God loves us with an everlasting love! Don’t give up on loving yourself, loving your spouse, loving your children and most important loving Him!

National Family Retreat 2019: A Heart of Love

<p>God loves us with an everlasting love! Don’t give up on loving yourself, loving your spouse, loving your children and most important loving Him!</p>

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Restoration International

Tom Waters

Love Never Gives Up

So here we are at the end, almost the end of what has been for us a huge blessing.

We say this many times because it's not about us, whichever of the speakers is up here trying to give you something.

And it has been a huge blessing at this National Family Retreat.

And we're thankful for those of you that are here.

And we want to talk about, or I'm going to talk about today, my wife's going to join me at the end.

And I think she's going to have maybe a few young people.

Somehow I was thinking you were going to be back there today.

We can believe that about this love, right?

But We're not quite so good about not giving up.

Have another little version that I I really enjoy of our theme text Jeremiah 31 3 It reads like this.

I have loved you with a love that lasts forever.

And I have kept on loving you with a kindness that never fails.

That is the heart of love of our God, our Savior.

That's what we're going to talk about this morning in this closing time together.

I want you to think, maybe the Spirit of the Lord will bring something particular to your mind, I want you to think about something in your life where it has been clear to you, abundantly clear to you, that God loves you very personally and does not give up on you.

I'm going to share with you something that, There's many things that I could share but something that's been very meaningful to me for many years.

It was during a time in my life when I had left home, not on bad terms, but launched off into life.

I was almost 18 years old and went off to get training in x-ray radiology.

And I went through a time of really questioning, so why do I believe what I believe?

And of course the temptations were there, lots of things around me, suburbs, you know, around where I was going to school.

And I went through a time, unfortunately, a time of confusion, a time of finding myself spiritually.

What, you know, what am I going to do with it?

And I really walked away from God, Not in my belief in God, but in what I knew was the right thing for a period of time.

And it was during this time that I went home to a visit to my parents.

I was in Illinois getting my training and my parents were back in Michigan where I was raised and so I was driving home to visit for the weekend.

And I hate to say this but I'm going to share with you just briefly so you have a context.

I was driving home telling myself I'm not going to let my mother get to me this time.

My mother and I had a very special relationship.

I was never supposed to be, some of you know that story, I was never supposed to be.

My mother was run over by a school bus and was crushed from her knees to her clavicles, her collarbones.

Well, I was the miracle child, and that's another story.

But my mother and I had a very close relationship My dad was my hero and we had a very special bond as a father and son, but a very different closeness and connection and So I'm coming home, and I'm determined I'm not going to let my mother get to me because I'm not ready to surrender I'm not ready to really Do some of the things that I already knew I should be doing and and not doing some of the things I was doing and I got home with this determination what a horrible determination and so now it's it's Sabbath night it's Saturday night and as usual my dad went to bed you know about 8 830 because he was a I was born and raised on a farm and he was up early in the morning to milk the cows.

And I redetermined not happening here tonight.

And so we're just having a nice evening together.

She would throw the frozen pizza in the oven and we would sit together.

I'm not advocating the lifestyle, but this was, I was home.

And so we were there Saturday night and as time went on, we were having a nice conversation and I was telling her about what was happening in my training and those kind of things and It got later and we were Talking and my mother reached over and she took picked up a diary Now that was not a new scene for me because my mother kept a diary all of her life and before I was ever a part of their lives, my mother was always writing in her diary.

You should call them journals today, I don't know.

But anyway, they were called diaries back in those days.

She literally had boxes of them, and no 1 was ever allowed to look in her diary, not even my dad.

Now he may have, I mean they may have had their arrangement, I don't know, but she never wanted anybody to see those diaries.

Unfortunately, before she died, she made my dad promise her that he would burn all those diaries.

But it was just her heart in these diaries.

And so she lifts up her diary and I don't know what she's going to do.

I mean, she never told me what was in her diaries.

She opened up her diary and she said, honey, and she starts reading out of her diary.

She said, do you remember where you were this night?

And God awakened me wide awake and told me to pray for you.

And I got down on my knees, and she begins to read to me out of this diary entry.

And as she read to me, I saw the picture in front of me of that night and where I was.

And at 01:00 in the morning that night, I had a head-on collision with another vehicle.

It's another 1 of those things that makes the chills go down my spine.

Yes, I remembered where I was that night.

Unfortunately, I also remembered, sadly, that I was in an altered state of mind that night, and I had a head-on collision, and the girl who was sitting in the front seat, her head hit the windshield.

She said, Honey, that night, I was on my knees, and I knew right where that was, by her bed.

That's where my mother spent a lot of time.

I was on my knees praying for you when that happened.

Now, she didn't know what happened that night.

All she wrote in the diary was her experience of God waking her and getting her up, and I shared some of that experience with her that night.

And my heart was starting to soften, weaken.

We sat there for a few moments, and then she turned the pages of her diary again.

She turned a few more pages and she said, honey, do you remember where you were this night?

I'm not gonna share with you what happened that night, but vividly the memories were brought before me.

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Love Never Gives Up

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Parent Conference

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Sound Doctrine