Will you open your Bible at John, Chapter 14. One of the things that God wants us to have, is an understanding of is the immense love He has for us. You only give away what you've got, you can't give what belongs to someone else. You have to have something that's real, and the thing that the world needs more than anything, is the love of God. You can't give it if you haven't got it, and this year I would encourage you to open yourself up to encounter and personally experience God's love.
So I want to just pick up where we were last week, speaking about the story of Hosea. Hosea, whose name means salvation, is a type of God himself, and Hosea had an instruction. His instruction was to marry Gomer. Gomer means to come to the end of yourself, to be completely at the end of yourself, to have no more resources left. Gomer was a prostitute. She'd sold herself out, and so Hosea went and married her. Now I didn't go into trying to think through just the implications of the story, but I want to raise this bit. Even though he was married to her, she struggled in her heart to believe she could be loved. Her struggle was the difficulty in believing: I could be loved. This is a struggle many people have. It's a struggle I had for years, and at times still have it. It comes and goes.
It's a struggle to know that we're lovable, to know that we're loved completely and perfectly; and what happened was, Gomer had in her heart a wrong belief system. She had a belief system that somehow she was ugly, defiled, unlovable, and no one could love her, so when you have those kinds of belief systems, even though she had a marriage, and a marriage to a man who loved her, she couldn't receive the blessings of that marriage, because her heart belief system refused to accept that she could be loved. She continued to live as though she was unloved and rejected. When people believe in their heart that they're unlovable, they sabotage their lives and relationships, either by going for addictions to try and fill up that need for love, or by doing crazy things that prove that we're unlovable. So she ran away, and went back and sold herself into prostitution, was living with a man, and proving thereby I'm unlovable.
And yet God shows that no matter where we are, no matter what state we're in, we are lovable, because He's got great love for us. So He sent this man, this prophet to represent Him, and go and pay the full price, to bring her out of the slavery of prostitution, bring her back to himself, and to reveal to her, that in spite of what she thought and believed, she was lovable. This story can be found all over the Bible. It's this tremendous story, it's the story of Jesus Christ. This man Hosea is Jesus Christ, coming because the Father sent Him, into a world that doesn't believe it's lovable, that self-destructs in so many ways, and no matter what we've sold ourselves to, Jesus Christ loved us, paid the full price on the cross, to receive us into intimacy again. The story's seen in the parable of the Prodigal Son, it's seen in so many ways in the Bible, and we're going to explore some of those things this year.
So her difficulty was, her core belief: I'm unlovable - in fact she was an orphan in her heart, no one could love me and care for me. Now I want you to just have a look with me in John 14:18, I want to share on the Orphan Spirit. It's not a demonic spirit. It's just a whole stronghold, a mentality, a way of thinking, a way of living. It is called the world system, it's the way of living your life, when you live your life without God, and I want to just show you how it began. I want to show you how it shows up in our life, and then how Jesus came to remedy that situation for us. This year it's my prayer that God will bring the church, through great increase in personal revelation and corporate revelation, of the love our Father has for us. As we experience that love, it will change us, and change our relationships.