In Touch Ministries

Dr. Charles Stanley: To know that God loves me with an everlasting love means that there is nothing that can interfere with His love for me. Absolutely nothing. If it is everlasting, it is continuous. If it is everlasting, it is uninterrupted.

If your idea about the love of God is that it is something you deserve because of something you have done or doing or will do, then you may question the fact, well, how long is this going to last?

Guest (Male): The Bible proclaims that God's love is completely fulfilling and always flowing, but some people reject His offer of relationship because of how they feel about themselves. Well, today on In Touch, the teaching ministry of Dr. Charles Stanley, you'll hear an encouraging reminder. God's incomparable love toward us is unconditional. So stay with us now to understand how you can be liberated to love. Let's listen into Dr. Stanley's message.

Dr. Charles Stanley: The greatest gift that God has to offer us is the one that we probably have the most difficulty receiving because somehow we just have a hard time understanding it. What am I talking about? I'm talking about God's love for us. And I think there are two primary reasons we have difficulty receiving it. Number one, we don't think we deserve it, and we don't. And secondly, we don't understand it. And for those two primary reasons, we have a very difficult time receiving, accepting God's love for us.

And so the reason I think we have difficulty is because we can't quite make His love harmonize with our love, and so we want to be able to feel that God loves us the way we love others. And when we put it in that light, somehow if God loves us like we love others, then I'm not sure God will always love me the way the Bible says He does.

So what I want to talk about in this message, I want to talk about God's love for us. And I want you to turn if you will to 1 John chapter 4. This book is full of love. 1 John, that's Revelation from the back, Jude, third, second, first John. And I know that most of you know where it is, but every once in a while somebody doesn't know where these small epistles are. 1 John chapter 4.

So beginning in verse 16, he says, "And we have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. We believe it, we know it. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this, love is perfected with us that we may have confidence in the day of judgment because as He is, so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love. We love because He first loved us. If someone says, 'I love God,' and hates his brother, he's a liar. For the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from Him, that the one who loves God should love his brother also."

Now, all of us are probably at different levels in our understanding of God's love or even being able to feel it. And if I should ask you this morning, how many of you genuinely believe God loves you, more than likely most of you could raise your hand and say, "I do." But if I should say to you, how many of you as a way of life in your daily life you feel God loving you? More than likely most of you probably would say, "Well, I know He does, but to ask me if I feel like it, not exactly."

And more than likely the reason you don't feel like it is because number one, you don't think you deserve it. And so if you don't think you deserve it, then why should you feel something you know you don't deserve? In fact, you don't just think you don't deserve it, you know you don't deserve God's love, and so therefore, how in the world could you feel it?

So what I want to talk about in this message is God's love for us, and I want to talk about two or three things. Number one, I want to talk about what it's like. What is the love of God like? What's the character of God's love? Secondly, because you see today there's so much going on about emotions, and most books you'll find in any Christian bookstore has nothing to do with theology, the books of the Bible trying to interpret the Scripture or commentaries, most all of it today is emotional things.

All the emotions we feel, and so much of it is about love and the lack of love and loving too much and all kind of subjects. But I want us to look at the kind, the quality of love. What's this love that God has for us? And secondly, how does God express this love to you and me? Well, as I think about the kind of love that God has for us, first of all, it is a gift.

In James chapter 1, that 17th verse, you'll recall what he says in this passage: he says that every good and perfect gift is bestowed, it is a perfect gift, it comes from God the Father from above. And he says there is no variation, no shifting shadow, that is, whatever God gives us, it isn't a shifting kind of thing, it isn't something that's changing. God's love for you and me is a gift, that is, His caring for us, His kindness toward us, His goodness toward us, all the aspects, everything that is wrapped up in the caring and the comfort and the security and the satisfaction and the meeting of needs.

All the things that are wrapped up in love, God's love for you and me is a gift. Therefore, it means since it is a gift, I do not have to do anything to deserve it. Once I begin to deserve something, then what happens is I distort it. For example, if I offered you a gift and you said, "Well, now wait a minute, I'm willing to take it but I've got to give you something in return." No, you can't give anything in return. "Well, I can't accept it. If I can't give you something in return, then I can't accept it."

