Oh Love That Will Not Let Me Go
https://www.sermonwriter.com/hymn-stories/o-love-wilt-not-let-go/
The Hymn=
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Surpassing=
The Story Behind The Hymn=
The author of the following hymn is a believer in the Restitution of all things. His name=Isaac Watts.
Do you love Me?
What Love Is All About
It was a busy morning, approximately 8:30 am, when an elderly gentleman, in his 80ās arrived to have stitches removed from his thumb. He stated that he was in a hurry and that he had an appointment at 9:00 am. I took his vital signs, and had him take a seat, knowing it would be over an hour before someone would be able to see him. I saw him looking at his watch and decided, since I was not busy with another patient, I would evaluate his wound.
On exam it was well healed, so I talked to one of the doctors, got the needed supplies to remove his sutures and redressed his wound. While taking care of him, we began to engage in conversation. I asked him if he had a doctorās appointment this morning, as he was in such a hurry. The gentleman told me no, that he needed to go to the nursing home to eat breakfast with his wife. I then inquired as to her health. He told me that she had been there for awhile and was a victim of Alzheimerās Disease.
As we talked and I finished dressing his wound, I asked if she would be worried if he was a bit late. He replied that she no longer knew who he was, and hadnāt recognized him in five years. I was surprised, and asked him, āAnd you still go every morning, even though she doesnāt know who you are?ā He smiled and patted my hand and said,
āShe doesnāt know me, but I still know who she is.ā
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The Way of Love
1 If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but donāt love, Iām nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate.
2 If I speak Godās Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, āJump,ā and it jumps, but I donāt love, Iām nothing.
3-7 If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I donāt love, Iāve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, Iām bankrupt without love.
Love never gives up.
Love cares more for others than for self.
Love doesnāt want what it doesnāt have.
Love doesnāt strut,
Doesnāt have a swelled head,
Doesnāt force itself on others,
Isnāt always āme first,ā
Doesnāt fly off the handle,
Doesnāt keep score of the sins of others,
Doesnāt revel when others grovel,
Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end.
8-10 Love never dies. Inspired speech will be over some day; praying in tongues will end; understanding will reach its limit.
We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete. But when the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled.
11 When I was an infant at my motherās breast, I gurgled and cooed like any infant. When I grew up, I left those infant ways for good.
12 We donāt yet see things clearly. Weāre squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it wonāt be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! Weāll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us!
13 But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation:
Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love.
The Message (MSG)
Copyright Ā© 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002 by Eugene H. Peterson
THE GOSPEL FROM OUTER SPACE ā Robert Short-
āThe gospel of love heard from the churches is at bottom a gospel at gunpoint. This gospel claims to speak of a great love, but only one step behind this āloveā is an unspoken, or often very vocal great threat ā the threat of eternity in āhellā if we refuse this love. What a travesty of love, even human love, not to mention Godās! For one would think that Godās love ought to be at least as great as what human beings are capable of. It is precisely the implied or expressed threat of eternal perdition that compromises the churchesā āgospel of love,ā and gives this āgospelā the lie to ordinary people, and is in fact behind by far, most of atheism.
On the other hand, this is not the quality of mercy I see in God. I get the strong feeling of an infinite, unconditional, no-strings-attached love for all people. At the same time this love is all-powerful and sovereign. It is not so flimsy and pitifully weak that it can be finally frustrated or defeated by mere human whim or by meager manās arrogant illusion called āfree will.ā ā
Godās compassion never fails" =
La compassion de Dieu nāĆ©choue jamais
Das MitgefĆ¼hl Gottes scheitert nie
La compasiĆ³n de Dios nunca falla
ē„ēęę«ę°øäø失ę
ą¤Ŗą¤°ą¤®ą„ą¤¶ą„ą¤µą¤° ą¤ą„ ą¤ą¤°ą„ą¤£ą¤¾ ą¤ą¤ą„ ą¤µą¤æą¤«ą¤² ą¤Øą¤¹ą„ą¤ ą¤¹ą„ą¤¤ą„
Gods mededogen faalt nooit.
