Someone once said we are a generation looking for likes yet longing for love. Many of us don’t realise how much we are loved and adored. Someone once told me that when I grew up, no one would like me. Those words haunted my heart for years. I got married when I was twenty and my husband was a very likeable chap. Everyone loved Ray and I thought everyone tolerated me because of him. Things changed when a dear friend told me that although she loved us both, it was me she loved and valued as her friend. Her words began to heal my heart.

Do you know that you are loved and valued? We are all incredible human beings who are precious and special. The Bible tells us that God so loved the world that He sent Jesus to show us what His love was like. Today, let’s realise afresh just how much we are loved!

I was thinking recently about a beautiful gift that God has given us – the gift of laughter. We all have this precious gift, but do we use it? When is the last time you laughed, and I mean really laughed? Do you know that children laugh on average three hundred times a day but an adult, only about four times a day! It seems that when we grow up, we forget to laugh.

Did you know that laughter can help you lose weight? Laughing one hundred times is as much of a workout as fifteen minutes on an exercise bike. Ten minutes of laughter can result in two hours of pain relief. It dispels anxiety and fear. What a gift! We all need to learn to laugh. In Proverbs, it tells us about a woman who can laugh at the days that are to come. When we have fear and anxiety, let’s trust God and laugh!

Do you know that you have a bodyguard? Celebrities, royalty and other world leaders all have bodyguards. Their bodyguards are there to protect them and to keep them safe. But did you know that you have a bodyguard?

It says in the Bible that God stands in front of us and behind us. He stands at our right-hand side and our left-hand side. He constantly surrounds us. If you’re a Christian, then He also lives inside of you, and you live inside of Him. He is the best bodyguard ever! The Bible says that His wrap around presence protects you always and that there is no need for you to fear. Remember, whatever battle you find yourself in, that you are not alone. You have the best bodyguard ever.

One of the things Jesus said when He was here on earth was “Just believe”. How easy do you find it to believe when your circumstances seem dire? Do we believe Him when we are ill, or a family member gets a bad medical report? Are we hoping against hope that God will do something and are we believing Him for healing and the miracle that we need? Can we trust God in the middle of heartache?

I know we can because God is faithful and kind. He will be with us through any dark and difficult time. He warned us that ‘in this world you will have trouble but take heart for I have overcome the world’. Can we believe Him when he says He will never leave us or forsake us? Instead of worrying, just believe!

When a phone rings, we automatically pick it up and answer it but are we as quick to answer a call from God? Do we know that God is calling all of us to deeper intimacy? Do we answer our spiritual call as quickly as we answer our earthly call? No matter who we are, God wants us to draw near because he loves and values us. Perhaps we feel that we won’t be accepted, yet it says in the Bible ‘Draw near to God and He will draw near to you.’ It also says, ‘Let us draw near with confidence to the throne of grace where we may receive mercy and may receive grace to help in our time of need.’

So, the next time your phone rings, why not remember to also answer your spiritual call from the Lord and receive mercy, grace and assurance of how much you are loved.

In 2003 God visited us in ngm and showed us the depth of his love, which not only changed us, but also made us realise that we had been asleep to the deeper realms of God’s glory and presence!  The Lord took us to new heights in him and we never want to go back to the way things were beforehand. The Lord called us to come closer to him and when we responded the first thing he did was to show us how much he loved us.  It was as if he woke us up with his kiss of love.  We didn’t know we were asleep, but we were!  We were going for God with everything we had yet we discovered we were missing so much of what God wanted us to experience.  As the Lord showed us more of himself, we couldn’t get enough of his presence.

Scenes of revival began to break out at ngm; scenes I had only read about in history books.  Each night streams of people came to the open microphone, some to express their hunger for God, some to openly repent of ‘hidden secrets’ in their hearts and others to tell the Lord how much they loved and delighted in him.  We had never before witnessed such hunger for God, open confession and repentance like this.  People were lying face down on the floor crying deep tears of sorrow.  Their tears were literally causing large puddles of water on the floor as people confessed sins of pride, jealousy, pornography, selfishness, lust, greed and much more.  It was an amazing sight, one that I will never forget.

Each of us began to spend more and more time in the secret place with Jesus and as we did our hunger for him and for his presence seemed to know no bounds.  We had fallen in love all over again.  It was as if we had been born again, again!  He lit a fire of joy in us that has never gone out.  We could only describe this incredible joy as having a ‘woohoo’ in our hearts; and we never want to lose that ‘woohoo’!  Nothing else satisfies other than living in his presence, where there is fullness of joy.  Many people try to find that joy in possessions, in relationships, in work, in drugs etc., and although at times we can experience a high through these things, no high can ever compare to the ‘woohoo’ that the Lord gives us!

