First Love

Intro Voiceover: Welcome to First Love with Dr. Robyn Kassas and Dr. Nathan Kassas, where faith meets real life. In this weekly broadcast, you'll discover practical and spiritual keys to reclaim God's story in your life, deepen your relationship with Jesus, and encounter him as your first love, whether for the first time or all over again. No topic is off-limits as we make Jesus real, relevant, and relational. Stay with us; your journey back to first love starts now.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: To go to Pastor Wendel's question last night, I said about this YouTube gospel. Very famous preachers leading the movement in Christ at the moment: God wants to use your pain to give you purpose. No, he never wanted you to be in pain. Never. Pain does not point out who he is to you. He caused Jesus to carry the pain so you would not have to.

He allowed Jesus to stumble when he was carrying the cross so that you never have to stumble. Are you getting it? Stop blaming him and start to see what he's done so you don't have to do it. Keep going. I'm going to give you these and wake you up because I'm hitting you with some big heavies now.

People will say to us, "Well then, why am I in pain? I didn't have anything to do with this choice." Someone down the road chose to take the moment from God. Maybe it was your mother, your father, maybe it was two generations back, maybe it was one generation back, but God never wanted pain to bring you into his presence.

And maybe it was a son or a daughter. This is it. Someone stole the story, and that's why you're in pain because the heritage, the legacy got stopped. This is it. The legacy got stopped. But you can regain it for you. You can regain it for you. The thief on the cross was not the only person. We think, "Oh my God, that is hard, impossible. Own the moment from the conception." David does it with Goliath.

Straight away, he goes before them. Who is this guy talking about my God like this? That's what David said. Right from the moment of conception, David's called to be king when Samuel anoints him with oil. David is not in competition with God. He owns the moment. God uses the limits of Goliath, not to force David to remember he's God, but to force Saul and Israel to remember he's God. Because David's confession is, "Today, my God will give you to me. Give me your head. Do you know who the heck you're dealing with?"

But Saul was in the tent, cowardly hiding away. You know what the motivation with Saul was? "If I go out there and give my life and they lose their king, Israel will cease to exist." Everything was about him. I think that happens in Israel all the time. Here we go. When God uses the limits of Goliath to force the children of Israel into a position of vulnerability, they are so used to relying on the strength of their king, Saul, that they are dumbfounded when their king is too much of a coward to confront the giant. David, however, doesn't let the narrative limit God from owning the moment.

And so my challenge is: let this be on your lips. Lord, own the moment. You should do it all the time. It should be the thing you wake up with, and the thing you go to bed with, and the thing you wake up with and go to bed with. But if you forget it, he gives you new mercies every day. He can own the moment every day through you, or you can own the moment through him.

You will always be bound to limiting natural factors if, at the conception of life's moments, you let the narrative steal the moment from who God is, the author and owner of it. Now here comes the big one. The result will be: if you let the narrative steal the moment at conception, you will set a path to walk for the next 20 to 40 years, a cycle of generation where God will use what limited him in you, by you, to limit you.

What does that mean? If you don't give God that moment from conception, for the next 20 to 40 years of your life, God will use what you used to limit him to limit you. What did you use to limit him? Your power. It will come back on you. Your strength. So he'll say, "Right, you put your trust in your own arm? Well, now your arm will limit you." It doesn't work because it's limiting you.

If the moment is being birthed, limiting God and robbing the ownership of that moment from his glory however he wants to manifest that, then the limits we put on God, he will allow to be put back on us. Look at Joseph, who although picked up on God's heart and story for his life, didn't let God own how he would manifest it.

Joseph owned the moment through pride and self-importance, his idea of how it would work and why it would work. This is what took place when Joseph started to dream as a young teenager. Immediately, the chapter that was leading towards the legacy of Christ fulfilled God had written for Joseph to play the lead character in was now being revealed. But this was for the sake of relationship and conversation, not activation.