My friend God loves you! He always has He always will!
The Father Who Lost Two Sons
This is about whatās normally called The Parable of the Prodigal Son . Thatās only one of the two sons in the parable, the younger boy. The older boy is the oneāthe other sonāwho is lost. And the point about changing the name of the parable is that the parables are almost always misnamed.
The Parable of the Lost Sheep is not about the lost sheep.
All the sheep ever did was get lost. The parable is about the passion of the shepherd who lost the sheep to find the sheep. His passion to find is what drives the parable; and consequently it isnāt the Prodigalās lostness , wasting all his money on wine, women and song in the far country; and it isnāt the elder brotherās grousing and complaining and score keeping that stands against him. What counts in the parable is the fatherās unceasing desire to find the sons he lostāboth of themāand to raise both of them up from the dead.
The story, of course, you know. The story begins with the father having two sons and the youngest son comes to the father and says, āFather, divide the inheritance between me and my brother.ā What heās in effect saying is,
"Dear Dad, drop dead now, legally.
Put your will into effect and just retire out of the whole business of being anything to anybody and let us have what is coming to us." So the youngest son gets the money and the older brother gets the farm. And off the younger brother goes. What he does, of course, is he spends it allāblows it allāon wild living. When he finally is in want and working, slopping hogs for a farmer and wishing that he could eat what heās feeding the pigs, he canāt stand it. When he finally comes to himself he says, āYou know, Iāve got to do something. How many hired servants of my fatherās are there who have bread enough to spare and Iām perishing here with hunger? I know what Iām going to do.ā
Almost every preacher makes this the boyās repentance. Itās not his repentance.
This is just one more dumb plan for his life.
He says, āI will go to my father and I will say, āFather, Iāve sinned against heaven and before you.āā Thatās true. He got that one right. āAnd Iām no longer worthy to be called your son.ā Score two. He gets that one right. But the next thing he says is dead wrong. He says, āMake me one of your hired servants.ā He knowsāhe thinks he knowsāhe canāt go back as a dead son, and therefore he says, āI will now go back as somebody who can earn my fatherās favor again. I will be a good worker or whatever.ā This is not a real repentance, itās just a plan for a life. What it is, is enough to get him started going home, and consequently when he goes home, what happens next is an absolutely fascinating kind of thing.
What happens next?
What happens next is that the father (you must remember this) is now sitting on the front porch of the farm house. The farm house doesnāt belong to him anymore. The front porch doesnāt belong to him. Heās sitting in the rocker that belongs to his oldest son who is now, you know, the owner of the farm. Heās sitting there and he sees the Prodigal, the younger boy, coming down the road from far away. He sees him coming. What does he do? He rushes off the porch, runs a half mile down the road, throws his arms around the boyās neck and kisses him.
Now, this is all that Jesus does with this scene. The fascinating thing in this parable is that in the whole parable the father never says one single word to the Prodigal Son. Jesus makes the embrace, the kiss, do the whole story of saying, āI have found my son.ā The fascinating thing also is that when the father embraces the boy who has come home from wasting his life, the boy never gets his confession out of his mouth until after the kiss, until after the embrace. What this says to you and me who have to live with the business of trying to confess our sins is that confession is not a pre-condition of forgiveness. Itās something that you do after you know you have been forgiven. Confession is not something you do in order to get forgiveness. Itās something you do in order to celebrate the forgiveness you got for nothing. Nobody can earn forgiveness. The Prodigal knows heās a dead son. He canāt come home as a son, and yet in his fatherās arms he rises from the dead and then he is able to come to his fatherās side.
What happens next is that the father, saying not a word to the Prodigal, turns to the servants and says, āBring the best robe, bring a ring for his finger and shoes for his feet, kill the fatted calf and let us eat and be merry for this, my son, was dead and is alive again. He was lost and is found.ā Now this is the point in the parable at which everything is going well. The dead son, the no-good Prodigal Son, is home. He has been raised from the dead by his fatherās embrace. He has done nothing to earn it, but now all that matters is that the father has called for the party to celebrate the finding of the lost and the resurrection of the dead.
