How Deep The Father's Love Series

LISTEN – God has had you in mind since the foundations of this world. He has loved you before the beginning of time…

HEAR – these words from the one who pursues you…

Long before he laid down earth's foundations, he had you in mind, had settled on you as the focus of his love, to be made whole and holy by his love.

5Long, long ago he decided to adopt you into his family through Jesus Christ. (What pleasure he took in planning this!) 6He wanted you to enter into the celebration of his lavish gift-giving by the hand of his beloved Son.

8He thought of everything, provided for everything we could possibly need, 9letting you in on the plans he took such delight in making. He set it all out before us in Christ,

10a long-range plan in which everything would be brought together and summed up in him, everything in deepest heaven, everything on planet earth.

It's in Christ that you find out who you are and what you are living for. Long before you first heard of Christ and got your hopes up, he had his eye on you, had designs on you for glorious living, 12part of the overall purpose he is working out in everything and everyone. - Eph 1:4-7, 9-12

UNDERSTAND – as you flip the pages of the bible from genesis three to the very last page of the Old Testament…

YOU SEE - a lover in a relentless pursuit of the one he loves… YOU SEE - a passionate God in pursuit of a prodigal people.

YOU SEE – a relentless God pursuing those He loves.

UNDERSTAND B/S…

THERE - is a beauty,

THERE - is a value in you that is so deep, so real – that is causes God to pursue you with reckless abandoned…

YES – there is something about you…

THAT CAUSES - God to:

• act like a jealous lover,

• to launch the greatest campaign in the history of the world to get you back

• to send his prophets to tell of this unstoppable pursuit

• to lay siege on both the kingdom of darkness and our own little kingdoms if necessary to bring us home to Him

• to send His son as a sacrifice for our sins so that we could be together.

B/S – I pray I am making sense here. I pray that I am getting across exactly what God wants you to hear this day… UNDERSTAND – you are not a booby prize that God gets stuck with for eternity… NO – you ARE;

• The pursued one

• The sought after one

• The one - worth stepping down for

• The one – worth fighting for

• The one worth dying for…

AND – His pursuit of you, and love for is like the waves of the sea… they just keep coming and coming and coming…

Define yourself radically as one beloved by God. This is the true self. Every other identity is illusion. – Brennan Manning

(Abba’s Child, The Cry Of The Heart For Intimate Belonging)

LISTEN – I am totally convinced that before we can ‘really’ love God, others and ourselves – we must begin to plunge the depths of the Father’s love for us.

UNDERSTAND – Paul’s prayer for the church in Ephesus is my prayer for us, for you, for me, for MGCC…

May your roots go down deep into the soil of God's marvelous love; and may you be able to feel and understand as all God's children should, how long, how wide, how deep, and how high his love really is; and to experience this love for yourselves.