So many people on this planet – a couple of billion in fact – believe in the love of God in Jesus. But whilst many know about that love, only a fraction experience that love day by day. Strike me that that’s a tragedy. Imagine what this world would be like if all the people who believed in Jesus, experienced the love of Jesus. Just imagine!

I don’t know if you remember but last week we started talking about love, the sort of love that never fails, God’s love. See I think this is important, I mean really important for us to wrap our hearts and our minds and our souls around God’s love. Because it’s a startling love, a surprising love, the sort of love that we rarely find, if ever, here on this earth.

It’s not to say that other people don’t love us, I know my wife loves me and I love her, we’ve promised ourselves to one another for the rest of our lives. And there’s the thing, one day that love will end, one day one of us is going to die and in the meantime we’re going to love each other imperfectly because we’re human.

But God’s love never fails. He never leaves us, He never forsakes us. And with all the bumps and the bruises and the scars that we’ve been left with as we’ve travelled along that bumpy road we call life it’s something that you and I really need. We all have fears and insecurities, okay some more than others but we all have them but God doesn’t want us to be afraid, He doesn’t want us to be insecure. Have a listen to this, it comes from 1 John chapter 4, verses 16 to 19:

God is love and those who abide in love abide in God and God abides in them. There’s no fear in love but perfect love casts out fear for fear has to do with punishment and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. We loved because he first loved us.

I love that. God is love and if we abide, if we dwell in fellowship with God we’ll know that love. And get this, the perfect love of God casts out all fear so we don’t have to be afraid anymore or insecure anymore or worried anymore because it turns out that love, perfect love, God’s love is like a healing balm. God’s love when we live in it, dwell in it, abide in it, sets us free from fear.

You know that sounds fantastic and if its true well we all need that. So here’s the plan, let’s spend a bit of time exploring this healing love of God today, in fact over the next few days on the program because this love thing is so important, knowing that we’re safe and secure in God’s love is just so important, isn’t it?

Well it is because healing and restoration is precisely the reason that Jesus came to this earth. The very first time He got up to speak in a Synagogue or at least it’s the first time following His launch into His public ministry, He chose to read from what we now call the Old Testament from the book of the prophet Isaiah and this is how it all went down. Luke chapter 4 beginning at verse 16:

When Jesus came to Nazareth where he had been brought up he went to the Synagogue on the Sabbath day as was his custom. He stood up to read and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written, ‘The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lords favour.’ And Jesus rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of all the Synagogue were fixed on him, then he began to say to them, ‘Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing’.

You see His whole pitch, His whole reason that He came and He starts off with the poor. Can I tell you? The poor were despised and marginalised and ostracised. The poor weren’t by and large the ones filling the Synagogue that day in Nazareth but He came, He came to bring them, them the poor good news. Release to the captives, people in prison, people no one bothers with and sight for the blind, they were beggars out there on the street. No welfare cheques in the mail for them, they were the lowest of the low, freedom for them.

The very first thing that Jesus gets up and says about Himself is He came to bring healing to the least of the least and isn’t that often how we feel? Sure there may well be poor people, imprisoned people, blind people, oppressed people listening to this message today, in fact I know without a shadow of any doubt that there are and their ears are listening keenly to what’s going on here.

But what about to those who don’t quite fall into those categories? What about those who are comfortable middle class suburbanites commuting on the tube in London or driving home in Chicago or resting on a beach somewhere in the Pacific, what about those people? There are plenty of those people listening today too.

Well that passage from the Book of Isaiah that Jesus read there actually in full has a lot more to say. It talks of binding up the broken hearted, proclaiming liberty to the captives, releasing prisoners, comforting all those who mourn, to give us a garland, a wreath of flowers instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit, to repair the devastations of the past.

Now why wasn’t it quoted in full by Luke? Because those guys lived in a oral culture and so he quoted what he remembered but you can be sure that if Jesus was reading from chapter 61 of the Book of Isaiah then this is what He read, this is what He said about Himself, all those things. He came to bring healing and restoration to you and to me.

Just let that sink in. Is any of us broken hearted today? Do any of us have devastations of the past that need rebuilding? Is anyone today mourning? Does anyone need the oil of gladness? Does anyone need the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit? Well? I think we pretty much covered everybody there with that list.

