first love

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 

Matthew 22:37

When I was seven-years-old I began to follow Jesus. We have had quite a journey the two of us. I wish I could tell you I have walked the straight road, always listening for His voice and direction, but that would be untrue.

We are in the middle of a sermon series on Hosea. This series has caused me to think a lot about my assumptions about God.

When I asked Jesus into my heart, I knew it was the right and good thing to do. But, naively, I believed that if I did the right thing, only good things would happen to me. Now, you might attribute this to the fact I was young. But, unfortunately, even though I grew older I kept the same mindset to some degree. You see I might know intellectually that my assumptions were false, but part of me wanted to believe that if I did good things for God, He would do good things for me.

We could unpack this statement for days, but we won’t. I will just share of a few of my thoughts and if you like, you can share a few of yours too in the comments.

In Hosea, we read that God told Hosea to marry a woman who would become a prostitute. He knew this would hurt Hosea, but He needed Him to do it as an object lesson for His people.

In Ezekiel, God tells the prophet to lie on his side for 390 days for Israel’s sin and then 40 days on the opposite side for Judah’s sins. This would not have been comfortable and I am sure people wondered what in the world he was doing.

In the Gospels, we read about Jesus, who we know God loved completely, but still asked Him to lay down His life in order to save mine.

Loving God, following God, is not a ticket to an easy life. Actually, for some, it means life will be harder. For some, they may lose their life.

This is heavy and hard. Our purpose is not to be happy and live a life of ease. It is not to be comfortable and to serve Him only within our comfort zones. Our purpose is to seek and do God’s will, to tell or show as many people as we can how great our God is with our lives. This is not easy. But we can do it. We can by seeking and investing in our relationship with Him.

Remember your first love? Remember how you wanted to spend every moment together? If you grew up in the 70s and 80s like I did, this often meant marathon phone calls. You thought about this person all the time. You wanted to make them happy, not because in turn they would make you happy, but because you simply loved them.

This ladies, this is how we need to think of Jesus. I pray for you and me. I pray we fall completely head over heels in love with Jesus. That is how He feels about us. Instead of asking God, help me to feel your love, maybe we should ask Him to help us to fall more in love with Him.

That is my prayer. Because ladies, those tough, awful, knock you to the ground times will come if you aren’t already walking through one. And when they come, all of our friends and loved ones will want to help. But the only one who will be able to meet you where you are, walk you through the difficult time and heal those hurting places is Jesus. He made you. He knows how to put the broken pieces back together. And He wants to.