I want you to have a look at a scripture here in Psalm 139, it's an amazing scripture. This is one that David wrote. I won't open it all up but I want to just draw your attention to just a couple of things in it about how God looks upon you. See, God is an initiator of love. We'll pick it up at Verse 13. You formed my inwards parts; You covered me in my mother's womb. Now what he's saying here is he's saying that - see, what happens in a mother's womb is the physical body is formed, a child begins to grow and develop. But what David is saying in here, is he's saying that I was actually a spirit being, and You have covered me with a physical body, so You were watching over me even while I was being formed in the womb. Notice what else it says. My frame was not hidden from You when I was made in secret. Your eyes saw my substance being yet unformed, and in Your book they all were written, the days fashioned for me. So David is saying this; he's saying that while I was still in the womb being formed, while I was experiencing things in my mother's womb, You were watching over me, and as I came forth, You wrote down in a book a destiny, a plan, something my life was called to accomplish, a purpose for my life. What an amazing thing.
In Jeremiah 29, Verse 11, it says I know the thoughts I have to you, thoughts of good, not evil. So every day God is thinking about you. He's thinking thoughts that'll give you hope. He's thinking how your life can go forward. He's thinking how you can prosper. He's thinking how you can be encouraged. He's thinking how you can succeed. The Bible says the Lord delights and takes pleasure when we succeed and prosper. He loves it. He doesn't sort of rejoice over us failing and falling over, He lifts us up. The steps of the good man are ordered by the Lord, though he fall, he'll not be utterly cast down or abandoned by God. God will lift him up and get him going again. This is the nature of God. He initiates love, He initiates reaching out, He continually thinks so God's absolutely passionate about people.
I want you to go with me in Song of Solomon. There's a whole number of ways in the Bible where God seeks to express what He's like, so if you just read it as a book you kind of miss it really, but if you realise that this book describes the experiences of men who encountered God; they weren't perfect people. The Bible's full of people with lives that were full of holes and mistakes and failures, yet God loved them and worked powerfully through them. Many of them changed their generation, yet they were full of holes and faults in their lives, but God loved them. He's not overwhelmed by your failures and lacks. He'll help you get up. I want you to have a look in Song of Solomon here, and it tells us about the love that God has. Now Song of Solomon, guys don't tend to like this book too much, and it kind of looks like sort of a romancey sort of book - well it is, and what it is, it's actually like an allegory. It's like a picture, a story of a relationship between a groom and the bride, so all through the groom talks, the bride talks, and so that's what it is. It's all full of that and it's full of talk of romance and love using picture language, but actually it is to describe the nature of what God's feelings and desires and yearnings are for people, particularly for those who have responded to Him.
Look what it says here in Song of Solomon, Chapter 8, Verse 7. It says many waters cannot quench love - so waters in the Bible speak of adversity or difficulties or setbacks, and notice what it says. It's God's love for you, you can't quench it. You can't put it out. You can't take the flame out, you can't diminish it in any kind of way. His love remains consistent. It's not dependent on our performance, so what happens is we tend to respond based on our performance, and the Bible says no matter what we're going through, no matter what difficulties, hardships, whatever struggles, failures, God's love for you doesn't change - unquenchable. He loved you at the start, He loves you now, He'll continue to love you - hard for us to understand it, so we're going to look at just a few more expressions of it. The Bible's full of it. Once you start to look for it you'll find throughout the Bible God trying to show how He loves people, and His willingness to engage in our lives in a positive, life-changing way - if we will respond. He's yearning for us to respond.