Does that mean that Jesus only came for the losers? No. That’s what the sceptics will tell you. The point is, we all have things happen to us along the way that require healing. Things that sometimes are our own fault but other times they’re not our fault and we’re left with wounds and scars. This is universal. Rich and poor, black and white, Jesus came for all of us. He came to bind up the broken hearts among us.

Can I tell you? As I look back to a devastating time in my life when I was broken hearted the only person who could make any difference in that place was Jesus. Nothing anybody else said or did had any impact whatsoever and that’s how often it is. The only thing that can make an impact, the only thing that can heal us is the healing balm of Gods own love. Totally accepting, totally loving, totally faithful, totally powerful beyond measure to drive out darkness and fear.

And you know the sad thing, so many people don’t believe that this love is actually for them, it’s as though it’s for others but surely not for me because I must come somewhere low down on the pecking order. I mean, surely God would go to the super spiritual people before me, surely God wouldn’t have time to get as far down the list as me. Which is why when Jesus stood up for that very first time in His public ministry He read from the Book of Isaiah and declared for all the world that He came for the poor, the oppressed, the captives, the blind, the broken hearted, the least of the least.

What He was saying is that He came for everyone including you and me and friend that’s why over the next couple of days we’re going to meet two of these people, a leper and a woman with a terrible sickness. Both people who laid hold of Jesus’ healing love. Both people who should have been so far down the pecking order that Jesus wouldn’t even have noticed them. Because I believe that Jesus, through His Word, wants His love to become real in your life.

Ever felt like the amazing love of God – sure it’s true, but it’s for other people. Not for me. Well, in this next episode of “A Different Perspective” – we’re going to meet a man who, according to our view of God, should never have experienced His love. And each time I visit this man – his story completely blows my socks off!

Yesterday, and indeed over the past week, we’ve been exploring God’s love and if the truth be known my hunch is we could go on doing that again next week and the week after and the week after that – for an eternity. Because on this journey of exploration the one thing I do know is that no matter how far we go or how long we go or how wide or how high or how deep we go what we’ll discover is that we will never run into the boundaries or the limits of God’s love.

Because God’s love has no boundaries, God’s love knows no limits, would you agree? The thing that always rocks me to the core is that when I’m in a place where I don’t expect to find God’s love, when I’ve failed Him, when I’m alone in a dark place, the last thing I expect to find right there is the love of God. And yet time and time again as I’ve wandered off in those dark places the love of my Saviour Jesus always finds me.

He’s there in that place, even though I may not expect Him to be because I haven’t yet grasped in my understanding that He will always be there for me. I don’t think I’ll ever truly know the love of Christ because it surpasses knowledge and that right there is the most important thing we can ever know.

So we can wax lyrical about the love of God, we can talk about it in theory but what about God’s love in our own experience? What about in your experience? I wonder whether you, like me, from time to time will find yourself in a place where the last thing you expect to find is God’s saving love. I wonder whether you, like me, have had times where you’ve just lost sight of the unfailing love of God. Well if that’s you too then I have something really special for you today.

I think we each have one particular story from the Bible that more than any other story resonates with us. For me, it comes in the first chapter of Mark’s Gospel. I’d not long been a Christian, probably no more than a year and I was already in Bible College, don’t ask me, God had a plan and at that point I just grabbed hold and hung on and so there I was studying at a Bible College.

One of the compulsory subjects I had to take was evangelism. Oh okay, compulsory subject, need a tick in the box, could sit through a whole semester of lectures. But hang on a minute, look at the timetable, look next semester I can take this subject as an intensive and what that meant was I could attend for two weekends, get all the lectures on those weekends, do the assignments and hey bingo, I had the tick in the box. Pretty good plan, so that’s what I did.

I got to the first intensive, it started Friday morning and met the visiting lecturer, a long hair, bearded, ex-heroin-addicted bikie who now had a couple of PhD’s to his name. And as well as being a theologian he presented himself as a cultural anthropologist. Pretty impressive but understand, at this point in my life I was just a young Christian. I’m a well heeled pretty successful businessman and to tell you the truth I looked at this guy and I was not impressed at all by what I saw.

Nevertheless the lectures began and even though it was hot and humid I was absolutely riveted and as we came to the end of the day it was as though for the first time someone had opened the lid to the box labelled ‘God’s love’ and I was completely overwhelmed. And for that night the lecturer set us an assignment, to read one of the Gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke or John – from beginning to end. He happened to mention that Mark was the shortest of the four so, you guessed it I chose Mark.

