How Much God Loves You Episode 2

In this episode, I go into greater detail about God's Love for you. I read more from the passage Psalm 139. This illustrates how well God knows us and how lovely are His thoughts towards us. God's thoughts about you out number the sand. He has the hairs of your head numbered. He knows when you wake up and go to sleep, he knows your thoughts and words before you speak them. He loves you anyway. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Hello. Welcome to the Never Nothing, Never Nobody Podcast. This is a place for those who have felt unloved, felt like they were nothing and nobody, to learn the truth about who they really are and who God created them to be. This is a place to find hope for healing, to end your search for significance, and to find the truth that you are never nothing and never nobody. In today's podcast, I want to talk to you about how much God loves you. In the previous one, I told you about how God formed a special attachment to you when he was making you and forming you in your mother's womb. That came from a verse in the book of Psalms, chapter 139, verse 14. Today I'm going to continue to talk to you about the love God has for you. What you may not know is that the Bible is God's love letter to those who believe in Jesus. In the Old Testament, God spoke through prophets. In the book of Jeremiah, chapter 31, verse 3, God told his people through the prophet Jeremiah that I have loved you with an everlasting love. These words not only applied to those Jeremiah was speaking to, but it also applies to those who believe in Jesus today. He paid our sin debt by dying on a cross, and he rose again on the third day. Okay, back to Jeremiah 31, verse 3. The phrase, I have loved you, tells us God didn't just start loving you, He's been loving you. God has loved you since the day he thought you up and created a plan and a purpose for you to fulfill. God already knew and had a plan that you would exist in the day in the time that you do. You have not lived a single day of your life unloved. In the book of Ephesians, chapter two, verse ten, the Apostle Paul wrote, We are his workmanship, created in Christ, to do things which he prepared beforehand that we should do. The word workmanship comes from a Greek word poema. This word should sound familiar to you. It's the same word where we get our word for poem. The word means work of art or masterpiece. So essentially what Paul is saying, who God says you are, is a masterpiece. You are a priceless work of art. You are loved far more than you'll ever be able to wrap your mind around. Paul wrote to encourage the church at Ephesus to be strengthened in the knowledge of how great God's love was for them. I'm going to read to you Ephesians chapter three, verses seventeen through nineteen. I've chosen the amplified version of the Bible today because I like the way the amplified will take a couple of sentences and then add three or four, five, six additional sentences to expand what is said to intensify and strengthen the meaning behind the words. Here's what it says that Christ may dwell richly in your hearts through faith, that you, having been deeply rooted and securely grounded in love, be fully capable of comprehending with all the saints, which is God's people, the width, the length, the height, and the depth of his love, fully experiencing that amazing, endless love, that you may come to know practically through personal experience the love of Christ, which far surpasses mere knowledge without experience, that you may be filled up through your being to all the fullness of God, so that you may have the richest experience of God's presence in your lives, completely filled and flooded with God Himself. Psalm 139, King David writes about this love, this intimate love God had for him, which is the same intimate love that God has for us. This is what King David O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up, you discern my thoughts from afar. You search out my path my lying down, and you are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O Lord, you know it altogether. You hem me in behind and before, and lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, it is high, I cannot attain it. Where shall I go from your spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there. If I make my bed in Sheol or Hell, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me. For you formed me in my inward parts, you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works, my soul knows it very well. May a frame was not hidden from you when I was being made in secret, your eyes saw my unformed substance. In your book were written every one of them, the days that were written for me, when as yet there were none. How precious are your thoughts toward me, O God, how vast is the sum of them. If I could count them, they would be more than the sand. I believe that every person in this world desires to be loved and known like that to be truly seen and truly known and loved flaws and all. We desperately want people to love us and accept us. We ache for the kind of love that King David wrote about here, to be known so well that even before you can say a word, the one that loves and adores you knows what you're gonna say. God has watched you like a parent watches their child, sleeping and waking and delighting in it. God knows every breath you take. God pays such close attention to us that he knows our thoughts. He knows the thoughts before they've even formed fully in our minds. God is attuned to every single detail about us. God knows you inside and out. And the best