Practically addressing what keeps us from opening our hearts to God and really trusting our lives to Him in now.

National Family Retreat 2019: A Heart of Love

<p>Practically addressing what keeps us from opening our hearts to God and really trusting our lives to Him in now.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Restoration International

Alane Waters

Tom Waters

Opening Our Hearts

So tonight we want to talk about on this opening night of National Family Retreat, about opening our hearts to God.

I don't know, sometimes we don't let this kind of thought soak in.

He loves us with that kind of love and that heart of love never changes towards us.

Aren't you thankful that when we come to God, when we have messed up, when we have done it again, when, whatever it is, that when we turn our heart to Him and we ask Him to forgive us.

This is about the 49th time you've asked me forgiveness for that.

God doesn't just step back and say Look I don't really trust you anymore Does he have reason not to trust us?

Is that the kind of heart that we have toward Him.

Because His heart never changes toward us, but our response to Him is often based on a variety of different things and sometimes keeps us from opening our hearts the way he opens his heart of love to us.

Maybe we should start off with a raising of the hands.

I love to do these kind of things once in a while.

Even if we don't raise our hands because we don't maybe want to look bad, or we don't know how somebody, maybe there's somebody in your church that might see it, but we know that we don't always respond with this kind of heart.

And tonight we want to talk about what God is putting in our hearts as we prepared for this retreat season about what it means that we need to open our hearts to him.

You know, as we prepare, we're actually preparing for 2020 right now, but as we were a year ago thinking of the topic for 2019, and we look at our own lives, we see areas that we keep going the wrong way, away from this heart of love.

And we came to understand it's because we don't really understand God's heart of love the way we should.

And so that's why when we started preparing this, all these messages from the various speakers this year are going to be focusing on God's heart of love.

And we hope it penetrates all our human hearts and that we can respond more and more to that love.

It's interesting that we know many stories about Christ, don't we?

As he came here to this earth to demonstrate that heart of love.

He shared that heart of love and the scriptures say, never a man spake as this man.

Everybody wanted to be healed by him and blessed by him.

And so here he is in 1 of the stories found in Luke chapter 9.

And he is going to be heading to Jerusalem.

And he intentionally is planning to pass through a Samaritan village.

And before he gets there, he sends messengers ahead.

Does God ever send messengers of love to us?

He sends messengers ahead to let them know he is going to pass through their village.

Now you remember there was some tension between the Jews and the Samaritans, wasn't there?

And yet that heart of love wanted to go outside of the cultural norms where you kind of avoid, you know, certain groups of people, and he wanted to pass into and remain in that village for the evening.

And as he's coming into the village and as he begins to enter in and start to walk through that little village, it appears as if he's going to walk right on through.

But yet they had the message that he wanted to stay there.

He wanted to be a part of that little village for the evening and spend the night there.

And as he began to walk through, the people in the village were offended.

It's interesting to take these little 4 verse scriptures or 5 verse stories out of the Bible and stop and pause on this.

He's going, he looks like he's going to pass through, now they're offended because Christ didn't come the way they wanted him to.

And so not only did they allow him to pass right through the village and out the other side, but they also didn't even treat him with the courtesy that you would give to a total stranger in their culture, regardless of their nationality.

So in this story, we see something that reveals our hearts here in this room as human beings.

We don't always like the packages that the blessings come in.

We don't always recognize, oh, that's Jesus.

That's the Jesus that loves me with an everlasting love.

When we get those kind of messages that come the way we want them to come Yes, I love it.

That's Jesus That's everlasting love But if that's the only kind of messages that we can see from Jesus, he's got to teach us some other things, doesn't he?

And so he walked through that village and their response, as my wife said, was not even the response they would have given a total stranger, they actually rejected him.

Now this is not a raise your hand question, but this is what happens to us when things come to us that have been passed through the hand of Christ.

Every trial is weighed and, Do you know what it says next?

But sometimes we don't recognize it, and then we end up not only missing the blessing but rejecting the Savior who loves us with a heart of love because it didn't come the way we wanted it to come.

Now we can understand, oh that's the Samaritans.

And we've heard about the difference that the Samaritans had with the disciples So let's find out how the disciples reacted because these are the ones who are not only professing to be his followers, they're with him, walking with him.

Let's call the house of fire from heaven!

And Jesus said to them, you don't understand the spirit that you have.

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Opening Our Hearts

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