 Well, good morning everyone. Hey, can we just take a moment and welcome our family from the Portage Campus who's joining in with us. Let's put our hands together and welcome them. We love you guys as well as everybody who's joining us online. Turn with me in your Bibles while you're thinking about it to Malachi, the book of Malachi, which is the last book in the Old Testament. Some of you thought his name was Malachi and that he was an Italian prophet, but his name is Malachi. So turn there and we're gonna go there in just a moment. But real quickly, I wanna just bring us up to date on Seek, which is gonna kick off this Wednesday night. There's a few things that is gonna help you if maybe you've never been a part of Seek before. Every year we do this to start and calibrate our hearts right at the beginning of the year by calling a church-wide period of prayer and fasting and gathering. So January is when people hit the reset button and start new routines, working out, eating better, those kinds of things. What we have done for the last, I think 15 years is we start the year off with a season of prayer and fasting. Fasting is different than dieting. How many know what I'm talking about? Dieting will change your body. Fasting will change your soul. And that's what prayer and fasting together are. So we have a couple resources we want you to be aware of. Number one is we have, when you walked in, you should have gotten this, it is a Seek January schedule of all of our prayer meetings. For 21 days beginning Wednesday night, we are gonna have prayer meetings at both of our campuses at 12 o'clock on noon prayer and then 6.30 p.m. And these are prayer services. So there's worship, there's prayer leaders, you come and engage and it's life-changing. If you've never been a part of one of our Seek prayer meetings, this is not the old kind of prayer meetings where you show up and you stand around and look at patterns in the carpet and agonize in your soul because it's the most morning thing that you've ever been involved in. These are gonna be powerful prayer meetings and we have a schedule of those. The other thing that we have is we have produced a Seek devotional book for this year and it's really nice, our media team did it. And inside this, it has devotions for 21 days from one of my favorite preachers, Charles Spurgeon. It also has articles in here from myself, Pastor Caleb Culver, our friend David Perkins, and then Bob Sorgi. And there are all kinds of resources about fasting. So if you're new to fasting, this is gonna help you. There's scriptures on fasting, there's the different types of fasts, there is the what, the why, the where, the how of everything that you need to know about fasting. So if you've never fasted before, this will help you. And then there's a place for you to journal throughout the 21 days. So we have these available in our bookstore. They cost us $5 to produce. So we're selling them for $5. I would encourage you to pick one up. Here's the problem, they are sold out. So instead of, this is like the last one. And so normally they're $5, but I'm selling this for $2,000. So if anybody wants this last one, see me after, actually Wednesday night, when we have our Seek gathering at 6.30pm here at the Richland campus, we will have a new shipment of them. So we sold through all of them this weekend and we ordered another batch that's gonna come in. They'll be here so either get here earlier, stick around afterwards, pick up your Seek prayer guide and here's the other thing. We throughout the month of January for Seek, we have our regular weekend services, but then we also gather on Wednesday nights. We get really crazy and fanatical by going to church twice a week. We go on Wednesday nights and these are powerful prayer worship services and we have a couple of guests that are gonna be joining us. This Wednesday night as we kick it off, I'm gonna bring a message that God laid on my heart. I kind of made reference to it earlier. That is gonna set the pace for our fast and for the new year. Following week we have one of my mentors and friends. He hasn't been here in about 10 years but he has pastors in amazing church for 40 years on the east side of the state. His name is Lauren Covarrubius from Mount Zion Church. He's gonna be here the following week. Michael Miller from the upper room in Dallas. Many of you are familiar with the worship music. Michael Miller will be here in the following. The week that we close out our 21 days, that Wednesday night is gonna be a blowout night of worship and intercession over our city and then at the end when the fast is done, we're gonna have pizza waiting in the lobby because pizza is the one thing that I crave the most when I am fasting. Anybody like that? I mean, even bad pizza, even like little oven bake my kid's toy that you make on English muffins. It's like, that's the one thing the devil tempts me. If I was Jesus, which I'm not, thank God, but if I were in the wilderness being tempted, the devil