Hello, Life: Love Is Here | Part 7

Welcome to the Awakening Church podcast.

We pray this message encourages you and provides the hope and light of Jesus Christ.

Thanks for tuning in.

Well, good morning, awakening church.

Great to be with you, happy Candy Palooza.

If we haven't met yet before, my name's Ryan.

We're absolutely thrilled to have you join us today.

Um and I actually love that Dave um started out with kind of uh talked about cats and dogs.

We're in the series called Hello Life, and Carolyn, who spoke a few weeks ago, she asked, How many are dog people, how many are cat people?

Can I just see how many are cat people real quick?

Great.

So we offended all of you.

Perfect.

Okay, great.

Um I love dogs.

I like cats too, but I love dogs.

Um we have a dog, we've had a dog for about eight years.

Her name's Finley.

Um, and we named her Finley because finally mom let us get a dog.

Uh she didn't grow up with dogs.

This is her first dog.

In fact, um, this is awesome.

We were walking this week and she's asking, Do you think we're always gonna be dog people?

And I didn't want to answer.

I wanted to see what she said because I was like, I'm not sure how this is gonna go.

I know what my heart says.

Um I said, Well, what do you think?

And she's like, I think we'll always be dog people.

It's like, yes.

You know the difference between like dogs and cats, right?

You I'm sure you've heard this.

Like a dog, you love them, you care for them, you feed them, you give them a home, and they look at you and they go, You must be God, right?

A cat, you love them, you feed them, you care for them, give them a home, and they look at you and go, I must be God, right?

I mean, that's just the reality is a dog, you are the center of their universe, and and a cat, uh, you you're like, you know, an intern that's late bringing snacks.

Like, what are you doing?

Um growing up, uh, I had a great dog.

His name was Spike.

Well, it wasn't a he, it was a she.

I didn't know it was a she, but I named him Spike.

I was I was seven.

I it was we found Spike.

This, I mean, as you can imagine, what Spike is um fear, lots of fear.

It was a terrier.

It was a terrier mud, it was about this big, ugly as all get out, but it was my dog.

Found Spike rainy day under the um uh under a van, and I asked, can we keep them?

And we kept them, became my best friend.

I remember moving from um Texas to California.

Oh, by the way, there's a football game today.

Uh Cowboys and 49ers.

Did you know that?

Some of you know that I'm a Cowboys fan.

I think we have a couple 49ers fans in here.

Um, some of you 49ers fans, sorry, this is a total aside.

I I completely apologize.

Um, but some of you have been so good at telling me, like, wow, your team's doing really bad.

And then you know what my response has been?

You're right.

We're doing terrible this year.

Do you know how bad we are?

You can ask, how bad are they?

How bad are they?

Isn't that lame?

Why did I do that?

That was stupid.

This is how bad the cowboys are.

If we lose today, we'll have the same record as the 49ers.

And now we offended the cat people and the 49ers today.

Amen.

Be blessed, have a great Sunday.

All right.

All right, back to Spike.

We moved to California.

We moved to California, and I here I am, this hick kid in Surf City, Santa Cruz.

And I remember nights I'd be in my backyard, and little Spike nuzzled up next to me, and I'd just be pouring my heart out to that dog.

I'd just be crying.

Like nobody understands me.

Parents don't listen to me, they don't get it, I don't feel hurt, I felt so lonely.

You know what's interesting is we grow up, but we actually don't grow out of that loneliness, that longing to be known and to be loved.

In fact, C.S.

Lewis said it this way: we are born helpless.

As soon as we're fully conscious, we discover loneliness.

There's a space inside of us, a vacuum, that no achievement, no relationship or success can fulfill.

Sociologists uh would say today we have a loneliness epidemic.

We are more connected than ever, we have more access to people, and yet at the same time we're more isolated and alone, and to solve it, we are turning to AI chatbots, replacing human connection and dogs.

Why, after all the striving, do you feel so empty and alone?

Humanity's deepest desire is to be truly known and fully loved.

To be loved and not known is at best superficial.

That's where most of us live.

To be known and not loved is one of our greatest fears, and so we hide our true selves.

Where can you find a love that fills the deep longing of the soul?

If you got your Bibles or your phone, would you open up to 1 John chapter 4, verse 7?

1 John 4:7

In our time together, the Apostle John's going to give us this breathtaking vision of love and show us how do we experience the love our souls long for.

What if the love we've been searching for has been here the whole time?

