Return to Your First Love

Light Russ said, my name is Jonah Faulkner.

I have the privilege of being the student pastor here at Church of the Grove.

I'm going to get my timer out so I don't want to keep y'all too late.

But man, I'm excited for this morning.

I'm excited for our new series that we are starting called Seven.

And in this series, we're going to be going through the book of Revelation, looking at chapter two and three.

So before you get too excited about talking about the Antichrist or the Mark of the Beast, which is COVID, any COVID vaccine people in here?

Raise your hand.

Right?

Yeah?

That was my wife's idea.

She told me to do that.

I'm kidding.

I don't believe the COVID vaccine is a mark of the beast.

But I kind of say all that to say that the goal of the series isn't necessarily to go through the whole book of Revelation.

And a lot of times we approach the book of Revelation in a way I don't think it was intended to be approached.

A lot of the times we think of things like the Antichrist and the Mark of the Beast.

But in short, Revelation is just a heavenly vision, a heavenly vision for an earthly situation.

It's a vision that Christ gives John about ultimately of what is to come.

It's a revelation of what is to come.

And I say all that to say is that Revelation isn't meant to be this puzzle or this riddle that we're supposed to read and try to solve and figure out every last detail.

It's not meant to be read that way.

It's meant to be read with an open mind and an open heart, understanding that really the things in this book are symbolic because our earthly minds can't wrap we can't wrap our minds around the truth that's actually found, and we can't possibly wrap our minds around the entirety of God's plan of restoring this creation and how he first intended it.

So this this book is meant to be read with an open mind, an open heart, with the goal of just simply seeing the glory of Christ, the power he holds, and the plan that he has for our future hope in him.

But more specifically, again, the point of this series, as we go through chapters two and three, is just to examine the there's these seven churches that Christ writes letters to.

So over the next seven weeks, we'll be examining seven letters.

If you're good at math, that's one letter a week that Christ used John to write letters to these churches.

Um but before we get too much into that, I want to share with you one of my favorite, but also least favorite jobs I've ever had.

Um the summer after my freshman year of college, I got to go to Daytona, Florida.

Got to spend the summer there for two months doing um going through a program called Summer Leadership Project.

It was through our college ministry where ultimately the goal of the program was to make disciples.

It was a summer of where we were just in what I like to call intense discipleship training.

Um, a lot of classes, a lot of talks, a lot of messages, a lot of reading and studying scripture.

Um but part of this project um this summer in Daytona was that they gave us full-time jobs.

So we went to work eight hours a week, um, unlike what I do now.

Um it's another joke about working at the church.

Um, not a good one.

But we we went to we went to work eight hours eight hours a day, um, and uh at night we would go through these talks, messages, train, and um essentially just be made disciples of Christ.

Um but the job that I was privileged of of being given was I was a groundskeeper at Daytona International Speedway.

Um any NASCAR fans in here?

All right, I don't like NASCAR.

Um but that job, that job was incredible.

Um I think I might have a picture, maybe not.

Um but yeah, this is a picture of me and my buddies that that these were the guys that worked there.

Um but this this job was really cool.

I didn't I don't really like NASCAR.

I didn't like it then, I don't really like it now, but it was still a really cool job because we pretty much had access as college teenagers at the time of to anywhere in this speedway.

I mean, I got to drive the golf cart around the track whenever I wanted.

We would have contests of who could who could keep it on the bank the longest without tipping over or falling off.

Um like we had a lot of fun, but it was also cutting grass, weed eating.

If you know the Daytona track at all, you know it's a little over a mile around, and we would have to take a weed eater and an edger all the way around the track.

So you know, you can imagine how long that takes.

So it was hard work, but man, it was fun.

I I was amazed by this big stadium.

Um I was excited, as crazy as it sounds, to to go and cut grass for eight hours and 105 degree heat.

Um it sounds crazy, but I was, but as you can imagine, the the excitement, maybe the love for this job quickly faded away.