would not say turn these stones into bread. He would say turn these stones into pizza. He'd probably say turn them into a pizza hot pocket. I mean, and I would have been tempted. Because of that, we will close the fast out with fasting and then we will eat pizza and it's gonna be glorious. So join us on Wednesday nights and I just wanna encourage everybody fully engage and seek this year. If you wanna set the trajectory of your life to go deeper in God, fall more in love with what Jesus falls in love with, then do something this year that you've never done before. Find a way to up the game and engage and seek. All right, you guys in Malachi? Malachi, chapter one, verse number one. We're gonna read one verse to start this morning. Here we go. The Oracle of the Word of the Lord to Israel by Malachi. So Malachi is the last book in the Old Testament. It is the last book and Malachi is the last prophet that God sends to Israel before a 400 year period of silence where God does not speak to Israel for 400 years. And when he speaks again, we pick up the story of the gospel in Matthew when God raises up a man named John the Baptist who is the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, prepare the way for the Lord and then Jesus comes on the scene. And I believe the book of Malachi is oftentimes, it seems like the only time that it's referenced is when it comes to the subject of tiding. But there's so much more in the book of Malachi because Malachi is not just the last book and the last prophet written in the Old Testament. It's a book that I think has massive relevance to all of us in the days and the times that we live in and in our walk with God when it comes to keeping Jesus as the first love of our life. And so we've entitled this series, First Love because that's what Malachi, the oracle, the prophetic word that God gives Malachi that we just read about in verse number one is all about that. It's all about God sending Malachi to God's people, the nation of Israel and calling them to return back to their first love because they've lost that loving feeling. They've departed away from their first love. They've grown cold in their walk with God. Some interesting things that you might be interested in knowing about the book of Malachi. Number one, the name Malachi, his name actually means messenger. So not only was he a messenger, but that's actually his name. The messenger of God to God's people. And Malachi, the book of Malachi was recorded during a time in Israel's history that was pivotal. It was written in around 500 BC or about 450 BC. And it was written after God had brought them, the nation of Israel, out of Babylonian captivity. Remember in the story of Daniel and Nehemiah and different ones like that, that's all surrounding the time period where Israel was wiped off the face of the earth, the temple was destroyed, the city of Jerusalem was destroyed. Nebuchadnezzar took all of the Jews back to Babylon and then under Persia, they were there in exile and God had prophesied it by Jeremiah, said that they would be in exile for 70 years. That 70 years came and went and God raised up men like Nehemiah to rebuild the walls of the city. Ezra who was the priest to re-institute the laws of God and then Zerubbabel who was used to rebuild the house of God. So they rebuilt the temple and they're living in a time period where they've come out of exile, they're back in the land and to the Jewish people, the land meant everything. You and I kind of live where we live but we don't have any qualms with moving because our identity is not really found in where we live. It's like I've grown up in Michigan all of my life. I was born in Pontiac, grew up in Grand Rapids, moved to Kalamazoo 23 years ago. All my life in Michigan, minus two years in those two years, I moved to Kansas City, Missouri and it took me two years to realize I wanted to move home. I love Michigan, but my identity is not found in Michigan. My relationship with God is not wrapped up in living in Michigan for the Jewish people it was because the land actually was the promise that God had given to them and to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. This land is your inheritance. And as part of that land, God says you're my people and in their city of Jerusalem was the temple and the temple was the physical earth address that God lived in. So when their temple was destroyed and their city was destroyed and they were uprooted and moved to Babylon, it was like every part of their identity was challenged because not only had God given them the land but he had also given them promises of what he was going to do through them. He was gonna change the world through them. Remember the promise given in Genesis 12 and Genesis 15 to Abraham? I'm gonna bless you and make your descendants as numerous as stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore and I'm gonna bless you and through you bless all the other families of the earth. So Israel was the carrier of those promises