In fact, the sermon titled today is Love Is Here.

Go ahead and turn to your neighbor and say, Love is here.

Well, you guys had more fun with that than anybody else.

That's awesome.

I wish we all were doing that.

First thing the Apostle John is gonna tell us is that love actually begins with God.

Love begins with God.

Listen to what he says.

Dear friends, let us love one another.

By the way, he's gonna say, let us love one another five times in this short little letter.

Why?

For love comes from God.

Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.

Whoever does not love does not know God because God is love.

In fact, John tells us something about the nature, the character, who God is.

In this uh little letter, he tells us that God is light, there is no darkness in him, that God is spirit.

And here he tells us that God is love, that God's essential attribute is love.

Core to his nature and character is love.

Love is not God's only attribute.

However, love informs all of God's attribute.

All that God does is love.

And so, his justice is an expression of love.

His holiness, that we sang, is done in love.

His mercy is love.

Everything that God does is love.

And when he loves, he is simply being himself.

A.

Tozer in the Knowledge of the Holy writes this says, from God's other known attributes or character traits or qualities, we may learn much of his love.

We can know, for instance, that because God is self-existent, his love had no beginning.

Because he is eternal, his love can have no end.

Because he is infinite, it has no limit.

Because he is holy, it is the I I so messed up this word in the first service.

I practice you have no idea how many times I practiced this word.

That's awesome.

I love it.

Quintessence.

Is that right?

That was a teacher over there.

She knows.

She knows.

He is holy.

It is the quintessence.

Quintessence! Thank you, quintessence.

Spit it out already, Ingram.

Quintessence of all his he's like writing such beautiful prose here, and I'm ruining it.

He is holy, it is the quintessence of all his spotless purity, because he is immense, his love is an incomprehensibly vast, bottomless, shoreless sea before which we kneel in joyful silence and from which the lofty eloquence retreats, confused and abashed.

God's essential nature is love.

When he loves, he is simply being himself.

And as a result, then God is the source of love.

Love begins with God.

C.S.

Lewis again writes this God is the wellspring from which all love flows.

Without him, we are merely cups trying to fill other cups with no source of water.

Like if you want to know where love begins, if you want to know what can fill the void in our souls, it says love, John's telling us love begins with God.

That he is the ultimate source.

See us the wellspring.

See, here's the problem, and I love his illustration.

He grabs this cup, he says, you know what?

If we're just trying to fill ourselves, it's just an empty cup.

But you know, in our culture today, this is what we do.

We say, before uh I can love you, I need to love me, right?

It's this self-love.

Now, let's be clear healthy self-care and self-love is important.

In fact, Jesus said that we're called to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.

And yet, the reality is, if I have an empty cup and I'm just trying to fill myself, what do I have?

Empty cup.

And we spend so much energy and the weight of that, friends.

How many people feel the weight of like, I just gotta love myself, but I'm not doing it right, and I'm not filling myself up, and I feel so heavy and I feel like a failure.

I go online, it seems like everybody else has it figured out, but my cup is empty.

I'm lonely.

And self-love, loving ourselves to fill ourselves up, it doesn't work, and so we go to others.

Man, I need that girl or that boy.

If I had a girlfriend, if I had a boyfriend, if I was dating someone, if I, you know, married the right person, um, if I find a different person than one that I'm married to, uh, if we only had kids and we go to people that are finite, that are broken, that were never meant to carry the weight of our need.

Fill my cup, fill my cup, and it's almost as if we have a hole in the bottom, isn't it?

And it just kind of drains out and we fill each other, but it never quite fully fulfills.

And then we go through our careers or success, longing for others' approval.

And what John's saying here, God is love, and love comes from God, and so if he is the source of it, what I first have to do is I first have to allow myself to be filled up with God's love.

Anytime I'm trying to fill myself up, it ain't working.

But the moment I tap into the God who is love, he says, hell, hey, hell, hello, hello, life, there you go.

It's Halloween week, you're fine.

And we tap into God just a little bit, right?

Because we want, we think other things will fulfill, and so we come on a Sunday, we come, you know, maybe in our need, and we just get a little bit, and he's like, if you would allow yourself just to receive my love, if you would acknowledge and recognize that the things that you're looking forward to are gonna fill you up will not fill you if you will embrace the God who is the source of love.

In fact, I love how the Apostle Paul says that God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.

Like that's what he wants to do for you.

He wants to pour his love into your hearts.

So let me ask you.

Or what are you looking to fill your cup?

