Exploring the Greatness of God's Love

God morning, I’m pastor Hector.

This cold morning I’m going to be your tour guide as we explore the greatness of God’s love together. Grab your Bible.

Now, I want to warn you of a great danger that we must face as we explore together the greatness of God’s love.

It’s called the danger of familiarity: Becoming familiar with something that you lose the Awe Factor so it no longer moves you.

Paul prays for the church in Ephesus,

Read Ephesians 3:18-19

This is a church that has already experienced the greatness of God’s love back in chapter 2.

Good news: You and I can understand and experience more of God’s love. We can both an informed mind and an engaged heart.

Confession: We have a small view of the greatness of God’s love.

Pray!

On this cold day I would like to do two things: Look and experience the greatness of God’s love.

Look at the greatness of God’s love

Let’s look together at a very familiar passage.

Read Isaiah 55:6-9

Whenever life turns hard we often to turn to Isaiah 55:8 to comfort people regarding the sovereignty of God.

Context: NOT about the sovereignty of God but about his great heart of love and compassion.

Notice God’s invitation in vv.6 & 7

Seek the Lord

Call upon him

Let the sinner return to the Lord

What happens when people turn their hearts to God in brokenness and repentance?

The second half of v.7 states that

God will have compassion

God will abundantly pardon.

Isaiah could have simply written, God will pardon (forgive) those who turn back to him. Instead, the Holy Spirit inspired Isaiah to add “abundantly pardon” (forgive generously, NLT).

Look at the greatness of God’s love. God’s heart beats with compassion, mercy and love. What a life-changing, comforting truth.

I’m afraid you and I have become familiar with these words that our hearts no longer experience awe and wonder.

Part of the problem is that we make God into our image. We question, how can God extend abundant grace and forgiveness to someone like me? If God really knew me...

I feel so ashamed and disgusted with myself.

After losing your temper

After falling for the lie of momentary pleasure

When I feel emotionally empty and numb.

When I doubt God’s love for me.

God knows our tendency to put a limit to God’s love. To question whether God can love the real me. Not the social media version of me, but the real me. Not the Sunday morning version of me, but the real me. Can God really love the real me?

That’s why he declares in verses 8 & 9

Read Isaiah 55:8-9

These verses give us a glimpse of the greatness of God’s love.

Instead of lowering God’s love into a level that we can grasp and understand, God says, “I don’t think the way you think and I don’t act the way you act.”

We have a small view of the greatness of God’s love. God’s ways are higher than our ways. Not just by a few feet, but as far as the heavens are higher and the earth. An expression before modern day technology to describe something “infinite.”

There is only one other place in the Bible where you can find the expression, “For just as the heavens are higher than the earth...”

Read Psalm 103:8-11

This is the Father saying, “I love you to the moon and back”

In our fallen sinful human nature we like to lower God into a level that we can understand: “God ought to be like...”

We have a hard time experiencing the greatness of God’s love or as the Apostle Paul put it, “the richness of God’s mercy.” Why? Everything in life must be earned. (Good, but bad when it comes to God’s love)

Imagine, a child given a precious gift by his father, something that he/she has been wanting for a long time. How would you feel if that child ran to get his piggy bank and said, “let me re-pay you the gift.”

In order to understand and experience the greatness of God’s love our view of God must change.

God’s thoughts and ways are beyond what our minds can conceive.

(John) Calvin— (divine providence) saw that the mystery of providence is not what Isaiah 55 is really after. He notes that some interpret the phrase “my thoughts are not your thoughts” to be a sheer distancing between God and us, expressing the enormous gulf between sacred divinity and profane humanity. Yet Calvin saw that, in fact, the flow of the passage is in exactly the opposite direction. There is indeed a great distance between God and us; we think small thoughts of God’s heart.

John Calvin, “Men are [inclined] to judge and measure God from themselves; for their hearts are moved by angry passions, and are very difficult to be appeased; and therefore they think that they cannot be reconciled to God, when they have once offended him. But the Lord shows that he is far from resembling men.” Dane Ortlund, Gentle and Lowly (p. 159).

The problem: We think small thoughts of God’s heart. Our view of God’s heart must change.

God invites us to explore and delight in the ocean of his love. Imagine living by the ocean in Mexico for one winter. Upon returning people asked you, how often did you go swimming in the ocean? “I never went swimming, we played in a puddle of water nearby.

Main Idea: We must not settle with knowing about God’s love, but we must also experience it on an ongoing basis.

Experiencing the greatness of God’s love.

Come back with me again to Ephesians 3:18-19

This is a powerful prayer. Paul wishes not only for the Ephesians, but also for MEFC “to be filled with all the fulness of God.”

James Montgomery, “I think Paul is praying that we will be filled and filled and filled and filled and filled - and so on forever, as God out of his infinite resources increasingly pours himself out into those sinful but now redeemed creatures he has rescued through the work of Christ.”

How can we be filled with all the fulness of God?

