

And I just learned so much from him.

But now I'm a little different.

I don't happen to do that, I can be all over the place.

You know what I mean?

Just like, what does that have to do with what he just said?

So, so since that's because I'm an exhorter, and uh, you know, I'm just always motivated to find a way to encourage us in the faith and overcome the challenges and the struggles we have and the suffering that we have in life.

And um, I've already put in my suffering time.

You know, so I'm trying to talk the Lord into this to understand, you know, I already put in my time.

So smooth sailing would be fine from here on.

I just, you know, I guess I'd be okay.

So I'm gonna see if I can just tell you where I'm going before I start.

So for those of you who get lost in it, you can still remember what where I was going.

I realized over the years, particularly in going through uh the pain I went through, which had, for those that don't know, I lost my first wife, Joyce, those who've been here for a while know her and have known her.

And you know, that was a 15-year journey of her mental decline.

She was diagnosed with early onset dementia at age 52.

So we moved from a big house with all of our children into a smaller house with less of our children, into married children's homes, and then eventually to Georgia, where Joel and Sarah uh were on point.

And by the way, they're here.

Joel and Sarah are here from Georgia.

And uh that was a long, hard journey.

It was somebody wants to describe it as nine miles of broken glass, just crawling over it, you know, bleeding, suffering, alone.

And I found it was hard to connect with the spirit of the Lord.

Now I was filled with the spirit in my 20s, and I was a worshiper, and I prayed in the spirit all the time, and people who know me know that's that's my passion.

I want to worship the Lord and be in his presence.

But I had a hard time finding his presence, I was suffering so much, and so through that I have reflected back on it and realized that one of the challenges that we face and that I faced has to do with receiving.

Now, we're used to saying giving and receiving, right?

If you've been to church very long, you've heard that.

It's giving and receiving.

I want to suggest it's the opposite.

It's receiving and then giving.

Now, the reason I say that is because we have to know how to receive the Father's love.

And that's what Tiana is just setting us up for, and that's where I want to go.

We have to learn how to receive the Father's love, and the love that He gives us, that's what we give away.

Then we give.

So you receive first, and then you give.

Amen.

So I want to talk about why it's hard to receive, because I have discovered it's harder to receive than you think.

There, and and then I want to talk about how sometimes we hide our love.

Instead of receiving a giving, we hide it.

And so if I can kind of, as they say, unpack these ideas, where I want to go at the end is I want us to have another opportunity to receive the Spirit of the Lord.

Yeah.

Are you up for that?

Yeah.

Okay.

All right.

So now the young preachers nowadays, they say, well, let's hop right in.

And they also say, let's jump right in.

But at 77, I can't hop into anything.

I don't hop into cold water, I'll tell you that.

So instead, we're just gonna walk in, okay?

You would do that.

So I'd like to ask my wife Britt to come, and she's gonna help me demonstrate something here about giving and receiving.

And while she comes, I'd like to look at Luke 15, 20.

And the NLT says it this way So he returned home to his father.

And that he there is the younger brother in the prodigal son story who took his father's, took half the inheritance and went and spent it in while living.

You all know that story.

He decided he was gonna return home because he was starving.

And he said, Well, I'll go ask my dad if I can be a servant, be a slave.

And he was anticipating that the father, if he was gonna receive him at all, it would be as a slave, as a servant, not a son.

So he came home to his father, and while he was still a long way off, his father saw him coming.

That's interesting, isn't it?

The father was looking for him, waiting for him to come back.

Isn't that amazing when you think about that?

When the moment you turn your heart to the Lord, he's already looking and anticipating you doing that.

So he saw him coming and he filled and filled with love and compassion.

That's the Father.

The Father, filled with love and compassion, ran to his son, embraced him, and kissed him.

I love this story.

Jesus, when he told this story, this is one of the best stories you'll find in the Bible.

So, what I want to talk about here is this whole thing about he ran to him, embraced him, and kissed him.

Now, for some of those who are ahead of me right now, I'm not gonna kiss Britt in front of you, okay?

But you'll kiss me.

I want to I want to talk about how giving and receiving has different levels.

So, so one of the first levels that I encountered in my relationship with Britt, she asked me to come to a Christmas concert.

She was dressed up as Mrs.

Santa Claus and singing Christmas songs.

It was one of the retirement communities or senior care communities.

And uh Brit and I had not yet really dated.

Um, I found out later that we had get-togethers.

We didn't have dates.

Do you know what I mean?

I didn't know it existed, but we had some get-togethers, and she asked me to come to her concert, and I'm sitting there uh as she's singing, and then she started walking around the room singing, and she touched my shoulder.

Now she had my attention right there, I'm telling you.

You know, we were we didn't really know each other that much, but when she touched me, my love language, of course, is physical touch, and when she touched me, it's like, hello, who are you?

