"I want to see You now, like when I saw you for the first time. I want to hold Your hand, I want to feel You holding mine" - Heavens To Betsy
How often have we heard sermons/camp sessions/seminars/devotionals on how we should live with the passion and fervor of a new believer? I hear them all the time. To my chagrin, not a a single time have I ever heard a message on how to go about doing that. It's especially tough for me, because I've grown up seeing some version of Christianity around me since I was a tiny baby. God did not save me until I was about 16, so I can see a clear difference in my life as someone who hated God and his Word to someone who enjoyed the Word and did not (as frequently) scorn rebukes. The really difficult part is reckoning back to a time when I felt newly invigorated to love and share the Gospel. I see myself and many other professing believers quite clearly in John's epistolary addition in Revelation to the Ephesians (Revelation 2:3-4):
"...I know you are enduring patiently and bearing up for my name's sake, and you have not grown weary. But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first."
I want to have that love. I'm not totally sure what it looks like, but it probably doesn't look like your typical know-it-all Bible school student *ahem*. Having never heard the solution but only hearing about my problem of lukewarm Christianity, I don't know how to go about enacting change in my life. These topics make for good devotionals but end in a hopeless cession of any and all hope for change because it's just. too. hard.
Is it too hard for me to force myself to love God? YES. God is the only one that can break my heart up that has been hardened in sin and make it soft and tender again. But is it impossible to love God? By no means! For God, all things are possible. When we see that we are gliding, slipping, or even stumbling through life, it is Imperative that we beg Him to do what He needs to do to change our hearts so that we might see Him in a new way. It may mean that God exposes some dark sins, it may mean that He will lead us through deep waters, or it may mean that He will simply break us with His love. Whatever it is, He is the only one that can turn our hearts around.
We need seek to go deeper into the Good News by which we are now being saved (1 Corinthians 15). That is one clear way to be restored to the joy of our salvation. When we realize, like when we were first saved, that we the state of hearts is one of desperate wickedness in need of a Savior, only then can we love Jesus in the way that we were made to love. Just because we are believers does not mean that we have been extricated from our body of death. Our hearts are still deceitful. Anyone who struggles with sin on a daily basis should not have a hard time comprehending this idea. When we begin to wrap our minds around the miracle of salvation and feel His cleansing blood again, our hearts automatically turn to Him and we will desire to drink as much water from the fountain as our bodies can hold.
I heard a guy say the other day that nobody does laundry like Jesus. He takes our clothes that are blackened from all kinds of dirt/grime/grease/and all things nasty, He soaks them in blood that is an intense hue of red, and they are finished. WHITE. Whiter than snow.
The farther that thought penetrates the core of our hearts, the more fervor with which we will love our Jesus.
.DSN.
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