So let's have a look at another verse. I want you to have a look with me in Jude, Verse 20, just before Revelation. It's a little wee book right at the back there. You can just about miss it if you don't know where it is - Jude, Verse 20, it's only got one chapter, and I want us to read Verses 20 and 21. Now you beloved, building up yourselves on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Ghost, keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ, unto eternal life. Notice what it tells us now. It says keep yourself in the love of God, implying no one can do this for you. This is your responsibility, is to discover, nurture and hold onto the reality that you are loved and valued by God. If we don't do that, we will look for substitutes, or be overwhelmed by lacks and problems and issues. It's something we're responsible - notice it says you do it, you keep yourself in the love of God. Keep means to guard from being taken away or losing something, to guard yourself or literally it means, focus your attention on this so it doesn't get taken away from you.
Now that's an extraordinary statement, because the Bible says the love of God is unchangeable. God is unchangeable, God doesn't change. Today He loves you as much as He loved you yesterday, and He'll love you the same tomorrow. He is unchangeable in His love, but our positioning to receive and to walk in the reality of it can change. We can feel very close or very far. We can be enjoying that love, or we can be missing that love. We can be longing for it, or we can be overflowing with it, and if you're longing for it, that's a thirst inside you that you're going to have to fill somewhere, and as Jesus spoke to the woman in the well, she filled that thirst for being loved, with ungodly relationships and with trying to desperately find some man that would meet the need in her life. All of us are designed to have this thirst met through relationship with God, so that raises a number of questions. Here's the first one. How can I experience the love of God? What can take my awareness of that away? What have I got to watch out for that would steal that from me? Then how can I keep myself in the love of God?
When you're reading scripture it always helps you to ask questions, so the first thing I want to look at is just the area of how can I experience the love of God, or can I experience the love of God? What is involved in that? I want to share with you just a passage that will just help and it's found in John, Chapter 17. There are two things I want to draw your attention to that are quite vital in helping us come to grips with being loved as a person by God, then we'll look at some of the things that we struggle against sometimes. Let's read in John 17 and this is Jesus' last prayer as He finished His ministry.
Verse 20, He's praying for the believers. I don't pray for these ones, my disciples alone, but for everyone who will believe in Me through their word. He's praying for us, you're a follower of Christ. Now here's what He's praying, that they all may be one as You, Father, are in Me and I in You; that they may be one in Us, so that - there's the outcome - the world may believe You sent Me, and the glory You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one: I in them and You in Me, they may be perfect in one, that the world may know that You have sent Me, and have loved them as You have loved Me. Father, I desire that those whom You have given Me may be with Me where I am, that they may behold My glory which You have given Me; for You loved Me from before the foundation of the world. Righteous Father, the world has not known You, but I have known You, and these have known You sent Me. And I have declared to them Your name and will declare it, that the love with which You loved Me may be in them, and I in them.
Now when you look at it initially, it's just not easy to get to grips with it. There's a lot of things that Jesus says there that's recorded, but I want to pull it apart and just bring out some very simple things in it. Jesus is praying, and He's concerned not just about His disciples. He's concerned about every person who would believe in Him, because of the disciple's mission, in other words us. He's really praying two things; number one, that the disciples, the believers, would experience intimacy and the love of God. That's His prayer, you would experience the love of God for yourself. That's the first thing. The second thing is that His followers would express the love of God in such a way to one another, that there would be unity in the church, and that people would see how they love one another, and would recognise only God could do something like this. So in other words notice what He's doing. He's saying His prayer is that believers would experience love, not just know about it but to feel, experience it in such a way, it would change how we relate to one another, that the outcome would be unity and connectedness to one another and a love for one another that is visible, that people can see and say man, God has got to be here, look at what's happening in these people's lives. That's His prayer.