God revealed something to Joseph at 17 years old for conversation. But he could not keep his mouth shut. He thought it was for activation. So he unzipped his lip. He should have been like Mary and pondered these things in his heart. But he goes and blabs. Guess what God showed me? You're going to bow down to me. I can just imagine his little swag walking in.

"How are you doing, Joe?" "Oh, I had such a good dream last night. Let me tell you about it. And you, and you, and Mom and Dad, and the stars and the sun and the moon. Everyone was bowing down to me. You're going to do it too." I would have said, "Can we get him a brain scan, please? Get him a bucket. He needs deliverance."

God could have owned the moment with Joseph. He could have. And the path would have been different. I really want you to get this. When I get to heaven, I want to know how God wanted to do it. How did you want to do it with Jacob? How did you want to do it with Joseph?

Jacob redeemed himself. He got them back into legacy. But I would like to go, "How were you going to do it with Joseph?" and then hear the Father go, "Well, you see, I had talked with the Holy Spirit and Jesus like this." So you never wanted him to be humanly trafficked? No. But somebody interfered. Somebody robbed you. And God knows it. Leave it to God to deal with. Don't take vengeance. Let the Lord deal with it and be determined to live your life in Christ so that you don't get robbed anymore.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: The story isn't finished yet, and neither is what Jesus wants to reveal to your heart today. Let's jump back in and pick up right where we left off. So we then get back on focus. We get back on focus and we don't lose our focus. We don't let anything cause us to lose our focus. And these things will come back because they've gone in. And when you're in a situation, they're going to come out.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Limitations will be exceeded level by level if you let the Lord own the moment. I love that word, "own the moment." David said it like this: "Today, the God of Israel will give you into my hands." Right from the onset, God is the main character in the story. Not David. Never was. This caused acceleration and limitation to be exceeded level by level.

What is the key here? Living towards legacy, not from heritage, removes your limitations. Here is the example: David, shepherd, moved to musician, moved to warrior, moved to commander, moved to king, moved to psalmist, moved to poet. And here's the key: he could have moved to builder of the house of the Lord, but he broke connection with legacy. He forgot what his life was about.

This caused David to move in direct contrast against the timeline of God's story. When David sinned with Bathsheba, Satan was going, "That's it. That's it. You're gratifying your lust, but I've got a bigger plan. I'm stopping that from coming forward."

Dr. Robyn Kassas: I feel the Lord said we've done enough, and we should go to the last one because I want to tell you about reclaiming the story. You have had enough lessons about legacy and inheritance, heritage, and birthright. You know enough now to follow this to find out more. So let's go to the last part because I want us to have church. I want us to sing a couple of songs, take our tithes and offerings, and let the children dance.

Lord, own the moment. I hope tonight you will let him own the moment, and you'll get up and dance. I won't be dancing because I fell, so I'm sitting. But you get up and dance. Let's find our last one, please, Pastor. Okay, if you need to get up and shake yourself a bit... All right, here we go. I know what you're at. Oh Lord, this is good. What number are we up to? We are up to: going back to go forward. This is it. The rest, Pastor, we might use some other time when we're teaching. But this is going back to go forward. I don't go back to go backwards. I go back to go forward.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: If we are to allow God to reclaim his story in our lives, we have to go back to go forward. We are not going backwards. In other words, in this journey, it is a revisit to reclaim. We don't realize that when we put a preconceived idea of a way on how God wanted to reveal his glory in that moment, we robbed him of creative power that his nature wanted to release. When God is allowed to release his divine nature from the onset without interpretation, life and not death is activated.

Again, go to Acts 2. You don't have to now; look it up. He originally wanted to meet with them at Pentecost the moment Moses came down the mountain. But they were afraid of him. Fear stopped them. So 3,000 died. He got those 3,000 back at the Day of Pentecost in the Second Testament. Reclaim. Why? Because Peter and the disciples didn't interpret the moment. They just waited in the upper room for the Holy Spirit to do his thing. We try to interpret the Holy Spirit all the time. He is the interpreter. He is God on earth.

