God's Love - Nick Frey

God's Love - Nick Frey

Nick Frey shares his personal journey of wrestling with the concept of God's love and its practical implications. He emphasizes the depth and experience of God's love, acknowledging the challenges and doubts that may arise. Nick urges listeners to cultivate a deep revelation of God's love and to trust in His perfect plan, even in difficult times. The talk encourages reflection on one's own understanding and experience of God's love.

Timestamps:
00:02 - Paul's Corinthians

01:23 - How I Learned to Love God

06:17 - How God Used a Cancer Scare to Convince Me of His Will

10:54 - How to get rid of dysentery after 5 weeks

14:26 - Jesus Calling Out Peter's Love

19:50 - How To Love God (New Year's Resolution)

25:08 - God's Love for Us

Transcript

I don't have, like, a main chunk of scripture tonight. I was praying all week when Rick asked me, actually, when I asked Rick if I could come share, he's like, hey, you want to give it to three or four years ago when I was leading him, I said, oh, yeah, this will be sweet. I was like, this is terrifying. I don't really have anything that I can't really gather my thoughts. I don't really feel like I have much.

And all week, I'm like, lord, like, what do you want me to say? What do you want me to talk about? He's like, what have I been doing in your life? I'm like, a lot. He says, all right, use that.

And so in corinthians, Paul is talking, and he says, I came to you, brothers. I didn't come with eloquence or wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. I came to you in weakness and fear and with much trembling. My message and my preaching were not with persuasive words of wisdom, but with the demonstration of the spirit's power so that your faith wouldn't rest on men's wisdom, but on God's power.

And so my hope and my prayer is that as I'm here tonight, that I'm not speaking to puff myself up as I share what God's been doing in my life, that it doesn't put me on a pedestal. Paul says, if I boast, I'll boast about my weaknesses, and I'm going to be talking a lot about my failures and the struggles I've had with God the last four years. And so, yeah, if I say something that's great, praise God. But with that, the topic that has been a constant wrestling, I think, for me, I would assume every believer is God's love. It's something that we say, oh, yeah, God loves us.

That's good. That's great. God loves us. But what does that look like? What does that look like when it is experienced and it is deep?

There's a proverb, and it says, each heart knows its own bitterness, and no one can share in its joy. There's another one that says, hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life. And for the last four years, I have wrestled with God, and I said, I do not feel your love. I don't know where you are. You have me doing all these crazy things, but this just does not feel like the christian life, something is missing, and this sucks.

And it's like, where are you? Where are you in this? What was the verse with that? Looking back at my time doing all this, there's been so many challenges in trying to navigate that. And when somebody talks and gives a good sermon, that's great.

But if we're hurting, those good sermons don't help us. Right? It can be bitter and painful when somebody talks about their experiences, about how God loves them. When you're not feeling that, when somebody's getting the things that you long for, it's easy to say, God, where are you? Do you really love me?

When you're trying to have a kid and your friends get pregnant and you've been struggling for years. God, what the heck, man? God, I'm struggling to pay my bills. My friends get a raise. Where are you, God?

You hear them talk about it. You've seen God's love you read about in the Bible. But when you don't feel that and experience those hurt, that's not fun. It's hard to rejoice in God when everybody else around you is. And sometimes that encourages you, and that's great, but a lot of times, it just makes you feel even worse about yourself.

And so, as I share tonight, my prayer is that through my mess and through my brokenness and how God redeemed that, it doesn't leave you saying, oh, great, that's just somebody else, but not me. I hope and I pray that it can bring you in to say, there is hope for me. And God abundantly loves me. And so four years ago, I was, what year is it? 2024.

Now I stopped leading in 2020 and up to. I became a Christian in July ish of 2016. And so my first three years were probably pretty common for everybody. It's overwhelming. It's great.

You're doing a bunch of cool things. You're trying to figure it out. You're learning about God, you're empowered, and you're invigorated. And then things start getting hard and you start saying, okay, the honeymoon phase has wore off. How do I do this the rest of my life?

How do I walk with God in a way where it's like, yeah, this is in some sense how it's supposed to be. And so I started seeking that. I started trying to figure out, why am I still struggling with the sins that God says I'll have power to overcome? Why am I still struggling with all of this brokenness and all of this mess? And I don't feel close to you.

