Saturday, October 29, 2011

John 9: When Jesus heard...He went and found him.



SOAK IN THE TRUTH--- Let’s just start talking about the Love of God!As we do this our hearts will be presented with the truth that we can be receiving more love…honestly, who doesn’t want more love? We all do, even if we don’t know or admit it.
LOVE ENCOUNTER:
We are here meeting to encounter the love of God. There’s no other reason we do anything that we do. The revelation of His love to our hearts, and our hearts in turn opening up and receiving a transformational encounter with His love is everything. I believe there is a desperation building in hearts to experience the love of God, and to live out who we are in Christ and God will honor that desperation. So we are in a good place.
The Flame of Love Picture

1.) A few weeks ago at the SLG Trev and I go to (we love to just sit in God’s presence and worship and pray together—like we are doing tonight) God was speaking word after word about His love for us. We truly had a revelatory encounter with God’s love during this meeting. With each scripture and word each person was sharing we really felt God wanting to put our attention completely on the love He has for us.
During this time I saw a picture of a fire in the middle of a pitch black night. I saw many people around the fire and they were all standing spread out in different places. Some were standing very close to the fire—even close enough to warm their hands—and some were standing far off from the fire. The Lord showed me that the fire is His love and He invites us to press in close to His love to get warm and be healed. He showed me that sometimes we are afraid to come into His love, especially when we are hurting, because we are afraid He is going to be unfaithful to us, or harsh with us, but really what He wants to do is draw us close to His heart flame of LOVE, and warm and comfort our pain.
Graham Cooke (a preacher I love to listen to): “Just in case we are not convinced that God is kind” (lets read His word on it—LOL—imagine that ;-) :
The Lord is close to the brokenhearted; he rescues those whose spirits are crushed.
Psalm 34:17-19
He heals the brokenhearted and bandages their wounds.
Psalm 147:2-4 (in Context)
The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is upon me (Isaiah prophesying about Jesus), for the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to comfort the brokenhearted and to proclaim that captives will be released and prisoners will be freed. Isaiah 61:1-3
There is nothing about a broken-hearted person getting wounded more deeply for running to God’s heart.
Psalm 51: 17
The sacrifices of God (or the sacrifices that please Him) are a broken spirit; A broken and a contrite heart, O God, You will not despise.
This is the LOVE the Lord revealed to the blind man He healed in John 9. Jesus arranged a LOVE ENCOUNTER with him and led this man through it so beautifully and tenderly…when I saw the love and the follow-through and care of God in this passage my heart was forever changed.
Blindness was this man’s world identity—but Jesus was about to meet him and completely change his life with love.
John Chapter 9 Verse 1-end of chapter
I especially love this passage in the Message...
John 9:1
*I love the way right away God’s word exposes the influence the religious (performance) mindset had on the disciples thinking in the disciples’ question for Jesus, and we are so often effected by this same spirit and mindset even today, so it’s important that we compare religion and relationship(which is what Jesus is offering) here for a minute.
*Spirit of Religion can be described as: measuring worth by performance, having to earn God’s love, having to act out hard work and rules and regulations in order to be close to God
*Some damaging effects of religion are alienation from God’s love (because we don’t measure up) and self-emphasis and effort which ending in failure and increasing in sin and inability to receive God’s love
*Religion always will ask the questions, who’s fault is this? and where does the blame fall?
*Religion always alienates us from God and from people (because there’s no way any of us could ever be perfect) If we are always setting up that standard of self-effort and in any way not allowing God to cover us and reconcile us, we are basically making ourselves be alone in that part. Any part of us we believe can function without receiving the love of God is a place we have cut ourselves off. It’s a crazy thing, but sometimes we can actually make ourselves be alone, and it will seem like it’s everyone else’s fault.
*There's a flip side Jesus presents to the disciples...
and definitely not to be too hard on the disciples, because their questions, unlike the Pharisees, were honest, and even followers of Jesus need to ask the wrong questions sometimes, but honest questions are always safe with Jesus and always needed for growth. In essence, Jesus was working with them to shift their perspective of what His heart truly was for the situation.
*By doing this shift with them Jesus was drawing them into a a heart of relationship instead of religion, and relationship always draws us in and connects us.
*When we receive God’s love, we will find ourselves naturally flowing into deeper connection with people in the Spirit without even knowing it. That’s why we always want to look at our own relationship with God first before we look at anything else anyone is doing. It just doesn’t work the other way around. Our personal love encounter with God is our #1 priority!!!!
Let’s look at Jesus’ answer….. LOOK INSTEAD FOR WHAT GOD CAN DO!!!
this is not about accusation!!!--blame
Don’t look at sin in yourself or in the world!!! Look to the love of God!!!! In this man’s trouble….his blindness…look for God to come through! Other translations say, “this happened to him so that God’s work (and all His works are done completely in a heart of love) could be shown.”
The pool of Siloam—Siloam means SENT
* I believe God prophetically wants us to see this man’s story through the eyes of destiny and God releasing a testimony of destiny through Him,
I think it is very interesting that the pool God had Him wash to be healed in was called “Sent”.
GOD IS SO TENDER TO GIVE US A WASHING AND VISION OF OUR DESTINY AND OUR CALLING AND WHO WE REALLY ARE AS WE ARE BEING HEALED. AS WE ARE BECOMING WHO WE already ARE IN CHRIST.
This is a WORD for some in this room!!!:
God is saying: I KNOW YOU FEEL BROKEN NOW, BUT THERE’S MORE FOR YOU THAN THIS. MY LOVE HAS MADE YOU WORTHY OF BEING SENT. MY LOVE HAS MADE YOU WORTHY OF YOUR DESTINY AND CALLING IN CHRIST.
God doesn’t deal with us in stages of arrival. He empowers us and activates us in His Kingdom through our whole life process with Him.
The man went and washed and he saw”….
“Soon the town was buzzing”
And I love John’s account, because all through this you can really feel the tension between the accusation and alienation of religion and God’s pursuit for a free love encounter with this man now healed.
We on this earth will feel that tension----BUT GUESS WHO WINS?!
Our response to that tension is what matters here.
Are we going to be looking for what God can do?
Are we going to be declaring what God can do?
Are we going to stand up to accusation and refuse to accuse and choose to be loved and love?