What have you been chasing after, run running after, hoping?

Here's the thing.

We all do this.

I remember um in our marriage, what I was really looking for is that my wife would fill my cup.

Yeah, intellectually I get it, God.

Yeah, you're gonna fill that up.

But I was putting a weight and a pressure and an expectation and a burden on someone who was never meant to carry that.

It breaks our relationships, it brings such harm and chaos, and God's like, I already have it.

My infinite love is for you.

And so, how do we then connect to the source that is love?

How do we then allow God to fill our cup?

Well, he says, love begins with God, and then this is such good news.

Love made the first move.

Love moved first.

It's not you moving first, it's not you figuring it out.

It's like, okay, I gotta do just the right thing.

Somehow, God to get you to move towards me to fill my cup.

He's going, I'm moving.

This is how God showed his love among us.

This is how he demonstrated it, it's how he revealed it.

He sent his one and only son into the world that we might live through him.

Would you do this?

I'm going to read this next line, and as we get, every time the word love, would you just say it out loud as we get there?

This is.

I gave you a heads up.

I thought it would be.

Let's try it again.

This is love.

Not that we loved God, but that he loved us.

This is love.

I love this.

I know that sounds silly.

I do love this.

This is love.

This is incredible.

Not that we love God, that we somehow figured it out, that we got the right thing.

And we're like, I mean, we think about this, like somehow, like if I somehow love God enough, then he'll love me back.

Won't he get it?

God just, this is love.

Not that we loved him, but that he loved you.

His activity and intentionality towards you and sent his son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.

We actually see a few things about God's love here.

First, God's love is active, not passive.

God didn't wait on us.

God initiates, he didn't wait for us to clean up our lives, get our act together.

His love moves towards your messiness.

He fully knows you.

Isn't that amazing?

Every part about you.

And he was moved in love towards you.

His love enters our brokenness.

And his love isn't afraid of the things we've been hiding.

God's love is active, not passive.

God's love is self-giving, not self-protecting.

That he sent, that he gave, that he gave of his own life.

In Jesus, God held nothing back.

In Jesus, God poured it all out for us.

And so much of love is self-protecting because we've been hurt by people.

We've had people disappoint us.

We've loved, we've given parts of our hearts away, and and then our hearts were broken.

Isn't it amazing that the God of the universe is just self-giving, not self-protecting?

He gives you his whole heart immediately right now.

Holding nothing back.

And then God's love is completely undeserved.

It's not earned.

You did nothing and can do nothing to earn God's love.

Listen.

And so you can do nothing to lose God's love.

You can't make God love you anymore.

And he won't love you any less.

You can't work your way into God's good graces.

His love is simply a gift.

In fact, you are loved by God simply because God loves you.

Isn't that amazing?

Like right now, in this moment, you are loved by God.

Not because anything you've done, not because anything you can do, not because you made promises or you're gonna work your way, and now this time you're really committed.

You are loved by God simply because the God of the universe, who is love, the source of all love, just loved you with an everlasting love.

And if we could get that truth, it'd change our entire being.

You know, sometimes I I love, I hope I could preach the same message like multiple times in a week.

One, because it's so important, or two, I just don't think we're getting it.

Or maybe three, I just did a bad job.

Those could be all the same.

And in John's letter here, he circles this theme of love so many times.

We're hitting it again and just constantly going into it.

Why?

Because we need this more deeply than we ever could understand.

When we talk about uh like transformation, how God changes you.

Oh, so much we think, gosh, if I just you know change my behavior, then I'll become this person.

And we we do this behavior modification.

The way God changes us is through the identity formation.

Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

Allow your mind to be changed and transformed into more thoughts that are true of you and true of God.

And when I begin to embrace my belovedness, that I am loved by God, it changes the way I walk through life.

In fact, Henri Now, and we've said this quote before in the past: being the beloved constitutes the core truth of our existence.

Like the truest thing about you is that you're loved by God.

But you just sit in that.

He loves you.

We live in an identity dysphoric society.

We're searching constantly for an identity, looking all around us.

There's confusion and chaos and tripping over things and saying this is the most important thing or this is the most important thing.

And the truth of the matter is your gender and sexuality are important, but they're not your core identity.

Your identity is your beloved image bearer of the God most high.

Your success and your achievement, they're important, but they are not your core identity.

They are not your essential identity.

Your identity is your beloved daughter or son of the King Most High.

