Mike Bickle emphasizes the necessity of experiencing God's affections as a pathway to fulfilling our destiny. He explains that knowing the love of Christ is not merely intellectual but requires a heartfelt experience that transforms us and equips us for our purpose. Bickle warns that without this deep connection to God's love, we risk falling short of our full potential and succumbing to temptations that arise with success. He encourages believers to actively seek and abide in God's love, which empowers them to run towards Him in times of weakness rather than away. Ultimately, Bickle calls for a deeper, experiential relationship with God that transcends mere knowledge and leads to a vibrant spiritual life.

Father, we come to you in the name of Jesus. And Lord, we ask you for the experience of your affections. We want to feel what you feel when you look at us. Lord, we're asking for a Holy Spirit supernatural encounters with you through the word of God, where you reveal your heart to us. And we thank you in the name of Jesus, amen. Roman number one, transformed by encountering the affections of God. A, to know the love of Christ means to know by experience the love of Christ. That's what Ephesians chapter 3, verse 18 is talking about, knowing the love of Christ. And to know means to experience it. And the love of Christ is talking about his affections. Let's just read the passage. Paul prayed that you would be able to comprehend what is the width and the length and the depth and the height. There's this fourfold dimension that I don't want to go into right now. But Paul said, my prayer is that you would be able to comprehend, that you would understand it in your mind first, and then you would know it. And knowing in the Bible means experiencing. Comprehending is at the intellectual level, but knowing is the heart level. Paul says, I pray that you would know, verse 19, that you would experience the love of Christ. And instead of the word love, I'd like you to think of it as his affections. Because the word love sometimes, it's a word that's used so often, we don't always get a hold of it. God wants us to feel what he feels when he looks at us. This is part of our inheritance. Anyway, verse 19, Paul said that you would know by experience. You would experience the affections of Jesus, which passes knowledge. Now, here's the phrase I want you to pay attention to. So that, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. In other words, the experiencing of God's affections is the pathway, it's the foundation to experiencing the fullness of what God has for you in your life. I'll say it in the negative way. If we don't experience his affections, we will not enter into our full destiny. We will not. We'll enter into some of the things God has for us. There's a great implications to this concept of experiencing the emotions of God. Number one, part of our inheritance is to feel the pleasure and the exhilaration. I mean, to feel that God likes us, that God enjoys us, that God has deep feeling for us. I mean, every one of us love to be loved. That's how the human spirit is made. We love the feeling of being loved by God. And we want to feel it. Our spirit craves this, this reality. And God is more than desirous to release this to us. It's just too often the body of Christ is decided to be content with a Christianity that's mostly at the head level, that is not at the heart experiential level. But God never ordained that the Christian faith would be mostly intellectual. There's concepts that we debate about or think about. He wants our hearts ravished. He wants our hearts ravished because his heart is ravished. He feels such intense feelings towards us. And this is an idea that most believers are not in touch with. And when we experience this, there is truly, and I know that a number of you have experienced it a little bit. I've only experienced it a little bit. God has way more than any of us have experienced it. But it really is exhilarating when our human spirit feels a little bit of this, the pleasure that we feel, the contentment, we feel powerful in our spirits. We feel confident. We feel fearless. Our heart feels this overflowing sense of joy. And this is too often just the exception in the body of Christ. But it's more than number one. It's more than the fact that we feel pleasure. And I love that point. I could spend several messages just talking on the implications of the pleasure we get out of feeling God's affection for us. It's very, very pleasurable. We were made to feel that. But that's not the main thing I want to talk about. I want to talk about number two. Number two, I'll just read it. Feeling God's affections, it's more than pleasurable. It actually equips us. It's essential in equipping us for our destiny. It's not just that it's pleasurable. That's good enough. But it's necessary if we are going to go to the next level of who we are as a missions base, as a spiritual family, or who we are as individuals. That we would be anchored and rooted in the love of God. And the reason, the second sentence of paragraph two, the reason for this, and it may not be obvious to everybody, it seems pretty obvious, but many people have not connected the dots, so to speak, with this idea. But the breakthrough of the Spirit that we're longing for corporately, we pray for the breakthrough. When the breakthrough of the Spirit comes to us as a corporate people, and it will, and when the breakthrough of the Spirit comes to you as an individual, and the favor of God comes upon you as an individual, what we don't think about is the added pressures that come on our life if the favor of God touches us. When the favor of God, I'll just look at it through, through church history, and even very, very obvious in the last 20, 30, 40 years in our own nation. But we could go to many different generations. Often when the favor of God comes on a man or a woman, what happens? The power of God comes on. Their ministry grows real big. And their ministry grows big, or their business grows big, or their favor, whatever, it can have many different manifestations. It's not only just a platform ministry, but let's just take that as an example. And what happens is that when God's favor and finances and power touches your life, you then have many more options. You have many, many opportunities, many open doors, because many people want your favor. Many people want your attention. Many people want to know you. Many people want to give money for you, to you. Many people do favors for you. And many, many things, open doors happen. And in that, temptations, they don't double. They don't triple. They do far more than that. And the man or the woman that's asking for the breakthrough is not thinking that the breakthrough of power and favor is going to bring many options. And the definition of an option is a temptation. One of the obvious examples in our society is the superstar athlete that comes out of college that has no money in college. And they signed the $10 million contract. And more times than not, it really injures their life. And it wrecks their life, because they've never had $10 million. And now they have opportunity for fame and fortune. And when they have that kind of liberty, more times than not, they make wrong choices, because