Tyler BriggsApr 30, 2017Fort WorthRomans 5:6-11; Romans 5:6-8; Romans 5:9-10; Romans 5:11

In This Series (36)
Join The Journey: A Tour of Romans
Blake HolmesDec 31, 2017
Christmas Eve 2017
Todd WagnerDec 24, 2017
Contentment, Longing and Christmas
Todd WagnerDec 17, 2017
An Update on the Mission in Fort Worth
Tyler BriggsNov 19, 2017Fort Worth
Evening with the Elders
Beau Fournet, Dean Macfarlan, Todd WagnerNov 12, 2017
An Evening with Eric Metaxas
Todd Wagner, Eric MetaxasOct 18, 2017
What a Compassionate God Wants You to Consider as Your Next Yes
Todd WagnerOct 1, 2017
Worship Together: You Are the Church
Harrison RossSep 3, 2017
Worship Together: The Future of the Church in the Hands of Parents
Wes ButlerSep 3, 2017
Worship Together: Remember. Consider. Imitate
David PenuelSep 3, 2017
Worship Together: Influencing the Next Generation by Preparing Ourselves and Investing in Our Children
Jason Bradshaw, Patrick BlockerSep 3, 2017
Do Good People Go To Heaven?
David MarvinAug 6, 2017
Step Up in Faithfulness, Discover and Invest Your Talents for Christ
Jeff WardJul 30, 2017
Regretful Hearts v. Repentant Hearts
Jeff ParkerJul 30, 2017
Leadership Matters…and Other Seminal Truths
Todd WagnerJul 23, 2017
The Future and Hope of Your Life and Our City
Todd WagnerJul 9, 2017
Keeping Short Accounts
Adam TarnowJul 2, 2017
Soldiers, Athletes & Farmers: A Biblical Look at the Spiritual Life
Blake HolmesJun 25, 2017
Why Your First Impression of Your Father Matters
Todd WagnerJun 18, 2017
Extraordinary Parenting
Jonathan PokludaMay 28, 2017
Baptism Sunday
Todd WagnerMay 21, 2017
Why Every Week is a Pastors' Conference
Todd Wagner, Blake Holmes, John McGeeMay 7, 2017
The End of the Search
Tyler BriggsApr 30, 2017Fort Worth
The Christian in Culture
Derek MathewsApr 30, 2017Plano
4 Dead-Ends to Spiritual Growth
Blake HolmesApr 30, 2017
A Spectacle of Glory: An Interview with Joni Eareckson Tada
Todd Wagner, Joni Eareckson TadaApr 23, 2017
Easter: “It is True”
Todd WagnerApr 16, 2017
Good Friday 2017
John Elmore, Wes ButlerApr 14, 2017
Fort Worth Raise The Mark
Gary Stroope, Beau Fournet, Tyler BriggsFeb 26, 2017Fort Worth
Seeing God as a Perfect Father
Adam TarnowFeb 19, 2017
Who You Are, Eternally
Jonathan PokludaFeb 5, 2017
Freedom from Following
Jonathan PokludaJan 29, 2017
Four Traits Christ’s Disciples Share
Jeff ParkerJan 29, 2017
Inquiring of The Lord
Jonathan PokludaJan 22, 2017
Fort Worth's Opportunity... A Day We Can't Wait to See
Todd WagnerJan 22, 2017Fort Worth
Psalms 1
Blake HolmesJan 1, 2017

In This Series (39)

This morning we're going to be talking about love, which is a grand concept we get to dive into. Specifically, how we consistently search for love every moment of every day throughout our lives. I want to start by taking you back a few years into my life when I first got out of college and started my career, a couple of years into it, an interaction I had with one of my bosses. Before I pursued vocational ministry and started on this track, I was involved in the health and fitness industry through college, and even after college I was a personal trainer.

I ended up getting into fitness management, and one of my clients had a good friend who was in commercial real estate, and one of their business models was that they would buy these empty strip centers, place a very large, nice health club in the middle of it to create foot traffic, and then use the foot traffic to fill out the rest of the lease spots. (That was free if you're in commercial real estate, if you want a little tutorial there.)

