Prayer Meeting 12/7/2022

To Know How Loved You Are Is To Know How To Love

Well welcome tonight again. I think it’s fair to say that between where we are at on Sundays and prayer meetings the Lord is for sure truly speaking to us about our devotion, our personal devotion to Him. Without it, as we have been saying on Sundays, we will never love people and serve them as God intends us to. Our sole greatest gift towards others is not our devotion to them, but our devotion to God, and for sure God is drawing us to that.

At the last prayer meeting we entitled it: ‘Intimacy And Confession Strengthens Our Resilience Towards Temptation.’ Again, it really was about devotion. We shared much of the teaching and drew from puritan Thomas Brooks in his discourse on privy prayer, or closet, private prayers, which is all about personal devotion. In particular we talked of how a life of private prayer, and private devotion intensifies our conscience, so that when we sin or are tempted our hearts are pierced. Here is something I said:

You see brothers and sisters, intimacy, closet prayers, deep crying to deep, not only brings God’s mercy to cover our sin, but it fills us with a deeper conscience that we are deeply convicted whenever we go near it. Time with the Lord not only cleanses us, but it fills us with a holy conviction as we live out our lives. Intimacy with God, communion with God, secret prayers, private prayer times, deeply pouring our hearts out to Him as a loving advocate who loves us so much He has already paid for our sin, gives us the most extraordinary armour to withstand temptation and trials and carnal things.

Brooks says:

Conscience is God’s spy in the bosom.

Prayer, devotion ,intimacy, communion with God, is our greatest weapon to not only withstand temptation, but also to give us the desire to confess and seek accountability. If you have already talked to God about it in the closet, you won’t fear confessing it to men in public. Therefore, what you won’t confess to man, you have not sought from the Lord. I love what Sinclair Ferguson says when talking of John Owen’s works about communion with God. Sinclair Ferguson, who probably knows more about the works of John Owen than any man alive says this:

It is the union with Christ which gives the Christian his status, but it’s the communion with God that gives them the fruit of that status.

In other words, it will take our devotion to comprehend and live a life worthy of His sacrifice. That status is what we have, we have it by God’s grace alone; He chose us, He picked us, He plucked us out of darkness. Why? Because of His love for us. It’s His love that brought us to Him, and it’s through communion with Him that we will gain a better understanding and depth of that love. Devotion leads us to love God more because devotion leads us to know His love for us more.

Okay tonight I’m going to be sharing some thoughts from thee theologian John Calvin from his sermon on Ephesians 3:14-19. Let me first read the verses then the prayer I have chosen for tonight.

Ephesians 3:14-19

¹⁴ For this reason I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, ¹⁵ from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, ¹⁶ that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, ¹⁷ that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, ¹⁸ may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height— ¹⁹ to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

The prayer is simply entitled ‘Love’. It’s from ‘The Valley Of Vison’ page 290; the book we mostly read from.

Lord Jesus, Give me to love thee, to embrace thee, though I once took lust and sin in my arms. Thou didst love me before I loved thee, an enemy, a sinner, a loathsome worm. Thou didst own me when I disclaimed myself; Thou dost love me as a son, and weep over me as over Jerusalem. Love brought thee from heaven to earth, from earth to the cross, from the cross to the grave. Love caused thee to be weary, hungry, tempted, scorned, scourged, buffeted, spat upon, crucified, and pierced. Love led thee to bow thy head in death. My salvation is the point where perfect created love and the most perfect uncreated love meet together; for thou dost welcome me, not like Joseph and his brothers, loving and sorrowing, but loving and rejoicing. This love is not intermittent, cold, changeable; it does not cease or abate for all my enmity. Holiness is a spark from thy love kindled to a flame in my heart by thy Spirit, and so it ever turns to the place from which it comes. Let me see thy love everywhere, not only in the cross, but in the fellowship of believers and in the world around me. When I feel the warmth of the sun may I praise thee who art the Sun of righteousness with healing power. When I feel the tender rain may I think of the gospel showers that water my soul. When I walk by the river side may I praise thee for that stream that makes the eternal city glad, and washes white my robes that I may have the right to the tree of life. Thy infinite love is a mystery of mysteries, and my eternal rest lies in the eternal enjoyment of it. 