Itās the party. Every one of Jesusā parables of graceānot every one, but most of themāend with a party.
When the Shepherd finds the lost sheep, he doesnāt go back to the 99, he goes home and has a party with his friends in order to celebrate the finding of the lost. The fatherās will to have a party is what the parable is all about. Thatās why you must always do, not the human race characters in the parable like the Prodigal and the elder brother, why you must always do the God character first, because itās the God character who drives the parable.
All right, now, what weāve got now is everybody dead in the parable.
The father died at the beginning, the Prodigal died in the far country: he came home dead and the father raises him. Everything is fine. And now what weāve got is Jesusā genius as a storyteller. The party is in full swing, so Jesus brings back in the only person in the story left who still has a life of his own: Mr. Responsibility, Mr. Whining, Mr. Elder Brother. He comes up and hears the music and the dancing and he probably sees the waiters scurrying around with roast veal platters and everything else. And he asks one of the servants, āWhat is this all about? I didnāt commission a party.ā The servant says, āNo, no, your brother has come home and your father has killed the fatted calf because he received him safe and sound.ā And the older brother is angry and he will not go in. He will not go into the house. He is right out there in the midst of the party. He is part of the party but he will not join the party. And the next thing that happens in this: when he comes in with all this bookkeeping he says, āLook,ā to his father, āall these years I served you and I never broke one of your commandments and you never even gave me a goat that I could make merry with my friends. But when this your son (notice he doesnāt say, this my brother) cuts off his relationship, this your son has wasted your substance with riotous living, has wasted your substance with harlots, when this son comes home you kill the fatted calf!ā
I think that one of the things you could do with this is make up a speech for the father.
The father goes out in the courtyard to plead with the older son. He goes out there in order to find him as he is and to raise him from the dead. He never gives up on any of them. He says to him, āLook, Arthur (letās call the older brother Arthur), what do you mean I never gave you a goat for a party? If you wanted to have a great veal dinner for all your friends every week in the year, you had the money and the resources. You owned this place, Arthur. You have the money and the resources to have built 52 stalls and kept the oxen fattening as you wanted them to come along, but you didnāt. Why didnāt you do that, Arthur? Because youāre a bean counter, because youāre always keeping track of everybody else. Thatās your problem, Arthur, and I have one recipe for you.ā (The father is pleading with this fellow to come out of the death of bookkeeping.) He says, āI have one recipe for you, Arthur. That is, go in, kiss your brother, and have a drink. Just shut up about all this stuff because, Arthur, you came in here already in hell, and I came out here in this courtyard to visit you in the hell in which you were.ā
This is the wonderful thing about this parable, because it isnāt that there was a Prodigal Son who was a bad boy and who, therefore, came home and turned out to be a good boy and had a happy ending. Then the elder brotherāyou would think Jesus, if he was an ordinary storyteller, would have said, āLetās give the elder brother a rotten ending.ā He doesnāt. He gives the older brother no ending. The parable ends with a freeze frame. It ends like that with just the father, and the sound goes deadāthe servants may be moving around with the wine and vealābut the sound goes dead and Jesus shows you only the freeze frame of the father and the elder brother. Thatās the way the parable has ended for 2,000 years.
My theory about this parable is that if, for 2,000 years, he has never let it end, then you can extend that indefinitely, that this is a signal, an image of the presence of Christ to the damned. When the father goes out into the courtyard, he is an image of Christ descending into hell; and, therefore, the great message in this is the same as Psalm 139, āIf I go down to hell, You are there also.ā God is there with us. There is no point at which the Shepherd who followed the lost sheep will ever stop following all of the damned. He will always seek the lost. He will always raise the dead. Even if the elder brother refused forever to go in and kiss his other brother, the Father would still be there pleading with him. Christ never gives up on anybody. Christ is not the enemy of the damned. He is the finder of the damned. If they donāt want to be found, well there is no imagery of hell too strong like fire and brimstone and all that for that kind of stupidity. But nonetheless, the point is that you can never get away from the love that will not let you go and the elder brother standing there in the courtyard in his own hell is never going to get away from the Jesus who seeks him and wills to raise him from the dead.