There's only so much of taking that 105-degree heat that you can that you can take.

But over time, um my love for the job, the the amazement, the excitement just began to fade away.

What I what I thought at one point was the coolest grass in the world just became plain old grass.

You know, what I thought was fun, weed eating, it just became plain old weed eating, and it wasn't fun.

What I thought was a cool, awesome stadium just slowly became a concrete oval, and it was that was kind of all that it was.

Nothing about my job changed, nothing about the duties of my job or what I had to do.

None of that changed, but my love for the job, my affection, excitement for the job definitely changed over time.

And I say all this day is that our love, our affection, it's fickle.

That's just a fancy word for temporary.

It varies from point to point.

It's very dependent upon our circumstances, and our love and affection for something or someone can be there one day and gone the next.

And as sad as it is, the same can be said about our love for God and our love for people.

Our love for God is fickle.

It's very dependent upon the things around us sometimes.

It's very temporary.

It can be there one day and gone the next.

And this is true for us, it's true for me, but it was also true for the church in Ephesus, which is the first of the seven churches we're gonna be examining over these next few weeks through our series seven.

So, as I said, these letters that we're gonna be walking through in Revelation 2 and 3 are letters that Jesus told John to write.

Does that make sense?

Jesus is the one speaking.

John was the one writing it down, but Jesus is speaking to these seven churches.

And our entire goal as we go through this is first and foremost, like I said, we want to have a better understanding of the glory of Christ.

When we open scripture, before we start figuring out what truths we can take from it, we should just come with an open heart of God.

Reveal yourself to me in new ways, in deeper ways.

So as we go through this, one, we want to understand the glory of Christ better and in a more clear way.

But two, we want to take what he said to these churches and use it to evaluate our own lives, but also even the life of our church here at Church at the Grove, or even maybe more broadly, the church in America that people typically think of when they think of the church.

Um, so let me pray for us and then we'll we'll get into Scripture.

Father, we thank you for the gift of your word.

We thank you for revelation and the revelation that it is.

Father, thank you for giving us a tiny glimpse of the glory, the hope that we have coming for us one day in the future.

And I pray that as we look through these letters, you would open our eyes to the truth of your word.

You fill us with your Holy Spirit and give us understanding.

We love you.

Praise these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Amen.

Alright, so Revelation 2, verse 1.

Revelation 2:1

We're gonna be, if you want to open a Bible, it's Revelation 2, verses 1 through 7.

Revelation 2:1–7

But if you have heard me teach before, you know, I typically just kind of go verse by verse.

So that's what we're gonna do this morning.

So Revelation 2, verse 1, it says, To the angel of the church in Ephesus, right, the words of him who holds the seven stars in his right hand, who walks among the seven golden lampstands.

Revelation 2:1

So over these next few weeks, um, you you'll probably kind of start picking up on some of the patterns that are found in these letters.

Jesus has patterns as he goes through these letters, and the first pattern I think we can pick up on is at the beginning of every letter, Jesus kind of starts with this statement of credibility.

It's kind of an introduction of himself.

Um, I took a few public speaking classes in college, and and one of the things that was required for most speeches was this was this uh introduction.

It was um it was this statement of credibility because when you start a speech or you're about to say something to someone, you want to give them a reason to trust you, you want to give them a reason to listen to you.

You they you want them to know why they should listen to the words you say, and that's exactly what Jesus is doing here in verse one.

He's given us this statement of credibility, this introduction of why we should trust what he has to say and walk in obedience to that.

So he says the words of him talking about himself, who holds the seven stars in his right hand, who walks among the seven golden lampstands.

If you've read Revelation before, you know that is very revelation-y language, right?

What are the golden stars?

What are the golden lampstands?

What does all this mean?

So you might be asking yourself, what does this mean?

But if you look at the end of Revelation 1, um, John is seeing this vision of Jesus, and he sees him holding these seven stars in his right hand, and he's him standing among seven other golden lampstands.