Here we see God reclaiming what he originally wanted to gift them with, which was his presence. He said to the children of Israel, "I want to come and I want to meet with you face to face. I'll come, and here is all my order. Here's the Levitical thing that I've set up, the tabernacle." They said, "No, no. We are too afraid. Please meet with Moses. Do not meet with us." They lost the moment.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: So that means, really, God wants to meet with us. You think, "Oh no, look what happened then." That was their choice. Don't make it your choice.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: We need to realize that our lives will not move forward into the legacy life of Christ being empowered and energized by the Holy Spirit until we go back to the moments we didn't allow the Lord to come in his full glory due to fear and hard-heartedness. If we allow the Holy Spirit to refill us in these moments that we have owned, we can see the 3,000% of the Father's story that died due to our flesh and self-life, ego interjecting, turn to 3,000% of God's life now released and birthed.

This is the need for reclaim. You can't move forward if the Holy Spirit hasn't owned your moment to express through the authority of Jesus the will of the Father. You would ask: why now? Why not before? Remember, you've got to go through feast by feast. It's not one step at a time. It's not like I get to jump into the feasts that I want. If I didn't start at Passover, I can't go to Pentecost and I can't go through to Tabernacles. I've got to go back and start at Passover.

So it's sequential. It's not convenient. You're not starting at the bottom of the ladder, but you're starting at conception, not birth. Precept upon precept, the Bible says. Feast upon feast, he revealed himself and his nature. I could explain that, but I think we understand. You read a trilogy of books and you start at the last book. You don't know the story. You have no appreciation for the characters, for the character development, and you've always got to go back to the start to look at how you got to it. It's like watching the final Lord of the Rings movie. It will not make sense. It's like me; I wanted to watch Creed III without even watching Creed I.

So, why now? Why not before? The key is you weren't ready. Back then, you were ready to do what he asked you to do. But you weren't ready to do how he asked you to do it. The key is you weren't ready to do it his way. And he won't let you do his will your way. He won't let you because he's the author and the finisher of his story. Remember we talked about weakness at point A, the moment of point B over here, and the vacuum in between is the Holy Spirit's grace to pull you through.

So what God has done in his great grand design, the ultimate storyteller, is he says, "Okay, you were ready to do what I asked of you, but you weren't ready to do it my way." So in between this whole vacuum, I've shown you your way is death, and I've built into your heart a knowledge of who I am. So right now, the moment here that you are right now, you have a greater knowledge of who I am in your life than you had when you said, "I'll do it, Lord."

So now you can go back because of that relationship and because of that knowledge, and you can say, "Because of who you are in my life now, your way is the only way." You couldn't choose his way back then, so don't be upset and don't think you've wasted time because you didn't know him like you do now.

In getting to know him like you do in the space in between, he's gotten you to understand his ways are higher than your ways. And so you go back and you go, "Wow. I want to give you this moment. I want to get it back for you to own it. Not just the what or the why, but the how."

(Singing) I thought I did what's right. I thought I had the answers. I thought I chose the surest road, but that road brought me here. So I put up a fight and told you how to help me. Now, just when I have given up, the truth is coming clear. You know better than I. You know the way. I've let go the need to know why, for you know better than I.

If this has been a test, I cannot see the reason. But maybe knowing I don't know is part of getting through. I try to do what's best, and faith has made it easy to see the best thing I can do is put my trust in you. For you know better than I. You know the way. I've let go the need to know why, for you know better than I.

I saw a cloud and thought it was the sky. I saw a bird and thought that I could follow. But it was you who taught that bird to fly. If I let you reach me, will you teach me? For you know better than I. You know the way. I've let go the need to know why.

And so, therefore, when we do it his way, he puts us on his timeline. And when we do it his way and go on his timeline, we reach a new level of knowing him. When you do it his way, then the timeline will show you a new way of knowing him.