The Prodigal Father!! I love that.
Godās love & compassion never fails=
Lāamour et la compassion de Dieu ne manquent jamais
Gods liefde & mededogen faalt nooit
El amor y la compasiĆ³n de Dios nunca fallan
ŠŠ¾Š¶ŃŃ Š»ŃŠ±Š¾Š²Ń Šø ŃŠ¾ŃŃŃŠ°Š“Š°Š½ŠøŠµ Š½ŠøŠŗŠ¾Š³Š“Š° Š½Šµ ŠæŠ¾Š“Š²Š¾Š“ŃŃ
Jumalan rakkaus ja myƶtƤtunto eivƤt koskaan onnistu
Gottes Liebe und Mitleid versagen nie
My friend: God loves you. He always has, He always will. His love NEVER fails!
The Inescapable Love Of God
Thomas Talbott- The Inescapable Love of God - 2nd Edition
āā¦Nothing can be lost that is not first owned. Just as a parent is compelled by civil law to be responsible for his family and his property, so the Creator --by His own divine lawāin compelled to take care of the children He has created. And that means not only caring for the good children, but for the bad ones and lost ones as well. So the word lost came to be for Mrs. Smith (Hannah W. Smith), a term of greatest comfort. If a person is a ālost sinnerā it only means that he is temporarily separated from the Good Shepherd who owns him. The Shepherd is bound by all duties of ownership to go after all those who are lost until they are found.ā -Catherine Marshall-
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"Behold the Lamb of God, which takes away the sin of the world."
"Takes away"= airo=
To take upon oneās self/ to bear.
To bear away what has been raised/ carry off.
To move from its place.
To take off or away what is attached to anything.
To remove. To carry off or away with one.
To appropriate what is taken.
To take away from another what is his or what is committed to him/ to take by force.
plan b=
There is no plan b!
The inhabitants of the world: ĪøĪĪ±ĻĻĪæĪ½ į¼Ī³ĪµĪ½Ī®ĪøĪ·Ī¼ĪµĪ½ Ļįæ· ĪŗĻĻĪ¼įæ³ ĪŗĪ±ĪÆ į¼Ī³Ī³ĪĪ»ĪæĪ¹Ļ ĪŗĪ±ĪÆ į¼Ī½ĪøĻĻĻĪæĪ¹Ļ, particularly the inhabitants of the earth, men, the human race.
Dear qaz: The sheep are His, the goats are His. Have you ever considered why the Master of Reconciliation is speaking of virgins (5 wise & 5 foolish) in the context of St. Matthew 25? Why? Further, why are two clean animals being addressed according to the Old Covenant, rather than 1 clean and 1 unclean? Why qaz? Why?
Friends: once in a while on Christian threads a post appears that is exquisite. This is one of them.
"The reason hell is such a dangerous doctrine is because we become exactly like the God we worship . If we worship a God who tortures people endlessly for finite transgressions, that has a way of changing who we are in a very ugly way. If we worship a God who is love, who forgives seventy times seven and then some, who doesnāt leave us or abandon us no matter where we go, who loves enemies, who tells us not to judge, who is the perfect love that casts out fearā¦then that weaves its way into who we are and how we act.
And you cannot just āread his word and understand his decrees.ā First of all, his āwordā is the living Christ, not a book, and reading and understanding requires interpretation, which is always through a veil of psychological projection, cultural influences, personal biases, IQ, and God knows what else, so itās never that easy. Thousands of biblical experts and theologians throughout the centuries have been wrong too many times to list." -kmom2-
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Friends: Our brother Ben has just posted a lovely song that is fact.
