Topic: Love

Don’t make worship about conjuring presence or catching the mouse in its trap. Make presence about lifting God up so high above you that His presence becomes impossible. Then, when He is the focus of your praises & elevated far above you, in His proper place of worship, He will satisfy you & fill you with joy more abiding than any manufactured or machine trap of presence. Worship’s chief end is to glorify God. By glorifying Him in worship we will enjoy Him in it as we never have before.

We must feel neither condemned nor comfortable in absence. If we become comfortable in this world, we have stopped our search. If we become defeated in absence, we have forgotten the assurances of God. God withdraws to lead us deeper into Himself because He loves us, & by that same love He will return.

You should stop thinking of God only as someone you fear, but as someone you can love. This should settle what you believe about the character of God forever. God keeps His promises. God can be trusted with your heart, you soul, & your strength. He is not giving you Canaan because you deserve it, or because of who you are, but because He is God.

God’s ability to clean things up is infinitely greater than our ability to mess things up.

You only love God as much as you love the person you love the least. To evaluate how much you love God, evaluate how much you love people.

You fight favoritism in your heart and you grow in character by giving VIP treatment to those who are more vulnerable than you. We fight favoritism by going to the back of the line. This isn’t optional for us. As a church, this is our obligation, and God doesn’t have another set of hands and feet on the earth other than His church. We’re called to this.

You know how to pursue. Don’t waste the gift that God has given you through all these years. Fall in love all over again. If the grass looks greener somewhere else, put some fertilizer down. Water your own yard. Mow that grass.

This parable makes it clear that if we love our neighbors only when it requires no time, energy, money, or risk, we will never love our neighbors as ourselves. All love is costly.