That night I started to read and I wasn’t long into it when I came across the story of a leper. It’s only very short but this one story, I have to tell you, was the turning point of my life. Mark chapter 1 beginning at verse 40:

A leper came up to Jesus begging him and kneeling he said to him, ‘if you choose you can make me clean’. Moved with compassion Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him and said to him, ‘I do choose, be made clean’. Immediately the leprosy left him and he was made clean. After sternly warning him he sent him away at once saying to him, ‘see that you say nothing to anyone but go, show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded as a testimony to them.’

But he went out and began to proclaim it freely and to spread the word so that Jesus could no longer go into a town openly but stayed out in the country and people came to him from every quarter.

See right there in that moment it hit me that I was that leper. Not just in my own eyes but in God’s eyes. You see the moment I met Jesus, the moment I accepted Him something started really bothering me and frankly from time to time since then it’s come back to bother me again. It’s this: that I am simply not worthy of God. I’m not. The more I get to know Him I, like the Apostle Paul, the more aware I become of my sinfulness. I truly am not worthy.

But back then it struck me for the very first time that my sin was a rancid stench in the nostrils of God just like the pus filled sores of that leper. This leper back then was an outcast, he couldn’t approach anyone else who wasn’t a leper unless he yelled out ‘Unclean, unclean’. He lived in a slum outside the protection of the city walls with the other lepers and as much as I came to the realisation that I wasn’t worthy to approach God this leper already knew that of himself.

Everything in his culture and his society and his religion told him he was not worthy to approach Jesus. So what does he do? He approaches Jesus anyway. He throws himself at Jesus’ feet, he kneels down before Him and begs:

If you choose you can make me clean.

Do you see that? Nothing was going to stop this leper, not his religion, not the law, not social customs, not his own loss of dignity, nothing. He cast himself on the mercy of God that day and Jesus, listen carefully to this:

“Moved with compassion Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him and said ‘I do choose, be made clean.”

Jesus was moved by compassion. The love of God reached out and did the one thing that nobody else on this planet would have done in that moment, the love of God reached out and touched the leper. And that loving, compassionate reaching out and touching was the healing love, the healing power of God. And my friend the only reason that this leper is before you today is that I too was so touched by the love of God.

Do you notice what happens straight after this? Jesus tells the man, “Look don’t tell anyone else, just go to the priest, according to the law offer your sacrifice for your cleansing then they can declare you clean and alls good.” But the guy, well he’s over the moon! He’s not going to see any priest! He races into town to his former friends and family, people he’s been separated from for who knows how long, and he shouts the good news from the roof tops, “I’m clean! I’m clean!” A leper no more, healed, restored.

Back into relationship with his family and his community, can you blame him? And do you notice that this healing touch came to the least of the least, most marginalised and rejected of outcasts, it came to the leper. Feeling inadequate? Feeling unworthy? That’s the whole point. God’s healing touch is for you and for me as much as it was for that leper.

There are a whole bunch of people who have what I call a worm theology. They look at themselves in the mirror – what they see is a worm – God’s love couldn’t possibly ever be for me! Well, we’re going to meet someone on the next episode of A Different Perspective – who had every right to think of herself that way. And despite that – she reached out and touched Jesus.

If you’ve been able to join me on the program over the last week and a half you’ll know that we’ve been exploring the amazing love of God. Why? As the old Beatles classic goes, “All You Need Is Love”. And with so many people living their lives under a cloud whatever that cloud might be, whatever failure or regret or loss or threat, whatever it may be I believe God wants to blow that cloud away in many a life, maybe in your life.

We started off last week by taking a look at this verse, 1 Peter chapter 1, verse 8:

Although you haven’t seen him (that’s Jesus) you love him and even though you do not see him now you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.

And yes whilst God lets us walk through difficult times sometimes, whilst pain is as much a part of life as anything else I believe that whatever circumstances we find ourselves in He wants us to experience His indescribable and glorious joy and if there’s one thing I’ve learned in life there can be no joy where there is no love. Would you agree?

It’s only when we receive love and when, at the same time, we have the extraordinary privilege of giving love, that we’re truly living the life that God intended. It’s only in love that we can experience the joy of the Lord. And there’s a downside, because the love that we discover in this world isn’t always the sort of love that we need.

