Returning to Love
“Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken the love you had at first.”
She met him at her new job, and they hit it off straight away.
A circumstance that otherwise may have led to nothing, but Sharon’s home life had been hard work for some time. Some bad financial decisions meant her husband, Graham, had been working painfully long hours to try and resurrect their dream of a family home in which they could raise their two beautiful children. Sharon was a great mum, she adored her kids and had been a faithful and loving wife for eight years. Graham blamed himself for some stupid decisions. Sharon’s family accused him as well. What had once been a marriage of mutual love and affection, became what felt like a prison of hurt.
Graham heard about Sharon’s new ‘friend’ from a mutual acquaintance and Sharon was upfront about the relationship. He was crushed, his dream; shattered. When the dust had settled Sharon offered to “try and make it work”, but Graham, drained spiritually, emotionally and humiliated socially, could see no alternative. He no longer had the strength to keep fighting.
In spite of what popular culture says, people don’t just wake up one day and fall out of love. We can fall out of trees, or fall off a ladder, but we can’t fall out of love. If you could ‘fall out of love’, don’t you think God would have warned us? Nowhere in the Bible does God say that we can fall out of love.
We can’t just lose our love. We don’t wake up one morning and look for love as we rush for work and think, ‘Gosh, I’ve lost my love.’ However, Jesus did warn about people’s love ‘growing cold’ because of worldly living (Matt 24:12) and that Christians are at risk of abandoning their first love (Rev 2:4).
We have all known the feeling of being ‘out of love’, both in our relationship with God and with others. However, if we take an honest look at ourselves, our affections and our habits, we can take steps to fall in love again.
In Matthew 24:12, Jesus told us that the influence of worldly living (living regardless of what we know about God) would have a chilling effect on love. That warning is consistent with what Jesus taught in the parable of the sower, that the ‘cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches’ will choke God’s Word, and hence His will and nature in our lives.
Don’t be fooled; we cannot ‘love the world’ and have the true love of God working in us (John 2:15). Whatever gets our attention, will get our affection. It’s not complicated, and if we’re honest with ourselves, we will know that what we make a priority of is where our affection will be.
In Rev 2:4-5, Jesus warned the church of Ephesus that they had left their first love.
“Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken the love you had at first. Consider how far you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first.”
Jesus’s solution to returning to your first love is so simple that it’s almost too easy! We are to do whatever it was we did when we first fell in love. God has wired us so that if we sincerely act as though we love someone, the fact will follow.
Remember what it was like when you did everything you could to be sweet and kind to your beau? Do it again, and the feelings will follow. Remember how you used to get up early to read your Bible and pray. Remember the time when you wouldn’t think of missing church or Bible study?
Do it again, and you will return to your first love.
Written by Grant Peterson
