It’s so wonderful to be in the house of God and to greet one another and to uh to be able to share that warmth of God’s love with one another. So, um as you take your seats, we’re going to uh have some teaching today. But first of all, bombia, good morning to those of you who don’t speak Portuguese. Uh Sandy and I are very glad to be back uh with you from our 30th anniversary trip to uh Portugal. And we want to thank you for your prayers and emotional support on our subsequent exploration of a possible uh ministry at an expat church in Spain. Uh they’re having their congregational vote today, but I was told they’re recommending the other fellow, but that’s okay. The result of your prayers is that we’re at peace with uh what God wants. He knows best. Um, have you have you been to Portugal? I know I know the Germings have been to Portugal. Okay. Uh, let’s uh let’s just take a look at Portugal. This way, right? Right. Isn’t it lovely? That’s all you need. You I’ve just spared you a plane ticket. Well, that was really hardly even a glimpse. And what if that little slideshow was as brief and rushed as as any sense of God’s love for you that you come away with today? That’d be a bit of a shame, right? If it was that brief, just what what something over your shoulder, you just see a little glimpse of color. That was God’s love. Okay, I’ve got seven more days and I’ll get a little bit more next Sunday. We want to talk about God’s love today. and thank you for the worship set. It was really lovely, really wonderful. Um, and I just want to remind us whatever we’re going through this morning that I don’t think that the Lord wants us to mistake some fastm moving reference to his love for all that there is. Right? I think our father’s heart, our savior’s love isn’t meant to be either exotic or foreign. Some are way over there. I think he wants those who seek his face to come away with a much fuller sense of his truth and love, enjoying his presence, delighting in this relationship, this salvation that we have. So, I want to share with you uh a tweaked message of what I gave in Spain two weeks ago, and it’s called, “What have Christians gotten themselves into?” And it refers really to two things from an outsider point of view. the secular or atheist view of why on earth would someone want to willfully follow a historical figure from 2,000 years ago and be part of an institution that seems to be if anything arcane and limiting on personal freedoms. What has a Christian gotten themselves into? Let’s say you’re not a believer. Your friend becomes a believer and you go, “What? Why would you even do that?” And then from another side of view, say you are a believer, but given the vast array of Christian gatherings, traditions, and let’s face it, some pretty peculiar characters and movements, as an insider, do you ever ask yourself, what have I gotten myself into? Why do I have faith? Why do I go to church? I mean, some groups are very legalistic. Some are quite bizarre. I I remember reading about this group in West Virginia that took seriously that injunction in Mark’s gospel at the end that you’ll be able to handle poisonous snakes. And that was really the basis of their of their church service was to put your hand in a tank full of rattlesnakes and pull one out and make sure you didn’t get bitten. I mean, I don’t know. Um, on the other hand, there’s a lot of religion out there and a lot of people being told to do empty and ungratifying rituals that don’t necessarily bring about any fundamental change in that person for the good. So, this talk isn’t really about against anybody or any type of church. I don’t I want to make that clear. I’m not trying to uh vilify anyone. It’s actually about us, our very human need to belong, to find power and purpose, to seek peace and hope. And finally, just to be loved. Now, in saying that, I don’t want to say anything sappy like all you need is love or love of any form is sufficient and fly your flags. If in the real world there are such things as food allergies, bad job placements, and disappointing even abusive marriages, I think it has to follow logically that spiritually there are such things as bad, false, or harmful connections. While it’s true we’re designed for love, a lot that we settle for falls far short of representing that love that we need. In fact, do you know that the scriptures warn us that there will be terrible times in the last days because of love? Did you know that? It says, it says that misdirected love, giving yourself to an unworthy object or for selfish reasons can actually make you less of a person, not more. The same New Testament that speaks so gloriously of God’s love also speaks of this saying people will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. This false love, this opting for lesser things over our creator redeemer has really disastrous results for our character development. Um Paul says in the second letter to Timothy, “People who love the wrong things will become boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, and hotty.” Not the kind of description you want for your daughter’s future husband. But the remedy is not religion. It’s not religion. It’s an authentic relationship with God. Well, I’m going to take you on a Jesus journey. Do you know