But Jesus tells us in Revelation 1.20, he says, As for the mystery of the seven stars that you saw on my right hand, and the seven golden lampstands, the seven stars, here's what they are, are the angels of the seven churches, and seven lampstands are the seven churches themselves.

So when you kind of plug that into what Jesus says of himself, you'll begin to see that essentially Jesus is saying, I'm the one that holds the angels.

And we know from Hebrews, the angels are ultimately just servants sent out by God to serve and love the saints, to serve and love the church.

So he's holding the angels, the servants of the churches in his right hand, but he's also walking among the churches themselves.

So I think what we can learn about Jesus, again, understanding more of his glory and character, is this is that Jesus is in authority over us, but he also walks among us.

Jesus is in authority over us, but also walks among us.

And this statement, it might not seem like a big deal at first, but it is incredibly important for us to understand that Jesus, in one capacity, is in complete authority over us.

He is in control of everything that happens.

He is in control of everything that happens in your life, in my life, in Russ's life, but also the life of this church, the life of the students, the kids that are involved, the community groups that this church has birthed.

Jesus is in control and sovereign over all of those things.

But also, Jesus is walking among us.

He's not domineering over us, he's not using us like a bunch of puppets.

He's walking among us.

He's with us, he dwells with us.

He abides in us as we abide in him.

As we go through trials as individuals and as a church, Jesus is among us.

He is with us, walking with us hand in hand.

So we should listen to what Jesus has to say, not only because he has complete authority, and he is the Son of God, and when the Son of God speaks, we should listen.

We also listen because he knows us.

He is with us, he walks with us, he knows exactly what we are going through.

And as we open up his word and he continues to speak, he's speaking because he knows what we need to hear.

Therefore, we should be willing to listen to him.

So again, going back to the pattern, you'll notice that after the statement of credibility, Jesus then follows with a statement about just kind of the general condition of the church he is writing to.

So in verses two through three, he goes on to say, He says, I know your works, your toil, and your patient endurance, and how you cannot bear with those who are evil, but have tested those who call themselves apostles and are not, and you found them to be false.

I know you are enduring patiently and bearing up for my name's sake, and you have not grown weary.

So in this in these verses, we see that Jesus is commending the church in Ephesus for what I believe we can kind of remember by this, is that Ephesus was a church that lived in um lived with conviction and a culture of compromise.

They lived with conviction and a culture of compromise.

For the church in Ephesus, Jesus knew their works, he knew their toil, their patient endurance, and how they could not bear with those who are evil.

As a result, they were constantly testing and discerning between those who were truly people of faith and those who were not.

The Ephesians were also enduring patiently, bearing burdens for the name of Jesus, and they welcomed it without growing weary.

And I really think you can sum kind of all of this up into one word about the Ephesians and the church in Ephesus, and it's just effort.

It's effort.

If you've been here for a while, you know that we we say a lot that the kingdom of God is opposed to earning.

God does not want you to earn anything, but the kingdom of God is not opposed to effort.

God wants you to live in obedience, he wants your faith to be put into action.

And I think that's how we can sum up the church in Ephesus.

They didn't use God's grace as an excuse for laziness or apathy.

Rather, they allow God's grace to be to begin transforming their behavior.

In a culture much like ours today, man, we live in a culture that lets lies compromise, compromise what we know is the truth in God's word.

The church in Ephesus worked hard and toiled to stand firm in conviction and truth.

And I think as we look at that, we need to be a church that takes note of that, takes note of their faithfulness, their conviction when the culture around them was telling them to compromise the truth for a lie, but they stood firm on the truth of God's word, and we should look at that and be a church that takes notes of that and imitates that.

However, just because they stood up for the truth of Scripture does not mean they had everything together.

Because Jesus says this in verses 4 through 6.

He says, But this I have against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first.

