Rekindle Your First Love
This summer my husband and I celebrated 40 years of marriage. With that many years comes many peaks and valleys, disagreement, arguments, but also much joy, adventure, and shared experiences that tighten the bond. Eventually your children leave the nest for good and you are left looking at one another to decide how we will focus on one another in a new way as we spend these latter years of our lives.
Revelations 2 reminds us of 3 ways God wants to rekindle our first love with Him. The angel came to address the church of Ephesus. It is an active church with good attendance and hard workers, but it has forgotten the most important thing in relationship. It has forgotten love and moved to pragmatic functionality. This church is getting stuff done. They are hardworking, persevering, enduring, and tireless. In many ways they are exactly the kind of people we want in our churches. YET. Yet, they have forgotten their first love and the messenger of God has come to invite them back to choosing love.
For God, Christianity has always been about love. The Trinity decided to add to their harmonious relationship by creating mankind to share in it. God’s purpose in this addition was always love. An invitation for people to choose simple and pure devotion to Jesus. As sin entered the world and a chasm was created between God and mankind, people used different methods to prove their love. Hard work, sacrifice, perseverance, busyness replaced love. Ministry for God replaced relationship with God. This Ephesian church is not the only church to need this reminder. We, the Church, big C, today, needs this reminder as well.
God wants to help us rekindle our love for Him in three ways. They aren’t necessarily difficult things to do, but will take our focused intentionality.
The first way God wants to rekindle our first love is tenderly and simply. When we first fall in love, we are hyper-focused on the person. We can’t get enough of their presence and want to be with them as much as possible. There is something about the person that the Song of Songs refers to as “ravishing my heart with one glance of your eyes.” In our relationship with Jesus, when we have “tasted and seen that the Lord is good” we want to keep experiencing that love. It bypasses our minds and awakens our heart’s longings for love.
The second way God wants to rekindle our love for Him is by asking us to realign ourselves to His wooing. This is another way of saying repent. He asks us to turn back from the things that have distracted us and realign our heart to His ways and will. Oftentimes getting off track happens very subtly. Slowly we stop spending time in His presence. We skip our daily routines that anchor us in the Word. We stop making time to listen for His voice. We stop waiting for Him in the secret place. Over time our love grows cold, but we keep going through the motions with little or no feeling of love or desire for intimacy. It is always His wooing that causes us to return to Him. His tender calling of our name to come back to Him and give ourselves to Him again. It is always His kindness that leads to repentance. It may be faint, but He’s calling your name.
The third way God wants to rekindle our love for Him is by asking us to return and do what we did before. What did you do when you were desperate for God? What did you do when you had nowhere else to go? Jesus is asking us to remember and return to those routines and habits that helped fuel our passion and deepen our love and trust in Him. God wants relationship that leads to work, not work that leaves out relationship. Return to the simplicity of pure devotion to Jesus. He is calling your name. Make room for Him today and rekindle your love.