And so I started seeking out, and there's a book I read, and it's talking about being rooted and grounded in God's love as our foundation. We know God's love, right? Yeah. Christ died for us. That's what we're telling kids every week.

But do we believe that at the end of the day that God looks at us and he is chomping at the bit to be reunited with us, and he is longing to love us and lavish us and dance over us and rejoice. And for me, the answer was no. I said, I've blown it. I've screwed up. Yeah, I'm not there.

And I started to be invigorated and changed by trying to meditate on how much he loved me. And I finally got to a point where I said, this is the christian life. I am dancing and singing and rejoicing in God's love and so overwhelmed that I will do anything. What's he saying? The psalms.

With my God, I can climb a mountain. With my God, I can scale a wall. This is incredible. And I started praying in faith for crazy things. I needed a laptop for Nepal.

I said, I'm not going to buy one. God can provide this. Sure enough, I prayed for a MacBook pro. And my budy's like, you need a laptop, right? I was like, yeah.

He goes, my dad has an old, fully specked out MacBook pro. You want it? I'm like, thank you, jesus. I was like, God, I need $10,000 fundraise and I have zero. I was like, by the end, or I had $100.

I said, by Saturday night at 08:00 p.m. Please let me have $800. And Saturday night came along and there was no extra money in the account. I was like, well, that sucks. The next day I got up, there was $800 and I got a text and somebody said, I've been praying all week and that amount was on my heart.

And I made that last night, like, right around 08:00 p.m. And I'm like, what? And there was those moments like, this is the christian life. We are praying in faith and rejoicing and delighting in God's love, and he is lavishing it upon us. And we're seeing power in our prayer and being motivated to change and seeing power over our sin.

I was like, this is awesome. I hope this never stops. Well, I think one of the things God loves to do is take us through our biggest fears to show us that he's bigger than our fear. And one of my greatest fears was God. I never want to be numb to the gospel again.

I never want to doubt your presence or your love or be numb to you. That scares the heck out of me. And sure enough, I had expectations of how God was supposed to work, and I had a love for my perceptions of God. But God's ways are higher than ours. God's ways don't always make sense to us.

God's ways a lot of times hurt. And so I don't even remember what it was. No, actually, I do. So I was praying about something, and I was working on trying to figure out how do I discern God's will? How do I discern where God wants me and how to do it.

And I was making very foolish mistakes on how to do it. I was, like, flipping coins and doing other stuff. But this is also how I got a laptop and answered a prayer. And so I'm trying to figure out where this balance is. I was like, I'm convicted.

I got to fast for 40 days. I was like, I'm going to do it. And I was terrified when I had that conviction. I said, God, I could die on this. Can you really use me if I'm dead?

And he goes, did you miss the point of Jesus? Didn't I kill him and reconcile the whole world? I'm like, oh, that's pretty convicting. Okay, I'll go through with this. And so I start fasting.

Well, after you get far enough in a fast, you start to lose enough weight where it becomes pretty noticeable. And so my dad finds out on day like 14 that I haven't eaten. My dad is very overprotective, and he loses his mind to the point where he breaks out in shingles. And so he's like, you got to stop. You got to stop.

And I'm like, God told me to do this. And I said it probably pridefully, but I tried to say it in a humble way. I was like, I'm not stopping. I'm listening to God. Well, my mom calls the church because she's not trying to tell me.

She's like, hey, I don't really know what to do in this situation. So then I had to talk to my good friend at the church. I talked to somebody. It's like, yeah, that doesn't really sound like a biblical way of doing things. I was like, you're probably right.

And so then I think I stopped on day 16, and I'm like, God, I thought I had this figured out. I thought you were showing me how to discern your will. You've answered so many of my prayers. I thought what happened and trust was hurt. I said, God, I said, I want to trust you, but I don't know where to go from here.

And so I started wrestling with that and praying about it. And over time, if our trust isn't fixed, it continues to break. And I started to see so much of the sin that God finally gave me. Victory over and power over and the control over start creeping back into my life. I said, God, I thought this was done.