the flag to the left? Manitoba flag to the right. Morocco. Good on you. Um, so the country just south of Portugal, where we came from, is Morocco. And I want to tell you about a Jesus journey from flat rural Manitoba to the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. A girl that I met while I was pastoring a church in Jasper. So, one particular night she grabbed a small bag of her belongings, some clothes, and she silently crept to the gravel road at the edge of where she lived and scanned the horizon for some headlights, which eventually came and came closer and closer, stealthily crunching down that gravel road, stopping in front of her, opening the door. She jumped in. She didn’t know where she was going. She’d never really been much outside of where she had lived her whole life, which was a religious commune, protected from the world, protected from unbelief, protected from social media and bad connections. But for her, it had become toxic and stifling and just a religion. Well, her the person who picked her up was her older brother who had also made the same escape a few years before. He couldn’t take care of her. So, she like many people I discovered wound her way to the Rocky Mountains to try and figure out life. She got a job in a hotel. She was cleaning rooms. And it was the same hotel that a young man who was our sometime worship leader uh also worked at. He invited her to church and one day she came. the only church she’d ever been to outside of this religious colony. She came and eventually she began to discover a way of relating to God that was very different from what she grew up with. and she actually developed a relationship with God through Jesus to the point that about a year after being with us one October day about 19 years ago she asked to be baptized in Pyramid Lake. Pyramid Lake is always cold. In October it’s particularly cold. I put on some hip waiters. We went out to this dock, a bunch of us from our little church. It was a fairly sunny day and Pyramid Mountain was in the back and in those deep dark blue waters I said a very hasty in the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit and brought her up again. Those waters representing death to an old existence and new life in the trinity. Well, that girl Vicki was her name. She didn’t just stop there. She decided to go on a YAM mission, be trained for three months in disciplehip and then go on an assignment somewhere. Her assignment was three months at an orphanage in Morocco. Those three months stretched out to be five years. The girl who in her quest for truth and freedom gave up connection to her parents and her other siblings. never knowing if she’d ever see them again, followed a path that Jesus led her on a journey to now be part of a Christian family in Morocco who loved her for who she was and then gave her the opportunity to be a channel of God’s love to some orphans, some Arabic children that had been abandoned. God connects the dots that we don’t even know are out there. He forms relationships of the most unlikely character. The text I have for you today is from the book of Ephesians in chapter 3. And this is what it says. Paul’s prayer for these believers. I pray that you being rooted and established in love may have power together with all the Lord’s holy people to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ to know its full dimensions and to know this love that surpasses knowledge. In other words, it’s not just something you can read about in a book. You’ve got to experience. You’ve got to know this love on a heart level that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Friends, you can go to a seminary. You can fill your head with biblical knowledge. You can go to a very exacting church and and and partake of all the doctrines and all of the don’t do this and do this. But if you don’t have the love of God in your heart, you’re just wasting your time. You will never be filled with all the fullness of God without being filled first with his love. So what I want to share with you today is how can we know a love beyond knowing? Well, we may be able to at least make some progress today in knowing this love that surpasses feeling. Because isn’t that how we often understand love? It’s a feeling. It’s a sensation. It’s a warm fuzzy thing that I have towards another person. But feelings we have no control over. Feelings can come and go. And that leaves us a bit vulnerable. If we’re saying that the most important thing in our Christian journey is God’s love, but we don’t always feel that love, where does that leave us? And I want to share with you, I think, four New Testament themes of connectivity. I want to present this to you as a way of improving your sense of the dimensions of the heavenly love that is ours and to defeat the devil who knows that it’s easier for us as human beings to reach out for something tangible like religion. I don’t do this, but I do do this. or to reach out for creature comforts. I am a Christian, but I don’t feel God’s love right now, and I feel very stressed. I’m going to partake of this, and I’ll have two of these. I want to present to you some things that God has uh created as a channel of his love, as an embodiment of his love that will not change no matter your circumstances