C.S. Lewis said,  “Indeed if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak.  We are half-hearted creatures, fooling around with drink, sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.  We are too easily pleased”

Once you have experienced the depth of God’s love and his oasis of pleasure – nothing else satisfies!  If you have never experience that love – then why not experience it today?  Let’s not be satisfied with anything less!

When Adam and Eve were removed from the Garden of Eden it doesn’t tell you in the Bible how they felt, but I am sure they must have been totally devastated.  Because of their wrong choices, they could no longer live in their oasis where they had experienced the depths of God’s pleasure and delight and what it was like to walk each day with their creator.  There must have been deep immense regret and enormous sadness in their hearts.  They had lost so much and at that point so did the whole human race.  We were created for Eden.  We were created to have a deep and precious relationship with our God and so when Adam and Eve sinned, the Lord looked to find a way for us being able to live in the land of pleasure once more.

Throughout the years he sent many prophets to call his people back to himself, but eventually he did the unthinkable, he sent his one and only son to this earth to reverse everything that happened when mankind sinned.  On the cross, Jesus made a way for us to come back into that deep and wonderful relationship with the Father.  He came not only to restore Eden, but he came to make it better than it had ever been in the beginning.  What wonderful news!  Yet here we are 2000 years since Jesus died and rose again and so many of us live without really knowing the depth of his love, his delight and his pleasure in us!  He has given us an incredible inheritance and yet we are content to live outside of his promises.  Even though some of us have asked Jesus to come into our lives, we choose to live in the land of pain and rejection rather than in the oasis of delight that God has prepared for us.  He wants us to experience his delight, his joy and his love.  When we find the greatest treasure ever, we surely will become so intoxicated with joy and delight that nothing else will satisfy!

I read recently in Joshua 18:3, where Joshua challenges the people of Israel to take a hold of what God had already given them.  He says, “How long will you wait before you begin to take possession of the land the Lord, the God of your fathers has given you?”  What a challenge to us several thousands of years later.  How long will we wait before taking possession of the land the Lord has given us?  He tells us in the Bible that he delights in us, yet how many of us live experiencing and relishing that enormous delight?  He tells us in the Bible that we are valued and have been chosen, yet so many of us think of ourselves as worthless?  The Lord came to bring us freedom; he secured freedom by overcoming sin, death and hell, yet how many of us live in freedom from fears, worries and concerns?  How long will we regard ourselves as useless and worthless, when we have already been given a land to possess, a land where we are loved and adored?  Why do we allow our fears to tie us up when we have already been given freedom?  How long will we wait?  Lets not be satisfied with anything less than what the Gospel offers us!

It says in Genesis 3 that when the Lord came to walk in the garden with his beloved creation, Adam and Eve hid from him.  It was a forlorn thing to do but it’s true to say that our natural self tends to want to hide the sin we have committed not only from others but from ourselves and from God.  We push the guilt deep inside of ourselves not realising that we are storing up problems for a later stage.  Guilty secrets always have a cost!  Those things that are hidden will one day pop up to let us know that they are still there.  Guilt needs to be dealt with and the only way to do that is to confess it and allow the Lord to forgive you. The great news is that every single thing we have done whether in our past, our present or even in our future has been dealt with at the cross 2000 years ago!  Jesus died to set us free from our guilty secrets!  Woohoo indeed!

It’s interesting to note that even though the Lord knows what has happened with Adam and Eve he doesn’t condemn, instead he asks them questions.  As Christians we so often condemn!  So many people leave the church because we have taken it on board to be their judge and jury.  We often forget we are all sinners saved by grace!  We forget that the Lord Jesus told us clearly not to judge.

I recently heard a story about how Billy Graham answered a difficult question when he was attending a rally to support Bill Clinton.  It was just after Bill Clinton’s sex scandal had been made public and so the reporter asked Billy how he could support such a man!  Billy Graham answered the question wisely.  He said, “It’s the Holy Spirit’s job to convict, God’s job to judge and my job to love.”  Oh, that we would learn to love others in that way.  It’s not our job to judge or even to try and convict, it’s our job to love people into the Kingdom.

During God’s questions, Adam and Eve finally spurt out their version of the truth. It’s interesting to note that when we do something wrong, we often look for a scapegoat to take the blame and this is exactly what Adam and Eve did.  Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the serpent.  When things don’t go well for us, there is always the temptation to blame someone else.

With Adam and Eve there was a slither of truth in their answer, but they needed to own their own choices. Each of us is responsible for our own choices.  We need to be able to own the choices we make in life and freely admit when we get it wrong.  No one forced Adam or Eve to eat the apple; they both chose to do so with their own free will, knowing that the Lord had commanded them not to do that.

Let’s learn from the way the Lord, out of love, dealt with Adam and Eve; maybe we need to ask questions rather than being the judge and the jury of others.  Let’s pray for love, grace and wisdom for ourselves and for others.

