Restoring First Love – Sons of Issachar

524. What Does Love Mean? Experience, Belief and the Nature of God’s Love

Mike Parsons –

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Understanding Love Through Experience

What do we mean when we use the word love? What do we think and feel when we hear the word love? The answer to those questions will have been influenced and affected by our personal experiences. For some, you hear the word love and it is a really hard thing to hear because you may have been affected by broken relationships and promises of love which never came to fruition.

John (who I believe experienced a depth of love) when he wrote John 14, was expressing something of his own personal experience and what Jesus was revealing to him. John also wrote in 1 John 4:16, “we have come to know,” and that means by personal experience, “and have believed.” When you have personal experience, you do believe. It is not that you believe and then that gives you the experience. The experience gives you the belief.

That is why faith is not based in what we experience, but in the realisation of what is already true. Therefore, we do not have to have faith. God has faith in us, or God imparts His faith to us. So as we experience it, we will inevitably believe it, unless we have a real problem with trust and we are suspicious, and that does happen.

309. Experience love – and be free!

Experience Produces Belief

I have seen miracles happen. I have seen miracles performed as I prayed for people, and people have watched and observed amazing things, people’s legs growing and things like that. And then they are sceptical of whether they really saw that, whether it was really true, whether it really happened. And they were there watching it, but they did not have the experience.

I guarantee that the person who had their leg grow, and therefore were not lopsided in their walk and no longer had a problem with their back and everything else that caused, did not have a problem believing that they were healed, because they experienced it themselves.

So this verse in 1 John 4:16, “we have come to know and believe the love which God has for us,” is the key to restoring first love. It is the love that God has for us from the beginning, that we knew in the beginning.

God is love, and the one who abides in love (abiding meaning dwelling, living) abides in God, and God abides in him. When we are abiding in this love relationship, we are abiding in God, and God abides in us. This is the way God described, and John described, what Jesus said in John 14. This relationship with love brings about an abiding where we live in love, and therefore we live in God, and God lives in us.

The Meaning of John 3:16

We know John 3:16 as a verse. It is probably one of the most famous verses there is. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish,” (or actually “be lost” is a better translation, because the word perish means lost) “but have eternal life.”

So God so loved everyone and everything that He gave, because He was totally committed to the restoration of us to that love, so that we could have eternal life, which is a return to the origin of life, the eternal nature of that origin. This does not just mean that we go to heaven one day when we die. It means a return to the true origin of what life was intended to be with God.

400. Living in Union with God: Embracing Our Original Design

One Word, Many Meanings

Love is one word in the English language with many different meanings. Other languages have multiple words that differentiate its meaning. Greek and Hebrew both have different words for love.

But in English, we have one word. I can say to someone, “I love you,” or I can say, “I love ice cream.” I do love ice cream. But does that carry the same weight as loving a person? No. The words are the same, but the context gives meaning. They are very different concepts, but we use the same word, and therefore it can be misunderstood.

Hebrew Words for Love

Hebrew words for love include:

Ahav – spontaneous, impulsive love
Hesed – deliberate choice of affection, kindness, covenant love
Racham – to have compassion, brotherly love

These are different words expressing something that in English we describe with one word.

Greek Words for Love

Greek also has multiple words for love.

Eros – Erotic love is not found in the New Testament, but is present in Greek literature. Other words include phileo and storge (pronounced stor-gay), which are found in the New Testament and have specific meanings.

Phileo love – means to have a special interest in someone or something, often with a focus on close association, affection, or friendship. It refers to a strong liking or friendship. We love things we strongly like. So I can say I love ice cream in that context. But I am not in love with ice cream. I might say I love my car or I love the way your hair looks. These uses of the word do not convey the full depth of what love is intended to mean.

Storge – refers to the love and affection that naturally occurs between parents and children. It can also exist between siblings and between husbands and wives in a good marriage. You can have storge love in a marriage, but if you add agape love to that marriage, it goes to a completely different level.

Romans 10:12 talks about philo storgos, encouraging us to be loving and kind to each other, expressing that brotherly and familial love.

Agape: The Nature of God’s Love

Then there is the Greek word agape, which was seldom used in Greek literature but is used extensively in the Bible. It refers to the love of God, the kind of love God has for us, and the love we are to have for God and for people.

You can agape love your enemies, but you cannot phileo love them. That is because agape is not motivated by feelings or emotions. Agape is the very nature of God, who is love.

