Touré Roberts - Getting Back to Love - Week 1

I’m on this series called «Getting Back to Love.» I’ll probably just be on it through Easter, but I think since not many of you were here on Wednesday night, I’m going to give you a little more on what I talked about then before I press into this. The good news is I’ve got six weeks, so I can take my time and really present it the way I want to. How do you have a healthy heart? How do you get a healthy heart? How do you know if your heart is healthy or not? There’s a passage of Scripture in Jeremiah—Jeremiah 17:9 or 10, I believe. Just read the whole Bible; I promise you’ll find it. But it says, «The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.» Then it asks, «Who can know it?» It says «desperately wicked,» and now I’ll talk about why it is really wicked. This is not just wicked; it’s desperate. And it’s desperate because it needs an encounter with God’s love. That’s why the heart is desperate. We are desperate. We were born—watch this, family—we were born in the context of pure love. There was absolutely no fear in the beginning. Imagine that: no fear! Even the baddest of us have a little fear. You can tell you’re even a little fearful, but you can’t show it. You fear something. In the beginning, we were born in the context of absolutely pure love. So, as humans, we have an innate desperation for love that only comes from God. Now, the tricky thing is we are all pursuing love but don’t realize it, and we are so desperate for this love that we misdefine it and even settle for a cheap copy. That’s how desperate we are. Oh, how bad do you want it today? Yeah, we’re desperate. Everything that we do, we do because we’re looking for love. You don’t get fly just to be fly; you want someone to like you. Yeah, you’re searching for love but might not even know it. That’s why self-awareness is everything. You’ve got to know how you’re wired, and I’m telling you right now: you are wired to pursue love. I’ll make it even more specific: you are wired to pursue a love that only God can give you, and you are desperate for it. I mean desperate! You’re so desperate that you’ll take anything that might bear a resemblance to it. Paul says, «I’m praying that you’d be strengthened on your insides.» I know you’ve got all these things on the outside that you’re concerned about, but I’m telling you, your insides are going to determine your outsides. Let’s keep reading. So he says, «I want to see you grow in your inner man, ” and then he says, „that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.“ And then watch this: he says, „I’m praying for you. I want you to be developed on the inside. One should be strong on the inside.“ And then he says, „that you, being rooted and grounded in love.“ So God’s love roots you and grounds you; it is your resting station. You are no longer a love wanderer when you find and grow in the revelation of God’s love. You will no longer be a wanderer when you find God’s love. Let’s keep reading. So it says, „I want you to be rooted and grounded in love, ” and then he goes on to say, „Now let me tell you how it’s going to happen.“ He says, „I want you to be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and the length and the depth and the height, and to know the love“ (verse 19) „and to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge, that you may be filled with all of the fullness of God.“ So if we work it backwards, he’s saying that he wants you to be full of God. I want you to be filled! Boy, I want you to be filled with the fullness of God! See, here’s the reality: you were created in His image, and the reason why I’m saying „getting back to love“ is because you are going back to how powerful you were before you forgot. Let me say that again: you’re getting back to how powerful you were before you forgot who you were. Jeremiah 1: „Before I formed you in your mother’s womb, I knew you, and I ordained you, and I set you apart.“ Before you got started, you were something incredible. But when you got here, you forgot, and so you’re working your way back into it. The way that you work your way back into it is by evolving in your consciousness of how loved you are. Because when you grow in your consciousness of how loved you are, you will no longer settle for cheap replicas and cheap imitations of God’s love because of your desperation. Because those very things are feeding your brokenness, and if you feed your brokenness, you just get more broken. Paul’s serious; he’s saying, „I’m praying, ” and Paul’s a pastor, so they probably come to him. „Pastor, I’m having trouble here. I’m having trouble at my job. I’m having trouble getting this record deal. I’m having trouble with my girlfriend. I’m having trouble with my boyfriend.“ I’m having trouble; whatever it is, I’m just having trouble. Because anything goes when you’re not perfected in God’s love. Because you are desperate, and nothing other than God’s love is going to satisfy you. That’s why people move from this to that and then from that to this and this to that.