Yesterday we met a leper who knew that by every law, every custom, whatever else he’d been brought up with, the last thing he should do was to approach someone who wasn’t a leper. He was required to yell out at the top of his lungs at some sixty to seventy paces away from someone else ‘Unclean, unclean’, to warn other people not to come near.

You and I, we can scarcely fathom how that must have hurt him, how that must have torn at his soul. And despite this he throws himself at Jesus’ feet. He ignores protocol and cast himself at the mercy of God and was healed.

Well right now we’re going to meet a woman, she too was unclean but for a different reason and she too come to Jesus for healing but in a different way. Let’s listen to her story, Mark chapter 5 beginning at verse 22:

One of the leaders of the Synagogue named Jairus came and when he saw Jesus fell at his feet and begged him repeatedly, ‘My little daughter is at the point of death. Come, lay hands on her so that she may be made well and live.’ So he went with him and a large crowd followed him and pressed in on him.

Now there was a woman too who had been suffering from haemorrhages for twelve years. She had endured much under many physicians and spent all that she had and she was no better but rather grew worse. She had heard about Jesus and come up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak for she said, ‘If I but touch his clothes I’ll be made well.’

Immediately her haemorrhaging stopped and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. Immediately aware that power had gone out from him Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, ‘Who touched my clothes?’ And his disciples said to him, ‘You see the crowd pressing in on you, how can you say who touched me?’

He looked around to see who had done it but the woman knowing what had happened to her came in fear and trembling and fell down before him and told him the whole truth. He said to her, ‘Daughter your faith has made you well, go in peace and be healed of your disease’.

Now just think about this, being unclean was a big deal and because of her constant bleeding. According to the law of the Old Testament this woman was unclean and anyone or anything that she touched became unclean. And if you’re unclean you couldn’t go and worship God at the Synagogue or in the Temple, that’s it in a nutshell, she’s an outcast.

Aside from probably being quite smelly, given that they didn’t have the mod cons some of us expect today, she was totally outcast because she was ritually unclean. Isolated, no husband, poor, no one to protect her or to provide for her, twelve years of pain and suffering, rejection, isolation and then she hears that this Jesus is coming to town.

We don’t quite know what went through her mind but my hunch is that after all the Doctors, the years of suffering, she’s completely at the end of her tether. So she takes the bit between her teeth, she’d heard about the miracles, maybe she’d seen Him perform miracles, perhaps she knows someone who has been healed.

So she sets out that day with pretty much nothing to lose but when she gets to where Jesus is He’s surrounded by this massive crowd, seems everybody else had pretty much the same idea that day. Let’s go check this guy out who’s supposed to be healing all these people and at the top of the heap, at least a hundred and fifty pegs higher in the social order than this woman, is the leader of the Synagogue, Jairus, whose daughter is on her death bed.

Now imagine how this woman felt. The crowd. Jairus. What hope was there? Well just one. If Jesus wasn’t going to see her and reach out to her as He did to the leper, well you know what, she could see Him and maybe, just maybe, she could squeeze through and reach Him, what’s she got to lose? She had heard about Jesus and came up behind Him in the crowd and touched His cloak for she said:

If I but touch his clothes I’ll be made well. And immediately her haemorrhaging stopped and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease.

And no one, no one other than herself knew. Perfect. She could slip away anonymously, she could touch the healing love of God and she could get on with her life. No one need know that she, this unclean woman, had squeezed through the crowd and touched so many other people in the crowd and made them unclean too. What a perfect result for her, healing and anonymity.

But Jesus knew. Jesus had been touched by someone in the crowd, the one person who for whatever reason, whatever her thinking was, had come with a faith beyond faith, a hope beyond hope, in the healing love of God. And it was through that faith and that hope and that determination that she lay hold of the power of God. For the power flowed out of Him into her. Not to anyone else.

And the disciples who should have got it were incredulous. What do you mean someone touched you Jesus? Give me a break; you’re surrounded by this huge crowd pressing in on you. But Jesus singled her out, she told her story and He said to her:

Daughter your faith has made you well, go in peace and be healed of your disease.

And through this woman He taught the crowd – He taught you and me two thousand years on – that His saving love, His powerful love, His healing love is for everybody. From the greatest – Jairus, to the least – this woman whose name we will never even know.