or your feelings. But first of all, I want to talk about four things very briefly that can prevent you from uh being at rest in God’s love. The first is adversity. We all experience hard circumstances in life, things we can’t explain or things where we feel very pressured under that can challenge our sense of God’s love. Skepticism. We live in a culture that has largely rejected God and that is in our media, that is in our entertainment, that is in our colleagues view of the world perhaps and that can and maybe alongside a bad church experience make us feel I’m not sure about God’s love. I think he exists, but I don’t know if he loves me. Spiritual attack. Jesus called the devil the killer, the stealer, the destroyer. Think of Satan as the great separator. He separated Adam and Eve from a loving, trustful relationship with the creator. And ever since in your life and my life, that is his his mo. If he can separate us from God, he has won a victory. So that’s another way we can lose sense of God’s love and also from past wounds. If you grew up in a home where love wasn’t very evident. Um I met a man in Java, Spain where I preached two weeks ago and he grew up in a home with the mother and dad frequently were violent with each other and with him as a boy. Even his grandfather who lived with them punched him in the face a few times. He had no love in his home. It was completely chaotic, dysfunctional and abusive. And as a result, he became an alcoholic for decades. But God rescued him and God made him to be very active in his service. So beyond those things, which I think apply to a lot of us, here are four things that a Christian has gotten themselves into. This is a response to the question of the title of our sermon. What have Christians got themselves into? First of all, and the most tangible, the most visible evidence is they’ve got themselves into the church. And the next four slides will look like this. They’ll have a thing on the top what they’ve gotten into. Over there, they’ll have like width, height, depth, and a number. There’s our scripture. And then there’s a couple things that support this view that the church, for instance, is one of the things that we’ve got into as believers. So if you’ve become disoriented about your spiritual journey in Christ, know then that the church is something you’ve got yourself into. And it is bigger than the local church. It is beyond that. It is part of the body of the Lord. It’s being part of his bride. It’s a living temple, a holy nation, a royal priesthood. Those are some of the metaphors that the New Testament uses. Now, a local church can be thwarted and defeated by Satan. If people follow their own selfish ways and refuse to yield to God, a congregation can lose its lampstand as we find out in the book of Revelation. In fact, that same prayer that Paul made in the book of Ephesians, we’re told that the living risen Christ at the beginning of the book of Revelation actually rebukes this very same church. And about this very same thing, they had lost their first love. And he said, “Look, this is the most important thing. Yeah, you guys are doctrinally correct. you’re doing this and you’re doing that, but since you’ve lost your first love, I have to rebuke you. You might lose your lampstand because if it’s not based in love, it’s not really worth anything. I grew up in a church in Toronto that began very wide and open, but then it became quite narrow and strict and hard and to the point that I finally left that church. I didn’t recognize it anymore. That might be the story of a particular fellowship, but as Sandy and I just recently experienced in Spain, the true church of Jesus is as wide as six continents and wider than any one generation’s lifespan. Notice, first of all, it’s the Lord’s project. Jesus doesn’t talk much about the church, but he did say, “I will build my church, and all the powers of hell will not conquer it.” uh a version that I grew up with said, “I will establish my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.” If you look in Psalm 87, it uses those same words, “Establish and gate.” It says this, “The Lord loves the gates of Zion more than all the other dwellings of Jacob. Glorious things are said of you city of God and the most high himself will establish her. What is the parallel here? Zion, the city of God is where God and mankind come together. Right? So Jerusalem was referred to as Zion for many years because the temple was there. And the temple wasn’t just a building. God’s presence was in the temple. So we was a meeting place between heaven and earth. That is the same language that Jesus uses about his church. It’s not Jerusalem anymore where we go to meet with God. It’s in the people of God. So the church, if you had a a smaller view of the church because of hurts that you’ve received from a church, expand that. Jesus has put you in a community that you can belong to forever. If you decided one day, hey, you know what? Canada’s pretty nice, but I think I’d like to move to Portugal. What would you have to do for you to really become at home in Portugal or any other place? You’d have to have a community over there. You’d have to have a visa. You’d have to have citizenship. And maybe maybe you even get a chance to marry in to a