new doors are open. And it really injures their life. Not only does it bring out a temptation, it brings opportunity for pride. God's favor comes on a man or a woman. Their business gets real big. Their ministry gets real big. Their favor, their profile. It's so easy to lose the servant spirit that they had in the early days. Pride, it's difficult in a place of honor to maintain a servant spirit, a grateful servant spirit, especially when you're mistreated. Because that's really what a servant, that's the real test of a servant, is that we remain a servant when we're mistreated. And we have power over the people that are mistreating us. Instead of using the power, we accept the role of the servant and we serve them and bless without complaining, without slandering. That's the ultimate expression of a servant spirit. And a servant spirit's critical. But what happens? God's favor comes on a man or a woman. They lose their servant spirit. And that has disastrous results in the presence of God. That may not seem like much, just at a casual observance, look at it. But that is a disastrous setback in a person's spiritual life when they lose the spirit of humility and servant spirit. And more times than not, when the favor of God breaks in, the spirit of servanthood goes out the window. Spirit of servanthood was just being formed. It was just beginning to manifest itself. But it wasn't a deeply rooted thing in their life. And then suddenly it's gone. Another thing that happens with a breakthrough, here's what we do in our missions base here. We pray for God to visit us with prophetic revelation, that God would come and make us messengers. You know what happens if he makes us a messenger? The angel of the Lord comes, like it came to Daniel. And the angel of the Lord gives us the revelation about great things to come. Now the problem with that is if the angel of the Lord comes because of God's justice, God requires you to be faithful to what that angel told you. You have to say it. Well, the problem is what the angel came and told you is politically incorrect. And a lot of people don't like it. So what happens is the servant of God, they begin to launch out and they're fiery on the front end. They get a bigger crowd. And they begin to succumb and yield to the fear of man. And the criticism, because if you have power or you have money, you have authority, I assure you, you'll have a lot of people that like you. But you will have many, many people who criticize you. The number of critics that you will get with the favor of God on your life is something that many people don't think about. Jesus had far more enemies in Israel and John the Baptist did than they had friends. They had massive crowds that said you're awesome, but they had more that said you're a false prophet. We look at church history. Many times when God's honor and favor and power came on a man or a woman, whether it's the marketplace, the pulpit or other spheres of life, athletics, music, more times than not, 10 and 20 years later, their faith is all but gone. Their heart is injured. Bitterness is settled in and they're stuck in a number of besetting sins that they were not even struggling with in the early days. So here's what the Lord says. I know I just talked all of you out of being rich and famous, but the favor of God's going to come, but the favor of God comes, Satan's attack increases, the press of the people, the press of the people, the people press in, they want a piece of you and they're mad if they don't get what they want from you. Criticism, all of this sort of thing. And what the Lord tells us is that our full destiny will not be released to us if we do not experience the anchor of experiencing the love of God in our hearts. Because the love of God is not just that which exhilarates us. Again, I could spend a little bit of time talking on that. That's a subject good enough. The love of God, the feeling, the experience equips us and it protects us in the place of prominence and prosperity. History is filled with examples. I've already said it three times, but four, I'll say four. History is filled with example in the secular and spiritual kingdom of God people is filled with example of men and women that were going, you know, in a certain way. And when the favor came, they lost their way almost entirely within a decade or two. Church history, mostly that's what happens. And what the Lord's telling us, he says, I want you, verse 19, let's look at it again. Well, no, I'll just read it to you. You don't, it says to know and experience the love of Christ, that you may be filled with the fullness to experience the affections of Jesus is critical to equip you and I to enter into our full destiny. I don't believe as a missions base, as a family, we can enter in to our next level in a significant way without a first, a greater increase of individuals individually that we experience the affections of Christ. Because when we experience his emotions, we experience his passion. It's an anchor in our soul. It stabilizes us. We don't want to walk in sin. We don't want to yield to the fear of man. There's something weightier happening on the inside of our spirit. Number three, there's another thing that the affections of Christ Jesus does to us, not only exhilarates us, not only equips us, that's number one and number two, but number three, it's the foundation that empowers us to run to God instead of from God when we encounter our own sin and weakness. See what happens is you and I, we're going on the road on our relationship with Jesus and we run into our own weakness and we're so disgusted. We're so pained by our weakness and our most automatic response, the most, I mean, the most natural response in our unrenewed mind when we fail and we really love God, but we don't have revelation. Our love is real, but our revelation still is not clear yet. We, the God we love, we're so disgusted with ourself. We turn from him and we run from him instead of running to him because we feel the pain of shame and disappointment. Now, what happens if you and I stumble and we get up and run from him, how are we going to enter into our destiny running that direction? God's, you know, crying out, come the other way. That's darkness. There's more trouble that way. There's more snares of the devil that way. There's more deception that way. Turn around and come to me. Don't come, don't run from me. But the most natural thing for all of us to do in our natural thinking is the God that we love and we feel shame, or we just recoil on the inside. Oh, I hate this. And we get, we want to get out of his presence and to go sort it out. And then we can't grow in the grace of God. Beloved, it's critical that we not just have a language around IHOP, which I appreciate this. I appreciate this part of it. We have a lot of language. We have a lot of terminology about God's affections. We talked about the bridal paradigm. We talked about being fascinated by God, exhilarated by God, and the burning desire and the passion of God's heart and the bridegroom God. And that language I think is important. But here's the problem. And I'm speaking as a shepherd. I'm not speaking as a critic. I'm speaking as one that cares about the 20 somethings. I care about all the ages, all the ages. But