I okay, but that was that was kind of the first level of um expressing, you know, affection.

Um, then the next level is shaking hands.

We do that all the time, but there's a level that's even higher than shaking hands, and this is one the Africans are good at holding hands.

And they may not be in a relationship, but they will hold hands uh with a friend, you know, uh whether it's female with female, uh, male with male.

I mean, I couldn't believe it the first time I saw two guys holding hands, and you know, and I asked Pastor Willie, what's this about?

He said, That's what we do in Africa.

We we will express our connection, affection just by walking around and holding hands.

I thought you only did that with uh one of your children or with a spouse.

And then and then the next one, which is this is the one that's appropriate for church between male and female, that's called the side hug.

Yeah, so I just want to put that in there in case some of you younger guys had any ideas, you know.

It's just no.

You just yeah, that's it's good.

And then there's there's the next level and uh before kissing.

And this is called the level of a hug.

Now, we are experts at this.

Britt and I will stand in the kitchen for a couple minutes and just hug each other.

Yes, great.

I'm a blessed man.

Now, now when we hug, who's giving?

Who's receiving?

You got it.

I love you.

Thank you.

I I wanted I wanted to demonstrate to you visibly that giving and receiving can go together.

And when we hug like that, it's it's the high level of relationship.

And this is what the father in this story is demonstrating.

He ran to his wayward son and he embraced him, he hugged him.

So as I said, a big hug is a picture of receiving and giving at the same time.

Some years ago in my 20s, I was filled with the spirit, and I received the infilling of the spirit, and I was so filled up with his love.

As I visited my grandfather in Indiana, my mom's dad, he's a farmer and a successful farmer, but he did not know how to express encouragement or affection in any way.

I you know, and I noticed he just didn't know how to do it.

And I so I decided I was going to try to do something I had never done, or he probably hadn't experienced himself.

I don't know, but I'm a grown adult, I'm in my 20s, and we were standing out on the lawn, and my dad was there with me, and I was waiting for the right moment, and I felt like okay, now I'm gonna go in.

And I just gave him a hug, and he was like this don't touch me now.

You've been around people who say, Don't touch me, right?

And if you even say that, you got a problem.

You need healing.

You need healing if you if you don't like being touched, you need healing.

Jesus touched, and so his reaction to me or response to me was just cold.

And I was not happy about that, you know.

It's like, well, that didn't work.

Here, I've been praying how to make a connection with my grandfather.

I gave him a hug and he didn't appreciate it at all.

And I'm sitting in my home and I'm praying over this encounter with my grandfather, you know, and I'm just like, Lord, what's the deal here?

You know, he never expresses affection, and I'm wanting to show affection, I'm wanting to connect with my grandfather, and you know, I'm just kind of irritated about this whole thing.

And I heard the Spirit of the Lord say to me, if he were physically disabled, would you be upset with him if he didn't respond to you?

Well, no, I, you know, if he's physically disabled, I mean he's not able to do that.

And then I heard the Lord say, He's emotionally disabled.

And the Lord was putting in it a perspective to me to help me understand why he could not receive.

He's emotionally disabled, he needed healing.

There's a story in the Bible about Peter.

Jesus was washing the disciples' feet, and as he came to Peter, Peter said, You're not gonna wash my feet.

And Jesus said to him, If you don't let me wash your feet, then you have no part with me.

Now Peter had a hard time receiving, he didn't want to receive.

But when Jesus put it that way, if you want to be a part of me, you need to receive.

Then he said, Okay, well then wash me all over.

My head, my hands, everything.

Just wash me all over.

And Jesus said, No, no, no, no.

That's you don't get the you that's not the point.

Right, right.

It's not about the physical part, it's in here.

And what Jesus was saying to him is this uh in the kingdom we serve, we give.

Leaders are not takers.

Leaders are givers.

You remember David?

When he became king in Israel, he gave raisin cakes, he gave, he blessed dates, he gave.

The one before him was a taker.

But David was a giver.

And so Jesus is telling Peter, look, you have to receive from me.

Because in so receiving from me, then you can participate in this kingdom that I'm bringing to the earth.

If you don't receive me, you can't be a part of me.

That's the reason I bring that out is the importance of receiving.

We have to receive.

Now, I was in, if I could have some water.

Um Josh, is there water around here?

I was in uh Mexico at an orphanage after we placed Joyce in Georgia.

And at that point, I was completely spent.

I had nothing to give to anybody.

I was on medication to sleep.

Thank you, son.

I uh I didn't like alcohol enough to drink very much.

It didn't help me.

That's a joke, folks.

So I was struggling, so I had to get away, and uh my uh son Jason and his wife Megan.

Megan has a sister in Mexico, and she was running an orphanage, and so I thought that's where I'll go.

I'll go to the orphanage in Mexico.

And as I was there, there was a young mom with a 10 year old son.