The stand-out response

The Man said, “It’s Me!”…
Ok, Here’s the stand-out response God is looking for.
You can always tell a person who has encountered God and truly received God’s love because one of the things that will happen in a person touched by Jesus, is that they will have no fear about standing up for the love of God and declaring what God has done!
They will literally run right over the top of pride and performance because measuring up simply doesn’t matter anymore. The testimony of their encounter will just come out! You know, God’s love poured into a person who’s receiving can’t be stopped.
That person instantly is going to say—here am I send me!!!
Jesus I owe you everything.

It’s not always easy when we stand for God’s love.
“They marched the man to the Pharisees”
(some versions say they “reviled” him because he was speaking the truth about what Jesus had done for him.)
“There was a split in their ranks”
Here we can still see that tension happening between religion and relationship.
When a love encounter with God is being made know and transformation of lives is happening, there’s always that choice: shut-down or desperation and the hope that goes with it
Remember: hope does not disappoint us because God has poured out His love into our hearts (Romans 5:5)
“…anyone who took a stand that this was the Messiah would be kicked out of the meeting place”
“They said, “You’re nothing but dirt! How dare you take that tone with us! (Or, how dare you teach us)
*Very often when God is doing a destiny work and healing in ourselves and the lives of loved ones and breakthrough is happening as we are catching real glimpses of what it would mean to be free to live as we were made to live and be in Christ,
*this is the time we can expect to meet with very real spiritual opposition. We can learn to recognize when God’s destiny is being released and not be surprised at attacks.
*We just continually pray the truth of God’s love over our own hearts and speak that same truth over the lives of our friends walking alongside us.
*There is an encouraging, loving and kind way to say anything to anyone, and the Word of the Lord will always be kind.
*Religion will always accuse. Recognize the condemnation of accusation as satanic (completely foreign to God's heart), refuse to speak or believe accusation towards another person (no matter who they are or what they have done) and refuse to accept accusation (condemnation) as the truth about you. "Our battle is not against flesh and blood"...

WHAT IS JESUS’ HEART FOR me WHEN I CHOOSE TO RECEIVE HIS LOVE ENCOUNTER AND STAND UP FOR THAT LOVE RELATIONSHIP in my life?


The Crux—in these 3 little words—Jesus found him.

“Jesus heard that they had thrown Him out, and went and FOUND him.”
(Let it sit…………say it again maybe…….)
IN THE MIDDLE OF YOUR TROUBLES, YOU ARE FOUND BY GOD.
YOU ARE FOUND BY GOD. HE IS GOING OUT OF HIS WAY TO COME AND FIND YOU…
HE IS PUTTING HIS LOVE ON THE LINE FOR YOU AND YOU WILL NEVER BE SHORT-CHANGED.
Jesus follows through on the desperation in this man’s life by sealing a work of belief in Him, and the man ends the encounter confessing Christ as His Lord.
Belief and love go together. To believe in God is to receive His love.


You know, our pain is only with us until we see our need for God in those areas and we open our hearts to receive His love.

God does not have a heart to inflict pain on us to teach us a lesson
We’ve all heard and may at one point or another even bought into the Christian-ese cliché about asking God to teach us patience and then having to stand in a line at Starbucks the next day for 40 minutes….As if God would work with us in so narrow a way…..
rather,
He is longing for us to look for what He is going to do to encourage us in our struggle, and what He is going to do is always good, always loving, always kind.
2 Chronicles 16:9
The eyes of the Lord search the whole earth in order to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to him.
Romans 5 The Message so beautifully supports this love encounter Jesus has for us. It is precious to read!

Prayer:
That our hearts would be open to receive the specific and personal love encounters God is pursuing us with right now.
Heavenly Father, I pray a blessing of revelation of God’s love on us and great courage to receive God’s love even in the most dark and desperate places of hearts. I pray great hope and expectancy that God’s love began being poured out at the moment we invited Him into our hearts and continues to be poured out in us by the Holy Spirit today….
that God’s love would become the perspective through which we view our lives.
Amen

No comments:

Post a Comment