it's easy to learn terminology, to sing it, preach it, say it in seminars. But then, because we know the terminology, we are not passionate to make sure we're experiencing it. And the power is in the experience, not in the terminology. And I love the terminology. And we always say it a little, we say it for a while before we feel it. That's okay. That's okay that there's a gap between when we begin to say it. When I want to get a hold of something, I begin to preach on it and I begin to say it. And I begin to talk about it and I begin to pray it. And sooner or later, my heart catches up with what I'm saying all the time. So I'm all for saying it before we feel it. That's not, you're not a hypocrite if you say something, but don't feel it. You're not a hypocrite even if you say something, but you don't do it. Somebody says a hypocrite, somebody who says something, but doesn't do it. That's not what a hypocrite is. A hypocrite is somebody who says something, but doesn't pursue or try to do it. We're pursuing obedience with God. There's not one of us that's a hundred percent obedient, but if we're pursuing it, we're not hypocrites because we're calling people to obedience and coming up short ourselves. As long as we're pursuing it, we're not hypocrites. Now the day that comes when a person says it, but in the secret place of their heart, they're not going after it. That's a hypocrite. It's not that they have to attain it. I mean, our language is always more developed than our heart is. And that's God's way. That's a normal thing to have terminology before we have experience as a rule. Every now and then somebody has this, you know, really unusual divine encounter and they have an experience they don't have words for. That does happen, of course. But more times than not, our language gets formed before experience. But as I look around, again, thinking as a father's heart and a shepherd's heart, I'm thinking of, oh, the experience is so exhilarating. The experience will cause you to run to him, not from him. And the experience will anchor you. It will anchor you so God can actually release his spirit on you without injuring you. The experience is critical. And the experience must be sought for. There is nothing more glorious than the human spirit experiencing God's affection. When my human spirit a little bit feels God's feeling towards me, oh, I feel invincible. I feel powerful. I feel fearless. I feel totally content, regardless what's happening on the outside. Those are momentary inspirations and just flashes of glory that touch our spirit. And beloved, we want to live there. Well, we will forever. I love that reality. I feel transcendent. I feel above and beyond the reach of any man or any devil that could hurt me in a way that God will not be here to deliver. So it's an absolutely powerful way to live. They could criticize you, take your money, block your goals, stand in your path, but there's a transcendence. What I mean is you feel above and beyond. You feel bigger than the trouble coming towards you. Your spirit feels that. So the experience of this, I mean, look at this. Ephesians 319, to know the love of Christ, to know, to experience the affections of Jesus, to experience the affections of the uncreated God. I mean, that is a stunning concept. Paragraph C. There's a paradox in the church today. And the paradox in the church today is that many talk about the love of God. The language is all over the church in America. Matter of fact, if you would travel around, there's 300,000 congregations in America, probably a few more now, but that was the official number a couple of years ago. 300,000 congregations. Clearly the main theme and most of those congregations is the love of God. But I would go as far to say, clearly that is the one issue that is least experienced at the heart level by the majority of the people. The love of God has become an idea that kind of makes us feel comfortable when we're compromising. And the love of God emphasis that's in the church in America is mostly do what you want to do because God's a God of love. And it's actually not an encounter with love. It's kind of looking back over our shoulder with the idea of the love of God is kind of a safety net in our compromise and carnal living. And so the people, they don't feel empowered on the inside. They're not encountering God. The love of God is more of a logo than it is a living reality. And so it's quite a paradox because if you would talk to some prophetic voices in the church, they would say it. I think they would say it. Some might say it wrong. They would say the emphasis of the church in America is on the love of God and we're off track because we're spiritually shallow. And I would say, well, not exactly. The emphasis on the church in America is that it's okay to live in compromise. And they just throw the term the love of God to cover it up. They're not really going after the love of God and they're not really experiencing it. It's just dogma. It's just, it's a word in the air that isn't even, we need the love of God to be the main experience and the main focus of the church of America. The real love of God. I don't mean the phrase that has no power, but the living reality. We need churches. I'm thinking about our own spiritual family here. We need to go after this thing and to fill our mind with this reality, to meditate on it, to study it, to ask God to awaken it in our spirit, which is the prayer of Ephesians 3. That God would strengthen our spirit with might. That he would strengthen our spirit with might. The might of God would enter our hearts. We would feel might. We feel power in our hearts when we touch the affections of Jesus. D, the genuine experience of God's affection makes us ravenously hungry for more. The genuine experience does not leave a person wanting to compromise. It leads a person saying, I have to have more. I have to be saturated in this reality. It's powerful. I feel invincible on the inside because the truth is, when we feel the love of God, we feel the reality of God's eyes and protection over our life and his guidance. We feel the glory of the connection with his heart. We feel our greatness. We feel our power in connecting with God's heart. Oh, that's a great way to live. The church in America is not even close to living in the love of God. Again, it's not just a catchphrase. We live spiritually superficial. We live spiritually passive. We just live half-hearted and then claim, well, we're just in the love of God. I'm not trying to earn my salvation. I'm just into the love of God. Now you're living in a spiritual passivity and you're using it as a catchphrase to cover up your guilty conscience. It's not what we want the love of God for. We want the love of God like an arrow to strike our spirit and to show us our greatness and to show us the dignity of what the human spirit is in the grace of God. We're alive in that connection with God's heart. It's powerful. It will drive us into holiness. It will push us. We will so long for more of this. We got to have more. This is awesome. I want it all the time in greater measures. It's called holiness. I have in paragraph D, the second sentence is, in other words for holiness, but we go hard after God's heart to experience more of his affections. We're