I thought you delivered me from this, but here I am again. I said, man, do you love me? Do you love me? Your word says it, but I do not see it and I do not feel it. One of the psalms ends.

It says, darkness is my closest friend. And so I was like, well, I'm just going to keep searching and keep trying. And for the last three and a half years, it has been a broken battle of saying, God, I know your word tells me you care about me, but what is happening? Last three years have been crazy. If you guys don't know me, two years ago, my dad finally passed away after an eight year, 20, however many year battle of cancer.

And so I went straight from that happening all in the middle of while trying to move to Nepal during a global pandemic to finally getting all of that fixed and getting to get to Nepal. And if you guys haven't kept up with my updates, this year, I got demolished. The longest I went without being sick was six weeks. I had dysentery three times. I had food poisoning multiple times.

I might have had worms. I didn't wait to find out. I took a bunch of medicine I shouldn't have taken. But when you think you have worms, you don't want to wait a day to get results. You just want to get rid of them.

Physically, I was destroyed. My house molded twice. Everything I owned was getting ruined. I saw depths of brokenness that I don't even want to say in this room because it was so disgusting and so horrendous. And I'm sitting there just saying, God, what are you doing?

I said, I'm only here because you want me here. I'm going to give one example because this story kind of sucks, but it's hilarious in the same time. So the second time I got dysentery, I just finished, like, a 70 miles trek with will. If you guys know will watkins, he was there. I'm at class, I'm like, man, I feel kind of groggy.

I'm like, well, we don't have air conditioning here, and it's raining. I get home, I take a nap. I wake up. I was like, yeah, I'm sick, dang it. And so I start getting so out of it, I can't keep my eyes open.

I drive myself to the hospital on my scooter, which I probably shouldn't have done. Almost fell down the escalator, get my stool sample, and it's like, yeah, you have dysentery. I'm like, great. Talk to the doctor. Drive myself back home.

Which was a worse decision than driving myself there. And then the fun begins. If you guys don't know about dysentery, you typically get very severe vomiting and diarrhea. And so I go home and I hit my bed, and I sleep for, like, 13 hours. I couldn't tell you what happened.

I don't remember it. I wake up and my stomach starts crumbling. I'm like, oh, man, here we go. And so, sure enough, I start having diarrhea. It's like, I got to pee.

I stand to pee, and the next thing I know, I wake up and it's like, whoa. I haven't had this feeling a while. I'm sprawled over the toilet backwards with my head in the wall. It's like I just passed out. And my pee was like, neon orange.

I'm like, well, that can't be good. And so I call my boss. She's like, yeah, you need to go to the hospital. I'm like, dang it. I get to the hospital, they admit me.

One of Nepali's policies that I don't love is we have the machines. Why won't we use them? And so they want to run as much testing as possible when you really don't need to. And so I said, hey, I just passed out. I need an IV drip.

Like, I'm just dehydrated. They're like, well, we need to run a stool sample, a urine sample, kidney function, glucose, heart rate, EKG. And I'm like, can I not do that? No, we must. All right, well, when they pricked my finger, they forgot to swab with alcohol, and that's how you get hepatitis.

My gosh dang it. And so I finally start getting better off the iv, and they're like, we're going to do the EKG now. And I'm like, great. And they pull up this really old metal machine. This is going to go phenomenal.

And they put all the pads on my chest, and I said, hey, just a heads up. Like, my resting heart rate's in the 40s. That's totally normal for me. That's not, like, any cause of concern. So they take it like, your heart rate's very low.

I was like, what is it? It's in the 40s. I'm like, yeah, that's normal. Like, we must do angiogram. And I'm like.

And so they wheelchair me through the hospital, the cardiologist. And he's like, how old are you? I'm like, 25. He goes, why do they make me do this? He's like, you have any health conditions?

I said, no. He's like, you're fine. I'll run it anyways, just in case takes it. He goes, yeah, your heart looks perfect. I'm like, thank you.

And he goes, they also want to do a CT scan. And I'm like, why? He's like, let's just do it in case. I'm like, I don't like, no, we're good. I get the CT scan.

All good. They finally discharged me. I get home, I'm exhausted, I laid down, and then I had an allergic reaction to the CT scan. Die. And I busted out in a super painful rash.

