His Passion For You Series

Series:

Discovering the Heart of God

Part 1

His Passion for You

Song of Solomon 7:10

“I am my beloved’s and his desire if for me.”

This morning I want to begin a series of sermons I will call, “Discovering the Heart of God.” I will admit it is a daunting task.

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I am very much aware of Isaiah 55:8-9 where God says, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways… As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” I know that we can never know what He knows o feel what he feels.

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However, I am also aware of scriptures like Jeremiah 9:23-24 which says, “Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom or the strong man boast of his strength or the rich man boast of his riches but let him who boasts boast about this: that he understands and knows me..”

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And 1 John 5:20 which says, “We know also that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding so that we may know him who is true…”

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And John 15:15 where Jesus says, “… for everything I have learned from my Father I have made known to you.”

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And 1 Cor. 2:16, “For who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ.”

It is true his ways, thoughts and nature is too big, too grand, too eternal, to omniscient for us to grasp. It would be like trying to put the great Sahara into a tiny box.

However… it is possible for us to know some things about God… the things he wants us to know… the things he chooses to reveal to us… through the bible… through the prophets… through nature… through Jesus… through the Holy Spirit.

Those things we not only have the privilege to know and understand… we have a RESPONSIBILITY.

How can we know the heart of God? We can understand through what he has revealed. So for this series we will look at what is closest to his heart, what grieves Him, what excites Him, what brings him pleasure, what delights Him, what He talks about the most, and what things consistently show up on His own short-list of last minute instructions to his people.

In that way we can begin to understand the heart of God.

We will start today with God’s great passion as it is revealed in the scriptures and through Jesus. What is that great passion of God? Is it creating… judging… saving… healing… being praised… harvesting… what???

Let’s look at a few scriptures.

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Deut 7:7 Because he loved your fathers, therefore he chose their seed after them.

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10:15, “The Lord has a delight in thy fathers to love them…”

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Is.43:4 “Since thou wast precious in my sight, thou has been honourable, and I have loved thee…”

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Malachi 1:2, “’I have loved you,’ saith the Lord.”

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Romans 5:8 But God commendeth his love toward us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”

Do you hear God’s valentine to you today… the first thing you need to know to discover the heart of God… Slide 12 I LOVE YOU!!!

When you cut the heart of God what does it bleed? LOVE FOR YOU.

What makes that heart beat… what causes it to skip a beat? YOU

What moved the mind of God to create the world… what motivated God to leave heaven and come to earth… what provoked the hand of God to stretch forward and nail his own Son to the cross…LOVE FOR YOU.

There is nothing you can learn about the heart of God that is greater than this or that negates this or that contradicts this… GOD LOVES YOU WITH A LOVE THAT IS ETERNAL, UNDESERVED, COMPLETE and Beyond our wildest imaginations.

The place you have to start when discovering the heart is God is this…He LOVES YOU.

Those verses I read earlier are some of the greatest verses on the love of God for us. But there is yet one that speaks to me the greatest. I know some of you are thinking about John 3:16. Nope! I am thinking of Song of Solomon 7:10

Now let me make a disclaimer: There are two books of the bible from which I rarely preach… Revelation and Song of Solomon. The Revelation… because I do not understand it. I don’t think ANYONE does. I think we will not understand it until it is hindsight. It just gets my mind all twisted up thinking about the woman, the child, the bear, the antichrist, etc.