Then what would you do? You would frustrate me trying to express my love for you by giving you something, and secondly, it would tell me that something on the inside of you is so mixed up and confused you cannot accept or receive my love. Love is a gift. You cannot pay for it. When I say a gift, it has no fine print, it has no footnotes. When God says He loves us, He loves us as a gift. It is something given that has absolutely nothing to do with our deserving it.

Secondly, it is perfect. It is the only kind of love that God knows how to express. For example, God is the absolute perfection of everything He is. That is, if God is powerful, it's perfect powerful. If God is beautiful, He's perfectly beautiful. If God is all-knowing, it's perfect knowledge. Anything and every single attribute of God is absolutely perfect. That is, it has reached the peak of its perfection, you cannot improve it to any degree. God's love for you and me is absolutely perfect.

And that's the only kind of love that God knows. Now you and I can't love anybody perfectly because we're in the flesh and we all have our desires and we all have our prejudices and we can get covetous about things or whatever. The flesh is the flesh and it'll never change. We can't love anything and anybody perfectly. God has nothing within Him, not a single solitary aspect of anything that would keep Him from loving to perfection.

And the only time you and I are going to be able to love like that is when we get to heaven and we have left these old bodies behind and we have our glorified body, and there is absolutely no presence of sin, so there'll be no presence of any kind of prejudice on our part or selfishness on our part or self-centeredness. Then we can love with our whole heart, absolutely perfectly like God loves. That's the way He loves.

His love is a gift, it is perfect love. Thirdly, it is everlasting love. And when I think about that, I think about this passage in Jeremiah chapter 31. He says in the third verse, "The Lord appeared unto him from afar saying, listen to this, I have loved you with an everlasting love. Therefore, I have drawn you with loving kindness." Now what does that mean?

To know that God loves me with an everlasting love means that there is nothing that can interfere with His love for me. Absolutely nothing. If it is everlasting, it is continuous. If it is everlasting, it is uninterrupted. Now you and I can love someone and situations and circumstances or disagreements can crop up and we may not feel that love. You still love them or you may not feel it. Or some people can just quit loving someone.

But the one thing about God's love is this: you never have to worry about if God is going to stop loving you. Now remember this, if your idea about the love of God is that it is something you deserve because of something you have done or doing or will do, then you may question the fact, well, how long is this going to last? Now none of us want to be loved by someone who only loves us when we meet all the requirements or when we please them in every aspect. Nobody can please everybody else in this world, nobody can do that.

But you see, if I see that God's love for me is based on anything but the fact that it's just His nature to love, then I'm going to say, well, I know He loves me today or now, but listen, when God says "I love you," there are no buts, no ands, no ifs, no wherefores or therefores. It is the nature of God to love. It is absolutely everlasting and eternal, unceasing, unchanged. What I want you to see is the love of God comes from Him, it does not come from us. Since it is all from Him, it is His very nature being poured out upon us, you can't do anything to stop it and anything to change it and anything to interrupt it.

So what does that mean? Here's what it means. It means that every day you and I walk under the canopy of the love of God. It doesn't make any difference if you get out of the will of God over here and you're living in sin and being disobedient to God. You know what happens? Most people think, "Uh oh, canopy's down." The canopy's not down because listen, you didn't put it up. If you'd put it up by good works, you'd have to keep it up. God is the one who put the canopy up there, that is His love for you and me.

It doesn't make any difference if you're going right, wrong, left, right, doesn't make any difference. The love of God is the love of God. I want you to see the source of His love is God, not us under any condition. It is eternal and everlasting. Likewise, His love for us is unconditional. Now we've said that oftentimes because most people, it is human nature to believe that somehow there must be some conditions to the love of God.

You mean to tell me that God cares for me, His kindness, His goodness, His security, meeting my needs, that there's no condition? None. No condition whatsoever. What condition? What condition could there be? God loves you just the way you are. It doesn't make any difference what's going on in your life. I didn't say that you would enjoy life because He loves you. I didn't say that God was going to overlook sin. I didn't say that you could live any old way you want to and everything just be fine. I said that God loves you no matter what.