What happened is these guys hired me, and I went to work for them to help design and manage these health clubs. It was two brothers, and I looked at these guys. They were wildly successful. They were very wealthy. They lived on the best street in the best part of town. They had vacation homes all over the US. They drove nice cars. They knew everybody. They went and did anything they wanted to do anytime they wanted to do it.

I looked at these guys as a 25-year-old and thought, "Man, that's the life! Who wouldn't want to do that? That looks like a ton of fun." As a young man going to work for these guys, I thought, "Okay, here's the deal. I want what they have, so if I could just get them to love me as an employee, like if they truly love me and are blown away by the work I do, if I earn their acceptance and approval, then I can begin to ride on their coattails and start to obtain everything they have." So I desired my bosses to love me more than anything else.

What that led to the first six months I worked for them was me working hour after hour after hour after hour. The name of the game in the health and fitness industry is membership sells, so I was getting after it, and it was wildly successful. We designed and built the health club. We had a couple thousand members signed up before it ever opened. It gets time. We do a soft opening to kind of build some noise, and then three months into the club being opened we had this big grand open celebration. You know, we're cooking food.

It resembled our baptism Sunday except we weren't baptizing people. It was a little less holy. We were selling memberships to a health club. But we have this day. We run a huge special. It goes phenomenally well. We sign up hundreds of people. We have the big ribbon cutting. You know, the chamber of commerce comes out. We dedicate the new business, and I'm like, "This is awesome." I'm making commissions left and right.

The day ends, and my boss, one of the brothers, grabs me and walks me back to the office and sits me down and says, "Hey, Tyler, how do you think today went?" I'm like, "Amazing! It couldn't have gone any better." I explained to him the reasons why. I'm thinking, "Man, I'm in. He's going to love me from the success of this day." He looks across the table at me and says, "Really? I think it was a miserable failure." A punch in the gut. The reasons why is there weren't a few amenities around to offer to people when they came in, but I was a personal trainer. I didn't know how to do one of these things.

The point of it was I had worked incredibly hard to get this guy to love me, and it fell way short. When I realized that he didn't, that put me into a tailspin of disappointment and despair that I stayed in for the next year and a half as I tried everything I could to win this man's love back, to win his approval back. Call it acceptance. Call it approval. Call it love. The root of it is love, and it is what we are all pursuing all the time.

When I didn't have it, I sacrificed a lot to get it. I sacrificed my family. Lindsay and I had been married for three years, and I sacrificed the pursuit of my wife in pursuit of being loved by this man. It's not just me. First Corinthians 10:13 says, "No temptation has overtaken you but such as is common to man…" This desire in my heart to want to be loved is a common desire that exists for each and every one of us in this room.

I hope you've realized at this point the love I'm talking about is not a romantic love but a love that comes from acceptance and being valued and being deemed as significant and worthy. The root of it is love, and all of us experience this type of longing in our hearts to be loved. You don't have to look very far to see that we're searching for love. To go to the romantic side of it just for a moment, all of us are seeking that at some level.

If you just go online and Google how many dating websites there are, you would see that there are over 900 dating websites in existence. Think whatever you will about that. That's not the point. That just magnifies or highlights the truth that we are all searching for love. You have the eHarmony, Match.com, Watermark Mingle… (Oh, you caught that. Not really, but some of you were excited, and that's okay. That does not exist. That was a joke, but thanks for paying attention. I was just checking you there.)

You don't have to look any further than the enormous amount of time and money people invest in trying to be loved by others, being seen as significant by others, from the time we spend researching and spending money on diets and exercise and cosmetics and clothes to get people to value us. I mean, I bought this shirt just for today so that you would love me. That's how crazy this whole thing is. (If you don't like it, my wife is out of town, so I blame it on her.)

We'll do anything. You don't have to look any further than the epidemic of pornography that is ravaging our culture, as men and women look to this fantasy land where they are the pinnacle of the center of attention to be worshiped and feel loved by this imaginary world that does not really exist, and it is tearing us apart. Our search for love is a problem, and it's not a search that's only unique to one or two of us. It's a search that is common to all of us.