And I got to know her because she was at the desk there, and I did some teaching at the orphanage, and I worked with the pantry and different things like that.

But one day she told me that she and her Son were not able to sleep because it was so hot.

And so I thought about that and I said, okay.

And uh I started looking around for an air conditioner.

And I went to the local hardware store and I found one.

And so I gave her and her son an air conditioner.

And this is what she said to me when I gave it to her.

Why are you doing this?

She thought I might have some other motive.

You know, I might be up to something.

Why are you doing this?

And I that just struck me right away.

Oh, she's got a problem receiving.

It's just like Peter.

It's like my grandfather.

Just it's up, it's hard for some of us to receive.

And then I got to thinking, I wonder if I have that problem.

I wonder if if now some of you say, listen, give me a million dollars and I'll show you.

I have no problem receiving.

Right?

But we're not talking about money.

We're not talking about that.

What we're talking about is can you receive in your heart?

Can you open your heart to receive the love that the Father has for you and that other people have for you?

I sent this in a text, and I'd like to put it up there and just let you follow along with me because it addresses this issue.

You can't separate your love for God from the way you treat people.

Every act of grace, kindness, or forgiveness is a reflection of the love you've received from Him.

I should be getting amens here.

The way you love your neighbor isn't just about them, it's about your heart and your response to God's love for you.

What would change if you saw loving your neighbor as an act of worship?

You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

Mark 12, 31.

Now, when it comes to giving and receiving, as I reflected on it, I just thought, you know, there's a reason why we love dogs.

Yeah?

They're really, they're always good at giving and receiving.

Receiving and giving.

Sometimes too much.

I had the occasion this last week, Britt and I had the occasion to uh dog sit one of our granddogs.

I was happy to see him go home.

He was, he kind of overwhelmed me with his giving and receiving, I'll tell you that.

Now, the dog we had before that, his name was Riser, he was uh very old and he did not know how to give and receive.

I'd express affection to him and he would just blow me off.

And you know, and it irritated me because he reminded me of some people I had in my life like that.

I worked for a guy in Fort Wayne, Indiana who had a dog one time, his name was Pritzy, and we'd go into the office, and Pritzy'd be all over him, you know, and he'd be hugging her and so forth.

And and then his name was Darren.

He said to me, You know, this dog is a nuisance.

He said, I really he's so hard to take care of, you know.

I got him down here trying to take care of him, but you know what?

That dog loves me.

That's why he kept him.

He's a nuisance.

But that dog loved him, he said.

So loving others is the outward expression of the inward love of God given to us.

Ephesians 3 17 says, Then Christ shall make his home in your hearts as you trust in him.

Your roots will grow down into God's love and keep you strong.

See, you can't give away what you don't have.

What's in you is what's going to come out.

And so that's why we have to access the presence of the Lord.

That's why we have to learn to be uh accessing his love so that we can give away.

I'm reminded of the story of the wife who said to her husband, you know, we've been married for 30 years, and you never tell me that you love me.

How many have heard this story?

Oh, maybe one of you come up and finish this thing.

So, and and so the husband says, Look, we got married 30 years ago.

I told you that I loved you.

If it ever changes, I'll tell you.

What I'm getting at is that he hid his love from his wife.

All those 30 years, he hid his love.

And that's something that happens.

We wind up hiding our love.

Proverbs 27, 5.

When I ran across this, I was really rocked about this one.

It says, an open rebuke is better than hidden love.

Now, I was in a staff meeting years ago where as we were in this meeting, one of the staff members was openly corrected by another person in the meeting and told what a poor job they were doing.

Right in front of everybody else.

Talk about awkward.

I mean, we all like, you know, it's like what happens with the rest of the family when one of them is being disciplined in front.

It was awkward.

It was, I mean, what this is saying is as awkward, unpleasant that that experience is to be openly corrected, as tough as that is, that's still better than somebody hiding their love from you.

You're getting this, right?

Jesus was moved with compassion.

So the compassion that was in his heart, the father's love that was in his heart, was expressed to others.

And he would heal people.

I've had that happen to me when I pray for people.

I've had this time when I feel the compassion of God flow through me, and at that moment I know they're going to be touched.

It's an amazing experience.

You're just in the flow.

And and you know that God is here and God's at work, and he's giving his love away through you.

And if at some level, you know, I talked about the different levels we have, at some level, you've all experienced that in some way, of the joy of feeling like you're really in the flow of what God's doing and he's flowing through you.

You'll get addicted to that.

You really will.

It's so, you have so much joy when you're giving away the Father's love.

Listen, when we withhold from others, we both suffer.

Robin Williams said it this way.

He said, There's something worse than being alone.

And of course, he had my attention when he said that because I was alone for so many years and I was so miserable all those years.

I mean, it was hell.

That's what it was for me.

I felt separated from everything, including God Himself.

But he said there's something worse than being alone.

