O how God loves us! How He longs to spend time with us daily and misses us when we are to pushed and busy. To really know Him is to love Him.

National Family Retreat 2019: A Heart of Love

<p>O how God loves us! How He longs to spend time with us daily and misses us when we are to pushed and busy. To really know Him is to love Him.</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

Tom Waters

A Heart of Love

Jeremiah 31.3, our theme text says, I have loved you with an everlasting love.

Have those words and that sentiment and that meaning come more sweetly to you over the last few days?

The sentiment of this kind of love, the kind of love that His heart has, this is the love of God.

A love that continues to draw us, to yearn for us, to pursue us, to reach out to us.

I feel so loved, not just as a feeling, but by faith I know it is a reality.

And another blessing that that I often receive in preparing while my wife was here sharing this morning.

I was quietly staying in the room, taking time, very special time with God.

And I love that time because those of you that have never had to prepare to speak have missed a blessing, at least this 1 blessing, and that is feeling my need of this heart of love to be immersed in it.

Because you know, without experiencing the power of His heart of love into our hearts, we can say the right words, But it's God who changes hearts.

And once again this morning as I was kneeling before God, I found that experience that for me is a very sweet experience, and that is the heartbreaking power of the love of God.

And I love this because you can't manufacture it.

And just kneeling before God this morning and expressing my need to Him, expressing my desire to Him, that His love would reach into my heart, move my heart, immerse me with His love.

I found myself just being broken with tears running down my face.

Because I find myself in a position of not only recognizing my need but experiencing the need being met in me.

I feel my need for Him to work in me to make a difference in what I share today.

And when I experience that kind of brokenness, it's a good brokenness, okay?

It's not a brokenheartedness, but it's an awareness of my need that without Him, I can do nothing.

Yeah, I can get up here and speak, but without His power working in all of us, it won't make the difference.

This kind of love is the unconditional love of God.

Unconditional love, a kind of love that is so foreign to our humanity, a kind of love that loves us so deeply, that loved us so much before we ever knew our need, A love that was willing to give Jesus to redeem us.

You know, many people get a little bit confused, and I found myself questioning, so there's no conditions?

Oh there are conditions to salvation, friends.

But there is no, there is nothing we can do to God or not do ourselves that will change that love He has for us.

And that love will never stop pursuing us, will never stop reaching out to us until there is no other way that He can get to us.

And we need to surrender our hearts that love so conditionally to His heart of love.

We need to surrender all that we are and all that we hold on to to the 1 who has given all to reach our hearts.

Our love is so conditional that it hurts.

It hurts the heart of God who is constantly, has, is, and always will, until there is no hope, is constantly looking for ways to reach us with His love.

To help us somehow, Inspiration says, He has a thousand ways we know not of.

Sometimes I pray and I say, Lord, just give me 1 way that I recognize.

He keeps looking for ways to reach us with His love.

If you hurt my feelings, if you say something that I don't like, if you...

I can very easily, apart from Christ, have conditional love back to you.

That's the way we humans are because we don't spend enough time being immersed in the love of God.

Our love is often shaped by the people who are closest to us.

The people who we love the most and love us the most often have a big part in shaping our view of love and how we respond to others with or without love.

It's often shaped by abuse, through pain, rejection, or what we have seen modeled to us that we don't even recognize is having an impact by beholding changing our lives.

I want to tell you for a moment about a very, a very sad situation.

A person whose life was shaped by shameless abuse of a father.

For years, through adolescence, Day after day, shamelessly abused to the point where she begged, She begged for some kind of approval from her father and never received it.

And that shaped her life and has affected her life all the way through from those adolescent years.

It's affected every relationship because of the pain and rejection until this very day seeking the approval of the 1 who relentlessly abused her for all those years.

That kind of abuse can be healed, but only by the love of God.

There are people in this auditorium today, not because I know you, but because of the number of people that are here today that have gone through all kinds of life-shaping, changing events that have made you to some degree the person that you are today and how you respond or don't respond to the love of God and the heart of God and how you respond to others Because of what you've been through.

Today, God is reaching out to every heart here, and especially to the hearts that have been broken by those painful experiences.

You see, I came from a home, fortunately, I came from a home where my dad was my hero.

And even though my dad didn't do a lot of things right, and we didn't have family worship.

But my dad was a very loving father, a very protective father.

And I grew up coming to recognize that my dad would give his life for me.

I knew this intuitively, that my dad would do anything for me.

And my dad demonstrated that to me 1 day in a situation, and I won't go into all the story of it, but my brother and I, my brother was 7 years older, he's all of my parents and my brother, I'm the only 1 left in my family.

My brother died just before his 62nd birthday.

He died just a few days before his birthday.

But our parents took us on this special tour boat.

And this boat was a double-decker big paddlewheel boat that took us out to an island where there was amusement and recreation.

So he took 1 of his big friends and I took 1 of my friends and I Didn't realize it but while we were up on the upper deck and I was over here with my friend and my Brother was over there at the other end with his friend because I was I was a punk That was the word he used for me.

He's 7 years older and at that time in my life I was about 9 and I was a punk.

Hope you don't even know what that means.

But anyway, it means your brother thinks you're too little to hang around with him.

And so We were at opposite ends of this big, huge boat, and my brother dropped a cup.

I didn't know it, he dropped a cup, and apparently it almost hit somebody on the lower deck, and a few minutes later, there was a few rough teenagers, some big ones, that came up there and they thought I did it.

And they came to me and they walked straight to me and they said, we're going to throw you overboard.

We're going to get our friends or we're going to throw you off this boat.

When I think of this experience and share it, I still feel my heart start to do the same thing.

And so as soon as they went down to get their friends, I ran over to my brother and he said, oh yeah, I dropped the cup down there.

So we went and did get with dad, and my dad calmed us down and he said, it's okay, it'll be fine, don't worry about it.

Just stay with me and believe me, that was 1 day I had no trouble staying right with him.

I sat right next to his chair and I never moved.

After about a half an hour, I started feeling better.

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A Heart of Love

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