that God was gonna raise up Israel as a nation high above all other nations. They were gonna bring the knowledge of the Lord. They were gonna usher in a golden era and the Messiah, the savior of the world would come through the line of David in the house of Israel. So everything was wrapped up in the land. It was wrapped up in the city and the temple. So when they came out of Babylon back into the land and they rebuilt the city and they rebuilt the temple they thought now God's gonna send the Messiah. And when the Messiah comes, we're no longer going to live under anybody else's oppression because even though they were in the land they didn't control the land. They were still under Persian authority and later on they would come under Roman authority. They knew that when the Messiah came they'd get their land back, they would get a king and God was going to all of a sudden unpause the purposes of God for the nation of Israel. His glory, his physical, tangible. I mean you can see it, feel it, experience it. Presence of God was once again gonna fill the temple. But they had come back into the land. They had rebuilt the temple. They'd done everything that God asked them to do and they still weren't seeing the promises. They were living after the exile but before the promises, they hadn't seen the promises. And so they did what human beings often do is they settled into a mediocre room temperature relationship with God. Their first love began to grow cold. How many know that one of the best parts of waking up in the morning is a cup of hot coffee? Anybody relate to that? If you're a tea drinker, kinda the same, not really. I'm just being honest. I mean, I have friends that live in the UK and they're just like, oh, you want a cup of tea? No, not really, like a cup of coffee. In the morning, we just got one of these Alexa devices in our house, which I swear we'd never get but now I talk to another device and I set up a smart plug so my coffee maker's plugged into the smart plug. So when I wake up in the morning, I ask Alexa, turn coffee maker on, okay. And it begins to brew the coffee and the best thing is the smell that Ethiopian Yergechev begin to flow into the carafe knowing that I am 17 steps away from a little bit of heaven in a cup. It's glorious. The best part of the coffee in the morning is when you pour it and you see the steam coming up out of it. It's like, oh, but you know, listen, you know that there is a time expiration on that cup of coffee. Because have you ever done this? You get your cup and you're just like, oh yeah, and you take a sip, then you set it down and you get wrapped up in something and you come back 20 minutes later to your cup of coffee and you, oh, there it is and you go to drink it and it's media, it's like room temperature. It's like, oh, now my belief is that there are two kinds of people in the world. There are people that microwave coffee and there are people that don't. Because there's some people on my staff who shall remain unknown and some people that used to be on our staff who still are here who shall remain unknowns and best who would take one cup of coffee and it would last them all day long because they just keep reheating it up, reheating it up, reheating it up. That is a cardinal sin. That is so wrong in so many different ways. And, you know, that first cup of coffee when it's red hot, you just know, oh, it's so good. And then as it begins to cool down, it's not as good. A lot of times that's what happens with our relationship with God. We start off red hot. Jesus is our first love. I mean, the steam is rolling off of our passion for Jesus. Because we've just been saved. The guilt, the burdens of our sin has been removed off of our life. We have this moment where we realize that there is a God and He sees us and He knows us and He loves us. And the awesomeness and the unthinkableness of the cross is a reality that has changed our life. And we're just like, oh, I wanna love God. I wanna serve God. I'll do whatever. The passion of our young faith. And the idea that all the promises of God that are contained in this book belong to us. Man, it's unthinkable. When I was a new Christian, I've said this before, but I was so overwhelmed with the fact that God didn't just exist, but God knew me and God wanted to relate to me. And the Bible all of a sudden became interesting to me. And I went out and bought a Scofield study Bible, King James, 50-pound heathen choker. And I would read that thing for hours and hours and hours because as I'm reading it, it's like God is speaking to me. It was like, these promises are for me. And there were promises and there were this sense that God was going to do something big. And I was a part of it. But what happens to a lot of us is we start like that. But it's like a cup of coffee sitting on the counter. When it's separated from its heat source, it begins to adjust to the temperature of the room that it's in. And it doesn't happen, nobody wakes up one day and says, you know