Our relentless search for love wears us out. It hurts our relationships. When a husband tries to prove his value to his boss so that his boss will love him, it fills him with stress and anxiety, because he's constantly gauging his performance. Is he good enough to be loved? A wife is constantly searching for love from her husband, and when her husband doesn't pursue her and make her feel loved in a way that she would desire, she begins to seek affection or love from those outside her marriage. That may lead to something and it may not, but it's still the issue of the heart.

When a person becomes discontent in their singleness because they want to be loved so badly they begin to compromise their purity for the sake of earning love from someone it fills them with guilt, shame, and regret, not satisfaction. When you search to be loved in your Community Group (I spend a lot of my time with Community Groups, so I have to go here this morning), you try to get them to pursue you and make you feel loved. You're trying to look to them to meet all of the needs in your life, and they never can, so you get frustrated at the very people God has placed in your life as a provision for you.

So we get frustrated. Our relentless search for love wears us out and hurts other people. It usually plays out in one of two ways. You have achievers in the room, and then you have other people who are passive or who withdraw, but all of us are a combination of both. In our desire to be loved, we try to achieve. We'll work really hard. We'll put in a lot of time and effort to try to perform well for people, to get a lot of accomplishments stacked up so other people would value us and see us as worthy of their affection.

Others withdraw because they don't want to take any risk of failure, because if they fail people are going to think less of them. In reality, we're all a combination of both of those. We try to achieve in areas when we know we'll succeed and people will think well of us, and then we shy away from those opportunities God may put in our lives to be faithful, but we refuse to take them because we're worried about failing, and we think it may make people love us less.

It's a problem. It affects our church. It affects our families. It affects our ability to love others. But there's hope. This morning what I'm going to talk to you about is how God frees us from the relentless search for love forever. Specifically, three things we're going to look at is how you can stop searching for love because God has brought the greatest love to you, how he has given you an unlimited supply, and through resting in that you can finally begin to start experiencing joy and enjoying relationships.

We're going to do that through looking at a text in the book of Romans. We're going to be in Romans 5:6-11. We're not in a series here, so we're diving right into the middle of the book of Romans. Just a quick bit of context. What is the book of Romans? The book of Romans is the greatest theological explanation of love that has ever been written, and we are diving straight into the heart of this book where God gives the solution of why we no longer have to be bound to this search for love but we can be set free.

These six verses could and probably should be divided into a six-week series. It is rich with biblical truth, but there's one problem with doing a six-week series. I usually get one week a year to preach, so we have today to cover it all. So instead of taking the street tour of this passage and seeing all of the great things in there, we're going to take the flyover of it and look at the main truth that overrides this entire passage. We're going to see how God frees us from the relentless search for love forever. We're going to jump into verses 6-8 to start. The apostle Paul is writing.

"For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will hardly die for a righteous man; though perhaps for the good man someone would dare even to die. But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us."

So what's the overriding truth in there I want you to look at? Chapters 1-4 in the book of Romans are talking about the consequences of what happens when we search for love apart from God. Then right here in this verse Paul picks it up and says, "While we were still helpless." While we were helplessly searching for love in places we could never find it, not even knowing where to go to find a love that will satisfy our hearts, something amazing happened. God made a provision for us to stop searching. He didn't ask us to search. He didn't ask us to come to him. He brought his love to us.

While we were helpless, God brought a hero, and that hero is Jesus Christ. So while we were busy making a mess of our lives, looking for love apart from him, God, as a loving Father, steps in and says, "Hey, I can't stand the sight of what's happening to my children as they seek satisfaction and acceptance in places and people where they're never going to find it, so I'm going to bring it to them in a way that they cannot miss it. I myself am going to leave the throne of heaven, the comfort of heaven, and come to them and show them that I value them even more than I value my own life. Surely they will turn to me and receive this love."

That's what he has done. As you've been helplessly searching for love and not finding it, God has brought the greatest love to you. The incarnation, God becoming man, is his pursuit of us when we were not pursuing him. He has come to clean up the mess we made when we were helplessly searching. In all of our searching for love, what we're really doing is crying out with a question. "Do I matter? Do I matter enough for anyone to love me unconditionally?" At the cross, Jesus gives you that answer, and that answer is, "You matter. You are loved. You are loved far more than you can ever imagine, and I love you more than I even love my own life."