And then over the next three days, I was in the bathroom over 85 times. And I said, God, I'm not here for me, man. At this point, I don't want to be here. What are you doing? I said, I have nothing left.

This was, like my fifth round of being sick. In the span of five weeks. I dropped 30 pounds. I was down to 145. And I'm just like, you brought me all this way to drag me through the mud.

And at one point, on an update, I said, I know God's going to give me a visa. And somebody's like, you have so much faith. I said, God's not done dragging me through the mud yet. I was like, that is my confidence. I said, there is more that he wants to beat me up over.

Then it just kept getting worse and worse, and I'm struggling and I'm failing. And after our intern program finally finished, I didn't sleep for, like, three weeks. I couldn't sleep through the night. I was exhausted. I was sleeping all day.

I said, God, I botched this. I said, I am doing a horrible job out here. I said, I am basically as worse as I can do. I think I've hit that point. And I got convicted.

And he said, on your best days, you glorify my power and my might and my glory and whatever noble characteristic I have. He's like, but on your absolute worst days, I have ordained it. That my grace is sufficient for you, that my power is made perfect in weakness. And he's like, you can't fail. In your worst days, you glorify me.

And on your absolute best days, when you think you're on that mountaintop, he goes, you're still glorifying to me. Okay, I'm okay with that. But I'm still pretty miserable. And 90% of my prayers this year is, God, this sucks. I hate this.

I don't want to do this. If I could see the full picture, I'd be okay with it. I said, I don't see the full picture. So I'm going to keep complaining because I know you can handle that. Help me get through this.

And so I finally get home from Nepal after more dysentery and everything else, and I got great stories if you want to hear those on that. And I finally get home, and I'm just done. I'm exhausted. I'm laying in bed. I said, God.

I said, I don't want insight. I said, I don't want wisdom. I don't want anything. I said, I just want a hug. I said, I don't have it.

I said, I am at my end. I became a Christian because I was going to kill myself. And this is the closest in eight years that I've ever felt to wanting to die. Anything similar to that brokenness. I said, I am at rock bottom.

I said, I am not doing this for me. I don't want to do this anymore. Where are you? You love me so much that you died on the cross. For me to then not be anywhere near me for the 70 years that I need you most.

I know you're good, but I don't get it. I don't see it. Where are you? So I was reading through a book, or I read a John Piper article or something. And I said, God feels so distant.

And the article convicted the heck out of me. It says a lot of times, as we grow, it's not that God is stepping back farther. It's that our desire for him is getting deeper. And he's not as close as we want. And I thought back to one of my friends in community group who was sleep training their child.

And if you don't know what sleep training is, I don't really either. But apparently you're trying to get your kid to sleep through the night without you. And so they're putting their kid in a room, and he's basically just having to scream and cry himself to sleep for 20 minutes straight, she's standing outside of the door holding back tears with her husband holding her so she doesn't bust through that door to try to run in and comfort her kid. And all year that's convicted me, where I said, I am the screaming child and you are standing at the door wanting to bust in, and you're not. And I am miserable.

But for some ungodly, not ungodly, for some godly reason, you're standing outside the door wanting to bust in. Do I believe that about you? I started reading another book. It's a book I love, and if you want it, I can tell you about it after. But one of the comments in the book, it talks about John chapter 21.

If you guys don't know John chapter 21, that's a phenomenal chapter. You need to read it. It's where Jesus reinstates Peter after his denial. And he says, hey, peter, he says, do you love me? And one of the things I didn't know in the book talked about was in the greek act.

Jesus says, hey, peter, do you agape love me? Peter says, I brotherly love you. He says, peter, do you agape love me? Says, well, jesus, I brotherly love you. He says, peter, do you brotherly love?

Says that this Peter was hurt. Jesus called out Peter's love. He said, do you actually love me as much as you think you do? God has to take us sometimes, and hopefully not all the time, to the absolute depths of our brokenness to remind us that we bring nothing to the table, that we are not fighting for our freedom, that we are not fighting for his acceptance that we should be fighting from the freedom that we have in Christ and from the acceptance of Christ, that he loves us so much that on our worst day, he's ordained it so that we can't lose. And I was taken back.