Remember, therefore, from where you have fallen, repent and do the good works you did at first.

If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent.

Yet this you have, you hate the work of the Nikolaitans, which I also hate.

So again, the Ephesians put in plenty of effort, but their effort was flowing from the wrong place.

They allowed their works to start s start flowing from a place of head knowledge rather than a place of heart knowledge.

Warren Wearsby says this about the church in Ephesus.

He says, No matter how you examine this congregation, you conclude that it is just about perfect.

However, the one among the lampstands saw into their hearts and he had a different diagnosis from ours.

So again, we see Jesus commend the church in Ephesus for their for their doctrine and their integrity for the truth, but he rebukes them for forsaking their first love for Christ.

The church in Ephesus was committed to the truth, but again, it was a place from head knowledge rather than heart knowledge.

And I think it's important for us to know it's one thing to know the truth, but it's a clearly other thing to allow the truth of God's word to push us into a place of love, to walk in love.

The Ephesians had forgotten what Paul said to them in Ephesians.

The letter that Paul writes to the church in Ephesus, probably 40 years before this, he says in Ephesians 5, 1 through 2, he says, Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and walk in love.

As Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and a sacrifice to God.

So again, the Ephesians were walking in conviction, but they stopped walking in love.

As I mentioned earlier, our love is fickle.

It's fickle.

It can be there one day and gone the next.

It's true for worldly things, but it's also true for our relationship with Christ.

We go through seasons of life where our love and passion for Christ, it's exploding, it's contagious.

Our desire and zeal to know God deeper is there.

It's at the forefront of our minds, it's behind everything we are doing.

But then at other times in our life, our love for Christ grows, it grows stale, it grows cold.

The things we do are no longer done out of passion and zeal for God.

Rather, they become stagnant, mechanical routine.

Like I mentioned earlier, working at the speedway, my job never changed throughout the summer.

I like to think I did a good job the whole summer, but the passion, the zeal behind it definitely faded away.

And a lot of times in our Christian life, in the church in Ephesus, was doing the same thing.

They were going through the motions, they were doing all the right things, they were reading their Bibles, they were praying, they were gathering together, preaching the truth of God's word, but their love for Christ had grown stale.

It became routine.

Much like in our life, man, we can go through seasons of life where we're waking up every morning, we're reading our Bible, we're going to work, but the love, the passion, the zeal just isn't there.

When our love for Christ grows stale, we simply begin to go through the motions.

We grudgingly wake up for church on Sundays.

We might read our Bible or pray to check a box and feel good about ourselves, but our heart and love is not there.

And sadly, this is what Christ had said had happened to the church in Ephesus.

Stephen Lawson, one of the commentators I read, he says this about the church in Ephesus.

He says their activities for Christ had begun to suppress their intimacy with Christ.

And rather than it being a relationship, their Christianity had become a performance.

They had full heads, busy feet, but cold hearts.

The glow was gone.

And then he asked, Where are you?

Where are you?

Because sometimes the more involved we become in serving the Lord, there can be a sacrifice in our personal communion with and fellowship with the Lord.

Is your passion for Christ dynamic?

Or has your love faded?

Even though the Ephesians, like I said, were doing a lot of good things, they had forgotten their first love.

They've forgotten the love of Christ.

And if we're being honest, we're guilty of the same exact thing.

Again, Warren Wearsby says something similar.

He says, just think.

Think about this.

It is kind of crazy.

It is possible to serve, sacrifice, and suffer for my name's sake and yet not really love Jesus Christ.

It is possible for you to come in here every single Sunday and hold that door open or change diapers over there in the baby room to give your life away to serving Christ and yet not really love Him.

So where are you?

Where is your love for Christ?

Has your love faded?

Are you serving and working for Christ and yet not really loving him in the process?

If we ask these questions and begin to see, I can see so many areas.

When I was writing this, I could see areas in my life that where my love for Christ had grown cold.

Spiritual disciplines that I used to love doing have now grown cold in my life.