1.You can stop searching for love, because the greatest love has come to you. While you were still helpless, couldn't do anything to help yourself, God has brought that love to you. Just as a sidenote, this concept we're talking about this morning is a simple truth of the Scriptures. It is known by most. Hopefully it's new to some today, but what can happen is we begin to take this well-known truth, and it loses its power in our lives.

The truth that God loves you enough to leave heaven and become a man and live the life you never could and die the death you deserved so you may be forgiven of your sins and reconciled back into a relationship with him is not new, but the danger is that it begins to lose its power. So if you're sitting there and you've already thought during the course of this message, "Oh, I've heard this before, and it doesn't help me," I know the reason why it doesn't help you.

It's because you have too low a view of God and too high a view of man. You think God is really not that important and whomever it is you're pursuing love from is ultimately important. We have forgotten who God is and who we are. Who is man? Man is needy. Man gets thrown off when he gets a bad night of sleep, when he has a poor interaction with someone, when something bad happens at work. His ability to give love is limited because he's finite. He's created. He is dependent. He is ever-changing.

But who is God? He is unchanging. His joy and his capacity for love are unlimited and not dependent on any circumstances or any other person. His love for you is unconditional, and it will never change. That's why our hearts will only be satisfied when we receive the greatest love that has ever come to us, something that is never going to come from this world, and that can only come from God.

So if you find yourself having trouble finding rest in this truth, you need to go back and remind yourself who man is and who God is. Man will always let you down, but God will never let you down. His love never fails. Our love always falls short. The solution to us ending that relentless search for love is that God sent the greatest love to us.

I want to introduce you to my daughter. This is Lyla Rose. She is as cute as a bell. I love her to death. She is now 18 months old. Unfortunately, Lindsay and Lila are out of town this weekend, but I love her to death. She's a toddler now. I think after they're a year old they officially become a toddler, but when she was still a baby she was outstanding. I'm about to make a lot of new parents who didn't have this angry. She slept well. She ate well. She didn't fuss a lot.

She didn't get sick until she was 9 months old, which was outstanding, but when that happened it was not so much fun. When she was about 9 months old, we were on our way to a Community Group meeting. We had just loaded Lyla up in her car seat, and we were taking off to go to Community Group. We get no more than two minutes from the house, and the poor thing got sick all over herself, all over the back seat of the car.

But you know what? We had to get to Community Group, because that's what our agenda was, so we left her in her vomit and went about our business. She was crying. She was helpless to do anything for herself, but, by golly, we got to Community Group. I hope you're appalled at that, because that is not what we did. No loving father would leave their child in a mess. No. We canceled our plans. We turned around, went back to the house, and as my baby girl was crying, it hurt me.

I got her out of that car seat, picked her up against me, got sickness all over me, went inside, cleaned her up, held her tight, and rocked her until she fell asleep. I came to her rescue when she was helpless to help herself. That's imperfect. That falls so far short of God's love for you, but that's what God has done in a far greater way when you were helpless. He doesn't leave you there. He comes to you.

As you are helplessly searching for love, he's not letting you stay in that mess. If you're in that mess right now, he doesn't want you to stay there. He has brought his love to you. You can stop searching for love, because the greatest love has come to you. That's the first reason. Paul doesn't stop there. He gives us another reason. He keeps going in verses 9-10. "Much more then…" Much more than what? "Much more than the fact that I left heaven and came and gave my life so you could have life and know that I love you beyond all else. Much more than that."

"…having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through Him. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life." Paul says the same things back to back. Let me translate that.

He says, "If God saved you while you were his enemy, how much more, then, is he going to keep you saved now that you're his friend?" If God showed you his love while you were hostile to him, how much more will you experience and revel in and remain in his love now that you have been brought back into a relationship with him? There is nothing that separates you anymore. How much more now? "My love is not going to run out." That's what he's declaring.

2.You can stop searching for love, because you have an unlimited supply. It's never going to run out. God is never going to remove it from you. He doesn't change. We often think the cross is all there is to Christianity. There are times when I've been in spiritual conversations with people and get the opportunity to share the gospel with them, and it comes to a point where they receive Christ, and then they ask a very important question. They say, "Now what?"