what, yesterday was hot on fire for Jesus, really want to serve God, want to do it his way, his words alive on the inside of me. When I worship, I just feel him. And then the next day you wake up and say, you know what, I think I'm done with all that. I'm just gonna walk away from God. I'm just, you know, I'm gonna live like the rest of the world. I'm gonna put my focus. Now, typically it happens one degree at a time. There's a guy in our church, his name is Jeff. He's a commercial airline pilot, flies for Delta. And I asked him this because I read in a book one time, an interesting fact. And so I asked Jeff whether it was true. And he said, yeah, it's true, kind of. And the fact that I read was this. He said, if you start off in a commercial airliner in LA and you want to fly to New York and you set a course for that flight, but as you're flying, you get off course by one degree. By the time you get to the East Coast, you will have missed New York and ended up in Baltimore. Just because of one degree of change. And I asked Jeff that. And he said, well, that's kind of true. He says, but here's the bigger problem. He said, the bigger problem is if you set a course from LA to New York and you don't play the curvature of the earth and you base your flight pattern on a flat earth, on a flat map. He said, then you'll actually be more than one degree off because playing the curvature of the earth, the great circle pattern, they call it. He says, if you don't every so often, every 100 miles or whatever, if you don't readjust your destination and let the computer recourse correct, then you'll really be far off. And I thought, you know, that's kind of what happens. Israel can relate to that. They started off as being God's people with God's promises, God's dwells in their midst. Can you imagine? It's like, they saw the living God. They had experienced miracles. Prophets had been raised up. David was their king, but then they experienced all this loss, but then they experienced gaining it all back and there was kind of this sense of God is bringing us back and now it's about to happen and then it doesn't. And what began to happen is one degree at a time. They got off course. And you give that one degree of change and variation long enough and you end up in a place where Jesus isn't your first love anymore and your faith is kind of waned and you're lukewarm and you don't know how you got there. You see, what happens is we read the promises of God and we read the story of God in two dimensions and it's kind of like setting a flight pattern, but we aren't playing the curvature of reality because if you've followed Jesus for very long, been a Christian for very long, you quickly realize that life has a curve to it. The timing of God has a curve to it. Your plans, the closest or the shortest distance between two points in the spirit is not necessarily a straight line. Have you figured that out? Sometimes it's walking circles in the wilderness for 40 years. And other times it's a 400 year period of silence from the last book of the Old Testament to the next book in the New Testament. Sometimes we have to play the curve of life and realize, yeah, I'm reading the promises of God, but God's timing is not my timing. God's ways and methods aren't necessarily my ways. And if we're not careful, we can find ourselves in the same place with God that Israel was in the time of Malachi where our love and our devotion to God begins to impact the way that we live our daily lives because we'll discount God and we'll put our focus on some other things. An interesting parallel, by the way, between the book of Malachi and the book of Revelation. Malachi is the last book of the Old Testament. Revelation is the last book of the New Testament. Malachi was written by a man named the messenger. And in the book of Revelation in chapter two and chapter three, Jesus, the resurrected savior, 40 years later appears to John on the island of Patmos and he says, I want you to send messages for me, from Jesus to seven churches that were all across Asia Minor and Jesus says, you sit down and dictate the letters. And Jesus says this, he says, to the angel or the messenger of the church of Sardis, of Thyatira, of Ephesus, of Laodicea, to the messenger. Last books, messages from God to messengers. And in the letter of the book of Revelation that was written to the church of Ephesus, you know, the book of Ephesians in your Bible is the church at Ephesus. A generation after Paul wrote that book, Jesus is addressing them in a letter that he gives to John and he says this to them. In Revelation two, he says, I know your works, I know your toil and your patient endurance. How you cannot bear with those who are evil, but have tested those who call themselves apostles and are not. And you have found them to be false. I know that you are enduring patiently and bearing up for my namesake and you have not grown weary, listen to verse four. But I have this against you, that you have left your first love. That's what