Portuguese family. And then you really belong. This is the community part. God has put you in a community and those com those people in this community are also seeking God’s love and also have struggles but also in their better moments know that God is a good father. What else then? Um so we have a global eternal community family where the rule is to love God with all you are and have and to love each other as yourself. Next, you have been placed into a covenant. We’re going to celebrate that covenant at the end of this service, the communion table. So, maybe you had an experience of God one day when you were a child and you thought, “Wow, God really does exist.” But then life got in the way and you went on your meandering way. What you didn’t realize is if you’ve really given your heart to the Lord, you’ve been placed into a covenant. And it’s a covenant of love. Look at the lengths that Jesus went to establish this covenant. He went to the cross. It was a costly initiative. You didn’t form this covenant. God formed this covenant. And he invited you into that covenant based on the blood of his son. That’s the length God went so that he could be our God and we could be his people. It’s also a lifeimparting arrangement. says the old written covenant, the law, what the new the old testament was about. And if you know your Hebrew uh and Greek, the words that we use to divide our Bible, old testament, new testament, you could also substitute old covenant and new covenant. It’s the same word. So the written covenant, the law ends in death. Why? Because we can’t keep it. We’re not holy. We can’t keep God’s holy law. So as prophesied through Ezekiel, through Jeremiah, God was going to create a new covenant, a covenant of grace. Says under the new covenant, the spirit gives life. The Holy Spirit comes into us. You know, um, if one is an unmarried woman, one could consider entering a convent. If one is a witchy woman, one could illadvisedly consider entering a coven. But if one aspires to be the part a part of the bride of Christ, one must enter a covenant. There’s no other way. Nations enter into alliances, packs, and treaties. Businesses enter into contracts, agreements, and partnerships. But lovers enter into covenants. As easy as a well-loobed machine, the teaching of Ephesians about marriage slides right into teaching about the intimate union between Christ and the church, making human marriage, a covenant, a visible expression of the love and joy between the believer and the Lord. So that’s the second thing. What has a Christian got themselves into? The third thing is they’ve got themselves into a kingdom. You might think, “Well, I came to the Lord because I was struggling with a bad habit. Um, I felt really guilty about something or I was really wounded by what somebody else did or I was just really confused about the way the world is and I found in the Bible some truth.” That’s all fine. We have many ways of coming to Jesus. But once we come to Jesus, we recognize that he is the king of love. He is God’s man. who represents humanity before the throne of God. So what does the Bible say? For he’s rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the son he loves in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. If you just have a therapeutic psychological view of the gospel, well, it makes me feel good. Don’t stop there. Understand why it makes you feel good. Now you are a citizen of a holy and beautiful king whose kingdom will outlast the years. His kingdom will do away with the kingdom of darkness forever. It is a kingdom of eternal love. It’s fulfillment. It’s not religion. For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking. Here he’s referring to not just dining, but how do you show that you are in in with God? Well, I I don’t I don’t eat pork. No, no, no. That’s all done away with. It’s not a matter of that. The kingdom is a matter of righteousness. That is right relationship with God. Peace. I’m at peace with myself. My quest has discovered the truth. I am a child of God. and joy in the Holy Spirit. If the Holy Spirit is in you, whatever happens in your life, you’re connected with eternity. So bring on the adversity, bring on the hardship. It’s only proof that a greater thing has happened to me than my circumstances. So that is the third thing. We’re now citizens of an everlasting kingdom high above all earthly kingdoms under the King of Love. Have you got a sense of the width and the depth and the height of God’s love? As believers, we’re not people leaping into the darkness. We’re not holding desperately onto past traditions. We’re not wearily striving to gain God’s attention. We are a person that has been rescued from the dominion of darkness, graciously brought into the kingdom of the sun he loves. Like a maiden locked in a tower or a knight chained in a dark dungeon, we have been the object of a great hero’s mission to set us free and rescue us. Well, all of these things speak of this final thing because Jesus is in all of these things. He is in the church. It’s his body. He is in the covenant. It’s through his blood and body. He is the king that we now follow. So, the last thing is not a surprise. What has a Christian gotten themselves into? They’ve gotten themselves into Christ. Now, like a