So what do we do when we begin to realize these things in our life?

Jesus gives the answer to them in verse 5.

He says, remember.

Remember therefore from where you have fallen, repent and do the good works you did at first.

So Jesus gives a church in Ephesus, and through that is now giving us three steps of us kind of returning to our first love.

If your love for Christ has gone cold, what do you do?

The first thing Jesus says is remember.

Jesus says, remember from where you have fallen.

He calls us to remember a time in our life where the love of Christ was there.

It was evident, it was glowing in our life.

I think about marriage is probably not the best example to use right now.

My wife's over there.

But sometimes our marriage, our love for one another can grow cold.

There's some days it's easy to love each other.

There's some days it's really difficult to love each other.

But what we fall back on is the vows that we said to one another on the day we got married.

We go back, sometimes maybe more than me, I need to do it more than she does, but I go back to the day we were married.

I remember why I love Reese, why I would give my life for her and would be willing to do anything for her.

But we fall back on that.

And in the same way, Christ is saying, just remember, reflect on the times in your life where you understood my love in a clear way, where it began to change and control your life.

The story of the prodigal son, when he was in the pig pen eating pig slop, the first thing that he did that kind of led him back to his father was he remembered what it was like to live in his father's house.

He remembered the blessings, the peace, the provision that came along with living in his father's house, and he remembered that, and that's what began the process of him returning to his father.

So do you remember when God first awakened your soul?

Do you remember the excitement you had when you realized that God had just personally plugged you up out of darkness?

How joyful were you when you went from being an orphan to a son, from a dead sinner to a resurrected saint, from an enemy of God to one of his beloved.

Do you remember where God has pulled you from?

Do you remember the love of Christ that first compelled you and controlled you to place your faith in him?

After that, Jesus says, repent.

He says, remember and then repent.

What does it mean to repent?

Charles Swindles puts it very clearly.

Repentance is a true inward change, not a fake reformation of life or a mere outward modification of behavior.

It's a work powerfully wrought by the grace of God in our innermost being, which involves a deeply personal decision.

In other words, we like to say here a lot that repentance is just a complete 180 in life.

It's our Coming to this realization that we are walking this way, but God is that way.

And it's this 180 of leaving our life of sin, or even as believers, leaving the things that are causing our heart for Christ to grow cold and turning back for Him, returning to Him, and not just some outward thing that we say to feel good about ourselves or anything like that, but it's true inward change.

It's taking your sin to the throne of God and crying out for his mercy.

It's not this attitude of, I'll do better next time.

It's crying out to God to be covered and cleansed by the blood of Christ.

It's confessing your coldness and your lack of love for him and then feeding with him to fill you with the Holy Spirit, to create within you this clean heart that understands the depths, the richness of the love of Christ, to ignite a new flame of desire, intensity, and love for him.

And the promise that we see in all of Scripture is that when we turn away from sin and run towards our Heavenly Father, He's standing there ready to forgive us.

Not ready to point his finger at us, not ready to call out other things that we might have forgotten, but he's ready to forgive us.

He's ready to welcome us in as a lost son or a lost daughter.

He's ready to cover us with the righteousness of Christ and leave our sin in the grave with Jesus.

So Jesus tells them to remember, he tells them to repent, and then he tells them to do the works they did at first when the love of Christ captivated their hearts for the first time.

So he says, remember, repent, but then do.

Do the works you did at first.

The doing it demonstrates the reality of actually repenting.

If we say we repent and do not do, we are deceiving ourselves.

The Bible tells us that we are saved by grace through faith, but it also tells us that our faith without works is dead.

So the doing, when we repent and turn to God, and then we begin to do the works we did at first, or we begin to actually walk in obedience to Him, the doing represents the repentance that took place in our life.

We're saved by grace through faith, but our faith without works, without doing, is also dead.

One of the commentators I read said, if our lips in life do not agree, our testimony will not amount to much.

