510. Discovering Your Worth: The Truth of Being a Child of God

Mike Parsons

All of us, every single person reading or listening to this now or in the future, are children of God. You are the apple of God’s eye, the treasure of His heart and the object of His desire.

 

For some people, that is very hard to believe. The way they have been taught through religion, family upbringing or personal experience has shaped how they think about themselves and how they think about God. Many people struggle to accept that they are loved unconditionally, or to believe that God truly thinks about them in this way.

To know the truth, we need to stop trying to set our own course. We need to stop rowing the boat, even when we have no oars and try to make something work anyway. Instead, we are invited to jump into the vast ocean of unconditional love and allow ourselves to be consumed by it. What that love consumes is everything that hinders us from discovering the truth of who God is and who we are.

So who are you?

I would encourage you to go on a journey of discovery, to discover who you truly are as you walk through the garden of your heart towards intimacy. This was the path that I took, though each of us will engage this journey in different ways.

When I first began to engage God more intimately, and in what some might describe as a more supernatural way, I also became aware of something happening within me. I discovered that I had a garden in my heart. I did not know it was there, although Scripture is full of imagery that points to this. God began to show me this garden, and that marked the beginning of a deeper relationship that led me into greater intimacy with Him.

From there, you can step onto the dance floor of discovery, enter the soaking room of transformation, and eventually engage the bridal chamber for the consummation of first love. This is where we begin to experience, in a much deeper way, a heart-to-heart, face-to-face encounter with true reality.

Restoring first love restores our true identity. It restores our origin and our sonship, both in relationship and in position. This is where first love is found, at our beginning, our true origin. From that place, we begin to recover our inheritance and our authority as sons of God and co-heirs of creation.

There is a vast realm still to be discovered concerning creation and our role within it, as God always intended. We are rediscovering this as we come to identify ourselves as sons. It is essential that we embrace this reality.

Restoring first love restores our creative power and our position within the order of Melchizedek. This order restores our identity as priests, kings, oracles and legislators. It is a governmental function that flows from relationship with God, restoring our destiny and our true creational purpose as sons.

Our sonship is meant to reflect our Father. We are not called to independence, but to reflection, to reveal the nature of our heavenly Father as His sons.

Unconditional love is meant to be experienced, not merely believed or understood intellectually. My hope is that after many sessions, people are moving beyond simply believing that God is unconditional love, and that He loves us unconditionally, into actually knowing this through personal experience.

We are invited to move beyond intellectual and theoretical knowledge into experiential truth. True knowledge is experiential. It was never meant to be information alone, but lived experience, grounded in reality. This is what we call testimony. The power of testimony is that it is something we have truly experienced.

The Holy Spirit testifies with our spirit about who we really are, enabling us to grasp this truth in a much deeper way.

Ephesians 1:4 tells us that God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him in love. This was something God initiated. He was proactive. He did not wait for us to realise that we needed restoration. From the beginning, He had already set this in motion within His heart.

The Mirror Bible expresses this by saying that God associated us in Christ before the fall of the world. Jesus is God’s mind made up about us. In His love, He always knew that He would present us again face to face with Him in blameless innocence.

This is the state to which we are being restored. It is the state of first love, where we fully embrace how God felt about us and engaged with us before we ever entered this physical realm.

God is not passive. He is active and proactive, continually reaching out to restore us to first love. He is not waiting for us to make the first move. He is already acting, already pursuing, already inviting us into this restoration.

If you enjoy these videos, please take a moment to like, comment and subscribe. It really does help. Thank you very much.

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509. What is Love? Understanding Our First Connection with God

Mike Parsons

What is love? If we are talking about first love, we need to ask what love actually is, and what makes first love different. Why is first love so important?

 

Our eternal destiny is established on the restoration of our first love experience with our heavenly Father. We will never fully become who we truly are unless we know who we truly are. That makes it essential that we discover our true origin and our true identity.

Praying a prayer?

First love, in this context, is not the emotional state we may have experienced when we first encountered salvation. Some people have very emotional conversion experiences. I did not. I had no emotions or feelings associated with praying a prayer and asking Jesus to come into my life. That was shaped by who I was at the time, my relationship with my own father and my life experiences, even though I was only twelve. Those things had already shaped and programmed me.

I prayed the prayer believing it was the right thing to do, but there was no emotion, no ecstasy and no sense of exhilaration. Later in my life, I did have many profound experiences that helped me understand love at a deeper level, so I know that I am loved. But at the beginning, I simply prayed a prayer.

You may have had a very emotional and dramatic salvation experience, and that is wonderful. But when I speak about first love, I am not talking about going back to those initial emotions. Emotions can be valuable, but that is not what first love truly means.

First love is our origin in God before we ever lived in a physical body. First love is our eternal identity, originating in the Spirit of God. In Revelation 2:4, speaking to the church in Ephesus, it says, “You have left your first love.”

The Ephesian church may have once had a powerful and emotional experience of God’s love, grace and mercy, but over time they fell into the trap of religion, works, duty and obligation. Their relationship with God was no longer the priority. Duty replaced intimacy. They were no longer in love with God but were working for Him, almost as if it were a family business. That is not how God intends relationship to be.

Whatever our initial experience of God, He wants to take us beyond it into a deeper reality, one rooted not just in emotion but in depth of relationship. The intention is that we never leave it.

Do you remember?

Do you remember your own first love experience with God? Was it dramatic or deeply emotional? Did it feel like a completely new life? What about your first love relationship with another person? God designed us for depth, passion and intimacy in relationship.

In my own upbringing and insecurities, I never really had a true first love experience, because my understanding of love was distorted by emotional needs, physical needs and teenage hormones. I felt cheated of what love could be. God restored that for me, and I believe He can restore it for anyone.

When we experience first love, whether with God or with another person, there is passion, desire and fascination. Our minds are captivated. We long for connection. My salvation experience was not like that, so God took me into something I had never experienced, at a level I had never imagined.

There are many words associated with first love: besotted, infatuated, enamoured, love-struck, smitten, passionate, consumed with desire, captivated, enthralled, devoted. It is like springtime, when life begins to emerge again after winter. There is freshness, newness and vitality.

I had never felt that towards God, nor believed He felt that way towards me, until He took me on a journey of restoring my first love relationship with Him. That restoration enabled me to understand how that depth of love could also be expressed in human relationships.

So what does first actually mean? It means coming before all others in time and order. It is paramount, supreme and preeminent. It is above every other kind of love. When I consider that, I realise that this is the love God has for me, and it is the love that enables me to love Him and others in the same way.

The priority in my life

First love comes before family, relationships, work, leisure, needs, worries, anxiety, fear, depression or despair. It precedes everything, both in priority and in time. It reaches back to our origin and brings healing and restoration to everything that has happened in our lives. Even painful experiences can be healed when our spirit reconnects with its origin in God.

If first love with God is the priority of my life, everything else flows from that relationship.

In Luke 14:33, Jesus said that no one can be His disciple without giving up all they possess. He was not talking about literal possessions in every case, but about priorities. When God becomes our highest priority, everything else finds its proper place. Earthly possessions and relationships pale in comparison, but they are also enriched by our relationship with our Father, enabling us to love others more fully.

If you enjoy these videos, please take a moment to like, comment and subscribe. It really does help. Thank you very much.

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