Because it is an unconditional love. It is likewise a sacrificial love. And it's interesting in 1 John as we said before, every time the word is used in all that many times, every single time it is agape love, sacrificial love. John 3:16 is not "for God so loved you in a brotherly fashion and has affection for you," but God so loved you sacrificially that He gave His only begotten Son Jesus that whosoever believes in Him would not perish but have everlasting life.

God's love for you and me is a sacrificial love, that is, it cost Him something. God saw humanity, He saw you and me because He doesn't say people in mass, He saw you, knows you by name. He saw you in your sinfulness, in your helpless, hopeless, sinful condition and knowing that there would not be one thing in this world you could do to forgive yourself, to make yourself acceptable in the eyes of God. And God decreed, and if it had been any other way, He'd have told us.

And because of His nature and His justice, He's not only love but justice. In order to remain just and to express His love, He had to send somebody to pay the penalty for your sin and mine. That's what the cross is all about. The cross is all about one word, and that word is substitution. God the Father substituted His Son at the cross to pay for our sins in order that He could express His love to you and me. It is a sacrificial love.

So the sacrifice wasn't that God said, "Oh, I'm just going to love you and meet your needs." No, there's no sacrifice on the part of God to meet our needs. All He's got to do is speak every single thing you and I would ever need into mind, and it would have been done. But to atone for our sin, God sacrificed His only begotten Son. Now listen to this, and I repeat this also again because I want you to understand.

God the Father paid the greatest price possible for almighty, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, holy God could possibly pay for your sin and mine, and that's to give His only begotten Son. It is a sacrificial love. And that's why my friend, listen to me carefully. That's why if you reject the Lord Jesus Christ, listen to me. If you reject the Lord Jesus Christ, "I don't want any of that Christ business, don't give me this Bible and church business," for you to reject the greatest, most profound act of sacrificial love ever demonstrated to humanity and ever can possibly be demonstrated, for you to reject that and then you wonder why you would die and be separated from God for eternity?

It isn't that God stopped loving you, it's just that you have broken the heart of God. You have rejected the greatest expression possible for almighty, holy, all-loving God to express to you, and you turn your back upon that. The sin is the awful, horrible sin of ingratitude, of rejecting that kind of love. It is a sacrificial love. That's the quality and that's the kind of love that He loves us with.

It is likewise an immeasurable love. Turn if you will to Ephesians chapter 3. In the 17th verse of Ephesians 3: "So that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith and that you being rooted and grounded in love may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and the length and the height and the depth and to know the love of Christ which surpasses all knowledge."

How do you measure the love of God? The only way I even can come close to measuring it is looking at the cross and to think in my heart that that love is so deep it reaches all the way down to the depths of my heart. It is so broad that it reaches around the world. It is so high that it comes all the way from heaven. It is so long it can reach the longest point on this universe no matter where. It reaches out there. It is absolutely immeasurable. It knows no limitations.

All of us have limitations on our love whether we like it or not. We can't love with that immeasurable love. Now we can love with all of our heart and say, "I'd do anything in this world for you." God is the only one who can say that and do it without the slightest bit of inhibition in any way because nothing can stop God loving us. Now something can stop my loving Him, and something can stop and hinder my ability and my capacity to enjoy and receive and experience that love, but nothing can stop Him loving us.

It is a love that is absolutely immeasurable and it is a love beyond our understanding. Listen back in Ephesians chapter 3. He says in verse 19, "And to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to the fullness of God. Now to Him who is able, to do exceedingly abundantly beyond all that we ask or think according to the power that works within us." That is, God's love is immeasurable, it is inexhaustible, it is infinite.

And because He has all power to do all things, His love knows no measurements. But one last quality that I'll mention and there are many others, there's no way to exhaust this subject by far, and that is it is available. Now watch this. To whom would it be available? Either God would have to in His own way choose some fashion: I'm going to love him, not going to love her; going to love her but not going to love him. That is, God's love is available.

Listen to what He said. And imagine the Lord Jesus Christ saying this in such a brief word so that the whole world could memorize it. How available is God's love? For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believes in Him would not perish but have everlasting life. Now to make it a little bit more personal: for God so loved you. He loves all of us individually.