If our lips in life do not agree, our testimony will not amount to much.

So again, if our love has grown cold, like the church in Ephesus, like my love for Christ has grown cold so many times in my life, then Jesus is saying, remember, repent, and do what Christ is calling you to do out of a love and affection for him.

So Jesus closes his letter to the Ephesians with this, with Revelation 2, verse 7.

Revelation 2:7

He says, He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.

To the one who conquers, I will grant to eat of the tree of life which is in the paradise of God.

So one of the things I love most about Jesus, the good news that he proclaims all throughout Scripture, is that the promise in this verse, Jesus is giving a promise of reward, saying, if you do these things, this is the reward that you will receive.

You can take it to the bank, you will receive this.

But all throughout Scripture, the promise, the good news that Jesus offers, it's always clear.

It's always clear.

There's no tricks or gimmicks with it.

What he says, he means, and it's clear.

But it's also available.

It's not reserved for certain people who haven't done certain things.

It is available.

It is available.

The promise is clear.

He says, anyone that would listen to the Spirit's voice this morning, right now, in this moment, and return to their first love, you will be given the fruit from the tree of life in the paradise of God.

So when you hear this phrase, you hear this promise.

We will be given the fruit of the tree of life in the paradise of God.

What does that remind you of?

What does it remind you of?

Adam and Eve.

It reminds you of the garden.

Man, when Jesus gives us this promise, it should take us back to the garden.

And not the garden in the moment of sin, but the garden when it was the garden, when it was the paradise of God.

In this promise, Jesus is taking you back to a moment in time where we humans walked and dwelt and lived among God in perfect harmony, in perfect unity, in perfect relationship.

And I truly believe the whole point of this letter from the beginning to the end is Jesus trying to bring us back to this place of relationship.

It's his church, it's his bride.

He loves the church.

And he's trying to bring us back to this place of relationship.

Of course, Jesus wants us to walk in obedience.

Of course, Jesus wants us to do.

Of course, Jesus wants us to serve.

Of course, Jesus wants us to give.

Of course, he wants us to stand up for the truth when everything in the world is saying to compromise it, to throw the truth of the Bible out the window.

He wants us to stand on the truth.

But more than anything, he wants a relationship with you, with me, with us.

He wants us to walk in his love, to rest, to live in his love through relationship.

Going back to the very first thing Jesus said in his letter, he's an authority, but he also walks among us.

Among us, the same way that God was among Adam and Eve.

He wasn't distant, he wasn't far off, he wasn't disconnected.

He was among, among Adam and Eve.

And that is the same promise, the same reward that Jesus is offering to those who conquer, those who place their faith in him.

This is the clear promise of Jesus' reward, an eternal and personal relationship with him.

So again, the promise is clear, but it's also available.

It's available to anyone who conquers.

So what does that mean?

What does it mean to conquer?

If you read 1 John 5, verses 4 through 5, he doesn't use conquer, but he uses the word overcomes, and I would say that's a good, a good uh exchange.

1 John 5:4–5

He says, for anyone who has been born of God overcomes the world or conquers.

And this is the victory that has overcome the world, our faith.

So who is it?

Who is this available for?

Who are the ones that can conquer?

Who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?

So the promise that Jesus offers of this eternal and personal relationship with Him, it's clear, but it's also available to anyone, anyone who would step out in faith and believe that Jesus, the man that we see in Scripture, is the Son of God.

He is who he says he is, he is the Messiah, he is the Savior of the world.

This entire message, you might have been thinking to yourself, return to my first love.

I've never even placed my faith in Christ in the first place.

I've never experienced the love of Christ in the first place.

Then what Jesus is saying to the one who conquers, to the one who believes in him, will experience that.

If you've never experienced the love of Christ, then this morning it is available to you to experience, and not just experience, but to live in, to dwell in, to find peace and hope in.