I said, I'm at my brokenness. I bring nothing to this. And he goes, and guess what? I still love you. I dance over you.

I rejoice over you. I sing songs over you. I am so antsy and standing at the door ready to come back and redeem everything, but I wait because it's better. I said, I still don't understand that. We can talk about that if I have time.

But yeah, there has to be a revelation of God's love in our lives. Rick talked about carrying our cross. If we see that as a burden and not the result of being so overwhelmed by God's love in our lives, we're missing the point. When you are motivated by love the biggest burdens, the biggest sacrifices, they hurt, but they are a delight because you're doing it for the one you love. A lot of us are like Peter and especially me, when we're called out on how low and how crappy our love is and the fact that we can't reciprocate it to God, we have the choice to run and try to find cheap substitutes and whatever that may be.

I'm sure you guys all have something in your life from before you're Christians, or we can run into that and say, God, I can't love you as much as you love me, but the only way I'm going to get better is by sitting and staying in your love. In Ephesians, Paul says, I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord's holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know that this love surpasses knowledge that you may be filled to the measure of all. The fullness of God. Our foundation for every part of the christian life has to be an overwhelming, abundant revelation of his love towards us. The crosses are guarantor that on our days when we don't see it and we're vomiting for the 50th time and having rice come out of our nose, that we can look back and say, I don't know what's happening right now, but if you did this while your enemy, how much better are you working while I'm your child?

There's a verse, or actually proverbs says that fear is the beginning of wisdom. And a lot of us say, yeah, that's good. How many of guys you made New Year's resolutions? Nobody? Okay, one person, two, maybe.

Well, that destroys my analogy. I was hoping a lot of people, I was going to say, how many guys failed? But I'm not going to ask two people and call them out. A lot of times when we fail, we look at God's words where he says, abide in me, or the one who loves me will keep my commands. And we say, man, I suck.

I must not love God. We have that a little bit backwards. Proverbs says, the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. But if we look in first, John, it says, the one who fears isn't made perfect in love. So fear is a good starting point for us.

But if we're still living our christian lives out of fear of punishment or discipline or something from God, we have missed the most glorious part of the Bible. What is it? Whoever loves me will keep my commands. You love because I first loved you. This should be a litmus test, that if we're struggling to be obedient, that if we're struggling to keep God's commands, we're struggling to love God, which means we're not receiving love from God.

Our ability to love God back will never go above the ability to receive the love from him. The more we can learn to stand in God's love and embrace that truth, the more we're empowered to do it. Peter went on to die on the cross because he loved Jesus so much. That's one of the ultimate demonstrations. Peter could have fleeed and continued fishing, but he said, okay, jesus, I might suck at this.

And we see he still screws up in his apostle. But Jesus constantly works to grow him, to make him into a mighty man of Christ or mighty woman of Christ. If you're a girl, we have to take our foundation. We can repeat lies to ourselves all day long to the point where we believe, I'm God, I'm broken, I'm stuck in this sin, I'm an addict, I'm this, I'm that. The other thing he says, that's not who I say.

You are in my word. He's like in your pride. You might believe that, but in your humility, you need to start telling myself your word until it becomes true to you. I delight over you. Psalm 139, one of the parts that blows my mind.

It says, how numerous are your thoughts towards me, God? I can't count them all. Do I believe that every day if God could wake up, the first thing on his mind would be me. The last thing when he goes to sleep is thinking about me and delighting in me and saying, oh my gosh, I can't wait until I'm with him. It takes more love to wait for somebody than to immediately fix everything.

Because when we are waiting, God can work in us for every moment that we have to wait on God. He is perfecting us into the image of Christ. And one of the best things we can do is wait on him because we trust him. If you struggle in your ministry in any capacity, ask yourself, how much do I think God loves me? If I were to die right now and be before God, what's he going to say?

And if you're thinking he's going to call out something you're struggling with or sinning with, you're missing the point. You are missing how much he delights in you. You need to start repeating to yourself verses every day about his delight in you until they start feeling real. And when they start feeling real, all the other stuff comes easy. I mean, I'm not in a relationship, so I can't really relate to this, but I've heard this is true.

