Touré Roberts - Getting Back to Love - Week 4

Well, we have been dealing with this for the past three weeks. This will be the fourth week we’ve been discussing love. We’ve been in this series called «Getting Back to Love.» We started this series in the first week by looking at a prayer that a pastor prays for his congregation. The pastor could have prayed for anything; if you have a congregation as large as the Church of Ephesus, I’m sure there were at least thousands of needs that his parishioners had. However, he centralizes and consolidates all of those needs into one prayer, ultimately praying that his children, that his membership, would grow and evolve in the knowledge of God’s love toward them.

Now, I don’t know about you, but that could be somewhat disappointing. You go to your pastor, lay out all your issues, all your troubles, all your difficulties, and say, «Pastor, I’m going through this; I’ve got 15 problems, and I need you to pray for me.» The pastor listens very intently—okay, yes, you have trouble with money, trouble in your marriage, trouble with your kids, trouble in your job, all of this trouble. I hear you. Let us pray: «Father, grow them up in the way that You love them. In Jesus’ name, amen.» I don’t know about you, but I would be a little disappointed. I’d feel a bit shortchanged. I’d think, «My tithes should certainly warrant a better prayer than that! Come on, somebody!»

It wasn’t that he was praying a futile prayer; he understood that the key to wholeness lies in our revelation of how God feels about us. The key to holiness can be reduced to one thing: the knowledge of God’s love. The Bible supports this in many places. There’s a passage of Scripture that states that the person who isn’t mature, or the person who isn’t whole, is the one who hasn’t developed in their understanding of God’s love.

Later, in some subsequent weeks, we discussed how we either make fear-based decisions or love-based decisions. We either make decisions out of our insecurities or make decisions based on security. If you make a decision stemming from insecurity, you will find yourself with less than you deserve, because insecurity and fear devalue you; hello, somebody! If you examine life based on the decisions you make, consider it a house you’re constructing. Each time you make a decision, you’re placing a brick or some form of wall in that house. Whenever you make a decision out of insecurity and fear, you’re building an unstable house with unworthy materials. But when you make a love-based decision, when you decide based on knowing that God loves you and the fact that you don’t need anything, you build a house with materials that are worthy of who you are and who you are ultimately becoming.

So we talked about that, and if you missed it, I want you to visit YouTube to catch up on the previous weeks. Really, get the gist of what God has been speaking—powerful messages each week. Then last week, we discussed finding your identity in God’s love. When you see yourself, see yourself in every season, consistently as the one whom God loves. When you do so, it brings about a wholeness in you. Yet there’s a challenge: it’s one thing to experience a moment in a service, or a moment during your reading and study, to truly understand how God feels about you, and it’s entirely different to walk consistently in that truth.

Have you ever heard a message and felt it hit just right, so powerfully that you believed, in that moment, you didn’t need to hear any other message? You felt ready to take on the world! Have you ever been there before? I want to talk to some real people, real quick. You heard a word and thought, «Yo, Pastor, you don’t understand! Dude, that was like 'woo! '» In your mind, you almost feel like you don’t ever have to hear another message again because, finally, you have grasped it all.

Ever been there before? You needed counseling before you arrived, but now you think, «No, I don’t need counseling anymore; I’m good. I was trying to set up a meeting with you, but your message changed everything!» In that moment, you are seeing clearly; you are elevated above your problems. You’re like, «Yes!» But then Monday comes around, and you have lost it all. You’re scratching your head, trying to figure out how you could go from feeling so high, so clear, and having it all figured out to needing someone to explain it to you all over again.

The reason this happens is that you and I must not just hear the word and see the word once; we have to consistently fight for the revelation and ultimately the consciousness that we experienced, especially when it comes to understanding how God feels about us.