Friend, sometimes He heals our physical disease and sometimes He doesn’t but here’s what I’ve noticed about Jesus. Whenever we come to Him with just a mustard seed of faith His compassion, His love and His healing will touch us in ways that we simply can’t imagine. The point is that His love heals and restores according to His sovereign will and purpose and I’ve never met anyone who’s been worse off for having pushed through the crowd to touch His cloak.

I’ve never met anyone who says, “Man I wish I’d never touched Jesus”. And so often the ones who touch Him are the ones called to trials and challenges in serving Him. But even those, those who suffer have come to experience the indescribable and glorious joy of knowing Him and that my friend is worth more than anything else that you or I will ever find on this earth.

Don’t know about you but I love those bits in the Bible that tell me about how much God loves me. But when it comes to the bits about me taking the trouble and making the sacrifices to share His love around – honestly, I’d rather skim over those bits. But if we do – we miss one of the most important things in life.

Hey, listen how are you today? I hope that if you’ve been able to join me over the last week and a half on the program you’ve been as touched and as moved by the love of God as I have. There’s something so special about God’s love, it never fails. We’ve seen too how that love is for everyone, everyone who would come to Jesus and ask for His forgiveness and help.

That leper whom we met who cut through every legal, religious and social barrier to kneel down at Jesus feet and to say to Him, “Lord if you are willing you can make me clean”, and Jesus, moved with compassion, reached out and touched him and said, “I am willing, be made clean”. And the unclean woman who’d been haemorrhaging and suffering for twelve years who pressed through the crowd to touch Jesus’ cloak and was healed through her faith in His power and His love.

This healing love isn’t just for the greatest it’s also for the least, in fact especially for them, the poor, the lame, the blind, the marginalised, the prisoners, the broken hearted, everyone and everyone includes you and me.

But here’s the thing, it’s an odd thing, love is only love when we give it away. If it just flows in without flowing out it becomes stagnant and eventually it dies. So today I’d like to take a look at what we should do with this amazing love that God pours out on us because when we start doing something with that love it’s only then that our lives become rich and fulfilled.

It’s interesting actually how often God’s Word talks about the inflow and the outflow of love. It happens quite a bit although us being who we are we kind of lap up the bits about God’s love being poured on us but when it comes to us, you and me, sacrificing our lives so that His love can be poured out on others, well you see that’s not so much what we want to hear.

If you happen to be going to Church let me ask you, when was the last time you heard a sermon or a message on this passage, 1 John chapter 3, verse 16:

We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.

Yeah right. We don’t like that second bit too much but surprisingly it’s in that second bit, that bit about us laying down our lives for each other, that we discover our purpose in life. And when we live out that purpose we discover fulfilment and contentment. And those are commodities everyone’s looking for only to discover that when you look in the wrong places they’re very much in short supply.

But in the Kingdom of God, in God’s economy there’s more than enough fulfilment and contentment to go around. So let’s unpack this a bit and see if we can’t get some more fulfilment and contentment happening in our lives. Let’s explore this link between living out God’s love, letting it flow out of us and contentment and satisfaction because the two are intrinsically linked. 1 John chapter 4 beginning at verse 15:

God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God and they abide in God. So we have known and believed the love that God has for us. God is love and those who abide in love abide in God and God abides in them and there’s no fear in love but perfect love casts out fear for fear has to do with punishment and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.

We love because he first loved us. Those who say, ‘I love God’ but hate their brother or sister are liars for those who do not love a brother or a sister whom they have seen cannot love God whom they haven’t seen. The commandment we have from him is this, ‘Those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also’.

So first up, when we believe in Jesus it’s not about some distant belief, it’s about God abiding in us and us abiding in Him. Great word that “abiding”. It means “to move into”, “stay”. It means a strong and intimate relationship. And because God is love, when He dwells in us His saving love dwells in us too. For me, and for everyone else too, that means having a relationship with Him. It means trusting Him, praying, reading His Word, listening, enjoying, living our lives for Him, making decisions that honour Him.

That’s what abiding means. And then what we discover in that place is this amazing love. It just floods over us and envelopes us and we blossom, we thrive in it. Because not only do we experience the love of Jesus who died so that we could be forgiven, we experience the love of Jesus who rose again and through that we have a new life and that new life – coming with all the ups and downs that it does for sure – that new life living, dwelling, abiding in the love of God is awesome. You see:

There’s no fear in love but perfect love, Gods love casts out all the fear because fear has to do with punishment and whoever fears hasn’t reached perfection in love.