If you've never experienced the love of Christ, repent from your sin and believe that Jesus is the Son of God who loved you so much that he died for you while you were still a sinner.

And when you do this, you will step into a love that you have never experienced before in your life.

For those of you who do believe in Jesus, again, this was written to the church.

I believe this was written to believers.

So if you've experienced the love of Christ growing cold in your heart, don't feel guilt and shame that makes you think that you're not actually a Christian or you're not actually saved because this was written to believers.

But if love for Christ has grown cold, I want to challenge you just one more time to go back.

Remember the first time you understood the love of Christ.

Remember the first time you felt the Holy Spirit dwelling within you, the God of creation making his home, his dwelling place within your heart.

That feeling, the not just emotion, but just this overwhelming peace and joy that comes with becoming adopted and becoming a child, a son, or a daughter of God.

Remember that and return to the love you had at first.

Those who conquer and overcome the world by believing that Jesus is the Son of God, you get to enjoy.

Enjoy an eternal relationship with your creator that doesn't start when we get to heaven.

It's right now.

We get to enjoy the relationship, the company of Christ right now, right here on this earth.

But we also get to look forward to his imminent return, where he restores all things perfectly.

But regardless of where you're at in your faith, I want to end with the verse that ironically was the theme verse for the summer leadership project that I talked about at the beginning.

This was kind of the verse that they told us at the beginning of the camp.

They told us all throughout the camp and at the end of the camp.

This is the whole point of it.

And it's 2 Corinthians 5, 14 through 15.

And it says this, for the love of Christ controls us.

For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this that one has died for all, therefore all have died, and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves, but for him who for their sake died and was raised.

And I believe this verse, the heart of this verse, that everything we do as a Christian, everything we do as a follower of Christ, everything we do as a church, should be coming from a place of being controlled by the love of Christ.

It's not coming from a place of religion, of tradition, of the approval of someone or whatever.

It's coming from a place of this love for Christ, of being controlled by the love of Christ.

The life of a follower of Jesus is a life that is controlled by his love.

So as a church, we must remember, we gotta remember the love of Christ, rest in it, find joy in it.

When everything else is falling apart, when everything else seems to be going the way we don't want it to go.

It's just taking time to remember the love of Christ.

That while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

And there is no greater love than that love that was displayed on the cross.

But then it's this attitude of repentance, of turning, turning away from our sin, our life of sin, or even just the things that are slowly taking our eyes off of God.

It's repenting from those things and towards God.

And then it's just doing.

At that point, it's doing, it's resting in the love of Christ, and then doing whatever that love controls us or compels us to do.

I believe that's what we can learn from what Jesus had to say to the church in Ephesus.

And as we close out this time of worship, it's just a time of evaluation of has your love for Christ grown stale?

Do you have a love for Christ?

Have you ever experienced that before?

Have you been adopted into the kingdom of God?

Have you turned and repented from your sin and place your faith in Jesus?

And if so, remember that.

Repent and do whatever Christ is leading you to do.

Let me pray for us.

Father, you are so patient to us.

You're so kind when we have even experienced the love of Christ before, and we still fail, and we still allow that love to grow cold, and we allow our relationship with you to let distance in and separation in.

Father, you're still so patient.

And I pray this morning that you would bring us back to a place where we just remember your love.

We remember our first love, the moment in time where we were enlightened of the gospel, enlightened of the good news, the salvation that's found in Christ.

Would you take us back to that moment?

Let us rejoice in it, find peace in it, find hope in it.

Father, would you convict us of sin?

Convict us of anything in our life that is taking precedence over you.

And would we just repent from it?

Would we turn from it and turn towards you, expecting a loving Father to wrap his arms around us?

And then when we experience your love, remember your love that we had for the first time.

Father, would we just do what that love is controlling and compelling us to do?

Father, we are your servants, we are your people, we are your church.

Use us to do whatever you please.

Father, we love you and pray your saying in Jesus' name.

Amen.