Agape love is known by the action it prompts towards others. It motivates positive action. It is not about doing things because of feelings, obligation, or duty. It is the motivation and empowerment to love; but it must be received in order to be expressed. Agape love is not simply an impulse generated from feelings. It is an exercise of the will, a deliberate choice.

That is why God can encourage us to love our enemies. We can choose to do what God has done for us, not based on whether they deserve it, or how we feel, but because of His love. He is not commanding us to feel something towards our enemies, but to act in a loving way towards them. Forgiveness is one way of expressing that.

Agape love is therefore related to choice and commitment, not just emotion.

Biblical Expressions of Love

Loving someone is to be like God towards them, seeking their long-term blessing and good.

There are many biblical references to agape love:

Matthew 5:43–44 – love your enemies
Matthew 22:36–40 – the great commandment, love God
John 3:16 – God so loved the world
John 13:34 – a new commandment, love one another
John 17:26 – that the love with which You loved Me may be in them
Romans 5:5 – the love of God poured out within our hearts

Did we feel it? Did we experience it? Do we know it? It is important that we do. Even if we have not experienced it yet, we can still come into that experience.

Love as Fulfilment and Empowerment

Romans 13:10 says love is the fulfilment of the law. 1 Corinthians 13 says the greatest of these is love. 2 Corinthians 5:14 says the love of Christ controls us; not in the sense of forcing us, but empowering us, inspiring and motivating us. Galatians 5:6 speaks of faith working through love. Galatians 5:22 says the fruit of the Spirit is love. 1 John 4:7 says everyone who loves is born of God.

God expresses His character through restoring first love, to inspire us, motivate us, and empower us to love Him, ourselves, and others. If you do not love yourself, then you have not experienced God’s love. That raises an important question: how comfortable are we with loving ourselves? How do we even think about that concept?

Some people struggle with that, but God wants us to know His love so that we can love ourselves, knowing how loved, valuable, and worthy we are, and from that place, love others.

What Love Is, and Is Not

Love is not just a virtue, a value, an ideal, or a moral principle. It is not just a feeling, a sentiment, an impulse, or a passion. It is not just romance, benevolence, or amicability. Love is the most powerful force in the whole of creation.

John 13:34 says, “I am giving you a new commandment, that you love one another.” And the most important part is this: “just as I have loved you.”

It is impossible to agape love someone without first experiencing God’s love. We may have emotions, and we may even sacrifice for others, but when we know we are loved by God, we are empowered in a completely different dimension to love others. That is the key. That is how the world awakens to love: when people feel and see others loving them and one another the way God intends.

328. Experiencing God’s Love: A New Approach to Evangelising Christians

The Source of True Love

Only God can express His character through love to us, to inspire and motivate us to love ourselves and others with agape. Love is not a psychological predisposition or a genetically produced social habit. That is what you will often find if you look for explanations of love. Agape love can only be expressed by us when it is derived from God.

Love is the essence, nature, and character of God, experienced by us and then expressed through our lives. God’s love has practical features to be expressed and demonstrated. Love is not defined by the act, but by the character of God within the act.

You can do something that appears loving, but not be motivated by God’s heart in doing it.

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511. From Selfishness to Generosity

Mike Parsons –

If you are believing for something, you cannot be negative about it or double-minded. You need to live in the reality that you have already received it. Jesus said to pray believing that you have received, and you will receive.

Of course, this can easily drift into selfishness. Bigger house, bigger car, better job, more of this and more of that. The real question is why we want something. Is it simply for ourselves, or is it so that it can be a blessing? God wants to bless us so that we can bless others. There is always a receiving so that we can give.

Some approaches to manifesting reality are rooted in self-centredness. The principles may appear to work, but they do not bring joy or fulfilment. People can have more possessions and still be no happier. Materialism cannot meet a spiritual need. At best, it offers a temporary fix. God is not opposed to blessing us, but the purpose of blessing is always relational and outward-facing.

Everything operates at a frequency. Matter, thoughts, intentions, desires, all of it carries energy. When you intentionally release a desire aligned with God’s heart and purpose, that intention carries a frequency. It can connect with another person who is aligned in spirit.

This is something I experienced personally. When God spoke to me about having another relationship, it was not even on my radar. I was content living on my own and thought I did not need the complexity of relationship. When God challenged me, I initially questioned it. But then I realised my thinking had been centred on my own contentment rather than on being a blessing to someone else.

