The Relentless Love of God (episode 7)

0:00 Do you love a prodigal? Do you feel like you are lost in a scary and endless wilderness? Welcome to the When You Love a Prodigal podcast. I am Judy Douglass and I spent more than 15 years in that wilderness. I believe together we will discover help and hope for your journey. Welcome. I am excited now to begin to cover some helpful topics developed in some depth in my book, When You Love a Prodigal. We will begin with several weeks looking at the foundational concept for loving a prodigal.

0:45 And that is love. God's love for us, His love for our prodigals, and His desire to love our prodigals through us. We will begin with the relentless love of God. I hate you! If you are a parent, you might have heard those words from an angry child. If you love a prodigal, you almost certainly have heard those words, whether your prodigal is a child or an adult. It is our love for this person that keeps us going, reaching out, pursuing, loving, no matter what they do.

1:30 And they are smart enough to know that the greatest way to hurt us is to hurl that love back at us with those words, I hate you. Our son said it a number of times. This particular time was especially hurtful. He hadn't done something he was supposed to, and he didn't like the consequence. And he yelled at me, he said, you don't love me, you just love your girls. You're not my real mother. I hate you. I love my prodigal, and you love your prodigal. But often it's not easy to love them.

2:13 Our love is tested and stretched, unappreciated and questioned, not returned, even thrown back at our faces. And we can grow weary and discouraged. How do you keep loving as the years unfold? What does love look like when our prodigals keep making bad choices? We know that God's love is unconditional, unfailing, radical, sacrificial. That is the love which God has always had for me and for our Josh.

2:53 And I knew this love was mine to access for Josh, but I couldn't always grab hold of it. But this I know. I'm really not capable of that kind of love. Jesus set an impossibly high standard. So how? How do we love and keep on loving our often hard to love prodigals? It's times like these that we need the absolute assurance that we are loved by God Himself. And He makes that abundantly clear. In 1 John 4 19, He tells us that we are able to love at all because He first loved us.

3:40 This is even clearer in the message paraphrase. It says, we though are going to love, love and be loved. First we were loved, now we love, but He loved us first. So if we're going to consider how we can radically love our loved ones, we ourselves must be certain of, confident in, and comfortable in God's love for us. You see, all scripture is a love letter to us. There are so many verses and passages that declare and affirm His unfailing, everlasting love for us.

4:24 Here are just a few of those scriptural affirmations. And know this, they are for you and for me, they are for us. Zephaniah 3 tells us that the Lord your God will rejoice over you with gladness. He will quiet you with His love. He will rejoice over you with singing. This first paints a rich picture for me of God singing a love song to me, calming me, encouraging me with words of love. And oh, how often I need to hear that love song.

5:05 In Jeremiah 31, He tells us the Lord appeared to us in the past saying, I have loved you with an everlasting love. I have drawn you with loving kindness. I love this promise. God speaks tenderly to His people, to us. His love is everlasting, never ending, always there forever. His love is also unfailing. It will never let us down or abandon us or make a mistake.

5:47 And with this everlasting, unfailing love, God draws us, He calls us, He woos us to Himself. And then in Romans chapter 8, these amazing verses, for I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Sometimes I am sure I have sinned or failed so badly that I have lost, destroyed, or canceled out God's love.

6:36 How can He still love me? Yet these verses drill into my heart, to our hearts, to remind us of this truth. We can't make God quit loving us. No one, nothing else, can separate us from that everlasting, unfailing love. So much comfort, so much hope in that. Timothy, we read, for God did not give us a spirit of fear, but a spirit of power, of love, and self-discipline. There are lots of things in that verse, but we're just going to look at the spirit of love that God has given us.

7:19 Specifically, His spirit living in us will love through us. Did you get that? His spirit comes to live in us, and because of that, He can love through us. We'll talk about that some more in the next few weeks. All that amazing love we just considered is not only given to us, but also given through us. Remember that core verse, 1 John 4.19, that we did at the beginning? He loved us first, because God first lavished His love on us and sent His Spirit to live in us.