It's like they know there has to be something more, and there is. It's to enjoy this new relationship. The expression of God's love for you at the cross was not the end but the beginning. It's the beginning of you beginning to experience this unlimited supply God gives you in your life, a supply that's never going to run out and, therefore, never going to leave you in a place where you have to look for it elsewhere.

For those of us in this room who have come to receive the love of Christ and placed our trust in him for our salvation, it is crazy for us to continue this frantic search for love in all of these different places from all of these different people. It doesn't make sense. When we search for love in this world, we must keep searching, because every place that we find it is going to have a limited supply. It's never going to be able to sustain us.

That's why we get frustrated, that's why we get tired, and that's why we begin to hurt other people when we're not feeling loved, because they can never satisfy us. It's similar to snorkeling. This June, Lindsay and I will have been married for 10 years. We're really looking forward to that. Ten years ago, we were just about to graduate from college when we got married. When we did… I had saved for my entire duration of college to afford it.

We went to this all-inclusive resort down in Mexico. I don't know if you've ever been to one of these things. It was paradise. It was unbelievable. All of the food we wanted and amazing pools and the beach and people waiting on us hand and foot. It was incredible. But did you know when you go to one of these all-inclusive resorts they do something really tricky? They talk to you about these excursions.

These excursions are where they try to get you to pay money to leave paradise. It makes no sense at all, but we didn't know. We'd never done this before. This wasn't a part of our upbringings. So we go in and we're like hook, line and sinker. We're like, "We're doing one of these." They have all of these different things lined up. You can go on a Jeep tour, you can go on this hike, or you can go on this fishing trip. I was like, "I want to do that," but that would not be a good way to start my marriage, so we didn't do the fishing trip.

We came down to two options. One was snorkeling, and the other was scuba diving. One was significantly more expensive than the other, and we were just about to graduate college, so we took snorkeling instead of scuba diving. The snorkeling trip… They load you up on this boat and take you out with all of these other people who just got suckered in through the con artist in the excursion room to take you on this trip.

So you get there, and the guy who's in the boat gives you a snorkel and these goggles, and he gives this little safety talk. "It's beautiful down there. You're going to want to spend as much time looking at it as you can." He jumps off and gives you an example. With his little snorkel he'll take a deep breath of air, and then he dives down and stays down there for a long time. He comes up and blows the water out, and he's like, "Oh yeah, it's about to be good."

You jump in the water, and then about two strokes in you have waves crashing over the top of your snorkel. You're choking on sea water, having no fun at all. You kind of get your bearings. You're like, "Okay, I'm going to go deep," so you take a deep breath, try to copy that guy, and you go down, and you realize that he has probably been doing this his whole life and he can hold his breath for a while. I can make it about 15 seconds.

I think I'm about to drown, so I'm frantically going back up to the surface, trying to breathe, getting more water in, and it's like for 10 minutes… This is like a two-hour excursion. After the first 10 minutes of up, down, up, down, search for air, get air, go back, get air, go back, I'm worn out, hanging on the side of the boat with all of my other poor saps who got conned into this, thinking, "This is terrible. Why did we leave paradise?"

Finally, it's over. Lindsay and I load up, go back, and later that day we encountered the group of people who went scuba diving. We're angry and bitter, and they're talking about how amazing their experience was. It was unbelievable. The difference was when they jumped off the boat to go enjoy the beauty of a reef and the fish that surround it, they had all the air they needed. They didn't have to frantically go back up and down and back up and down to try to resupply their air, because they had all the air they needed.

As followers of Christ, we have a choice to make. Do we want to be snorkelers or do we want to be scuba divers? We have all the love we need, but the problem is we act like we don't, and we spend all of our time relentlessly searching for that next breath of love that we're going to receive from somebody, knowing that it's not going to last and we're going to have to keep looking for more. But we don't have to. You don't have to. You have all that you need in Christ. You can stop searching for love, because you have an unlimited supply.

