2-11-2024 1st DO YOU LOVE ME PODCAST TRIAL

The podcast "Do You Love Me?" explores the importance of having an intimate relationship with God. God desires for us to know His love and surrender to Him completely. Surrendering allows us to experience His love, have effective service, and receive His blessings. Pride, fear, and Satan's lies can hinder us from surrendering. God has good plans for us and wants us to embrace His gift and use it. Some people reject God's gift and try to handle things on their own. It's important to open, look at, and use God's gift in our lives. Good afternoon. My name is Cornelia Furcombe, and I'd like to welcome you to our first podcast, Do You Love Me? The podcast stems from an extensive study on having an intimate relationship with God. Do you want to know God better, learn to walk in the center of the Father's will as you come to understand his heart revealed in his word? Embrace these biblical principles today and begin your journey to life at its best. It is God's desire for each one of his children to have an intimate relationship with him. Genesis 1 verse 26 says, one of our greatest needs is to know we are loved. Each of us has a feel to feel certain deep down in our hearts that someone loves us, cares for us, and has our best interest at heart. That is how God designed us. He wants us to know he loves us with a passionate intensity too deep for words. God created human beings with fellowship in mind, first with himself and then with others, but we cannot fully love one another until we have ourselves experienced the love of God. We experience his love when we willingly surrender to his call to be our savior, our Lord, and our friend. There are at least three reasons God seeks our surrender. He loves us and desires our fellowship and worship. As long as we hold something back from God, we cannot know him. It's the same with any other relationship. If you have secrets, there's distrust. If there's distrust, there's no relationship. When we surrender to him, we get all of him and he gets all of us. He wants our service for him to be effective and fruitful. The more we know and love Jesus, the more effective our service will be. The closer we draw to God, the more impact our lives will have. The more energetically we nurture our relationship with the Lord, the greater the positive mark that we leave behind. He waits for the freedom to bless us. Yes, he waits for the freedom. God is omnipotent, but he will not violate his own principles. He draws us to himself so that we can experience his love and forgiveness. He asks us for our willing surrender, willing surrender, so that he can give us the best blessings he has to offer. So why do we resist? With all this in mind, why does anyone resist surrendering to God? There are several ideas. Pride, that's the key. The key reason for most people to surrender is pride. They think that they know better than God and that they can handle their lives better. Anyway, so they keep him at a distance. Others don't surrender because they fear what God will do or what he won't do. They're afraid that he won't do anything for them. They think that if they give him control, he'll make them do exactly what they don't want to do. He'll send them to a foreign country or he'll ask them to do some crazy thing. That's not the way he works. And still others refuse to surrender to Christ because they believe Satan's lies. Yes, Satan lies to us every day. And he tells us that God is judgmental and that he'll punish them for our mistakes. All of this is hogwash, completely false. God always has our best in mind. In Romans 8.32, he says he sacrificed his only begotten son for us. How much more would he not give us finest gifts? He will refuse no good thing when we gladly submit to him. In Jeremiah 29.11, he says, I know the plans that I have for you, declares the Lord. Plans for welfare and not for calamity, to give you a future and a hope. You know, God knew us before the creation of the world. He knew us by name. You say, well, my mother and father names me. No, God knew you by name before you were created. He had a plan for you. And when you receive Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, he hands that plan to you. And he says, here, this is the best that I have for you. These are the plans that I have for you. Some people take the plans, they put them down, and they never look at them. They never put them into effect. They do their own thing. Others accept the gift, but they don't do anything with it either. They just hold it. When someone gives you a gift, you have to open it, you have to look at it, and you have to use it. Do you believe that some people re-gift God's gift to them? Yeah. They give it away. They don't need it. They don't want it. God's best, the God that created the universe, the God that created heaven and earth, the God that gave us his Son, who died on the cross for our sins, yes, that God that created all that, we say, no, thank you. I'll take care of it myself. Well, I hope you come back and visit us again. We'll continue this conversation. Thank you. Thank you for sharing this time with me. This is Cornelia. Over.