8:04 He makes it possible for us to love with His love, which is surely the love we need for our prodigals. In the Psalms, I have found help to believe God's love in the midst of pain, uncertainty, rejection, failure, hopelessness. I received in Psalm 103 especially the assurance that God will not abandon or reject me. Now this Psalm is so rich that you can spend a long time in it. We're just going to look at a few of the sections of it. Just to get you started, I encourage you to go further into it with the Lord, asking more what He wants to say to you personally.

8:52 As I name some of these benefits that He promises in Psalm 103, be reminded of what God's love has done for you. And pause to remember that He says the same thing to your prodigal. So here are some portions of Psalm 103, followed by a few comments from what God said to me as I was in this passage. Verse 2, praise the Lord my soul and forget not all His benefits. He has done so much for us, given so much to us to praise Him for, and yet we forget.

9:36 I don't want to forget, especially in the hard times. He says, remember what I've done for you. Verse 3, oh, He says, who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases. When I was looking at this, I went through this for myself, thanking God for forgiving my many, many sins. And then, as I had no trouble recounting my prodigal's many sins, I was grateful for God's mercy toward him, as well as for the healing that He promised. Now, I have plenty of areas in my life that can use some healing, but my prodigal has more parts of him than need healing than I can name.

10:24 God is working on His healing, too. Verse 4 tells us that He redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion. Most of us have some acquaintance with the pit, but our prodigals often live there. But God says, no, I will redeem them, just like I've redeemed you, and I will pour out my love and compassion. Verse 5 says, He satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagles.

11:05 Too often, it is our prodigal's desires for unhealthy things that send them spiraling down. So, what a wonderful promise that He will give us desires for the good things, the things that will be helpful. May He do that for our loved ones as well. Verse 8, the Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love, just the way we always are to our loved ones, right? Our prodigals, hmm, maybe not always. Every day I am grateful that God is compassionate, that He's gracious, He's slow to anger, and He's abounding in love toward me.

11:53 I pray that I can act like God toward my loved one. Verse 10, He does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities. By that time, I was on my face with gratitude that this is true. His grace and mercy are overwhelming. May I pay them forward to my loved prodigal. Verse 13, as a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear Him. Sometimes, I think we need a greater measure of the Father's compassion for our prodigals.

12:40 Sometimes, that's not how we treat them. And then, this is one of my very favorite verses in the whole Bible, Psalm 103 verse 14. He knows how we are formed. He remembers that we are dust. He made us from dust. We go back to dust. And so, when I think there's no way I can live up to the standards that I know God has, I'm reminded that He knows that I'm dust, and He has compassion, and He's got mercy. Thank you, Lord.

13:20 Can I remember that my prodigal is also dust? And finally, verse 11, for as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is His love for those who fear Him. There is that amazing love of God again. I find I must recall every day that God is on His throne in heaven, and He rules. Because every day, things happen when you love a prodigal that are out of your control, or that you have no idea how to help that person you love so much.

14:02 But God rules. He will do what He says and what He wants. God told me that this passage I've just been reading from shows what His love for me and for my prodigal looks like. So I prayed that morning from these verses that my loved one would grasp the reality and depth of God's love expressed here. And that would happen mostly because He sees it coming through me. And I would urge you to do the same. Say, Lord, I can't love like You do, but I want to love this child, this adult in my life, this spouse, this whatever, whoever it is, says, I want to love them with Your love.

14:55 But don't stop there. Ask God how you might demonstrate this kind of love to your very loved wanderer. May God speak His love and truth into your heart and mind from this psalm. May you be able to rest in His love and live it out with your prodigal. And I would ask you, which of these benefits of God's love for you encourages you the most? God bless you. Thank you for joining me today on the When You Love a Prodigal podcast. If you enjoyed today's episode, please subscribe, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.

15:45 Your review helps the show reach more people with the hope and encouragement of Jesus. Don't forget, take a look at the show notes. And for more helpful information, resources, and books, check out judydouglass.com. That's Douglass with two S's. You can find me on Facebook and on Twitter and Instagram at JudyDouglass417. Until next week.