had happened to the Ephesian Christians. Notice it says they've got great theology. They're serving more than they've ever served before. They're being persecuted for the name of Jesus and they're not caving in on it. But something has happened to their hearts where once the fire burned bright for Jesus, now they're going through the motions because time has gone on and they thought Jesus was gonna come. They thought things were gonna be different. And just like the children of Israel in the book of Malachi, they respond to the challenges of the day that they live in by becoming disappointed in God. They respond to God in a couple of different ways. They're experiencing delay and disappointment. And the first way that they respond to God is they become discouraged. The second way is they get distracted. And then the third step in leaving our first love is they begin to develop distance. They get discouraged, distracted, and then without knowing it, there's distance, one degree at a time, and it takes them off course. Till one day, when Malachi comes to them, his prophet rolls up into town, says I've got a word from God. The entirety of the book of Malachi is about God calling his people back to himself. Return to me, return back to a first love. You see what had happened is their hearts had grown cold and it had impacted the way that they lived their lives. Have we figured out yet that the condition of our heart is not distinct and separate and compartmentalized from our behavior? Out of the heart flows the issues of life. And for Israel, this had happened. And God spends the next four chapters talking about some of these things. He says, listen, your worship is compromised. You no longer believe in my word. You begin to dismiss my word. Your marriages, you're divorcing each other because you think that if I'm not a covenant keeping God, then why should you keep covenant with the person that you're married to? It's affected your families. It's affected your worship. It's affected how you view my word. It's affected your finances. It's affected everything. And at the very end of the book of Malachi, when we get there, what we're gonna figure out is that God speaks back into them the promises of God. He says, behold, here's what I'm still going to do. I'm still going to bless you. I'm still going to bring the Messiah. And I'm still gonna rise up with healing in my wings. And I'm still gonna restore your families. I'm gonna do all those things, but you have to return to me. You've got to return to me with everything that you have. You've got to return to me. Don't allow distance to grow in your heart towards me. Look at verse number two. We're gonna read verses two through five here for just a moment. So it starts off with the Oracle of the word of the Lord to Israel by Malachi. And then it says this, verse number two. I have loved you, says the Lord. But you say to me, how have you loved us? It's not Esau Jacob's brother declares the Lord. And yet I have loved you, but Esau I have hated. I have laid waste his hill country and left his heritage to jackals of the desert. If Edom says we are shattered, but we will rebuild the ruins, the Lord of hosts says, they may rebuild, but I will tear it down. They will be called the wicked country and the people with whom the Lord is angry forever. The reason why God's angry at them is because they're attacking in their enemies of Israel. Then it says in verse five, your own eyes shall see this. And you shall say, great is the Lord beyond the borders of Israel. So what's interesting is God sends a messenger to call his people back to his first love. And basically what God is doing is he's calling a family meeting. And the first words out of God's mouth is not about the issues, it's about the condition of his heart. Because he's dealing with their heart. He says, you wanna know the condition of my heart? I love you. And I still love you. In the Hebrew language, it says, I have loved you and I still love you. How many of you like me grew up in a house where every so often dad would call a family meeting? Anybody? Okay, my dad would... Well, sometimes it was dad would scream up the stairs. I lived in pretext message days. So the way that we texted was you screamed. Hey, family meeting, beat out stairs. What, you heard me? Okay, that was texting. I have a thread now with all of my kids and Jane and me on there and it's just family thread. So now when we all get together, it's like, hey, everybody, it's all at once. Back then you had to scream. And sometimes the reason why we had a family meeting is because my mom would say this. She would say, wait till your dad gets home. Then you knew it was bad. We'd have these family meetings and family meetings from my experience were called when there was kind of a breakdown in communication and relationships in the family. And instead of going from room to room into room to having a conversation, because what would happen is siblings would get mad at each other. So mom and