Lost Your First Love?

One arrow is pointing left saying, "I no longer love Christ nor do I desire to spend time with Him. Thus I will live life as I believe best, serving my own desires and goals for life." The other arrow is pointing right and says, "I no longer love Christ but I desire to come back to that point where I loved Him, obeyed Him, and lived for Him alone." We all know what our answer should be to this crossroad of love and faith in Christ. But the better question is, "How did we get to this crossroad?"

How does one exactly fall out of love with Christ? The falling out of love is obviously not because Christ left us or was deficient in some manner. The problem has to lie within us. We are the root cause of our own lack of love for Christ. You may say, "But I truly loved Christ in the beginning! I have loved Him until just a few weeks or months ago! I just don't know what happened! I don't know how I fell out of love."

Sometimes we simply do not feel the gushy feeling for Christ any more. Is there anything wrong with that? Absolutely not! We are human! You cannot constantly feel an overwhelming sense of gushy feeling for God all of your life. You will eventually become worn out or will get used to the feelings and they will not be as powerful. The question is, when this happens do you continue to obey God?

You may be thinking, "Obey God?! What does that have to do with love and gushy feelings?" While we are never to base our love for Christ on feelings alone, we can base our love for God on our actions. Do we spend time with God on a daily basis? Do we pray and seek God when our world seems good and bad? Do we seek God's approval and not man's in all we say and do? Do we obey God? Jesus seemed to think that loving Him meant that we obeyed Him in all that we did. That love for Jesus meant to obey Him when He instructed us to love others. John 15:9-13,

"As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father's commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. "

Christ taught the disciples that to remain in love with Him they must obey His commands. The only Christ gave the disciples was to love each other as Christ loved them. Have you really loved those around you as Christ loved you? Have you really laid down your life for your friends? That means laying down your time, desires, preferences, selfish attitudes and behaviors, irritations, schedules, dislikes, etc so that you can love on the other person. Have you really done that? If

not, then that is why you have fallen out of love with Christ.

In fact, I can guarantee you that 99% of the people who fall out of love with Christ refused to obey Christ in loving others. If you are going to fix that problem you first have to understand what real love acts like. 1 Peter 1:22-23 instructs us on what true love looks like,

"Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for your brothers, love one another deeply, from the heart. For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God."

Its a sincere, deep, from the heart love. That means going through the motions is not good enough. That means helping someone when they are in a pinch is not real love. Neither is listening to someone having a hard time on the phone but not really caring. The action and the heart condition both matter. Peter was talking about a love that desired to see that person, that longed to be with that person, that desired to help, that cared, that sacrificed itself to help them. That was a difficult love. A love that took great sacrifices but had a great reward. Luke 17:33 gives us a promise of that reward,

"Whoever tries to keep his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will preserve it."

Christ was teaching here about temporal and eternal life. Christ said that if we try to keep our lives the way we want them to be that we will lose eternal life. Our calling is to lay down everything for Christ and others. Our personality, our dislikes, likes, preferences, schedules, family time, emotions, troubles, triumphs, etc were to be laid down for others and God. If we lay those things down then we will have eternal life and love for Christ. But if we refuse to lay down our lives then we will lose not only our eternal life in the future but our love for Christ right now.

Be obedient to Christ and love others! Love them so much that you lay down your life for them! Love Christ so much that you lay down your life for Him! Let Christ make a new life for you. A new life in what you do with your time, you goals, your dreams, your schedules, your family, and your friends.