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Five Signs you Don't Feel the Love and Approval of God
Audio Teaching (20 minutes)
Audio Exercise (40 minutes)
From birth all of us are created with a need for love and approval. As children we are able to take in the love and approval of our parents and that is actually healthy and helpful but as you know on earth it is a rather imperfect go around. Some people get a little and some of us get a lot. I like to think of us as eating and being nourished by love and approval. As adults, however, we are no longer able to eat human love and approval. It doesn’t work for us. And because the devil knows that we need it in order to be strong and to represent God well, he has made most of us ashamed about our need for love and approval. So you have gone to different people, or your work, or some accomplishment or a physical trait to get love and approval and you have found it empty. And many times there is a scar tissue built up from our quest from what we are designed to have because we look in the wrong place. The devil has gone way out of his way to get you to actually have shame in this area. So many people do. I not saying all of you do but it wouldn’t surprise me if some of you do.
Examples of how human love and approval doesn’t work. How many popular rock bands and famous people who are known and adored by masses often have personal lives characterized by drugs or alcohol, broken relationships and unhappiness.
Here are five symptoms that we don’t feel the love and approval/appreciation of God:
1. We will feel empty.
2. We will be in pain emotionally, possibility physically.
3. We will, because of our pain, feel a need to call attention to ourselves. (big toe example)
4. We will be overly busy (sign of emptiness).
5. We will be fragile (easy to be offended, to be anger, easy to hurt, despondent, check out of life).
I want to talk to you for a moment about ego. Ego has a bad rap in mind of many people’s minds. Christian circles. Ego is simply the healthy structure of the personality. The bones that the personality hangs on. In order to bear the weight or God and pre4snece of God you need a strong healthy ego. Egotism is sick ego. So, if we have egotism, It is all about us. All self-focus. Many of the most egotistical people will tell you they are pond scum and don’t deserve to live. They are just waiting to be dismissed and rejected. You don’t need to be in love with yourself to be an egotist. All you need to be is overly self-focused.
The devil knows we need love and approval and works against it in us. Sometimes we pretend we don’t need it but we miss it. Fortunately, there are a lot of ways to get back in touch with this love and approval that we so desperately need. God showed us this exercise to help people to get in touch with God’s love and approval and it works very well.
There are two perspectives that we always have the love and approval of God in. The first one is from the perspective is one that He created us before we came out of our mother’s womb. He put in us things that please Him and things that He loves. The first thing would be Himself. There is a part of Him in us, the spirit man. And He loves and enjoys Himself. He approves of himself. Next there are gifts and callings. All of you are unique here. All of you have some special gifts, callings and abilities that God delights in and He always have. The Bible says He is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. In Him there is no change or shadow of turning. So, His love for us is not a light switch. It does not hinge on our behavior. It is not the tail wagging the dog. It’s not like God’s got a little switch, “I approve of you, I love you. I don’t approve of you. I don’t love you. I approve of you, I love you, I don’t approve of you, I don’t love you.”
From this perspective of what He loves in us-- I am not saying He is not aware of our shortcomings and sins. I am just saying He is not overcome by them. If some of you are counselors, you have heard some pretty gory things from people. Do you hate those people? If you do this for a living, basically the fact that the person has problems doesn’t offend you particularly. And you are moving on toward their healing. I am not saying you aren’t aware of them. But I find that what’s good about people if you bring that forward pushes out what’s bad about people. Where no amount of harping about how bad they are ever seems to heal anything. So, we deal with the bad in people, but counseling needs to hold more tightly to what God did right in you, to what God put in you already that can’t actually be destroyed regardless of these experiences you have had. And we find this again and again. And I’ve had people who have been cocaine addicts, who have done all sorts of reprehensible sins, who have been really, really lost. And yet within a year or so you find this shining, strong individual who really, while though they aren’t perfect, are free of their presenting problems and living a life that is God-pleasing and useful to others.