two-sided coin, the New Testament sometimes refers to us being in Christ and other times of Christ being in us. It amounts to the same thing. It’s an interpenetration of natures. Like the two becoming one at the altar in a wedding ceremony, we too have been joined with our savior. This, my friends, is true security. Jesus said on the night that he was about to go to the cross, some of the most profound things he ever said. He said this in a prayer to the father. And he said it to his close disciples, his inner group. He says what? Remain in me. Not beside me. Not close me to me. You don’t just remember me but remain in me as I also remain in you. Something that crucifixion doesn’t change. In fact, it makes it possible. As the father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. And he goes on to say, doesn’t he, that as the father’s love is in him and he is in them, so the father’s love will be in them, too. Can anything separate you from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus? Height, depth, past, future, angels, demons, nothing. Nothing can separate you. What can separate you? Your mind. Who wants to control your mind? The devil. It’s the battle for the mind. Do you know your identity in Christ? When you’re under pressure, are you able to get on your knees and pray, “Father, I’m really feeling shaken right now. Help remind me who I am in Christ and that your love will never fail me. Never.” As a child of God, we now enjoy deep attachment to the one who’s love. If you really want to go titanic deep on this, you could read in Colossians where it says, you know, Christ in you, the hope of glory. But beyond that, he says, you died when you believed in Jesus and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. So, we’re talking about something very profound here. You sitting in this pew are not just located here. You are located in the heavens, the highest of heavens, because you are in Christ who has ascended to the very throne of God. This is just part of your life. Your life is broader than what your body contains. Now, that is deep. That is profound, friends. Uh let’s go to the next slide. What have Christians gotten themselves into? They’ve gotten themselves into a comprehensive love relationship. Our marketers say, “Hey, you guys, you lovers, you should celebrate February 14th. And what should you do? You should buy your lover some flowers. You should buy them a card. You should buy them some chocolates. And you should go out for dinner.” Well, a real lover knows their love is much deeper and profound than these outward things. Their love shares the same house, shares the same bed, shares the same life, the same journey. Right? As Christians, then let’s not just settle for the peripheral outside things. Let’s get to the heart, the meat of this. So, what are we talking about here? This is something that I think is is just a very profound thought that is really changing my Christian view of things. We’re talking about connectivity. Okay? Okay, do you use that word or um let’s say from um psychology the word is attachment. What happens if you have a little child, a little infant and you just feed it, you keep it alive, but you never hold that child, you never talk to that child, you never affirm that child, you never give it a sense that it belongs to you. That child will have very serious psychological problems. it will not feel that it’s its own creature and that it has its own place in this world. Vickiy’s story had some elements of detachment. she had to detach herself from um it was a Hutterite colony and and saying that I’m not saying that all Hutterite colonies are very uh restrictive and uh religious but in her case it wasn’t meeting her heart’s need. So can I she had to detach from that and eventually God attached her to himself in Jasper where we were and went on to then try and attach those little orphans to the love of God herself. She became part of that cycle. So think about this like this microphone, this stand, this body, anything that exists is made on the molecular level through the attachment of molecules. If you didn’t have molecules attaching themselves, you would have no solid matter. You wouldn’t even have gases either. Everything is the product of attachment. Think about it on the cosmic level because all science whether it’s chemistry, cosmology, geology, uh anatomy, whatever it is, every science is really the study of connections. What a thing is composed of and how it relates to the things around it. So on the cosmological level, the planet Earth doesn’t just exist by itself. It’s within a solar system. The gas planets protect it from certain uh interstellar objects. The sun and the other uh closer planets uh help it in its orbit and give it life. Ecosystems um we learn more and more now about ecosystems and how interdependent they are. You take out all the sharks from the ocean because you like shark fin soup, you’re going to have a problem. The balance is now being skewed. you warm the ocean too much so that there’s a a bleach off of all the coral, you’re going to have a problem. All of these things are integrated. What about your own nervous system or digestive system or coronary system, whatever it is, all of these things work together? I can feel this because