Paul is going to tell us one more thing in this passage. There is only one response to knowing and believing these truths. He continues. "And not only this…""Not only the fact that I brought the greatest love to you, that it's an unlimited supply that's never going to run out. Not only that, but if you truly rest in that, something amazing is going to happen in your life." This is what he says. "…but we also exult in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received the reconciliation."

I probably need to explain this, because none of you have used the word exult in the past lifetime. What does exult mean? Exult means to revel, to glory, to gloat, to boast, to wallow, to rejoice. What Paul is saying is that the song of the loved is joy. He's saying, "If you know this truth, that God brought his love to you and it's never going to run out, you will start to experience joy for the first time in your life, a joy that's not going to run out, that's not dependent on circumstances or your performance or any other person."

3.You can stop searching for love and start experiencing joy and enjoying relationships. That sounds good, doesn't it? To not be frustrated week in and week out or day in and day out about how your boss responded to you or your spouse responded to you or your peers whose friendship you're desiring have responded to you, to no longer be frustrated with your Community Group because of what they do or don't do.

You have all the love you need in Christ; therefore, your joy is not contingent upon your circumstances, your performance, or any other person and the way they respond to you. When we give our hearts to anyone or anything but God and search to be satisfied by love there, one thing is for certain. You will always end up disappointed, because they have a limited capacity to love. God has an unlimited capacity to love.

Without the gospel we are doomed to the relentless search for love that will never satisfy that's going to continue to wear us out and cause us to hurt other people out of frustration, but with the gospel we are free. God sets us free to experience joy and to enjoy relationships. Augustine, a famous theologian in the fourth century, long before us, put it this way. As he speaks of this topic, he says, "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you."

Until we rest in God's love for us, we will never experience joy. That person who you are hoping will satisfy that desire of your heart will always let you down, but when you find the solution for your restlessness in Christ, you'll find that rest. You'll have that joy. You'll no longer need anything from other people, and therefore you can actually love other people. The only response to this is joy. Another great theologian, Buddy the Elf, put it this way.

[Video]

Buddy: I'm in love, and I don't care who knows it!

[End of video]

That's it. It's to celebrate. That's the kind of people other people want to be around. Your greatest opportunity for evangelism, to tell people about this God who you love and who loves you is to revel in joy over his love for you. People are going to say, "What's different? How come this circumstance in your life has not thrown you into a tailspin?"

You can say, "Let me tell you why. Because I know I'm loved, and I'm in love, and I want you to know about it, so let me tell you." It's the only right response. Once we find rest for our hearts in God, in Christ, our searching stops and our joy begins. We stop trying to squeeze love out of other people and start being able to give it to them, because, after all, we have an unlimited supply.

To circle back to what we talked about in the beginning, when you stop searching for love and start actually enjoying the love of Christ, you become free to love your wife even when she's not loving you in return, even when there's not the respect you hope to receive. Therefore, you don't have to seek it in outlets of pornography or approval from your boss at work, and then you can begin to be a source of life in your family and not a source of destruction, because you are satisfied in God's love for you.

When you stop searching for love and are satisfied by God's love, you'll be able to stop getting frustrated with your husband when he prioritizes work over family. You don't need his love because you are full in the love of Christ. Therefore, you can come alongside him, not out of frustration and anger but as a faithful helpmate, to encourage, to support, and even to admonish and point back in a way that reflects God's love for your husband.

When you stop searching for love in your children and are fully supplied by God's love for you, you can stop placing expectations on your children that are going to crush them, that they can never stand up underneath the weight of, and you can start being a father or a mother who reflects God's love for them and is able to give love to them and not take it from them because you are full with the love of Christ.

When you stop searching for love in the acceptance and affection of your friends, you can actually start being a friend because you're not trying to take anything from them. You are free to give of yourself to them. When you stop searching for love in a dating relationship and find contentment in the love of Christ, you can start trusting God with your singleness and basing your value not on whether or not you're being pursued but on the fact that you have been pursued by Jesus Christ, and you don't have to compromise yourself to earn the affection of anyone.