He said it's being with someone who makes you feel alone.

Are you getting this?

Or am I, I mean, am I here?

Yeah.

We we have to learn to express our love in word and deed.

We need to, we need to do that with each other because hidden love is worse than an open rebuke.

So many live life feeling not loved.

And so let's not add to their pain by withholding the Father's love through us.

The Father expressed his love for Jesus two times in the scripture it says, He said, This is my beloved son in whom I'm well pleased.

If it was important enough for the Father to tell Jesus that, how important is it for us?

Right?

Right, right.

And so at a conference with filled with uh many believers, one of the speakers said, How many of you have ever not had a father say to you, I love you?

How many have never heard that from your father?

Would you raise your hands?

How many do you think?

What percent of people raised their hands and said, My father never said he loved me?

Ninety-five percent.

Now, if that's indicative of the general population, no wonder we have so many problems.

We have an immense deficit of awareness of how much God loves us.

That's why the story of the prodigal son was told.

Do you have a clue?

Do you understand?

Jesus came here on a mission, and his mission was to tell us how much the Father loved us.

I had one guy tell me that his dad was a tough old guy from a different culture, and he said he never said anything affectionate, never kind, never said he loved you.

So when he became a Christian, he said he decided to tell his dad he loved him.

And so he had say, I love you, Dad, but his dad would not respond to him.

He wouldn't say, I love you too.

He said, It took me years, but it broke through.

And finally, after telling him for years, I love you, he said, his dad finally said, I love you too.

Our family, we're really good at this.

I love I really like it.

We have a phone conversation, and when we hang up, we say, I love you.

And the other one says, I love you too.

It's just it's just such a blessing to live in this place of receiving and giving the Father's love.

The Father expressed his love to us when he sent his son.

Jesus expressed his love for us when he sent his spirit.

One of the seven primal questions that we have in life is I am I loved.

That's one of the seven primal questions.

Am I loved?

When you suffer, this is what I found.

I don't feel loved.

I did not feel loved.

I and I, you know, I know the scriptures and I preach for years and I was spirit-filled, and I, you know, all of this, all of this, but yet I'm just out there, just so distant from the Father and the Spirit and His people.

I I I suffered being away from people who could love me.

And I didn't know what to do.

And I and this thing started getting into years, not months, but years.

I don't think God loves me.

I think it's over.

But little by little, it's like an ice cube melting.

The more I prayed in the spirit, the more I worshiped the Lord, the more I tried to access the spirit, it's this heart, this coldness in my heart started to melt.

And I started to sense the promptings of the spirit and feel his love and began to get convinced, you know, maybe he hasn't forgotten me after all.

And then he started restoring me because I lost just about everything.

And he started restoring me.

And when I met Brit, I knew he was restoring me.

It was a God thing.

Total God thing.

That's what happens in our life.

We will experience struggles, challenge, suffering.

We're gonna have all this.

I'm talking out of Romans 8.

I don't have time.

That's another sermon, but I'm just saying there's so much suffering we can experience in life.

But when you get through it with his intercession and the Holy Spirit's intercession and the Father's love, you'll come out in a whole new place.

But you're gonna be challenged like I was to access the Holy Spirit.

You're not gonna do it apart from Him.

You're gonna get lost, you're gonna go down, you're gonna be filled with doubt.

You're gonna, you're just gonna have these thoughts that torment you, and you're gonna feel like nobody loves you.

How come nobody's calling me?

It's gonna be a struggle.

Now, maybe it won't be at that level, but what I'm saying is that when Jesus sent the Spirit, the Spirit in Romans 8, it says he gave us a spirit of adoption as sons and daughters.

And this is what I want to tell you today.

It's not a one-time act.

You have to access the spirit over and over and over and over.

And if you haven't been doing that, you'll wind up like I was, with a long extended period of time of not feeling loved.

Yeah, so good.

Thank you, thank you.

There's a couple must in the scripture.

You must be born again.

What's the other one?

You must be filled with the spirit, you must be filled with the spirit, his presence.

So I know that today some of you are here, and you may not be at the level that I was talking about, but at some place you're feeling like, eh, I'm just kind of going through the motions.

And I'm battling these thoughts and these feelings.

I'm just struggling with all this stuff.

What do I do?

Well, I would I would say, do what I began to do.

I get up every morning, I get in my rocking chair, and I'd start praying in tongues.

And I'd keep praying in tongues, and eventually I started having a breakthrough where the spirit would come on me and I'd start laughing in the spirit.

Now it didn't change my outward uh circumstances, didn't change that, it changed this.

And as I was changed inside, filled with his love, filled with his peace, filled with his joy, you know, it didn't, these things didn't matter because in here I knew I was being loved.

God loved me, his spirit was on me, and that gave me assurance that he'd change it.

And he did.

You have to access the spirit, is what I'm saying.