part is He loves you anyway. He knows your habits, the good ones, the bad ones. He knows when you're down in the depths of despair and depression. He knows when you're on mountaintops and cloud nine, happy and joyful. But he's there with you. He's just hoping you'll notice and invite him to be a part of your life and love him in return. God is acquainted with all your ways. There's no one that loves you to a greater degree than God does. This is the kind of love we all ache for and search for in this world. The love we experience in this world from family, friends, beloved pets is a small drop in the bucket compared to the love God has for us. I don't know if you have pets or if you have children, but I have cats, and I simply love to watch them. I love to watch them sleep. I love watching them play, hunt, run, be curious. I just love my cats. I can't take enough pictures of them. And as a human, I carry a little bit of God with me and a little bit of his ability to love. And if I can so adore an animal like that, how much more does God adore you? He so desperately wants to be in relationship with you. God, the creator of the universe, the author of the Bible, is so consumed with thoughts of you that you can't even count them. Oh, how precious are your thoughts towards me? How vast is the sum of them. They are more in number than the sand. I'm not just talking about a handful of sand. I'm not just talking about the sand on the beach or the sand that fills the deserts. It just says the thoughts of God towards us are more in number than the sand. Have you ever even tried to count a handful of the grains of sand? That's a lot of thoughts God has towards us. God delights in us. We are told in the Old Testament, God dances over us, and his banner over us is love. There's a verse in the New Testament, it's in the Gospel of Luke. Now Luke had an interesting perspective on things. He came to it from a perspective of a doctor. So he was more detail-oriented and then he cut to the heart of the matter instead of going on and on on stories. But he had an interesting thing to say about God and his attention to us. In Luke chapter twelve, verse seven, he wrote, Even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Okay, he didn't say God has counted the number of hairs on your head. It says the hairs of your head are numbered. Each individual hair has a number, and God knows which number just fell to the ground or came off in your hairbrush or left your head completely because you have become bald. God's knowledge of us, his intimate attention to detail of every part of us, from our hair or lack thereof, to the thoughts we're thinking, to the words we're about to say, to the time of day we wake up or the time of day we go to bed. That is intimate knowledge, the intimacy of God. He can see into you, he knows you, and he chooses to love you. God's love is an all-consuming love. He came up with a plan to take our place on the cross because he couldn't bear to live one moment or have one moment of eternity without you there with him. So he made the way, he paid the price, he pulled out all the stomps so that he could be in fellowship with you because he loves you. God loves you with an everlasting love, a love that is unwilling to be apart from you. John three sixteen is probably the most infamous passage of scripture for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever should believe in him will not perish but have everlasting life. Well, as I have told you in the previous podcast, Jesus was and is God Himself. So it could read for God so loved the world that he gave himself, he sacrificed himself, that whoever believes in him would not perish, go to hell or forever be separated from him, but have eternal life with him in heaven. And the whole purpose and the whole reason for this was not to come and condemn the world, but that the whole world through his sacrifice, through his act of love, would be saved. God loves you and he always has. God gave himself for you and says you were worth it. You were worth the excruciating pain. You were worth the beating, you were worth having the flesh ripped off my human body. You were worth my hands and feet being pierced with nails. And not only did he die, but then three days later he rose again to prove that he was and is God. Heavenly Father. Thank you for those that are listening to this podcast. I pray that this message spoke to their hearts and their minds. For any of those who would like a relationship with you. All they need to say is Jesus, I believe. They want to get more eloquent than they say. Thank you for Jesus for what you have done for me. I accept your gift of salvation. I accept the paper for my acceptance of my life. There are no magic words. There is no script. There is no quotation from the scripture or any other book that's gonna get you into heaven. What gets you into heaven is faith and belief. And the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. He is your ticket to heaven. He is the way, the truth, and the life. No one gets to the Father except through him. If you prayed to accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior, welcome to the family. I recommend you get the U Version Bible app. This way you can find whichever translation fits you best, that you understand best. God created scholars to go back and interpret the scriptures from the Greek and the Hebrew for us to get our version of the Bible today. Then find yourself a Bible based church, a small group, or a Bible study, so you can learn more about this Jesus and more about God and who you are because God created you.