Forgiven – no longer afraid. Blessed – absolutely awesome. And friend, if you believe in Jesus but that’s not the sort of life you’re having there’s time to do some abiding. Because whatever in our circumstances He wants us to rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy in His love. But right following on from this description, this fantastic love is the outworking of that love in our lives. Please listen carefully as we read it again, 1 John chapter 4 beginning at verse 19:

We love because he first loved us. Those who say, ‘I love God’, and yet hate their brothers and sisters are liars for those who don’t love a brother or a sister whom they have seen cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this, ‘those who love God must love their brothers and sisters too’.

See what God’s saying here to us through the Apostle John is this, if you’re experiencing the love of God, I mean truly really powerfully in your life then you won’t be able to help yourself, you’ll end up loving others because He first loved you. And if we kid ourselves by saying, “Hey, I love God” without living God’s love out in our lives then we’re liars, you can’t help it.

Immerse yourself in God’s love and the natural inevitable consequence of that is love for others. And here’s the exciting thing, I was made to love people one way and you were made to love them the other way. Romans chapter 12, verses 4 to 8, we’re not going to go there now but that sets out all the different motivational gifts that we have and you and I are wired differently and God’s plan is that we live out who we are by loving other people.

If you read those giftings in Romans chapter 12 you’ll discover one of them is a leader, it’s what I am. And the way I love other people is by using my strength to get things done for them. Now you may be an encourager and the way you love them is by encouraging them and so on. Is it hard sometimes? Of course it is.

If you’ve spent any time with me you might find from time to time I’m difficult to love and vice versa right? The point is even when we’re still struggling or hurting in our lives one of the greatest things we can do is to take as much of God’s love as we’ve experienced so far in our abiding with Him and go and love other people with it using the gifts and motivations and talents Gods given us.

And when we do that it’s awesome. Firstly those other people get blessed by what God’s given us and the crazy thing is that we get blessed because finally we’re living the life God always meant for us to live. Do you see? Ephesians chapter 2, verse 10:

We are God’s workmanship created in Christ Jesus to do the good works God prepared beforehand for us to walk into.

And if perhaps God’s love is feeling a bit stale in your life at the moment it’s time to go and give some of it away. There’s a reason for that, faith without works is dead. To give it away, go sacrifice for others then all of a sudden it comes back to life, it’s the way God planned it to be.

When you throw a stone in a pond it makes a splash. But the ripples … the ripples reach further than the splash ever could. When we meet Jesus – He makes a splash in our lives and that’s fantastic. But what about the ripples? Turns out, He really cares about the ripples that go way out to the edge of the pond.

Well, listen over the last couple of weeks we’ve been exploring the saving love of God through Jesus. This love is completely unconditional. This love surpasses all understanding. It goes way beyond anything we could ever have imagined. I guess that’s why the Apostle Paul wrote these words with such incredible passion, Ephesians chapter 3 beginning at verse 18. He said:

I pray that you may have the power to comprehend with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

And the exciting thing is as we reach out day by day just as a tree’s branches reach upwards to the sun and as the roots reach ever deeper and wider into the rich moist soil, what we discover is that whatever direction we go, upwards, downwards, outwards, sideways, in God’s love we discover in our own experience that His love has no limits.

We never run into any boundaries, there’s never a point at which His love stops. And that’s how we know the love of God which surpasses all understanding as we discover in our very own experience that God’s love is infinite.

But as we saw yesterday on the program unless we do something with this love, unless we bear fruit then ultimately our faith dies. Faith after all without works is dead. James chapter 2, verse 20. So what do we actually do with Gods love? How do we allow it to flow out of us into a lost and hurting world?

Jesus said to His disciples, you can read this in John chapter 15, verse 16:

You didn’t choose me but I chose you and I appointed you to go and bear fruit that will last so that the Father will give whatever you ask him in my name.

So a tree is meant to bear fruit and when we become rooted and grounded in God’s love, as we spread out our branches into the fresh sunlit air, as our roots go deep into the rich moist fertile earth of His love, as we become established and grow in Christ so we are meant to bear fruit. It’s a natural consequence of being loved by God and loving Him.

That’s what we saw yesterday, 1 John chapter 4, verse 19:

We love because he loved us first.