going hard after God because we want to experience more. We're not going hard after God to earn anything. I hear that all the time. People say, I don't want to be in a place where I have to earn something. We're not calling people to go hard after God to earn it. You're going hard after God because you have to experience more at the heart level. And the way you experience more is by positioning yourself before him more. And when you put your cold heart in front of the bonfire, you know, I think of, you know, you take the pound of hamburger in the refrigerator or in the freezer and it's frozen. You put that thing in front of the bonfire over time. It becomes tender and soft and moldable. And the body of Christ is like that pound of hamburger. Their heart is, it's frozen right in the presence of the sun. That, you know, the first moment you put that, that, that, that, that ice rock hard piece of, of a hamburger right there in front of that bonfire. It's not responsive at all. It's as cold and frozen and unmovable as it was a moment ago when it was in the freezer. You keep that there long enough. All of a sudden it begins to thaw out, begins to be tender. And that's what the Lord wants. We're not earning anything by fasting and praying. We're not earning anything by being in the word. What we're doing is we're desperate to have more. We want more. We don't want to earn it. We want the coldness and the, we, our hearts are frostbitten. Our hearts are, are, are frozen. And we have to feel the dignity and the power of who we are to God. One guy told me, he goes, well, you've made this relationship between, he goes, it seems like you're saying the amount of time you have or before God relates to what happens in your heart. I said, absolutely. He goes, I have never heard that. The guy was a pastor. He goes, you're telling me the amount of time I spend in God's presence in the word and in prayer and fasting is dynamically related to my heart moving. He goes, yes. He goes, what about grace? I go, what about grace? He goes, what about, you know, isn't grace, you do what you do and all of a sudden it falls on you and you turn out right. I go, well, let's look at you. How long have you been in ministry? 30 years. I go, what's your heart like? He goes, cold and barren. I said, 30 years. How many more years you're going to work off that principle that one of these days is going to fall on you and just make you tender. It's been 30 years. You're O for 30. He said, I don't know. I thought grace was I kind of bebopped along and suddenly I just woke up happy and my spirit was alive. I go, no, grace means you're cooperating with God and you take your cold heart. You take that pound of frozen hamburger, your heart. You put it in front of the bonfire. You don't feel anything at first. But after a while, it begins to little by little fall out and you position yourself to receive the free heat. The heat from the bonfire is free if you'll just get in front of it. You don't earn. You don't earn the heat. You get in the way of it. The heat has its own power. The heat is its own energy source. The heat is the act of God. But the Lord says we can stay out of it. We can resist the grace of God or we cannot position ourselves to receive it. I want to be a man of fasting and prayer in the word because I have to feel more. I mean, I want the breakthrough. Yes, I want the breakthrough for my life and other lives. I mean, I want power. I want Cancina touched. I want the nations touched. I want Israel saved. I want all the orphans and widows of the earth touched. All the AIDS patients healed. I want a breakthrough, a serious breakthrough. We don't see abortion turned around in all the nations. I mean, we want a breakthrough. But apart from the breakthrough, I do want that. But there's something else going on. I have to have more. I have touched enough to make me demand to have more. I am not going to be content with what I have now. And I look at the body of Christ in our nation. It is so it is so easily satisfied. It is so satisfied on mud pies, as one man said, when God wants to spread out the banqueting table. We are the problem with the church in America. We're so easily satisfied a little bit, you know, just a little bit of of energy on a song or two on a Sunday morning service. And one good point and a couple of friends that, you know, we had a moment of good fellowship. And that's all we want. Boy, the kingdom of God is here. Beloved, when I touch a little bit of this, I have a demand. It's like there's a cry. There's something rises up. I have to have more. I have to get saturated. I have to get inundated. I have to get lost in this power. Oh, yeah. And I want the breakthrough too. Well, that's not exactly right. I want both. I want the breakthrough. I want thousands and millions of people captured by God. It's not one or the other. And I don't have to put them in order. But we're not earning. The cold hamburger doesn't earn anything by by receiving the fire. You receive the flame for free. All you got to do is get in front of it. And this guy said, you know what? It's 30 years of ministry because I had never, ever put that together. He said, I know you had to pray and be in the word. So because the Bible says that I just never thought about it much. He goes, I don't hardly ever do that. I really love God. And he really does. He goes, I really love God. But I just can't ever feel the connect every now and then. He goes, when I'm preaching, I feel his presence. He goes, how do you figure that? I go, the reason you feel this presence a little bit when you're preaching because God's anointed you because God has his heart for the people that's listening to you. I said, he's not anointing you in your public office for your sake. He's anointing you for the sake of the people listening to you. It's the same thing with healing evangelists. The healing evangelist, as they've been called in history, they pray for the sick. They go out and live in immorality. They come back and pray for the sick. The sick keep getting healed. They go, God must be happy with me because the sick keep getting healed because they think the healing anointing is about them. The healing anointing is on them for the sake of the people, not for them. Christianity 101, God anoints us for the sake of others. So the guy goes, when I preach, I feel that power. So I'm just assuming it's on me. I go, no, that's God's goodness to the people in the chairs. I go, what happens when it's just you and God in an open Bible? He goes, oh. I said, you know what? I'm not condemning you at all. But God has more for you than this. He goes, I had just never put this together, that time, the actual amount of time matter. That's not the only thing that matters, but that does matter. This is a strange idea to people in our nation. Beloved, you do not earn the love of God because you are desperate to experience the free flame and the heat from that bonfire. That is called wisdom. That is called hunger. That's not called earning anything. And when you touch number two, no, number one, under D, enjoying the love of God, is not the opposite of holiness. You know, some people says, well, this church is really in the holiness. That church is the love of God. I go, no, that's impossible. The love