First Love
First love • Sermon • Submitted
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Do not lose your first love
Do not lose your first love
Morning
So today we are celebrating the baptism of 7 people, i love it, come on lets praise God. You know why i love it, because it means that 7 people have given their lives to Jesus & as a church that is what we are here for. To depopulate the kingdom of darkness & populate the Kingdom of Light.
I love helping people, food, housing, whatever the need to be filled is, then as the people of God, the church, we need to fill it & that’s awesome but my passion is to see people come to know who Jesus is & want Him in their lives. More that that to also see people grow in Him & live out their destiny in Jesus & so in September we will be starting a discipleship night once a week here in the building & if you cannot make it here, it will also be on line.
It is so important for you to grow the seed that has been planted within you, now we can put on things, but you need to put yourself forward to be at them, to grow yourself, to study for yourself, to pray & teach your children.
The Church will help & we have a responsibility for you, but we can’t do it for you, what you need is a passion for Jesus, we’ll talk about this in a minute.
So when was the last time you did a Spiritual checkup on yourself?
How is your passion for Jesus? Is life just one thing after another?
What excites you? What gets you out of Bed in the morning? Job? Kids? coffee? Jesus?
What motivates you? What are you passionate about? Are you still passionate about Jesus or has it died down a bit? Have you believed the lie that that is OK, your’e maturing, like in marriage, is the spark still there? do you look at your husband or wife & they still make you smile, make your heart beat faster or do they make you grimace?
Are you so use to them being there that you take them for granted, do you do the same with Jesus. When was i love you last said to Jesus.
It’s funny how we can seem to be passionate about something one day & then the next it’s gone. playing instruments, health, driving, each other, your job.
My friend Richard just past his test, Fiat 127 small car. 5 of us in it. Borrow money to get petrol & drive around south London to get lost on purpose. warning light driving home. After a while Richard didn’t want to drive anymore, it’s like most people when they pass there test they will drive anywhere even the shop just on the corner. you only want to drive when you need to.
this cycle that people go through doesn’t just happen to people who drive cars, Christians also lose their passion, but for God, this brings me to what i want us to here today.
Paul went on 3 missionary journeys, all to tell people about Jesus, get them into the Kingdom of light & he was good at it, planting many churches, seeing many won for Jesus.
On Paul's 3rd journey he went to Ephesus 7 the people of the city had a great desire for the things of God, not only Ephesus but the 6 churches mentioned later in Revelation 2.
but lets read about Ephesus in Acts 19:11-27.
There was incredible things going on in Ephesus since Paul had arrived, this city was a place of supernatural activity, a centre for magic & evil. But people were becoming Christ followers & people were getting healed. Material or aprons used by Paul were being laid on people, sickness gone, demons gone.
They kept coming & brought their books to burn worth 50,000 pieces of silver. trying to get a true valuation today is hard, but it’s anywhere between £1- 5 million. can you imagine that, a fire in Boston, it would be huge, it would have been seen for miles, it must have been a raging inferno.
That’s what i want to be for God, not an ember, nor a flicker & some of you are like that at the moment & you need to fan that flickering faith into a flame, become a raging inferno.
Paul later wrote a letter to the leaders of the Ephesian church, warning of the troubles that he foresaw that they would face from within & from the outside.
This all happened between AD 50-60, but if we look in Revelation 2 we can find out how the city was getting on years later. Revelation 2:1-7.
There was good stuff going on at Ephesus, but there is something seriously wrong. They have abandoned not lost their first love. That means as a church they once had a love that they don’t have anymore.
Something can be lost by accident, but abandoning something is deliberate although not necessarily suddenly.
When we lose something we don’t know where to find it, when we leave something, we know where it is. sometimes we walk away on purpose.
Everything would have looked good on the outside, they were doing so much, saying the right things. If you attended there & were full of the Spirit you may have had an uneasy feeling at times & it was probably hard to pin down what it was, but not for Jesus.
The problem was serious, without love all is vain, no wonder Jesus said. “But i have this against you”. A Church has no reason for being a Church when she has no love within her heart or when that love grows cold, lose love, lose all.
What love did they leave? We are told to love God & to love one anther, which one, probably both because they go together. You cannot say you love God & not love His family & you can’t really love His family without first loving God.
The Ephesian Church was a working church, we are a working church. the danger is that sometimes a focus on working for Jesus will eclipse a love relationship with Him. We can put what we do for Jesus before who we are in Jesus. We can leave Jesus in the Temple, just like His parents did in Luke 2:45-46.
The Ephesian Church was a doctrinally pure church. sometimes a focus on doctrinal purity will make a congregation cold, suspicious & intolerant of diversity. Spurgeon says “ when love dies, orthodox doctrine becomes a corpse, a powerless formalism. Adhesion to the truth sours into bigotry, when the sweetness & light of love to Jesus depart”.
The Ephesians were like a shell you find on the beach, beautiful on the outside but empty on the inside Because they had lost their first love, they had been filled with the Spirit at the beginning but somewhere along the way they had lost it.
Do you remember being filled withe Spirit, do you remember becoming a Christian? do you remember those feelings?
I remember mine tingling from head to toe, completely being at ease, sometime we lose it because we are not doing the right things.
The Ephesians had stopped doing the right things, they had stopped doing the things that the Holy spirit had led them to do. they thought they could do it without the Holy spirit. After a while we take God for granted, we get into the comfort zone.
When we mature our love for Jesus will deepen, we might not jump around anymore but there should be joy in our hearts & it should be visible to others, there should be a depth of love that makes it even better than that first feeling of love.
What did Jesus want the church to do, He wanted them to remember where they used to be in their love for Him & for one another.
Listen the first step always needs to be ours because He always has His hand out to take us back.
Listen as i finish, this scripture says 1) repent, that means turn from where you are now. 2) Do the works you did at first. that means go back to basics, what you did when you first fell in love with Jesus.
Remember how you used to spend time in is word.
remember how you used to pray.
Remember the joy in getting together with other Christians.
Remember how excited you were about telling others about Jesus.
For those being baptised today, fan into flame the gift that God has given you, what He has done in your hearts, never let Him go.
At the end of our journey when we go to be with Jesus be able to say like Paul
I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.
If we want to finish the race we need to keep the fire burning.
Prayer for response.
Communion
Interviews.