Smitten with Love.

Zephaniah 3:17
17 The LORD your God is with you,
he is mighty to save.
He will take great delight in you,
he will quiet you with his love,
he will rejoice over you with singing."

I want to thank all of my readers yesterday. I got many compliments from yesterday's post. I thought some of the upcoming posts would have more to offer, but God of course has a different idea. It should be interesting to see how he carries me through this series.

On the first night, Mike Guzzardo, the primary speaker at Acquire the Fire, mentioned that God is smitten with love for us. How would you define smitten? The joke was that it sounds German or like an Irish dish. In all seriousness though it can be defined as being overwhelmingly and intensely in love. God is so in love with us!

Too many people know that God loves them in their mind, but don't understand it from their heart. Mike brought up a good point about the "Jesus Loves Me" song. It's probably the first song we learned as a kid and the first thing we learned about Jesus - that he loves us! With that song in our minds, occasionally we still remember it, and we think we have the point down. We think that we understand God's love. However, if it's just in our mind and not reflected in our hearts, then what good will that do?

He said there are two types of people in the world: those who know God's love and those who don't. That's so true. As I mentioned on Saturday, you don't have to know much other than Jesus died for our sins. That's the starting point. Then you can gain further knowledge by reading the Word.

With God's longing desire and love for us, he can come down and quiet us as today's scripture reading says. Understand that God will never leave your side. He is with you!

Here's to a great quote (below)...I love how certain words relate to what was learned at Acquire the Fire this weekend such as "encounter," the theme of the weekend. The only problem I see is that God should get the credit for rekindling our inner spirit but often he does use other people...

"In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit." - Albert Schweitzer

Unhindered was the in-house band at Acquire the Fire. They were there last year as well and they are fantastic. You may remember me sharing these songs with you last year. There are some new songs as well.

Today's song will be: "Light This World," a very exciting one!



P.S. If you have trouble with the video stopping and starting, keep the video paused, and let it "buffer" (load) as it's called for a while. You will see the red bar along the bottom advance (speed depends on your Internet connection). Wait until that bar gets pretty far along (I'd say more than halfway) before you play the video and it shouldn't pause.