of God and holiness are identical. What they think they mean is, well, this church is really soft on sin. If you sin, they go, well, boys will be boys. It doesn't matter. God loves you. And their love of God is a catchphrase that says it's okay to live in sin. I go, that's not even the love of God. That's not the love of God. That's a religious jargon with no life or power on it. And then some of the holiness camp, they're just so into their own dedication and they don't even experience God. They're gritting their teeth, that cranky holiness thing, just trying to keep all the rules and not encountering God. Beloved, we want to get lost in the love of God and then we're on fire to do his will. It's called holiness. Number two, under D, enjoying the love of God. If we enjoy it in truth, if we experience it in truth, it never leads us to spiritual passivity. These people that talk about, I've heard it for 30 years. I'm into the love of God. I'm not into works. So I'm not going to go hard after God because that's work. I go, if you experience love of God, you will get desperate for more and you will position yourself. It is an inconceivable idea to me that going hard after God is somehow the opposite of the love of God. It's the fruit of having touched the love of God. It never leads. If you touch the real deal, it sets you on fire. If you have just a slogan of the love of God, but you're content to stay in spiritual passivity, you've not touched the love of God. You've touched a religious idea. You haven't touched the power. He is a flaming fire. This God of love is fire when he touches us. It sets us on fire. If you can, quote, touch the love of God and remain passive and you can lack spiritual vigor, I want to suggest you haven't touched the love of God. This thing has a life and a mind of its own when it gets a hold of you. God, the Holy Spirit, when he touches us, we say, I must have more than he touches us. And then we say, I must give you more than he touches again. I must have more than he touches again. I must give you more. It just goes on and on and on. The ultimate statement. I'm going to give you what I believe to be the strongest passage in the word of God about our ultimate worth and value. I just don't know if too many passages in the Bible that have more power or that's not the right word that describe the height of our greatness, the height of our salvation experience than John chapter 15, verse 9 to 11. It's the ultimate statement of our worth that Jesus has the same measure of affection towards us that his father has towards him. This is indescribable. This is beyond exaggeration. You cannot exaggerate this statement. Jesus is telling the 12 at the upper room. He is telling them the way the father feels about me is how I feel about you. This is just in it. Paul said it right. It's, it's beyond our comprehension. Which means without the Holy Spirit helping us, we can't get ahold of this. But beloved, the Holy Spirit doesn't typically drop this into our spirit in a vacuum. He drops it in our spirit incrementally as we seek him for it. I'm going to say that again. All of us want this reality, but we have this idea. The Holy Spirit just drops it into our spirit in a vacuum. Here we are busy about life. We wake up one day full of revelation. I've never, ever met a man or a woman who's had that experience. Busy about life. They love God, but they're not really going hard for God. They wake up full of revelation. I don't know who that person is. The Holy Spirit gives us revelation incrementally step by step as we cooperate with them. He little by little imparts this to us and he gives it to us according to our own appetite and desire for it. Many people say, ah, you know, I don't really need this. And the Holy Spirit says, okay. That's okay. If you don't really need this, then you'll live without it. And I'll, you know, you still go to heaven. You're still in the kingdom of God. You love Jesus in that basic general way. But then another believer says, I have to have this. I have to have this. The Holy Spirit says, hey, I'm going to give it to you according to your hunger. I'm going to give it to you based on the measure of your appetite for it. I'm thinking of the, our interns, the several different internships that are here. If, if, if 20 year olds that, you know, plus or minus a few years either way, if the 20 year olds can decide they are going to experience this and no one's going to rip them off. No one's going to talk them into being satisfied with superficial Christianity. They're not going to be talked into anything less than, they're not going to look at others and put a ceiling over their experience. They're not going to look at others and say, well, I'm only going to experience as much as they do. No, beloved, your ceiling, the measure of what God wants to do is right here in John 15. Here's what Jesus said. Put on your seatbelt now. It doesn't, there's, it doesn't get any better than this, than this sentence from God's heart. Here's Jesus, John 15 verse 9. As the father loved me in the same way, I love you. Oh my, this is absolutely from another world. I mean, this is what? As the father loved me, they say that one of the part, one of the components of intimacy is shared experiences. You know, when two friends have a mutual experiences over years, they can be in the same family or they can be friends. They have intimacy because they have mutual experiences. Think about how many mutual experiences God the father and God the son have. I mean, how many things have they done together? How many afternoons have they spent together? How many billions of years have they communicated delightfully to one another? They have such a friendship. I mean, to talk about the way the father loves the son, I would think you just end the sentence. You don't add anything to it. Jesus said, no, I'm going to talk about the way the father loves me. I could just see him with the 12. It's at the upper room. It's at the last supper. Sit around, he goes, as the father's loved me, I just imagined him pausing. John, how much do you think the father loves me? Well, what do you mean, Jesus? Just what do you think? Do you think the father likes me a lot or a whole lot? How much the father likes you? Yeah. Well, didn't you? What did you guys create in Genesis one together? Yeah. Wow. I think he likes you a lot. Peter speaks up and says, Oh, I remember. I was there at your baptism when God, the father bent over the balcony of heaven and said, that's my beloved son and whom I'm well pleased because I heard him. I heard him. Wow. Are you kidding? He really likes you. Peter said, that's not all. I remember on the mount of transfiguration. He said the same thing. God spoke audibly over Jesus two times where the people could hear it clearly. And both times he said, my son, I love you. I love you. I love you. In essence, he said, my son and whom I'm well pleased. In other words, I love you. I love you. Peter says two times. I've heard the audible voice of God. We all did. And both times God said, Jesus says, yeah, Peter, you were listening. That's good. That's good that he does. He goes, I could imagine Jesus closing his eyes and going. Oh, oh, you guys don't even know. Oh, oh, oh, I love you, father. Oh, anyway. And they