If I am loved unconditionally by God and I do not share that love, then I am actually withholding something that was never meant to be kept to myself. My thinking shifted. The question then became how this could even happen, since I had not dated since I was sixteen, which was many decades earlier.

When I asked God how this would work, He reminded me that I already knew how to connect. That meant I had to act. I chose to release my intention, carrying the frequency of a desire to love someone, to bless someone and to make them happy. That intention connected with someone whose spirit was open to receiving love.

I am not saying there is only one possible person, but I did find the right person for me. When we eventually met, I knew in my spirit that this was the person I had connected with through intention and desire. I did not explain that on the first meeting, of course. That would not have gone down well. But within minutes, we were talking about deep things. There was an ease and depth that was unusual.

I engaged her at a spiritual level, even though she did not initially know that was what was happening. She felt it. She sensed a level of connection she had not experienced before. What I was doing was simply mirroring what God had done with me.

God had drawn me into first love, into my origin and identity in Him. That restoration opened the door for me to love another in the same way. I never believed God could restore my ability to experience first love. I thought that part of me had been lost through pain and disappointment earlier in life. I had closed down emotionally to protect myself.

God brought healing. Then He restored my capacity for first love. I fell in love, but I fell in love after choosing to love. That was the difference. I did not start with physical attraction or emotional intensity. I engaged first in the spirit.

When we met again, we sat by a lake and talked for hours. Time disappeared. I could see into her heart, the hurt, the caution, the pain from past experiences. In that moment, I knew I had a choice. I could choose to love her unconditionally and create a safe environment for her to heal and open again.

That is what God does with us. He chooses to love us. I chose to love her. I gave her time and space, creating safety rather than pressure. As I engaged her spirit with mine, she gradually opened. I fell in love, and with that came the emotions of first love, but without the immaturity, fear or hormonal confusion of adolescence. It was purer.

God restored my ability to love fully. I opened the garden of my heart and shared who I really was. She felt it, even before she understood it. At one point she said, “You are getting under my skin in a good way. What are you doing?” I explained that I was engaging her spirit, something she had never experienced before.

What had died in a previous relationship was awakened again. I discovered who I truly was. Romantic, expressive, affirming, generous, desiring to bless and serve. I realised those qualities had always been part of me, but they had been buried.

This restoration began with a simple question: how do I connect with the right person? The answer was intention. I released desire, purpose and frequency, and I trusted that connection would happen.

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360. The Reality of Unconditional Love (Meditation)

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.

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336. Get out of the boat… and SINK!

122. The Power Of Testimony

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.

400. Living in Union with God: Embracing Our Original Design

282. Live loved, love living, live loving

206. God’s Eternal Purpose

394. Salvation Isn’t What You Think!

Mike Parsons

Mike Parsons reflects on memes and quotes from social media.

Salvation isn’t what you think. People often view the miracles and healings in Jesus’ ministry as separate from what He accomplished on the cross, as if healing bodies and restoring lives were somehow different from the salvation of our souls. But Jesus’ entire ministry—His healings, His miracles, His death, and His resurrection—are all part of the same mission: bringing us into God’s shalom, into God’s peace.

Shalom, in Hebrew, means wholeness, the healing of all that is wrong. The word we translate as “salvation” is sozo, which means saved, healed and restored—a perfect reflection of shalom. Look at how Jesus shalomed people. He didn’t just forgive sins; He made broken people whole. When He healed the lepers, He wasn’t simply curing disease. He was restoring them to community, dignity, and life itself.

As Brian Finley says, “When Jesus healed, He didn’t just fix the physical; He restored lives in every way.”

Jeff Do writes, “The resurrection of Jesus from the dead is the new birth of all humankind. He who is the firstborn from the dead is the firstborn of all creation because all creation has been made alive in Christ.” What Jesus did is for all creation. Everything He created, He reconciled to Himself.

There are so many great and uplifting quotes like these. I encourage you to look for positive and encouraging messages that reflect love and grace. When you see a quote, meme, or post, ask yourself—what frequency does it carry? Does it reflect love and kindness? Is it full of grace? Or does it feel harsh, unloving, judgmental or unkind? We must be cautious not to embrace negativity when there is so much positive encouragement available. Focus on what uplifts and inspires.

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This is an excerpt from Mike’s current ‘Restoring First Love’ series. Sign up for one payment of £30 GBP at https://eg.freedomarc.org/first-love and receive a recording each month as they are released (ad-free and with many extras). Or become a Patreon patron and join Mike live online for each teaching!