Ask yourself, “If you were a perfect God, would you create crappy people? I was a caterer for twenty years and I like to cook. I am good at it. It’s fun for me. It is one of the ways I express love to my family and friends. If when I cook, things go wrong everyone stays out of the kitchen because there are pots and pans are flying around and dark words are spoken. I hate making crappy food. Well I’m not perfect, but God is. So the idea that he is going to make crappy, loser type people, is really not on the possibility list. So from the perspective of how He created you, He loves and approves of you. Access it today. A way, not only way.
Listen to the exercise that will help you to experience this here .
Get father’s love gives a sense of his love and approval. Wouldn’t think much of a parent who is on again off again towards their child. I hate you, I don’t approve of you. You don’t endorse everything they do. There is a constancy to your love and of your vision of the child as important, valuable, necessary. Even though you are aware of their faults, you are aware of their positives even when they are being rotten. At night you walk into their room and look at them, even after a day where they misbehaved, and you look upon them with deep love.
There is another perspective I want to tell you about. God lives in eternity he doesn’t live in time. I want to give you a little teaching on that. I want you to imagine a little block on the floor. Most of here on earth believe that time and gravity are constants and we can depend on them unfailingly to be with them. So we can fly to India we know we will be in a different time zone but there is still time and we don’t expect the pen to fly out of our pocket. On the other hand, if you go up in a space shuttle, I don’t really know how many miles, but it’s not too many miles. Until your pen starts floating around. And you start floating around. In heaven there is no time and you can’t have time and eternity simultaneously because the nature of eternity is no time. So God sees you (I am addressing this to saved Christians. I am not going to try to take a bigger bite than that) from that perspective He sees you (have to use things that don’t totally work but our perspective requires we have to have a sense of time) Have you ever gone to a conference or a prayer time coming home with your face shining and your heart all cleaned up feeling lighter and stronger.
How do you think you will feel after you have been in heaven for 10,000 years? You think you might clean up a bit better? Do you think you will look better and act better? From that perspective God sees you. Let’s do a little exercise. Pretend there is a block on the floor a little kid ABC block. And you are a little ant. This is how many of us perceive time. We start our life on the edge of the block and we walk forward midlife is in the middle of the block and at the end of the block you fall off the block bye bye and you are dead. God we are going to perceive as a great big dome over the block. But actually he is a never ending dome and He perceives you as he approved of you created you in the beginning, and he sees you as you are in the moment and not that he isn’t aware of your faults and then he also sees you as you will be in the future into 10,000 years. Heaven is an interesting fascinating fun place where there is responsibility and different possibility that unfold forever and ever and ever. I am easily bored and look forward to the heaven. It is exciting and beyond what we can imagine in the way of joy and ecstasy. Not a boring sermon or church picnic!
This exercise will break down scar tissue and walls barriers you have put up to God’s love and approval. Satan has conned you into. Shame a scary, driving force. It is a toxic force in people that hurts them terribly and it is difficult to help them let it go. But this will take down some of that shame.
So from this perspective, He sees you and loves and approves of you. He sees you from these two perspectives at the same time. In the exercise we will teach you, we will help you break down some of the scar tissue and walls that have been put up in you and that Satan has conned you into. We are going to tear down these walls together.
It reminds me of the children of Israel going through the Red Sea and the sea is piled up on either side and the walls are quivering ready to crash down. The sea is symbolic of God’s massive love and approval for you from the two perspectives we have discussed. When we connect with this love and approval, it will change us and fill us with energy and joy to become the truly impactful Christians that we were created to be.
An Excerpt from a Class on the Love and Approval of God by Richard Kinney
To hear this free class in its entirely and to listen to a small group of people being brought through the exercise go to http://firehouseministries.com/product/love-and-approval/
Ask God to show you from these two perspectives on how he sees you from these two perspectives. And then not just see it but begin to feel it. If you have scar tissue around your emotions this will be more difficult. But don’t give up. You will want to continue to add to these pictures that God shows you of how he approves and loves you.
We are not looking for a rendition of all the bad things about you. You are not hearing from God if that is what you are focusing on. We want to keep advancing little by little in seeing more and feeling more of how God sees us and feels about us. Experiencing his love and approval is worth the time to do this on a regular basis.