said, yeah. He said, I want to tell you something in the same measure. How the father loves me. I love you that way. I feel about you like he feels about me. Beloved, this is what can you say with that? Jesus looked at all the relationships in the world around the world. And I don't care how great of a relationship you have with somebody or how great of a relationship you can see between two people. It is far too low as the standard of what Jesus says describes how he feels about you. You take the person, the most wildly in love with the person that you've witnessed, either maybe you're part of it or you've witnessed it. I assure you the way the father feels about the son is infinitely higher than that. And I assure you the way Jesus feels about you is the way the father feels about him. Now, the interesting thing is what he told them this. He told him this at the last supper. What was going to happen within 24 hours of the last supper? Jesus was going to die. Within 24 hours, every one of them were going to deny him. Well, they all denied him that night. They had sincere love. They were all about 18 to about 25 is what 23 is what the scholars say. It's a young youth group of about 20 year old average. Their love was sincere. You understand there's a difference between sincere love and mature love. Sincere love is real. It's just not mature. You know, the difference between sincere love and mature love, it's not that it's one's real and one isn't. They're both real. They're both real. And God counts them as real. Mature love has follow through in it. Sincere love is I want to, I want to, I'm going to. And then every other time it follows through. Mature love follows through. There's a dozen different ways to apply that. They were filled with sincere love and it moved him. Jesus loved it. Jesus does not look down on our sincere love and say, Bah humbug, you bunch of hopeless hypocrites. He looks at our sincere love and he says, I love that you want to love me. That touches me. And don't let anybody, don't let anybody minimize the power of your sincere love because it's not mature and it's not, doesn't have full follow through. But beloved sincere love wants to follow through and it's learning how to get it to hold the grace of God. The heart is still a little bit frozen. It's not been in front of the fire long enough. Doesn't move in concert with the grace of God. When the winds of that heat come off of that fire, that frozen hamburger doesn't do anything yet on the front end. It just feels stuck. But after a while, when the winds come off of that burning, raging bonfire, that, that, that, uh, that hamburger is going to feel the power of it in time. After time, our heart begins to move in the winds, in the concert with the spirits moving our heart. It's a very, very powerful way, but he looks at them and he could have said this. Well, he said it a couple hours later. He said, every one of you will deny me tonight. Jesus said that he loved them knowing that night they would deny him because he wasn't confused by sincere love and mature love. He knew the difference and he knew they were both real, but he knew he didn't think they would be hypocrites. He knew that the message of his passion for them would be their only recovery after they failed. Here they fail. Peter's weeping. They're all weeping, undoubtedly. And John says, hey, hey, hey, hey, guys, quick. Something came to me. What he said last night. Oh my goodness. He said he loves us like the father loves him. He knew we would do this. He loves us, John. Oh Jesus. And he runs to him while some of the others are running from him. I love you, Jesus. It's amazing. John's the only one who put this conversation in his gospel. Now, I guess the Holy Spirit's ultimately responsible for that. Well, when I meet these guys, I'm going to say Matthew, Peter, who was, you know, the spiritual father over John Mark, who wrote the gospel of Mark. Luke, you were not there. But Luke, why didn't you put this story in? John says, I don't know about the other guys. That was my favorite story. That's the one that saved my life after I denied the Lord. They all denied the Lord. Every one of them fled from him. Every one of them denied him. And John, well, they all got ahold of this sooner or later. But beloved, this reality is what recovered them. This is not an optional reality. Like, well, if you join IHOP, we'll get a little bit of intimacy. We'll learn a few languages, a little bit of the language. Have a few cool songs about intimacy. Tell our friends about intimacy. Beloved, we want the fire to strike our spirits. We want our spirit lifted and moved in the power of God. We want to feel the power of this, not just have language for it. And we're not going to feel it just by saying it. We're going to feel it by positioning our cold heart in front of that bonfire. We're going to fill our minds with it. We're going to read the word. We're going to pray. We're going to fast. Not because praying and fasting earns us praying and anything. Praying and fasting makes our spirit receive at a greater capacity, at a faster level, at a faster rate. Fasting and prayer puts us closer to the bonfire to feel the power of the waves of heat coming off of that big bonfire. The wind blows, catches the heat of that fire and it hits that coldness. Fasting and prayer, I don't fast and pray to earn. I fast and pray because I'm desperate to feel more, faster, deeper to the ultimate. That's why I fast and pray. And it is God's way to bring the same reality to thousands of others. I do fast and pray for the others as well. Jesus looked at him. He says, if the father loved me, I've loved you. Then he gives them the ultimate, I mean, the main command. He says, abide in my love. That's a massive commandment. He says, I want you to abide in my love, which means to live in it, to live in it. He goes, I want you to fight, to get into this reality and to stay in it. When it says abide in my love, it means wage war, fight to get your mind filled with this and to stay in the power of this reality, abide in it. In other words, you could say, live in it, dwell in it. Most of the church, most believers I know aren't living in this. It's not like they got in it and got out of it. They don't live in this reality. They're not fighting to live in it because beloved, Satan will release all the forces of darkness to keep you out of this realm of reality because this realm will set you on fire. You will be ruined and you will bring destruction to the kingdom of darkness. Abide in the love of God isn't just about making our life more comfortable, like, well, I feel bad, I'll abide in love, I feel good when I do, when I said. Abiding in love is not just a catchphrase for living in compromise and feeling good about it. Abiding in love means get in the place where the fire strikes your spirit and you got power on the inside. You feel the power of this. I take this commandment serious. I want to abide in love. I want to, I want to, and it's not, he's talking about, he's talking about live in contact, live in a conscious contact with the love of God towards you. You will, you focus on God's love for you and you will always love him back and overflow to love others. If you focus, God, show me the way you feel. Let that arrow