dad would go into one room and they'd say, well, Johnny did this. And so then they'd go into Johnny's room and say, but Billy did this. And then Billy would say, well, yeah, but what about Susie? And then you go into Susie's room and you always take their side. You never believe me. How many parents have heard that before? And they're just like, I believe you, but, and you just wanna get everybody in the same room. Let's get everybody together. So my parents would do that. And I kind of followed suit on that. And Jane and I were young when we had kids. And so when our kids were growing up, one boy, two girls, they would always get in arguments and somebody bit somebody, stole something, I don't know, just whatever. And so it'd just be like, oh, that's it. In the living room, family meeting. My kids would roll their eyes. Oh, family meeting. Cause there were two kinds of family meetings. A was when there's trouble and the other one was for devotions. And so a little side note, by the way, it does not work as a parent. Try and force your kids to read the Bible. I tried. Maybe perhaps the worst thing that can happen to you as a child is to have a pastor as your dad. Cause my thing was my kids are gonna know the Bible. So I like laminated a Bible reading program for them. I gave them each a journal and a Bible and then we met on Sunday nights. And Sunday nights in my mind was gonna be all my kids going, there only takes a spark to keep the fire going. And like reading the Bible and praying for each other and taking communion, just being holy. No, it was not holy. It was hell. And so here's what happened. I told my kids journal what you read all week long in your Bible and then I want to read it on Sunday nights. Here's what I found out later. My kids never read the Bible. They just made stuff up and wrote it in their journal so that I would think that they did. And then when we did have meetings and they would not like engage, I got mad at them and it would erupt and it was terrible. So don't force that. Okay, the other kind of family that was just bonus material. The other kind of family meetings were when there were dysfunction and family meetings can go one of a couple different ways. They can either get worse or they can resolve the problems because it's hard to hate people that you look at. If you ever noticed that we're a culture that we're much braver by text or email than we are in person. We say things in social media that we would never say if we were looking at somebody eyeball to eyeball. And so when you get people together because you see emotions, you feel it, you can engage. So it can either get worse or it can get better. A lot of times it gets worse when there's emotions and you just let people just fly off the handle. Here's what I learned. Jimmy Evans, one of my mentors taught me this. When we would pull our kids together or even if it was a one-on-one meeting, always start the conversation with affirming your love. Okay, listen, we're gonna have a family meeting. We're gonna deal with some stuff. First thing I want you to know is I love you. Nothing's gonna change that, I love you. I'm for you. This isn't just about this thing's gonna come and this thing's gonna go, but what lasts forever is I love you. When you start like that, there's typically resolution. Why? It's because there's a foundation of love that's built. Isn't it interesting that when God has a message to speak to the nation of Israel and he sends the prophet the first words out of God's mouth to his people is I have loved you and I still love you. What's God doing? God's calling a family meeting. It's a DTR to find the relationship. You guys are my people and I am your God, but your heart has become cold and we can talk about all of the reasons why. What the book of Matthew is, think about it this way. It is the transcript between a dialogue between God and his people because it is full of statements that God makes and the book of Malachi is full of statements that God's people made against God in their disappointment and discouragement. Because when God says I've loved you, look at what they say, it says, how have you loved us? How have you loved us? So, and it goes on from there. You'll notice if you'll read through the book of Malachi you'll realize pretty quickly God will make a statement and then he will say, but you've said, and it's kind of how our family meetings go. It's like, you said this, let me tell you what I'm saying. You said this, let me tell you what I'm saying. And this is what God does to the nation of Israel, but he starts not with their behavior, he starts not with their sin, he starts with his love, affirming his love. I have loved you, I have always loved you and the reason why that's significant and it's important is because the foundation, the foundation stone for you and I relating to God rightly, relating to God, the way he wants us to relate to him is built on his love, not our ability. First John says this, in this is love, in this is