unconditional love of God – Sons of Issachar

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

Mike Parsons –

No video above? Please click here.

Join our Patreon patrons, who give a small amount each month and can tune in for our monthly group Zooms, get exclusive or early access to Mike’s teaching and enjoy many other patron-only benefits.

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.

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

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.

430. Being You | The Heart of Your Relationship With God

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

336. Get out of the boat… and SINK!

122. The Power Of Testimony

508. God’s Desire For You | Discovering True Intimacy

Mike Parsons –

This is the relationship God wants us to have: the deepest, most intimate relationship we could ever have with anyone.

He wants to reveal Himself in such a way that this relationship becomes possible, because we are no longer caught up in the issues that have separated us from Him or made us fearful of intimacy.

Often we are afraid of getting close because we think, well, He will really know me. But He already knows us, and He loves us anyway. That love is unconditional. Because of that, we do not need to be afraid to be real or honest with Him. We can share how we feel. We can learn how He feels towards us and be inspired by that. This is real relationship. It is not abstract or distant. It is real, and because it is real, it includes everything.

Sometimes we struggle. Sometimes it is difficult. Sometimes things happen that we do not understand and we ask, how could God allow that to happen? We have questions. We have doubts. At times, we even experience unbelief. God understands all of that. He is not threatened by it. He wants to draw us closer and closer, deeper and deeper, bringing us to a place where He truly reveals Himself.

As He does that, we begin to see ourselves reflected back in the wonderful mirror of His face. We see ourselves as He made us. He reveals who we really are. He wants us to live in that intimacy, but intimacy always brings change. It brings transformation. Sometimes the crucible gets hot, releasing the things in us that hinder relationship and closeness. But there is no guilt, no shame and no condemnation in that process. There is only love.

It was love that inspired me to trust God and to open my heart and my life fully to Him. It was love that brought me to the judgment seat, where the fire of His presence burned away the wood, hay and stubble of my scroll. It was love that brought me to a place of complete surrender. If I had feared Him, I could never have done that. He wants us to come to a place where the intimacy of His presence reveals the true nature of His heart, and we discover that this is home.

Not knowing who we are keeps us from Him. Sin is not primarily a verb, something we do, but a noun, something we are affected by. We lost our identity, and because we do not know who we are, we feel unworthy, undeserving or unqualified for relationship with God. Sometimes we even think we do not need it. All of these mindsets keep us from the relationship God always intended and has always prepared for us.

God’s desire has always been for us to return to restored innocence, to face-to-face relationship. The things that keep us from that are lies. Paul said that we are alienated in our own minds. God has never been separated from us. We think these things keep us from Him, but in reality, God embraces us as we are. In that intimacy, He reveals who we truly are.

As we come into agreement with that truth, we begin to resonate with it. The frequency of truth changes us. We are entrained into alignment with who we always were, but lost sight of and forgot. It is not behaviour that keeps us from God. It is mindset. It is the way we see ourselves.

That is why God wants to renew our minds, to the true nature of who He is and who we are. He wants us to realise that the only thing that keeps us from Him is our own perception. Once we begin to see rightly, we discover that nothing can separate us from God, not even ourselves, because His love never fails and never gives up.

As the psalmist David said, where can I go from Your presence? If I go into the grave, You are there. If I go into the highest heavens, You are there. In Him we live and move and have our being. We cannot be separated from Him except in our own minds. God has never separated Himself from us.

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

284. His Love Never Fails

422. From Rejection to Acceptance | Understanding Your Identity in Christ

442. Unconditional Love – NO GUILT, NO SHAME

446. Embrace Love’s Fire

498. Trapped In Fear: Evangelical Mind Control Exposed!

Mike Parsons –

No videos above?
Please click here to view #1
And here to view #2

We don’t know to what degree we have been programmed until God starts to deprogram us. And I would say that evangelicalism is very cult-like in the way in which it uses guilt and shame and condemnation to control people, and keep people in line; get people to toe the denominational line or the church line or whatever those beliefs are. Because, “You can’t belong unless you believe like us,” which is the fear, “Oh, I’m going to be on my own!”

And how many have been told, “Well, if you leave the church, or you’re coming out from under the covering, then Satan will get you!” And all of those fear-based things that we have all been told.

Well, God is love and God loves us unconditionally. And he wants us to enter into the fullness of that. And that will change our thinking.

And we will find that we get deconstructed from all of those belief systems, if we cooperate with him and we don’t keep resisting and fighting to hold on to our previous beliefs, which, you know, I discovered most of them were warped at least, if not completely wrong.