strike your heart. You will always respond loving him back and you'll have an overflow. You don't have to think of overly, you don't have to overly concern yourself about the others. You will truly love him when the arrow strikes your heart that he loves you. It has power in it. I, I don't want to, I'm not fully content with my experience in this over the years at all, but I'll say this. I have gone after this thing tenaciously for years. I have looked, you know, I got my Bible out many years ago. Alan Hood tells a story. Oh, I said it so many times. I don't remember when he heard it, but he remembers the story when he first visited when he was 22 years old or something like that. He's 36 now and he was just visiting right here in this building, sitting on the front row. And I got up and I used to say this all the time. I go, get out your Bible and find every single verse, Genesis to Revelation, the whole Bible on how God feels about you. Mark it, read it, pray it, sing it to God, speak it to God, tell your friends, then mark it, pray it and read it. And that gloriously crazy guy, I say that in the most flattering way, he got his Bible and did it. That little whippersnapper, you know, he was sitting there a little, a skinny little Alan Hood. He goes, I'm going to do it. That guy said, do it. And he got his Bible out and took a year or two and read every passage and marked every passage that talked about God's feelings. He did it. All these years later, he still talks about that all the time. Beloved, you want to go after this. You want to abide in love. The way you abide in love is by filling your mind. You fill your mind. God will fill your heart. You change your mind and you put this in your mind. God will change your heart. He'll change your emotions. But how many believers are so content to be superficial, spiritually superficial? Well, I'm real busy and I don't really have time to do that. Oh, no, no, you've got to do it. It's not you have to do it to earn anything. You have to do it because you were created for great things. You were created for encounter. You were created for power. You have to get in the flow of the power realm of the love of God. Let's go down to number three. Abide in my love. The challenge to abide in the love of God, we have to contend for it. We have to fight for it. Then once we get a little bit of breakthrough, I've had a little breakthrough here and there where I feel the power of it. You know what happens? Three steps forward, two steps back. I'm not prophesying that over me or you, but I have experienced it. I move into this and I feel like I'm so lost in a realm and all this and that happens, good, bad and ugly. And all of a sudden I'm back three steps. So I go, oh, you know, I figure it out. And I go, how did I lose ground? And I could just imagine Jesus saying, abide in my love. In other words, fight to get back in that river. Abide in it. Stay in it, Mike. So I tell you, you will never have anything that will resist you more than getting in this realm because this realm, this is the domino that knocks all the other ones down in a good sense. You get into the love of God. You will begin to love prayer. You'll begin to love moving in the spirit. You begin to move in greater revelation. So I get out of the love of God and I don't mean God doesn't love me out of the conscious experiential feelings. I want to use the word feelings that we don't go by feelings in the sense of this. God loves us even when we don't feel it. It's still true. God loves us whether we feel it or not. And a lot of people camp there. That is a true statement. And we need to, if that's where we're at, we need to really wave that flag, but don't camp there. It is true. God loves us when we don't feel nothing, but who wants to spend their life in this age or the age to come, not feeling it when it's God's will that we would experience the affections of Christ Jesus. It's what it said, Ephesians 3, the verse we started with. Paul in essence is saying, if you don't experience the love of Christ, the affections, you can't enter into your fullness. So I lose ground and I swim against the river. You know, it's like they say with the salmon swimming upstream. All this effort. Oh, I want to, because my schedule's busy. I got people that are mad. I got people that are glad. I got people. I got to do this. I got to do that. You do too. Things break. Things get busy. I go through, I make decisions that are dumb ones. I go fix them, cause trouble. Oh, and I go, Lord, I got to touch you. I got to touch you. And I just swim back and I begin to fill my spirit with this. I have that, that sense of connection again. I mean, I've always been in his presence. You've always been his presence. I've always been the light of his heart. You've always been the light of his heart. I didn't lose that from God's point of view. I lost the awareness of it from my point of view. I don't lose it. God didn't say he changed his mind. It's just, I couldn't feel the power of it. So I abide in it. I get back into the place of conscious connection. And ah, that buoyant, confident love and joy, that transcendent feeling of nothing can touch me that really matters ultimately. Oh, it's a powerful feeling. It's a powerful way to live. I'll go down to number five and I'm going to end with this. Jesus said when he was, oh, wait, wait, I didn't read it, did I? I didn't read it. John, let's go back up to E. I'm just going to read the passage. It's E, there you go. And I'll just mention number five without looking at it on the thing. It says, as the father loved me, I've also loved you. Now live in this love. Get in it and stay in it. And when you lose connection, get back in it, fight for it, fight for it, fight for it. If you keep my commandment, you will abide in my love. Verse 11, these things I have spoken to you. There it is. So that my joy will be in you. Jesus said these things because I have spoken them in my word. My word is the transcript of my holy heart. My word, I've spoken these things so that this thing can hit you with joy and power. I spoke my word so these things would hit you. Now we got to feed our spirit on the word. We got to fill our mind with verse 11, these things that were spoken to us. Beloved, we have to fill our mind with these things. We can't get too busy. If we're too busy, we have to downsize. Downsize your ministry, downsize your lifestyle, downsize your entertainment, downsize your play time, downsize your ministry time, downsize if you don't have time for God. Because I'm not saying that in a mean way. I'm saying that your greatness, your safety, your full destiny is in the balance. This is the only way you can experience downsize and get into the river of God touching your spirit. You can't do it on the run. And I've had seasons where I really pressed in and seasons where the Lord assigned me to do this and that. And always when the Lord gives me assignment more times than not, I always, he gives me a seven. I almost always make it an eight or a nine. It's just my nature. It's most of all of us in this room. And I do an eight or a nine and I'm getting burnt out. And the Lord might say something like, I didn't tell you to do an eight or a nine. I tell you to do six or a seven. Bring the thing down to the level