love. First John 4-10, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and he sent his son to be the sacrifice for our sins. First John 3-1 says, behold, what manner of love is this that the Father has bestowed on us that we should be called the children of God? You see, God's not interested in building religious structures and systems. Oftentimes when we relate to God, we're thinking in terms of religion and if you think through the lens of religion and when I say religion, I'm not talking about spirituality, I'm talking about systems, talking about systems. What mankind does is we create systems to explain God, contain God and to impart God. So we create systems. Oh, well if you wanna be right with God, you gotta do this and if you wanna be right with God, you gotta think like this and if you wanna be right with God and it's nothing wrong with those things except it's inverted. We don't do these things to be right with God, we're right with God so that we can do these things. And the reason why we're right with God all boils down to a foundation of God's first love so that he can become our first love. God loved us first. That's what we gotta come to. God loved us first. That's called grace. Sometimes we think to ourselves, well, God has some special people that he really loves more than he loves others. But look at what he says in the rest of this verse in verse number three. He talks about Jacob, he talks about Esau. He says, I wanna remind you, he said, you ask, how have you loved us? Is not Esau, Jacob's brother, declares the Lord? Yet I have loved Jacob. So I would love to just camp there and explain this but really what he's saying is I've loved you but you say to me, how have I loved you? Well, let me take you all the way back to the beginning of the story. It's Genesis 25. In Genesis 25, there's a man named Abraham who then has a son named Isaac who's the carrier of the promise. Isaac has two sons. One of them is Jacob and one of them is Esau. By all rights, Esau should receive the Abrahamic blessing, the inheritance, the birthright, the blessing from his father because that's what a first foreign gets. But do you know who God chooses? He doesn't choose Esau, he chooses Jacob. What's God saying in Malachi is this, he's like, you wanna know how I've loved you? The way that you need to stir up your first love again is go all the way back to the beginning of your story. Israel, Jacob, and remember, when you didn't have a birthright, I chose you. When your parents didn't want you to receive the blessing. Remember his dad wanted Esau. He said, when everybody else's opinion was against you, I chose you. And when your behavior couldn't earn you the rights of my love, I loved you. Remember his name's Jacob. And Jacob means deceiver, supplanter, one who takes, one who steals, one who lies. God's saying, look, I loved you in spite of your birthright. I loved you in spite of other people's opinions. I loved you in spite of your behavior. What's God painting a picture of in those few verses? He's using language that Israel would have known and understood of saying basically, I loved you before you ever loved me and I loved you for no other reason than my own grace and my own purposes. I chose to love you. I was thinking about that statement the other day and I was thinking, that's just radical. That God would choose the unchoosable and choose to love them in spite of pedigree, in spite of resume, in spite of public opinion. Cause that's not how we love. And then God reminded me of this. He says, oh, you do love like that, your children. If you're a parent in this room we're reported just raise your hand, you're a parent. Parents, if you need to have a picture of how to comprehend God's saying to you, I've loved you in spite of all the things that are messed up in spite of your background, in spite of your pedigree. If you want a picture of grace, all you need to do is think about how you loved your children. I want you to think about it. Children are born and they hand them to you, screaming. And then they keep you up all night long. They don't care about your sleep schedule. Wee, wee, wee, you can turn the speaker off, they're still gonna cry. They're not gonna stop till you go in there and give them what they want. You pop that bottle and bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop. Who else do you love that you allowed to just squirt liquid poop all over you? Who else in your life do you let do that? Oh, bro, go ahead. That's good. Now, when's the last time you just walked up to a random person sitting barefoot in a lawn chair and took their feet and go, stinky toes, stinky toes. No, you don't do that. But you do that to your kids. And think about this. Your children are born in this world. They can't take care of themselves. They have nothing to offer you. They can't converse with you. They can't do anything for you. They can't make you feel better about yourself. All they do is take, take, take, take, take. And you know what? You