Things like worry, fear, guilt, stress, condemnation, insecurity or rejection can stop us from knowing God’s delight in our lives!   A lady attended my Spiritual Health Weekends and during that time heard what it says in the Bible about how the Lord treated the prostitute, Rahab.  I had spoken on how the Lord loves each of us equally and even though Rahab did not belong to the nation of Israel, even though she was a prostitute, the Lord had plans and purposes for her life.  Rahab’s future began to change when she helped the spies who had come from the nation of Israel to escape from Jericho.  She saved their lives and because of that, when the walls of that great city fell down and her city was destroyed, she and all her family were saved.

However, God didn’t just save her life; he blessed her in the most incredible way.  Not only did the nation of Israel invite her to live among them as one of them, but also she met and married a wonderful Jewish man and in time they had a child who eventually became the great grandfather of the most famous king of Israel – King David.  Not only that, but if you look in Matthew 1:5 you will see that Rahab is mentioned in Jesus’ ancestors.  She is specifically mentioned in the line of Jesus.  What an amazing God!  He delights in us and blesses us beyond what we can ask or even imagine!

When my second son was born, I remember Daniel, my first son, asking his dad and I if we would love him less now that he had a brother.  We told him that when a child is born into the family something happens to your heart.  Instead of him having to share our love, our hearts would grow bigger to enable us to love him in the same deep way we had always loved him and yet still have room to love his brother in the same way.  That is just a small reflection of how the Lord loves each of us.  Don’t think that because you have done wrong things in your life that the Lord could never love you. Rahab and so many others in the Bible show us that this is never the case.

As the lady listened to the teaching on Rahab she suddenly realised that it was possible to get rid of the condemnation she had lived under for years!  She never could accept that God could love her because of all the horrible things that had gone on in her past.  The truth that night set her free!  Condemnation never comes from God!

Are you living under fear or condemnation?  Is guilt, stress or rejection weighing you down?  Then you can be assured that it does not come from the Lord.  Jesus did not come to condemn us, but he came to set us free!  Take time to sit with the Lord and if you have never confessed what you have done wrong, then do so and ask for his forgiveness.  He will not only forgive you, but he will free you from those things that have caused a huge burden in your heart.  He will free you like he did for this lady and like her you can feel as free as a bird.  Don’t stay in your cage of guilt and shame any longer, but instead let God set you totally and utterly free.

A long time ago before my husband, Ray died we had the privilege of going to a leader’s prayer event in the Palace of Westminster.  Around sixty leaders met together to listen to what the Lord had to say about our nation.  It was a brilliant experience and whilst we were there, we met some leaders we had not had contact with for many years.  One of those leaders was David Pawson.  During the 80’s we had come to know and love David and much of his teaching had been so helpful in our early years as leaders.  We were so thrilled that we had another chance to spend a few minutes with him.  He told us that at the age of 82, he is still travelling around the world teaching people about the Kingdom of God.  He went on to tell us that he had been invited to speak at a very large Catholic convention in Ireland where God moved in a powerful way.  He had never spoken at this convention before and so during his time there he asked the leadership how they knew about him.  Their answer took him by surprise.  They said, “An angel told us your name!”  They went on to explain that they had never heard of him and when an angel told them to invite him, they had to look on the Internet to see if a David Pawson who was a Christian teacher even existed!  They found his web site and wrote to invite him to Ireland.

Apart from the fact that having an angel as your promoter seems the best thing ever, the first thought that occurred to me when David told me that story was that Heaven knows David’s name.  I thought to myself, “That’s amazing!  Even the angels know David Pawson’s name.  Wow!”   It was only later that I remembered that this same thing happened to Peter in the book of Acts.  An angel told Cornelius to send men to Joppa and bring back a man named Peter!  The wonderful truth is that the Lord and the heavenly hosts know each of our names!  They know yours and they know mine!  Isaiah 49:1 says that the Lord calls us by name!  When the Lord speaks our name, it is so intimate and encouraging.  He knows us by name; his words are not for someone else, they are for us!  It also tells us in Luke 10.20 that if we have given our lives to the Lord Jesus then our name is written in his book of life.  Just think about this for a moment, if you have said Yes to Jesus – then right now your name is written in Heaven.  Long before you get to go to Heaven, there is a book and your name is written in it.  Not only that, it is also true that our names are also written on his heart.  How wonderful is that?  Whether you are a Christian or not, the truth is that he loves you so very much.  Do you know that he knows how many hairs are on our heads?  He knows the deepest and most intimate things about us.  He knows the things that we have never told anyone else.  He knows the good and the bad about each of us and he still loves us.  He sends his angels to protect us and to guard us in all our ways!  He loves us unconditionally!  Now that really is a WOW!