I told you and have time to linger before me. Fill your mind with the word. Because these things they have spoken to you will release joy. They will release the joy of the love of God in your spirit. I'm going to tell the new interns this. I'll end with this exhortation or illustration, whatever is it. It was years ago when I was 23, 22, 23, something like that, 21. A guy came through town. I live in St. Louis. And he said, I want to challenge you to read the Bible 10 chapters a day of the New Testament. And he says, when you read it, pause and talk to Jesus. As you read it, turn it into conversation. If you don't understand something, say, Lord, what does this mean? And if something says, tells you to do something, then stop and say, Lord, I want to do this. Help me. Just turn it into a little, you know, have prayers intermittently through it and journal a little bit. He said, read the New Testament 10 chapters a day. If you do that six days a week, you will read the whole New Testament once a month. That seemed like a phenomenal idea. I would love to read the New Testament once a month. I was doing it because I wanted to know what the New Testament was about. But that's nice. I think that's a good thing to do. But that's not what I'm talking about right now. I'm talking about to get our heart in contact with God. So I decided to do this thing. And I was a lead over youth group of several hundred people. And so I got them all together and I said, listen, we're going to read the New Testament 10 chapters a day. If one day we read eight chapters, the next day we're going to read 12. We're going to stay with it. If we get behind, we get one day a week where we don't do it. So we make up some time and we're going to stay with this. And we did it for a year. Beloved, I cannot even tell you. I cannot tell you the amount of people that this radically changed their life by putting them in a place of renewing their mind and cleansing them. The stories that we had. And that's why I want to begin to add that to our testimony time of people that are doing this and saying, you know what? It's just amazing what I'm feeling. Your emotions will begin to feel the power of this. I got so excited. A couple of us, we decided we were going to read the New Testament 20 chapters a day. Therefore, two times a month. And we did that for a year, nearly a year. 20 chapters a day. Someone says, well, I don't have to earn God. No, I wasn't trying to earn anything. I wanted to feel my heart. I wanted to feel what this thing was about. And it took a little bit of time, but I had to cut out this and that and a few other things. I had to downsize some of my activities, some of my play time, some of my just different things. I had to downsize. I tell you, it was one of the greatest years of my early life. I've had better years since then. But I'm telling you, in my early 20s, that was the grand year where things turned around in my life. I began to be a fanatic for the word. And what I mean is, I fell in love with it. Because my story is, as I say just to the new interns here, is that when I was 18, 19, 20 years old, I really loved God. I really loved him. I know what sincere love is without follow through. I loved him. My love was immature, but I loved him. My love is still immature, but it was really immature then. I loved him. I would do anything for him, except I hated reading the Bible. I mean, I don't mean I hated it. I mean, I hated it. The Bible, that was the enigma to me. I said, why is somebody as awesome as you write something so confusing and irrelevant? I said, look at creation. You're so powerful. You are such a funny writer. You're a great creator, but you're not a very good author. I wasn't being disrespectful. I really thought that. I thought you're a great creator, but you're, you didn't, you know, do so good on the writing thing. It was, it was boring and totally irrelevant. Lord, I'm sure looked down and says, I love that little guy. I just love his little confused heart that loves me. So I didn't, I hated reading the Bible. I really did. I couldn't stand it, but I did love God. I read biographies of missionaries and I really love the guys who got killed on the mission field. I just wanted to be a martyr on the mission field, but I didn't want to read the Bible. That was torture. Does anyone in the room relate to that? Here's what you can do this. You can put your hand up like this, you know? Well, then it was worse than that. I hated prayer. I hated prayer. I used to pray in college, 18 years old, went away to college every night at nine o'clock. I read a bunch of books that said, if you don't pray, you're never going to have a breakthrough. And I went to breakthrough, whatever that meant, I went to breakthrough. So I prayed from nine to 10 every night in college. And it was like the garden of Gethsemane to me. I mean, honestly, I live with four guys and they all laughed. And then we'd always have eight or 10 guys over at our apartment. It'd be five minutes till nine, the hour of death. I would begin to sweat. They would all be laughing, watching the TV, cracking jokes, getting movies and that kind of stuff. And I would like Charlton Heston, Moses, braving myself, walking into the wilderness, the room closed at nine oh one. Dun, dun, dun, the drama begins. Oh God. Thank you for arms and legs and that the kids in China or somewhere don't have food. But we do or something like that. And help me in the football team. Give me a good girlfriend and help me make A's without any studying. And I would look at my clock. I'm telling you. I had 59 roll minutes to go. Oh God, good. Thank you for arms and legs and the kids in India. Give me that girlfriend Lord. Don't forget that one. And help me score touchdowns. I played on the college football team. Help me be great. Lord, let me glorify you by scoring touchdowns. Only for your glory. But let me break records for your glory. I will tell them of you and how boring you are. I cannot even, if you would have told me at age 18, I would be leading a 24 hour prayer ministry that read the Bible all day and prayed. I said, you have got the total wrong guy. The third thing I hated. I hated fasting. They told me to fast. This is it. That's not going to happen. That's not going to happen. Well, I did it. I fasted one day a week begrudgingly. I remember I would tell everybody today's my fast day and I hate it. Let's say, I thought you weren't supposed to tell nobody. I said, well, I'm not there yet. I'm still at the tell everybody and complain. I'm going to fast today and I hate it. No, I'm, you think I'm joking. All my friends in college, they said you were out of control. Mike, you were just out of control. And the fourth thing I hated was witnessing. But that was the one I hated the least. I did the witnessing. I didn't like it. I wouldn't say I hated that. I did that every now and then. It was fun, but mostly it wasn't that fun. So I said, God, I don't like Bible. I don't like prayer. I don't like fasting. I don't like witnessing, but I liked meetings. I could go to meetings every night. I loved meetings. But when it was me and just wrong, me and God, it was horrible. Anyway, let's stand. I'm going to get myself in trouble. I'm going to get myself. I can't get out of this mess here.