We went through Ephesians together back in 2020, in those early days before we got full wind of the lies. And we went through it four nights a week. It was only ten minutes each night, so we couldn’t go as deep into each verse as we normally would. So there is simply just a small amount of notes. I want to read them all, as it’s a good introduction to tonight. The message that night was called ‘Binding All Things In Prayer’. I wrote:

Paul concludes this part of the letter, i.e. The first three chapters, with a prayer that really book-ends the first three chapters.

And the prayer is that all the church congregation and all the surrounding churches, and indeed, now all believers, would know and continually walk in the knowledge of who we are, and how loved we are. That we are God’s chosen family, His very own sons and daughters. That we have been granted this gift of salvation and given all things in Christ; an eternal inheritance, that we will never be plucked out of His hand. That we as gentiles and sinners no longer live outside the throne room of grace but can enter it, and are fellow-heirs to all of God’s goodness.

We are no longer foreigners, we do not ever need to look outside for comfort, or to the world, the false Gods, who have been replaced by the almighty God. We have gained access to all His riches because of the redemption we received, and that was bought by the blood of Jesus; and He did this because of His great love for us.

And Paul through, as we know, repetition, wants that to be the foundation we stand on; in fact more than that: the life we walk out. Paul knows that a shallow faith, a shallow foundation, will result in temptation to compromise, which in turn will lead to forgetting what we build everything on.

So many believers are chasing love, when they have all the love they could ever desire. They are chasing acceptance when they have been accepted beyond measure. They are looking for a reason to live, when they have been shown all the reasons to live.

They are looking for meaning when they have been shown complete meaning. They are looking for forgiveness when they have already been washed as white as snow. They are looking to be rich, when they have all the riches in heaven. They are fearful of dying, when they have been granted eternal life and they are looking for a counsellor when they have a wonder of a counsellor in Christ. They are looking to be understood, when they have a wonder of a counsellor in Jesus Christ, who now counts them as his very own sons and daughters.

I closed with a question: ‘Do you know how loved you are?’ And by that I mean by God.

Tonight’s message is called: ;To Know How Loved You Are Is To Know How To Love’. The strength from the inner man does not come from any other source but God. Any source of strength that comes to man out-with God will not be rooted and grounded in pure love. Today we have a wealth of aids and teachings and philosophies, of how to become strong, how to overcome, how it win, how to own your feelings, how to be a success; positive affirmation, etc. All of these things never give us the purity of Christlike love. Christlike love, is not self-seeking.

1 Corinthians 13:4-7

⁴ Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; ⁵ does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; ⁶ does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; ⁷ bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

This type of love we cannot attain with our own means. All sources of strength and love that comes to man that does not come from the Spirit of God will never be rooted in pure love and driven by love. For it takes Jesus to dwell in our hearts for true love to rise.

Calvin says:

St Paul says Christ must dwell in our hearts, for many men have him in their mouth, and even also in their brain, as they hear him.

If you’re wondering why you lack affection for others at times, it’s because Jesus is but on your lips but not alive in your heart. Now, I’m not saying He isn’t there. If you’re truly saved He is, but because of the lack of stirring up, the lack of intimacy, the lack of devotion, you are living from your carnal mind; your flesh. If you’re not rooted and grounded in love, you’re going it alone in your own power. How can we possibly comprehend with all the saints God’s love when we don’t join them in the same seeking spirit and heart?

To comprehend:

Καταλαμβάνω - Kata -lambano

• To lay hold of, to take possession, to stop evil overtaking your thoughts, to seize.

If we want to comprehend with all those saints who have went before us, the depth of God’s love, if you want to love God like those great saints then we must seek God like them. This is why to study and read of these great saints is so important.

As I study the Swiss reformation, and read about the saints who have gone before us, I have been stunned and moved and inspired by many. Some I knew little about, like the first anabaptist to be martyred: Felix Manz. These men where known as the radical reformers. As he was led out in a small boat to the middle of the Limmat river in Zurich, he was recorded reciting this:

It is love alone that is pleasing to God; he that cannot show love shall not stand in the sight of God…. …this light of life they have before them… …but those who are hateful and envious and wickedly betray, accuse, smite, and quarrel cannot be Christians… …By this we may know those that are not on the side of Christ. With this I will finish my discourse, desiring that all the Godly be mindful of the fall of Adam, who when he accepted the advice of the serpent the punishment of death came upon him. Thus it shall also happen to those who do not accept Christ, but resist him, love this world, and have not the love of God…. …and thus I close with this: I will firmly adhere to Christ and trust in him who is acquainted with all my needs and can deliver me out of it. Amen.