are madly in love with your children. Stop and ask, why do I love these kids so much? Because you made them. They were your plan, your purpose, and you've got dreams in your heart for your kids. You've got ideas in your heart. You've got visions in your heart. There is nothing you would not do for those children even though they have nothing to offer you. That's exactly what God is saying to Israel. I have loved you in spite of your stinky toes and your smelly diapers and keeping me up with your whining and your griping and your fighting and your teething and your pulling hair and you're touching the stove when I tell you not to. I have loved you. I've always loved you. Man, when you think about God in those terms, wow, how'd that happen? When you think of God's love in those terms, we quickly realize that the performance stuff, all the things that God's gonna address, because here's what he knows, God pursues you passionately, but God will also discipline you lovingly. All the issues that God needs to correct and discipline Israel on are secondary. The main thing that God's going after is their heart. He wants their heart returned to him. Stop looking at the idols. Stop looking at the world. Stop looking at your neighbor. Stop listening to your lowest base desires. Stop letting other things capture your attention and put your eyes back on me. Connect to the source because if I will blow on the embers of your heart, just hearing and re-encountering the love of God just one moment in your life will bring you back to God's first love. Just encountering his love one moment, just one second of your life. Re-encountering and saying, God loves me. Jesus loves me. This I know. For the Bible tells me so. Little ones to him belong. They are what? But he is, even in your weakness, he is strong because Jesus loves you. Let's stand up all over this room if you would. That's as basic as it gets. Here's what I wanna tell you today. What would happen if all the disappointments, all the questions, all the things that so easily distract us, all of our other obsessions were put on mute, were eclipsed and sidelined and we just put our eyes back on Jesus? How would it change our lives? How would it change your life? We make it so complicated. We're trying to figure out the algorithm and the algebraic expression of how we can have God and everything else and listen, take your eyes off of those things, lay aside your questions, all the other obsessions, the temptations and just like a child looking up into the smiling gaze of its father or mother. What if we just with our lives just put our eyes back on him, our first love? It's a God. I wanna love you like I used to love you and I wanna love you the way you've loved me. Here's what I know. Everything else takes care of itself. It just takes care of itself. We don't have to try and improve, be a better version of ourselves and press God, earn our way back in. It will all just take care of itself if our heart is centered on our first love and over the next couple of weeks during the month of January and Seek, that's what this is about. It's about for all of us, whether you're a pastor, a worship leader or whether you're a teacher, a mom, a grandparent, we are all being called. We've all been given a message to put our eyes back on Jesus. Wherever we're at, no matter how many degrees we're off base, just putting our eyes back on Jesus. Just want you to buy your heads with me in this room. Portage as well, I wanna pray for us. Doesn't matter who you are, where you are, whether you're watching by video or you're live in this room, if today you say, I know that there has been a temperature change in my passion for Jesus. And my prayer today is that God, I want my heart to burn brightly and passionately for Jesus again. I'm not talking about the how, I'm not talking about the why, you're just saying yes. I'm saying yes to Jesus. He's calling for my attention. He's calling a family meeting and I'm saying yes. I'm putting my eyes back on Jesus if that just wants you to lift up your hand. Just as a statement of faith, yes, I'm putting my eyes back on Jesus. There's been a pressure change. There's been a degree of alteration. There's been some distance. There's been some disappointment, but none of that matters today. I wanna put my eyes back on Jesus. Not saying you're not saved. I'm just saying you just wanna, you wanna burn bright for Jesus once again. Just lift up your hand. Lord, you see our hands, you see our hearts. The reason why we love you is because you loved us in the first place. My prayer is that you will help us to re-encounter your love, your first love, the love that changed everything, the love that rescued us, the love that pulled us out of the Myrie clay and put us on the rock of Jesus in the first place. The grace radically changed our lives. Only you can do that God and we're asking you today to do that in our lives over the next several weeks. And we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.