The 1st Step to Let God Restore the Wasted Years of Your Life (1 of 3)
After wasting 10 years of my life as an alcoholic, God promised me he would restore the wasted years (Joel 2:24). That promise is for you too, see “Let God Restore the Wasted Years of Your Life.”
Is that what you want? To be restored? Yes. Me too!
So, Now what do you do?
That decision was a new beginning for you. But restoration is a process. The decision launches the process, but It is our daily desire and pursuit of God that empowers our restoration. God does it, but in response to our daily desire and pursuit of Him.
There are 3 steps to God’s process to restore the years of our life we have wasted. Today, is the first step.
The 1st Step is to “Know Love”
God’s greatest priority for your life is intimacy with Him!
Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. John 17:3
God is Love. 1 John 4:8
Relationship with God begins when we know (we experience) Him as love.
*God created each of us with a need for Him. God wants us to seek Him.
Ecclesiastes 3:11 AMP
He has made everything beautiful and appropriate in its time. He has also planted eternity [a sense of divine purpose] in the human heart [a mysterious longing which nothing under the sun can satisfy, except God]—yet man cannot find out (comprehend, grasp) what God has done (His overall plan) from the beginning to the end.
Paul spoke about the “unknown god” of the Athenians. He told them about how God created the earth and man and concluded:
He has done this so that every person would long for God, feel their way to him, and find him—for he is the God who is easy to discover!
Acts 17:24-27 TPT
*Jesus said no one comes to Christ unless God puts the desire in his or her heart.
No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him [giving him the desire to come to Me]; …
John 6:44 AMP
All these scriptures reveal that God creates desires whose sole purpose is for us to seek Him and find Him.
So if God gives us the desire to know Him more, He will give us the ability to know Him to really know Him. To know God is to know Love, for that is God’s nature, that’s His character. God is love.
When my 5 nieces and nephews were small, we played hide and seek during our weekly family gatherings in Hong Kong. They loved having me hide so all of them could look for me. I always hid where I could be found, but not too easily. Their joy was in searching for me and then finding me! I can still hear their exclamations of joy when they finally found me.
God wants us to know Him. But he doesn’t crash into our lives with bright lights or loud thunder. He could, you know? We would be terrified. And would tremble in fear. That’s not the response God wants.
No. He wants us to feel loved and to respond. He wants us to come to Him because we desire Him.
God touches our lives with His love and waits for our response. For a love relationship to be real it must be mutual. God reveals enough for us to know He loves us, then waits for us to seek Him with all our hearts.
What joy when we seek Him and find Him!
Jeremiah 29:13–14 NKJV
And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart. I will be found by you, says the Lord…
This is the daily process God desires. Morning after morning of seeking and finding God! God wants you to “know Love” – real, unconditional, never fading, never failing love. The kind of love no man ever created. The kind of love that comes only from God. The kind of love Holy Spirit will create in you through this process.