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.”
