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.

Love is in the air

Last weekend I was almost literally blown away by everything that happened at the Exceptional Women’s Conference at my church (Carmel Christian Centre).

The theme 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”.

During the two-day conference, Pastor Michelle di Somma and guest speakers Yvonne Brooks and Marion Meyers unpicked what it means to love God, ourselves and our ‘neighbour’.


The teaching was too powerful not to share, so I’ll give you some titbits from Yvonne Brooks, first assistant pastor at the New Jerusalem Apostolic Church in Birmingham who, by the way, is absolutely hilarious.

If He can love me, I can

Pastor Yvonne’s first teaching session focused on the importance of loving ourselves. She explained that in Matthew 22:39, Jesus likens the second commandment – ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’ – to the first – ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind’. From this we can see how God presupposes that we already love ourselves.

“God, the king of heaven and earth, loves us!” she exclaims. “He has set his love upon us.”

According to Pastor Yvonne, we deflect our feelings onto others, making them appear ugly because we feel ugly ourselves. She joked that since she started loving herself, all the ugly people have disappeared! On a serious note, though, her advice was for all of us to go through our ‘emotional closets’; to face our ‘unlovable’ parts, deal with them and move on.

She drew attention to the fact that Matthew 19:19, Luke 10:27 and James 2:8 reiterate the importance of loving our neighbour as we love ourselves, adding that when scripture refers to something over and over again, it means that it’s a subject that is close to God’s heart. The Bible makes it abundantly clear that in order to love our neighbour we must first love ourselves.

“We need to see what God sees when He looks at us,” Pastor Yvonne says. “Satan will give you ten good reasons why you shouldn’t love yourself; he’s your enemy! But God has given us the victory again and again and again.” She claims that if we can just learn to love God, ourselves and our neighbour, all the other commandments will be taken care of!

“Neither do I condemn you”

Pastor Yvonne also took the final session on Saturday evening, basing it on the story of the woman caught in adultery (John 8). She reminded us how with one sentence – “He who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at her first” – Jesus silenced and disarmed the woman’s accusers.

If anybody could have judged, condemned and lectured, it was Jesus. But He didn’t even entertain the idea, and neither should we. “God won’t listen to anyone’s accusations about you,” she said reassuringly. “Now is the time of grace.”

According to Pastor Yvonne, Jesus came so the woman could be free, justified and live outside the shadow of her past. After coming face to face with Jesus it is very unlikely she went back to her old way of life, and neither should we, she concluded.

Loving myself isn’t something I had spent much time thinking about, but the teaching made it clear that it is one of God’s commands and that it is important to Him. It doesn’t mean we should be arrogant and think we are better than anyone else, it simply means that we should consider ourselves as our heavenly father does – with mercy, forgiveness and unconditional love.

Often we’re our own harshest critics, going over and over the mistakes we’ve made and continually condemning ourselves for them. For many of us it’s time to draw a line in the sand, and to allow God’s forgiveness to liberate us from sin and condemnation.

You can register now for the 2013 conference at www.exceptionalwomen.co.uk. 

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