When you're in your honeymoon phase, you're so infatuated and overwhelmed with that person. That's all you think about and want to do. And you delight in doing those hard things because it's a way to show them your love. No, babe, I'll do the dishes tonight. Don't worry about it.

I've already taken care of this. Oh, I'll do this for you. Here, I got you this gift. Yeah, it has a cost to it, but you're so enthralled with the person and the object that you're loved that there's a delight in doing it. And when we pick up our cross and carry it daily, if we see that cross as a burden and not an object of God's love for us, we're going to struggle to carry that cross, and we're not going to want to do it.

We're not going to want to be his word if we don't even know if he loves us or not. We're not going to want to trust in his promises if we say, where are you when I need you? Right? And so it takes time. And it's hard when you have to first start telling yourself, I'm loved by God, it feels fake.

But if you ask God and say, God, open my heart, root and ground me in love. That's why Paul calls it the foundation. We're rooted and grounded in love, not our obedience or our great works or mighty deeds. We're rooted and grounded by the unfathomable love of Jesus. Wow.

What's the one verse? There's a really good. It says, as the father has loved me, so I have loved you. Do we really believe that God looks at us and loves us as much as Jesus? I struggle with that every day.

I have to tell myself, God, you love me as much as you love Jesus. And I'd ask myself a question. If God loves me as much as he loves Jesus, how would that change my prayer life? I said I'd probably expect stuff from him. I'm going to Jesus perfectly faultless, with no sin and no brokenness in my life.

There's nothing in between us. That's the whole thing that Jesus set out to do was separate those barriers because we couldn't do it to begin with. Why are we trying to keep it now? Right. He did the hard work that we couldn't do so we could be people and his children that are rooted and grounded in love that can do mighty works for him because he loves us and because we love him.

And every time we wrestle with a sin or struggle and have to make those hard choices of carrying our cross, if we look that as a way to say, God, I struggle to love you, but I want to love you back, here's how I'm going to do it. I'm going to bear this cross. In our pain of bearing that burden, we can delight because we are his love children. He loves us as much as Jesus. His thoughts are too numerous for us.

He knows when we wake up and when we lay down, how wonderful are his ways and how above our comprehension. I'll end on one note about waiting. Because for some of you, when you leave here, you're not going to immediately be enamored by God's love for you. You're going to have to wait and you're going to have to bear the burden that's hard. In Psalm 119, it says, it was good for me to be afflicted so I might learn your decrees.

It was good that I suffered, for now I obey your commands. There's another proverb about like, beatings purging the inner soul. So, God, I hate waiting. Like one of the biggest miracles you can do in my life is to make me wait and do it with joy. And as he was working in that, I just totally blanked.

Let me think. Sorry, I'm just going in there and pray.

Lord, thank you for the leaders that are in this room that you have called into your covenant of love with them. Love fulfills the law. It's not us trying to live up to a standard. It's not us trying to fix all the things that you came to abolish. Lord, perfect love cast out fear.

Help cast out our fear of being good enough for you, our fear of not being able to love you back as you deserve. Lord, help us look into our hearts and be able to see ourselves and say, I am somebody who God takes great delight in because I'm his child. Lord, don't let us get puffed up because it's not of us. We've blown it. We've botched it, we've messed it up.

But you look at us and say, my child, my child. And when you finally get to see us again, you are going to be singing and running to us saying, at last, at last, this is my child in whom I take great delight. You are fearfully and wonderfully. You are beautiful. I can't wait to dance with you and to show you everything I've stored up.

Wait for me. I have something better. And though you don't understand it, I am working in ways that you can't imagine, because I love you every moment that you trust me with that and that you wait, you are loving me back and saying that you believe I have something better for you. Lord, help us be a community of believers, rooted, established in love, who can take up our crosses because we delight to serve you and to reciprocate the greatest thing you've ever given for us. Lord, help us believe that you look at us and you see sinless Jesus, that you love us as much as you love perfect Jesus.

Lord, your word tells it to us. Help us be mighty people of faith who accomplish great deeds not for our own glory, but for the one who loved us and set us free. It's in your name we pray. Amen.