And so right now I’d like to introduce you to a man who went through a radical transformation because Jesus came into his life and in particular we’re going to explore what Jesus told him to go and do after his life had been transformed. That man, that man is known to many as the Gerasene demoniac. Let’s listen to his story, Mark chapter 5 beginning at verse 1:

They came to the other side of the sea to the country of the Gerasene’s and when he had stepped out of the boat immediately a man out of the tombs with an unclean spirit met him. The man lived amongst the tombs and no one could restrain him anymore, even with a chain for he had often been restrained with shackles and chains but the chains he wrenched apart and the shackles he broke into pieces and no one had the strength to subdue him.

Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always howling and bruising himself with stones. When he saw Jesus from a distance he ran and bowed down before him and he shouted to the top of his voice, ‘What have you to do with me Jesus son of the most high God? I adjure you by God do not torment me.’ For he had said to him, ‘Come out of the man you unclean spirit.

Then Jesus asked him, ‘What is your name?’ And he replied, ‘My name is Legion for we are many.’ He begged him earnestly not to send them out of the country.

Now there on a hillside a great herd of swine were feeding and the unclean spirits begged Jesus, ‘Send us into the swine, let us enter them’. So Jesus gave them permission and the unclean spirits came out of the man and entered the swine and the herd numbering about two thousand rushed down the steep bank into the sea and were drowned in the sea.

The swine herders ran off and told it in the city and in the country and people came to see what it was that had happened. They came to Jesus and they saw the demoniac sitting there clothed and in his right mind, the very man who had had the legion and they were afraid. Those who had seen what had happened to the demoniac and to the swine reported it then they began to beg Jesus to leave their neighbourhood.”

As Jesus was getting into the boat the man who had been possessed by the demons begged him that he might go with Jesus but Jesus refused and said to him, ‘Go home to your friends and tell them how much the Lord has done for you and what mercy he has shown to you’ and he went away and began to proclaim in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him and everyone was amazed.

Pretty amazing stuff. This man was absolutely crazy and completely out of control, there were no mental institutions in those days and every attempt to chain him had failed so he had been consigned to living out of town amongst the graves like an animal all because the devil had got a hold of his life and possessed him.

Of course Jesus had the power to cast out these demons which He did rather spectacularly. As a result a whole herd of pigs, two thousand of them, threw themselves over a cliff. The locals were of course delighted and as He’s leaving this demoniac, former demoniac, the man comes to Jesus with such incredible gratitude. For the very first time in goodness knows how long he’s been set free, he’s so grateful, he wants to follow Jesus wherever Jesus goes.

Why did Jesus set this man free? Because the heart of God is filled with healing love that He would pour out upon even the most unfortunate wretch. The healing love of God flowed through Jesus into this man’s life and now he wants to repay Jesus by coming and becoming one of His followers. Now that’s a pretty natural response but look at what Jesus tells him, Jesus refuses and says to him:

‘Go home to your friends and tell them how much the Lord has done for you and what mercy he has shown to you.’ And away the man went to proclaim in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him and everyone was amazed.

Why did Jesus send him away? Because Jesus knew that this mans life had been radically transformed by Gods love and He wanted this man to go and pour that love out into his local community. This demoniac had been shown grace and mercy and now Jesus wanted him to go home and tell his friends about it and his family about it.

Go and become part of your community again. Go tell them about me. Jesus wasn’t so much interested in jumping up and down about the splash He’d made through setting this man free. He wanted the splash to have a ripple effect that would go on and on through the community and down through the generations.

Do you see? When our lives are transformed by the love and mercy of God, when Jesus comes in and turns our world upside down with His saving love, He doesn’t want us to go into a holy huddle. He wants us out there sharing that same love and mercy that’s touched our lives with all those other people out there who need that very same love and mercy.

Now I know sometimes that I can be a slow learner. I can be stubborn and stiff necked and so it takes a while to get things through my thick skull but for years I’ve been trying to make myself happy by getting everything to flow into me. Wealth, recognition, success. And as you may have heard me say before those things ultimately never brought the fulfilment and the contentment that I was looking for.

It wasn’t until I, like the Gerasene demoniac, was set free by Jesus that I discovered I could share His grace and His mercy and His love with other people. And you know the amazing thing, once I started doing that, once His love started flowing out of me into the lives of other people, that fulfilment and contentment I’d been looking for, for all those years, filled my life. It’s just the way Jesus always intended.