His love is such that it reaches everybody, so therefore everyone, everyone lives under the canopy of that love. There's no such thing as His—listen to this—there's no such thing as escaping the love of God. You can fight it, you can resist it, and some people do. Some people do not have the capacity to receive love. They can't. And here's what happens. When people, whatever the situation may be, maybe it's a home they grew up in or maybe it's their circumstance or maybe they've been hurt somehow, somehow there are those people who can't receive love and they put up a barrier.

And here's what happens. The more you try to love them, the more they back away. The sweeter you are to them, the more difficult they become. And the more you give them and the more you try to express love, here's what happens. They feel so uncomfortable with your expressing love they will become even hostile before they will say yes to your love. Now they don't understand what's happening inside of them, but it's like they become angry when you try to love them. They resist it.

They can't accept it because on the one hand, sometimes their expression is, well, if you love me, you must be expecting me to love you in return. Or if you love me, you must be expecting something from me. Or, I don't deserve to be loved. I can't be loved. Look at my life, how could anybody love me? And they reject the love of God the same way they reject someone else's love. Many people reject the love of God because somehow they just—how could God love me? How could He love me because He's love?

And you see, when a person is distorted in their emotions, they can't accept God's love. They can't accept someone else's love because they can give you enough reasons that it's absolutely proof that they are undeserving of being loved. You don't have to go through life feeling unloved. And it's one thing to go through life feeling unloved by somebody, but it is a tragedy to go through life feeling unloved by almighty God.

"Well, I know He's up there. I know He loves most folks. There's no way for Him to love me, look at me, therefore, how could He love me?" That's not even the question. Not "look at me how could He love me," but what? "Look at Him, how could He love me?" If I look at me, I may say, "How could He love me?" But if I look at Him, yes I can say, "Yes He loves me," because it is the nature of God to love.

Guest (Male): Thanks for joining us today for In Touch, the teaching ministry of Dr. Charles Stanley. God loves us because it's His nature to love. It's everlasting and unconditional. No matter what we do or do not do, His love never changes. To keep studying about the Lord's love for us, stop by intouch.org and to listen again click on "Today on Radio" on our homepage.

If you'd like to order a copy of today's complete message, open our online bookstore. This title is "The Gift of God's Love". It's also included in our teaching set, "Liberated to Love". Visit intouch.org or call or text us at 1-800-IN-TOUCH. You can also write to us at In Touch, Post Office Box 7900, Atlanta, Georgia 30357. And again our toll-free number, 1-800-IN-TOUCH.

Does your mind sometimes drift toward ungodly thoughts? Help is on the way in today's moment with Charles Stanley.

Dr. Charles Stanley: It's easy for any one of us to walk out on any given day of our life in society wherever we're going, whether it's shopping or whether it's in church or whatever it may be, and your mind drift. It can drift into all kinds of thoughts. That's why you should be careful who you're with, where you go, the kind of friends you have, the kind of people you fellowship with. Because they're going to influence you to some degree or you're going to influence them one.

And so what happens? Our minds can drift. If they drift, listen, we live in a worldly system. And the system of the world is ungodly thinking. That doesn't mean everybody thinks ungodly, but there is a core in this world system in which we live that's ungodly. And if we are not careful—and you see we have the Holy Spirit living on the inside of us, and listen, it's His job and His responsibility to do what?

To bring to our attention when thoughts come our way that don't belong to us. And we are to renew our mind. Let's say some thought comes your way and all of a sudden you grab that thought, Spirit of God convicts you, "That's not who you are," and what? Turn it off. Turn it out. You say, "I don't know that I can do that." You have the capacity to do it, that's a gift of God. Whether you choose to do it or not is something else.

Guest (Male): If you know Jesus Christ as Savior, the Holy Spirit is your constant helper. Stop by intouch.org to learn more about the believer's life of faith. Have you been encouraged by what you heard today? Take some time and let us know.

Ahead on In Touch, we may believe God loves us, but if we don't trust His actions, we can easily become insecure and anxious. We'll hear more about how to experience the Lord's fulfilling love when we return on In Touch, the teaching ministry of Dr. Charles Stanley. This program is a presentation of In Touch Ministries, Atlanta, Georgia, and remains on this station through the grace of God and your faithful prayers and gifts.