That familiar that has been fumbling you, and the sin that just keeps dripping you up, that anxiety that is weighing you down, and the depression that casts a shadow that looms over your life, and you think that's who I am.

It is not.

It's a lie from the pit of hell.

You are the beloved.

And love moved first.

Don't you ever forget it.

Love moved towards you.

God moved towards you.

The truest thing about you is you are loved with an everlasting, all-consuming, unrelenting love of the God who is love, who showed his love by sending his son Jesus for you.

Now listen to this.

That's how valuable and how loved you are.

Love begins with God.

Love made the first move, and then John's going to close it out.

This is so important for us today.

Love is completed in community.

We live in a hyper-individualistic, autonomous culture.

Where the highest good is the individual.

Hence, the individual appears more and more opened up and mobile, fluid and socially independent, but the this volatility signifies much more a destabilization of the self than a triumphant affirmation of a subject endowed with self-mastery.

Witness the rising tide of psychosomatic symptoms and obsessive-compulsive behavior, depression, anxiety, and suicide attempts, not to mention the growing sense of inadequacy and self-deprecation.

The more socially mobile the individual is, the more we witness signs of exhaustion and subjective breakdowns.

The more freely and intensely people wish to live, the more we hear them saying how difficult life can be.

Love is completed in community.

Listen to what he says.

Dear friends, since God so loved us, we ought to love one another.

No one has ever seen God, but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

Our hyper-individualistic culture is actually killing us.

God has revealed himself as a triune God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, three distinct persons, one God.

Existed in perfect unity for all of eternity, in community, perfect love.

And you have been made in the image of God, a reflection of the communal God created in community to express and give and receive love.

First, poured out by his love and then poured through you.

God's love is to flow to you and is to flow through you.

And what we do is we become consumers instead of contributors.

What we do is we just seek to what can I get instead of how can I give.

Like we will not experience the fullness of God's love if we're just holding it in.

And that's what we do sometimes is like, I just want me and God.

I actually don't need the church, I don't need community, and I'm just gonna be spiritual over here.

And he says, No, you get poured in by me as you pour into others.

And I wish I could have like this constant, ooh, that would be dangerous.

Um, that'd be fun though.

Um but he says, I've poured into you my infinite love.

There is nothing holding me back, you do not have a limit of it.

So let's be done with the scarcity mindset.

Humanity's deepest desire is to be known and fully loved.

And he made the first move towards you and is ever moving towards you, ever present.

And God is here right now, love is here right now, and the reality is so many of us just came in empty, our cups just dry, and we're looking to someone or something, hoping, tired, exhausted, and in this moment, child, daughter, son, he wants to meet you, he wants to fill you.

So we're going to take communion as a church.

It's the reminder that love moved first, that Jesus came for us.

It's the reminder that you are loved by God simply because he loves you.

Today, God invites you to receive that love.

Would you let his love fill those empty spaces?

Would you let his love answer the deep yearnings of your soul, the things that even we cover up, afraid to bring into the light?

He wants to meet you and fill you.

You know, there's some here.

And today's the day where you get to ex- can step into a relationship.

He's a relational God.

This is not a religion, he's a relational God.

It's personal.

That's why he came in person.

Would you let love come into your heart?

Invite Jesus, the God who loves you, to bring life and hope and to fill the deep parts of your soul.

And so if you wouldn't mind, would you all just pray with me?

And if you want to step into a relationship and have his love fill you, overwhelm you, this day and forevermore, would you just pray after me?

God, I need you.

Honestly, I'm tired of running after love that doesn't fulfill.

Thank you for making the first move.

Jesus, I want to receive your love today right here and right now.

I believe you came from me, you died for me, and rose again to give me new life.

I opened the heart, my heart to your love.

Will you come into my life pour your love into my heart?

Would you give me new life?

And Jesus answers that prayer a hundred percent of the time.

If you prayed that prayer, if you stepped into love in a relationship, just everybody keep their eyes closed.

I just want to be able to pray for you and know.

Could you raise your hand?

Just raise it high.

Amen.

Amen.

Ah Jesus.

Thank you for my friends and have stepped into your love in this community as we're waiting, acknowledging the things that we look to to fill us up in this moment.

Would you overwhelm us with your love?

Overwhelm us with your presence.

Lead us to your heart.

We hope you are blessed by this message.

Please subscribe to our podcast for access to every episode as they're uploaded.

And hey, we'd love to connect with you.

Take a next step by filling out our virtual connection card at awakeningchurch.com slash card.