When you stop searching for love in the approval of your boss and are satisfied in the love of God, you can stop feeling worried and anxious about your job and about your performance and can actually start being a faithful employee, to be faithful to work unto the Lord and not to men. When you stop searching for love in the acceptance and pursuit of your Community Group members and are satisfied by the love of God through an abiding relationship with him, you can stop looking to the members of your Community Group to meet all of the needs for love in your life. You can have those met in Christ; therefore, you can start giving love to them and meeting their needs.

When we begin to have Community Groups and a church and people all over the city who love this way because of the way they know they are loved, something amazing happens. Gospel conversations happen all over the place, because people want to know, "How come you can endure this differently?" and you can say, "Let me tell you. Let me tell you about someone who came into my life and brought the greatest love to me that will never be matched anywhere else, who supplies it unlimitedly and, therefore, frees me up to experience joy and enjoy relationships."

When you stop searching for love and are satisfied in the love of Christ, you are set free to experience joy and enjoy relationships. A few months ago, I lost my keys. When I get home every day, my keys always go in one of the same places. So I get home, and it either goes on the entry table or on the bookshelf or on the island in the kitchen or on my nightstand or on my dresser or by my sink. You can tell why my keys get lost.

Well, there was a morning where I couldn't find them anywhere, so I'm searching around the house. "They're not here. Okay, they're not on the entry table. They're not on the bookshelf. They're not here. They're not here." I go through it three or four times, and I'm getting late. I'm a person who struggles with control and the way people perceive me, so I'm thinking, "You know what? If I'm late, this is going to be a problem." Punctuality is a pet peeve of mine.

So the frustration is boiling over, and because they're not in any of the 12 places I normally keep them I think, "The woman. It must have been Lindsay." Because if they're not where I normally put them, she must have been cleaning the house or picking up after my mess and put them somewhere. So I go over. "Lindsay, where are my keys?" As you can guess, that did not go well. In my frustration I'm like, "I don't know where they are. Where did you put them?"

She's like, "I didn't put them anywhere." So at one point I just look up, and I'm like, "Oh gosh, what am I going to do?" Then I think, "Oh man, I'm about to eat my words." They've been in my pocket the whole time. That's silly, right? But what's even more silly is that what our search for love boils down to is we are searching for something we already possess. You need not look elsewhere. We have all that we need in Christ.

So my encouragement for you this morning is to not let a simple but powerful truth pass by without grabbing hold of it tightly and never letting it go but to realize that God has made provision to set you free from your relentless and frantic search to find love apart from him. He brought it to you. It's all that you're ever going to need, and when you choose to rest in that, get ready, because it's the beginning.

It's the beginning of experiencing the abundant life Jesus promised he came to give. So let's rest in that. Let's let our joy overflow, and let's watch people flock toward us to want to know what's the difference and get to see many people come to faith as you share about the way Christ has loved you. Let me pray for you.

Father, you are good. We do not deserve this. In all the ways that we have continued to run and rebel against you, what we deserve is to not experience the love you have for us, but you don't give us what we deserve. You give us something far greater than we could ever imagine, something that is not of this world, something we really can't even miss because the way you've made it known and evident to all men as you left your heavenly throne, a place where there's no pain, no suffering, no sorrow, no loss of fellowship or lacking of love, and set it all aside to come and express your love to us.

So I pray, I ask, Father, that, though I believe these things, you would strengthen me in my unbelief. On the days where I tend to think I need to be satisfied by love apart from you, may I remember it's never going to happen. May we run quickly into your presence to receive love, to be set free from the relentless search, that we may experience the abundant life you came to give us. Father, help us to rest in you.

I pray that if there are any of my friends here in this room who this is new to, that you would change their heart, that you would let this truth sink deeply into them and it would change them forever. I pray if there's somebody who came in this morning, whether it be because they lost their keys or something else going on in their life, and they are frustrated with people, Father, that you would take it from them, that you would not allow their circumstances, their performance, or the way people are responding to them in their lives to derail the love you have come to give them to give them rest.

Help this be true of us. Help us to then love others with the type of love you've given to us. Help us be a city set on a hill, a light in the darkness, proclaiming the good news that you have come to set us free to experience joy and enjoy relationships. Now, Father, let us respond to that truth in song and in worship. We love you, amen.