By comprehending. By having a greater understanding of God’s love

By knowing. In a Biblical sense it means to experience God’s love.

Jonathan Edwards used a simple analogy to explain this: “There is a difference between having a rational judgment that honey is sweet, and having a sense of its sweetness.” You can know honey is sweet, because someone tells you, but you don’t really know its sweetness until you’ve tasted it. When you move from just mentally knowing about the sweetness of honey to directly tasting it, you may say something like this: “I knew it was sweet, but I really didn’t realize what that meant. I knew but I didn’t know.” Edwards concludes that, in the same way, “there is a difference between having an opinion that God is holy and gracious, and having a sense of the loveliness and beauty of that holiness and graciousness on the heart.” ], Tim Keller. Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God (p. 170).

Paul desires for you and I to experience the love of God!

God’s love doesn’t deny the truth that sin is ugly nor lessens his demands for obedience - Gospel experience - Jesus is more beautiful and desirable than anything.

God’s love is not a license to live however you want. Gospel experience - that love changes you into want to be more and more like Christ: his beauty and holiness.

God’s love makes you wonder, why would I want to swim in a puddle of water when I have access to the pacific ocean?

Here’s another passage that speaks to that desire.

2 Thessalonians 3:5 ESV

5 May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God and to the steadfastness of Christ.

Let’s face a brutal reality: our hearts are prone to wonder away from God’s love.

This is a powerful prayer: “Lord direct my heart to your love.”

Let me share with you couple of stories of people who experienced the greatness of God’s love.

D.L. Moody

Book, “The Shorter Life of D.L. Moody.”

Chapter 9, “The Chicago Fire, and after.”

The year 1871 was critical in Mr. Moody’s career. An intense hunger and thirst for spiritual power were [awaken] in him by the action of three holy women, who used to attend his meetings and sit on the front seat. He could see by the expressions on their faces that they were praying. At the close of services they would say to him:

“We have been praying for you.”

“Why don’t you pray for the people?” He would ask.

“Because you need the power of the Spirit,” they said.

“I need the power! Why,” said Mr. Moody, speaking of it in after years, “I thought I had power. I had the largest congregations in Chicago, and there were many conversions. I was in a sense satisfied.

[Those 3 women keep praying for him]

There came a great hunger into my soul. I did not know what it was. I began to cry I never did before. The hunger increased. I really felt that I did not want to live any longer if I could not have this power for service.”

[Then came the Chicago fire. He traveled to the East to raise money for a new church]

That Eastern visit was productive of greater blessing in Mr. Moody’s life. The hunger for more spiritual power was still upon him.

“I was crying all the time that God would fill me with His Spirit.” Well, one day, in the city of New York - ah, what a day! - I cannot describe it, I seldom refer to it, it is almost too sacred an experience to name. I can only say God revealed himself to me, and I had such an experience of his love that I had to ask him to stay His hand.

Stop. I can't take anymore. It's too much.

John Wesley

John Wesley records in his journal for 1 January 1739:

About 60 of our brethren were present at our love feast in Fetter Lane (including George Whitefield and his brother Charles Wesley). “About three in the morning, as we were continuing instant in prayer, the power of God came mightily upon us insomuch that many cried out for exceeding joy and many fell to the ground. As soon as we were recovered a little from that awe and amazement at the presence of His majesty, we broke out with one voice, 'We praise Thee, O God, we acknowledge Thee to be the Lord.'"

What took place in that meeting was experiencing the overwhelming love of God.

Listen. Romans 8:16 declares, The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God.

One way the Holy Spirit works in our hearts is by making real in our hearts what we know in our minds - you are a loved child of God.

Thomas Goodwin, a 17-century pastor, wrote that one day he saw a father and son walking along the street. Suddenly the father swept the son up into his arms and hugged him and kissed him and told the boy he loved him—and then after a minute he put the boy back down. Was the little boy more a son in the father’s arms than he was down on the street? Objectively and legally, there was no difference, but subjectively and experientially, there was all the difference in the world. In his father’s arms, the boy was experiencing his sonship. When the Holy Spirit comes down on you in fullness, you can sense your Father’s arms beneath you. It is an assurance of who you are.

Tim Keller. Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God (p. 172).

Conclusion:

Do you long to experience more of God’s love in your life?

Start today! Hear the Lord say, “Return to me today”

Read Isaiah 55:1-2

Address the need for both non-Christians and Christians to repent.

Christians: you can know about God’s love and not experience it.

Paul prayed for the church in Ephesus. Something happened over time. We read in Revelation 2 that Jesus commends the church in Ephesus for standing up for truth and sound doctrine.

Yet Jesus raises a major concern for his church.

“But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first.”

Hear the Holy Spirit calling MEFC, “Come to the waters!”

Turn away from laboring for that which does not satisfy.

What is holding you back from coming to the waters in order to drink and experience God’s love?

God’s thoughts are higher than our thoughts and his ways are higher than our ways.