This is the first
Sunday of our series: “You asked for it.” A number of different people have
submitted suggestions, and Lee and I have chosen four of them to speak on over
the next four Sundays. Some of them may also find their way into future
sermons. I can add that if you have other ideas or questions, our doors and
ears are always open.
The first of our
series is an effort to answer the question, “What should we do when we lose our
first love?” The paper submitted to us read: “Losing our first love, Revelation
2:1-4. After a significant commendation (v. 1-3) comes a significant criticism
(v. 4). What is the first love? How is it lost? What does coming back look
like?” I have reworded this question into the focus statement you have seen: “God
calls God’s people to love: to love God and to love each other. We sometimes
forget to love.”
I wonder what most of
us think when we read this accusation: “You have lost your first love.” I
remember a few years ago at Providence we made this a theme of our chapel
services. The chapel coordinator and her husband had been working in Asia as
missionaries from the church in Korea, and they took several years at
Providence to train for further overseas ministry. She said to us, “I feel as
though we have lost our first love.” Her concern was that we needed revival; we
needed to recover our first love.
I don’t know if the
person who wrote this suggestion for our series had the same idea in mind, but
they may have. In order to get at the question, we will look at the Scripture
passages we read earlier in the service and then come back to our question: How
can we regain our first love?
Deuteronomy 6: 4-9
These words stand at
the heart of the Jewish identity: “Hear,
O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is
one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and
with all your strength.” It is said that an observant Jew wishes to die with
these words on his/her lips, remembering their first love and central love.
It places two basic thoughts at the centre of
Jewish faith – and of Christian faith. The first is the unity of God: “The Lord
our God, the Lord is One.” As Christians, we understand this unity as a trinity
of three persons in one God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in eternal
relationship. A basic aspect of this three-in-one unity is that God is love.
Love requires both one who loves and one who is loved. God as a unity has no
one to love, until God creates all that is as an object of God’s love. God as a
trinity exercises love within the Godhead from all eternity: Each person of the
Godhead loving the other.
The second thought picks up on this eternal love
flowing between Father and Son and Spirit. “Love the Lord your God with all
your heart, soul, and strength.” Jesus uses this verse in his own summary of
the law, to which he adds a verse from Leviticus: “Love your neighbour as
yourself.” Love for God and love for the other stand at the centre of our
Christian identity. John suggests that love for God naturally expresses itself
as love for the other. Hear 1 John 4:
7 Dear friends, let us love one another, for love
comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever
does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 This
is how God showed his love among us: he sent his one and only Son into the
world that we might live through him. 10 This is
love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an
atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Dear friends,
since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No
one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love
is made complete in us.
The point is clear.
When we talk about our love for God – “our first love” – we are talking about
the way that we live our Christian lives as a whole. The question about our
first love deals with the heart of our Christian experience and of the life of
our church as a whole.
Revelation 2: 1-7
The book of
Revelation was written near the end of the First Century. I am following John
Yeatts in the Believers’ Church Bible Commentary Series. Yeatts notes that the
time in which Revelation was written to the seven churches of Asia (Ephesus –
Smyrna – Pergamum – Thyatira – Sardis – Philadelphia – Laodicea) was a
combination of persecution for Christians in particular and prosperity and
peace for the Roman Empire as a whole. This setting is remarkably like the
setting of the church in contemporary Europe and North America. We have a
generally prosperous and peaceful society, but we have been pushed to the
sidelines. We are not persecuted actively in the way that First Century
Christians were, but we have a sense of unease that tempts us to ally ourselves
more closely with our society than with God.
The speaker is Jesus
(Rev 1: 16-20), and the description in the first verse makes clear who this
Jesus is. He “holds the seven
stars in his right hand and walks among the seven golden lampstands.” That is,
he is the one who controls the universe [the seven stars remind us of the gods
who rule the cosmos] and the church [the seven lampstands]. In the surrounding
society, Caesar was hailed as Emperor and also called “the Son of God.” When
the Romans held public ceremonies, they included a sacrifice on an altar,
repeating the words, “Caesar is Lord.” John makes it clear that only one can
claim to be Lord and Saviour, and that one is Jesus.
In this situation,
Jesus commends the Ephesians for their good deeds, their perseverance, and
their faithfulness to sound teaching. He also condemns them for “forsaking
their first love” – not just that they had lost it, but that they had forsaken it.
Apparently, they have another love that is now first in their affections. He
concludes with a final commendation for avoiding the sin of the Nicolaitans [evidently
a group within the larger church, who were following “other gods”].
Synthesis
The centre of the
Law, then, calls us to worship and love God above anything else in life. God
made us. God rules our world. God gives us the opportunity to be God’s
co-workers in this life. Anything less than living with God at the centre of
our lives is “leaving our first love”. Obedience to God’s ways is good.
Teaching and believing “the gospel” is good. Even more important than these
things, however, is loving God above all else.
With these thoughts
in mind, what does it mean to “lose our first love”? The commentators suggest
such possibilities as losing the first enthusiasm people have when they first
choose to follow God. I remember the sensation of being a new Christian. I felt
like I would never lose my temper at someone again (I was 12 years old),
because I knew Jesus loved me and I knew that I loved Jesus. Of course, that
enthusiasm faded. It usually does. Does that mean I have lost my first love? I
don’t think so.
Remember that the
churches of Asia lived in a context in which society elevated Caesar as divine
and despised Christians as atheists (because Christians said that Caesar was
not God). The great temptation that the Ephesians faced was to buy into the
peace of Rome [Pax Romana] – that is, to worship Rome instead of worshipping
God. This danger is referred to throughout the book of Revelation, most
dramatically in the picture of Revelation 13 of the mark of the Beast.