When they went back to the cell he was locked up in before his walk to death he had carved: ‘Only love to God through Christ shall stand and prevail’.

In the world today and Christianity, we have developed a form of love that needs not truly seek God, it’s a shallow feelings type of brain-love, lip-service love, and those that seek not Christ have called it love. Then when true love is shown , they leave or get annoyed at the so-called lack of love. How many times I’ve heard the brain-love, the lip-service love, the non-totally-devoted-to-God-in-prayer-love people criticise the lack of love while praising the shallow love as real love. Those who bring that type of love, are those that truly seek not God in deep devotion. We have a pandemic in Christianity of non-Christlike love under the banner of love. Calvin doesn’t mince his words when he explains it:

You see then that we must rest wholly upon our God, or else all the virtue that we seem to have before men, shall be but filth and dung, now then do we have faith? Love must be linked with it.

How many have developed love and have a form of love, yet are not truly full of faith; are not free, are consumed by others, are totally risk averse? Honestly, what I’ve seen happening over the years is people often say to people: ‘you have changed; where is the wee lovely girl I once knew, or the fun person, or the easy going person?’. What they are saying is: ‘I liked your lack-of-faith-love you once had, I liked the lack-of-devotion-love you had, I liked the love you had that was more accepting and more submissive, that never said things I didn’t like. You used to always agree with me, and were so nice.’ And what you need to learn to say is: ‘that wasn’t love I had, I knew not love, because I had not true faith, and had no deep devotion, or prayer life. Now I have true faith and am learning to grow in my faith and as my devotion grows, and my knowledge of God grows, I truly know what love is. It’s my faith that’s driving my love, what I had before was fear, not faith and that was hidden in a fake love’.

To be truly rooted and grounded in love means it’s the foundation of all we are. Anyone can show and act of love at times, anyone can be kind at any moment, but that doesn’t mean that they are rooted and grounded in love. What above all keeps us rooted in love? Well, the final part of Apostle Paul’s prayer is what makes the first part possible. To comprehend how much God loves us will give us a heart rooted and grounded in love.

I know we say ‘He loves us’, and we know His Son died for us, but do we truly know how much He loves us? As the pastor of this church and the under-shepherd, I know I do not yet fully grasp the depth of God’s love for me. I do know however, that through intimate devotion, its building up and becoming clearer. The more time I spend with the Lord, the more I see His great love and the deeper the root of love becomes in my heart. Of course, at any time I can stop watering that root. Yet even in that, God is using it to direct me to His greater love. Calvin says:

We must be sure of the infinite good that is done to us by our Lord Jesus Christ, in order that we may be ravished in love with our God and inflamed with the proper zeal to obey him.

You see, the more we have faith in Christ and all He has done for us and continues to do, the more we love Him and desire to serve Him. It’s a wonderful thing, that God first loved us, and by us learning to fully comprehend that, we love Him more, and the more we seek Him, the more loved we know we are. It a wonderful set-up by God. He loves us that much that He wants us to seek Him so He can show His love for us even more, and we feel even more loved, that we seek Him more, and it goes on and on, and on.

Do you know God’s love more today? Yes, I hope. Do you seek Him more? Yes, I hope.

Does that lead to being more rooted and grounded in love? Yes, I hope. And does that keep getting higher and wider, and deeper? Yes, it does. It’s a divine set-up by the Lord. He wants us to know the size of His love for us; the length, the depth, the height. As John MacArthur says: ‘the vastness’.

Let me read it again to close from verse 17-19.

Ephesians 3:17-19

¹⁷ that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, ¹⁸ may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height— ¹⁹ to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

God wants you to seek Him, brothers and sisters. Because He has more love to show you, to share with you, to give you. Its expansive, and that love He bestows upon us will cause us to become so free that we will only desire to share that love and the promise of that love with others.

Devotion, private prayer, seeking God, will open your heart to a whole new realm of His love for you, and in turn your love for others. Brother and sisters, these last four and a half years have not been about correction, although there has been correction, it’s not been about chastisement, although there has been chastisement; it’s all about His love for us.

Amen.