God Likes You!!!

Intro - Remember about losing our intimacy with Christ, 3 examples, then remember how we fight falling into those 3 examples

The more I thought about it the more that sounded like a self help list and I hope you understand that it is not. I hope that when you read Luke 15 you see that we fall into those distractions I hope that when you read scripture you see that you need to be doing some things

I hope you know that God likes you!

Different from the normal God loves you and He does but bare with me and I hope you see that this may go deeper.

God likes you!

First we must understand that God pursues you!

Through scripture we see that God tries to get our attention, tries to get back together with us

Overview of Bible

Prophets, said in 274 verses the Word of the Lord

at least 274 times God spoke through His chosen people to tell the nation something important, something like

Jeremiah 2:4-7

The prophet Jeremiah being used of God to tell His people something, to remind that He was still around and that He was still with them.

The OT used prophets to show that God pursued His people, in the NT we see Jesus going out to pursue His people

Exodus 6:5

God heard cries of His people, woke up Moses, and brought him out of the desert and back to Egypt because he was still pursuing His people

Matthew 10:5-8

Jesus is sending out the 12 Disciples, He did just send them out to preach although that was the focus to share the good news of the Gospel but also He sent them out to meet the needs of the people.

Matthew 28:18-20

Greatest verse that shows God still pursues you and I is the Great Commission

Jesus being God of the universe sent out the disciples to share the good news of salvation through Christ to everyone, that is how much he pursues you!

Second we must understand that God loves you!

In the OT we see God always being constant and alway calling out to His people through His prophets, we see that God loves us through this act in the OT.

In the NT we see Jesus as a physical act of Gods love towards us.

Isaiah 7:14

We see that Jesus’s birth is being foretold and from this we know that from day 1 Jesus was always part of God's plan to get us back

Romans 5:8

God sent His son to pay our debt for a chance at fellowship with us

God said I love them so much I will cover their tab, in hopes that we can be friends later in life!

John 3:16

Jesus was sent to die in our place, God loves us that much, He desires a relationship with us that much that He paid our tab and sent His son to die that we can come to Him free of charge.

God likes you because God pursues us, and because He loves us.

To pursue you, and to love you that much must mean He likes you!

Isn't that refreshing that we serve a God who likes us. He doesn't just pursue us to get us on His team and then forgets about us, He didn't just love us to pay for our debt then to forget about us or then not like us, those things show us that He is still very much interested in us personally today!

He is choosing to pursue you still in life, and choosing to still love you through all your failures.

He may not like what you are doing, or what you have become, but He likes you as His creation, as the person He created!

Do you know that Jesus’s love is different it is Agape - love that is unconditional and covers us completely

I hope you understand that here today Jesus still pursues you

Luke 15:4-7

Jesus is still pursing you, some of you here are like that sheep that get distracted and have walked way from a relationship with Christ, understand He is searching for you! Maybe some of you have never meet Jesus, and do you know that He loves you so much that He has paid for your debt!

Invitation, is open to anyone and everyone, maybe you need someone to pray with or maybe you need to pray by yourself, or maybe you need to talk with someone about rededicating your life to Christ, or maybe you have never met Jesus and would like to, people will be down front to help you with that.