Christians had to choose between the mark of God or the mark of Rome. Would they
choose to belong to the Family of God or to the Empire of Rome (Rev 13:17 and
14:1)?
I suggest that the
basic problem Jesus names in the life of the Ephesians is a problem of
allegiance. The problem is not that they were unenthusiastic. Those of us over
50 would be in trouble if we had to manufacture the enthusiasm of a 20-year old
to prove our love for God. Rather than a lack of enthusiasm, Jesus names a lack
of clarity in their allegiance.
What Does “First Love” Look Like?
Often, our deepest
allegiance will provoke great enthusiasm within us. When we sing “606”, I feel
a deep emotion accompanying our declaration of God’s praise. When I celebrated
my father’s final birthday with him just before he died, I declared my love for
him and felt deep emotion accompanying my declaration of love. These things
often go together. Yet we must be careful: People can show great enthusiasm and
not actually commit themselves to anything.
I think of a scene
from College Football in the United States. My older sister and her husband had
season tickets to Penn State games for many years. The stadium is usually
filled with more than 100,000 fans. One of their best-known cheers is simple:
One half of the stadium shouts, “We Are…” and the other half shouts back, “…
Penn State!” My sister and brother in law took their pastor to one game. He was
in awe! And quite jealous. He expressed a desire that their congregation could
worship with such enthusiasm!
Certainly, American
football (like hockey in Canada) can be a kind of religion, but I doubt that
everyone in the stadium is really declaring their undying allegiance to Penn
State. The fact is that in a crowd anyone can show enthusiasm and remain only
lightly committed to the goal the crowd applauds.
Total allegiance is
deeper and more vital. Let me tell you a story. Jesse Engle was head of the
first missionary party who went for the Brethren in Christ to Zimbabwe. He was
born in 1838 in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. At 41 years old, he followed
the call of the church to move to Kansas with a large group of BIC farm
families. He acted as a bishop and leader in the church there. Then, in 1897,
he agreed to lead the missionary group to Zimbabwe. They left for Africa in
1898, when he was 60 years old. He died there after less than two years, living
in rigorous pioneering conditions.
Here is how Engle
described his call to go to Africa:
[I expect to return after a few
years, if I do not die there.] The matter, however, is entirely with the Lord;
my coming to Africa was no half-concluded step, but enough of clearness in the
call to move me forward with an unconditional surrender even unto death; so now
I have nothing to choose or dictate. The Lord will doubtless consummate all
things well.
One of his co-workers
(Frances Davidson) described his death in the following words:
I … found Brother Engle speaking
the Zulu language rapidly, seemingly unconscious of our presence. … All night
we watched … far from his children, far from the comforts of civilization, with
none of his family or relatives, save his devoted wife, by his side. As it
became evident that the end was near, that heroic mother, who had been such a
worthy companion in all his labors, stooped over and imprinted on his face a
kiss for each of their seven sons in far-away America. At 5 P.M., April 3, he
breathed his last.
Missionaries are not
unique, the only ones who can show total allegiance to God. They are simply
witnesses sent by God across cultural boundaries. We are all witnesses to God’s
work through Jesus, and all of us are to live with Jesus as our Lord; all of us
give our full allegiance to God in Christ. Jesus is our first love. Jesus alone
is our Lord.
An Application
There were three
questions at the beginning: What is the first love? How is it lost? What does
coming back look like?
·
What
is our first love? Jesus. Total allegiance to Jesus. Not the feelings that go
with such allegiance, nor the enthusiasm with which we worship, but the full
commitment of our hearts and lives to Jesus.
·
How
is it lost? A good question! One way is by acting as though we have a different
allegiance. We can pursue what this means in the Going Deeper class.
·
What
does coming back (repentance) look like? I sometimes think that repentance
looks like going down to the altar and praying through with many tears.
Sometimes it does. Sometimes it looks like a simple re-affirmation of my first
allegiance.
A simple
re-affirmation: Every morning I pray the Lord’s Prayer. “Our Father in Heaven,
hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come; your will be done on earth as it is
in heaven.” You know the prayer. You could summarise it by repeating those
first lines in this abbreviated form: “Your name. Your reign. Your will.” I started
praying the Lord’s Prayer daily when I was in spiritual crisis. It changed my
life. Daily repetition of my own primary allegiance reminds me of my failures
to live up to that love and spurs me on to live up to that love. As we close
the sermon this morning, I invite you to pray the Lord’s Prayer with me. “Our
Father, Who art in Heaven, …”
Texts:
Deuteronomy 6: 4-9
4 Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is
one. 5 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and
with all your strength. 6 These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. 7 Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit
at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get
up. 8 Tie them as symbols on your
hands and bind them on your foreheads. 9 Write them on the door-frames of your houses and on your
gates.
Revelation 2: 1-7
2 To the angel of the
church in Ephesus write:
These are the
words of him who holds the seven stars in his right hand and walks among the
seven golden lampstands. 2 I know your
deeds, your hard work and your perseverance. I know that you cannot tolerate
wicked people, that you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not
and have found them false. 3 You have
persevered and have endured hardships for my name, and have not grown weary.
4 Yet I hold this against you:
you have forsaken the love you had at first. 5 Consider how far you have
fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first. If you do not repent, I will
come to you and remove your lampstand from its place. 6 But you have this in your favour:
you hate the practices of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.
7 Whoever has ears, let them
hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To the one who is victorious, I will
give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God.
Questions
·
Do
you ever feel as though your life as a follower of Jesus is hollow? Do you ever
wish that you could recapture the confidence of an earlier stage of faith?
·
I
offered a definition of love. How would you define “first love” or “our love for
God”?
·
How
can you (we) tell that you (we) still love God? How can you grow in your
love for God?
·
What
does it look like in actual practice to love God deeply?
Steinbach Mennonite Church
6 October 2019
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