there’s nerve cells that form a chain, go to my spinal column and up to my brain and back again, which is what did the Lord heal probably the most in the New Testament? It was leprosy. Leprosy impacts the nervous system so that you can’t feel anymore. It breaks the chain, the connection. So if this is true in the physical realm by a creator, shouldn’t it also be true in the spiritual realm that the gospel is about connectivity, redemption is about reattachment, atonement is about attachment, the cross is about connection. God is integrating you into his heart, into his being so that you have the hope of eternity with him. You are attached to him through Jesus. Well, it would be wrong for us not to uh end with uh a warning against counterfeit connections. I worked at Hope Mission for five years. Uh I saw the damage that um the failure to connect as a as a child to a a whole family per as one way of um getting into addictions. Uh people then got connected attached to uh self-medication substances that help dull that anxiety, that fear, and it cause even further damage. We know that if we overeat because it makes us feel good, we’re going to have problems in our body. We know that if we chase money as of the real security um we can lose our focus and all it becomes the root of all sorts of evil. If we follow um amorous relationships because that makes us feel attached and and good and attractive. We know that that also has its consequences. So, uh, again from the book of Ephesians, Paul says this, speaking of unbelievers, they’re darkened in their understanding, separated from the life of God. Profound statement, separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. What’s the consequence? Well, having lost all sensitivity spiritually, they’ve given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, and they’re full of greed. If you don’t develop your spirit, your body will be in control of you, and your body will demand certain things from you. Well, let’s end with this. We’ve been talking about divine attachment today. God’s love as divine attachment. This is how God roots and establishes in love. He puts us in his church. He makes a covenant with us. He puts us in his kingdom so that now he will direct our steps and he will protect us. He puts us in his son. That is one way of grasping the dimensions of the love of Christ. and to know this love that surpasses knowledge. This is how we get filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Well, before we come to the table, I um I really wanted to share a song with you. And um my wife begged me, “Don’t do it, Rich. Don’t do it. Um this was a song that we used often in Jar in our worship times and then um we uh I used it at uh Hope Mission in our chapels. I I coordinated chapels for quite some time. All the five years that I was there I I was doing chapels and I I modified the lyrics a little bit. So, if you know this song, it’s going to sound a little bit different to you because um some of the lyrics I didn’t think were so appropriate for that setting. So, I I modified them. So, we haven’t really um tried this. I don’t know if it’ll pick up in the guitar at all, but uh yeah, it’s called the King of Love. The king of love sorry king of love is my delight. He brings the dawn, defeats the night, the first and last. the living one. His name is Jesus. And from his throne with angels round, prepares a home for the lost now found. Eternal joy is where I’m bound because of Jesus. And I will sing my songs of love. Calling out across the earth. The King has come. The King of love has come. And troubled minds can know his peace. Captive hearts can be released. The King has come. The King of love has come. My Savior’s death has set me free. And now his spirit lives in me. How can a sinner know such joy? Because of Jesus. The wounds of love are in his hands. The price is paid for sinful man, accepted child, forgiven son. because of Jesus. And I will sing my songs of love calling out across the earth. The King has come. The King of love has come. And troubled minds can know his peace. Captive hearts can be released. The King has come. The King of love has come. And now by faith, Lord, I draw near. Jesus, help me trust. Replace my fear. Before such love, before such grace, I will let the walls come down. And now by faith, Lord, we draw near. Jesus, help us trust. Replace our fear. For such love, before such grace, we will let the walls come down. Day day and we will sing and we will sing our songs of love calling out across the earth. The King has come. The King of love has come. And troubled minds can know his peace. Captive hearts can be released. The King has come. The King of love has come. The king has come. The king of love has come. And Lord, we just thank you that in our apartness, in our alienation, you have come. You have come to rescue us and to restore us into a right relationship with our father. And for this, no amount of praise or thanks can ever ever touch on what you’ve done for us. So Lord, prepare our hearts for the table as Luke and Dina come up. And then when we come up at the sign of the covenant that we’re in, help us to receive this as a token of your love to give us fresh courage and fresh strength for the journey ahead of us in Jesus name.