Thursday 12 April 2012

Love is all around us

Following on from last week’s blog, I’d like to share some other nuggets from the Exceptional Women’s Conference.

In case you missed the last entry, the theme for the conference was LOVE, based on John 4:7, which says: “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God”.

Guest speaker Marion Meyers (senior pastor of The River Church in Devon) took two of the four main speaker spots at the event, which ran March 30-31.

I can’t say her teaching was exactly comfortable to listen to, but it was certainly relevant, poignant and incredibly powerful. At least, that’s how I felt about it.

Her first session was entitled “Looking for love in the wrong places”. She introduced the topic by explaining how she once took a play therapy course that talked about the concept of a ‘love tank’. In response to this, she told her two children that when they were hungry or thirsty, they had a little tank that mummy would fill when it was empty. In the same way, she told them they had a ‘love tank’ that she would fill with hugs any time they felt they needed love.

But she believes many women who grew up in homes where mum and/or dad were AWOL struggle to fill their ‘love tank’; many don’t even know how to do this. As a result, the tank gets broken and leaky; it never feels full enough.

This, Pastor Marion said, is something that God anticipated many moons ago. “For My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, and hewn themselves cisterns—broken cisterns that can hold no water” (Jeremiah 2:13).

But that’s just the bad news. She pointed out that God is too gracious and merciful to allow people to remain in this broken state. His response is to provide a fountain of living water that never runs dry and permanently quenches our thirst for love (John 4:7-19).

“My joy, peace and happiness do not rely on anyone else loving or being nice to me,” Pastor Marion commented. “When we are filled up with living water there is nothing more satisfying.”

Like the woman at the well with the six ‘husbands’, she claimed women who look for love in the wrong places will be constantly unhappy, vulnerable and tormented; and they will always struggle to comprehend the love of God. The solution, she said, is to practically come to know the love of Christ for ourselves.

Carrying on from her Friday session, Pastor Marion’s Saturday slot, entitled “Bad Love” began with Ephesians 3:17-19, which talks about being “rooted and grounded in love” and knowing “the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God”.

She played a clip from Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance”, which includes lyrics such as: “I want your ugly, I want your disease; I want your everything, as long as it's free; I want your love.”

As the song shows, some women would rather have bad love than no love, and this means we allow ourselves to make excuses for the people in our lives that treat us badly. “Love and bad can’t go in the same sentence!” Pastor Marion said. “Love is empowering and accepting; it wants you to fly! It doesn’t want to squeeze you into a box and keep you locked up.”

But Pastor Marion claimed that God is into “swapsies”; that he trades beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning and the garment of praise for a spirit of heaviness. And that if people allow this to happen they will never thirst again. “If you can get loving yourself right you won’t put up with bad love,” she concluded.

As Solomon says in Proverbs 27:7: “A satisfied soul loathes the honeycomb, but to a hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet.”

Read more from Joy in the next edition of Liberti magazine.

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