A GUEST ARTICLE BY DANA CANDLER OF IHOPKC
Jesus, it’s too much, I found the involuntary prayer escaping from my heart. All I ever wanted was to love You with my whole heart—and, oh, how this is still my cry—but something happened, and I’m not sure what it was. Somewhere in the middle of all the setbacks, the confusion, the accusations and the discouragement that accumulated over decades, my heart quit moving as it once did. I did not anticipate the insidious adversaries of my love for You, and somewhere along the way, I lost the brightness of its flame. And then the prayer heavy-laden with brokenheartedness and unperceived unbelief: Jesus, I’m afraid Your call is too impossible. I cannot love You as I did at first—though I want to with all my heart.
I’d been wrestling for some time over Jesus’ call and command to keep our first love for Him, and never forsake it—those “words in red” from Revelation 2, where He told the Church of Ephesus that they had left their first love, calling them to repent and return to it.[1] He had memories of these believers that moved Him. He zealously refused that they would lose their way in the most primary thing of all: loving Him.
He holds that same zeal in His heart for each of us who are in Him. My love for Him is not an insignificant thing to Him. Your love for Him is not minor to Him. He wants our love for Him to be the preeminent aim of our lives and reward of our hearts—that we would love Him with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind and all our strength.[2] When He calls us to first love, He calls us to love Him with all that we are, without division and with full givenness. Furthermore, He wants our love for Him to perpetually possess the primary attributes we know as first love, such as openhearted trust, wholehearted givenness, overflowing joy and vibrant affection—all of our days.
Maybe you find yourself in a similar crisis of heart. Where the words in red in the Word of God—Jesus’ fiery and undiluted call to us, confront you with their potency, leaving you in a wrestle of heart over what seems impossible. This wrestle is holy. These are crossroad experiences to be sure, and they are heavy laden with divine invitation. Jesus wants us to hear His call and receive His command here as a promise of what is possible by His grace, if we’ll respond to Him, refusing and repenting of the unbelief that makes us draw back or count ourselves out of the race.
The question that must be answered when we find ourselves in this place of cooled passion—or perhaps if we’ve never known such a fiery beginning— is, “Is it over? Can our hearts recover their passion? Can they be tender and not hardened?” Or for those of us who never had a fiery beginning in Jesus—who don’t even know what it is to have our affections laid hold of for Him—“Is there hope to know His love in this way? Is there such a thing as strong and fervent love for Jesus no matter what has happened or happens to us? No matter our failures? And when our hearts are under a damp blanket of coldness and dullness, can they yet burn again?”
The answers to these questions cannot arise out of our own perceptions, circumstances, or understandings, but out of His Word. The Word of God often tells us things that our present experiences radically argue against, yet His Word always wins the argument. All the commands of God are promises of His enabling grace. When He says, “Return to first love,” He is not laying a heavy burden on us, but drawing us to Himself, our highest Joy and Life. It is first a call to return to Him, to the discovery of His beauty and love—where all of our love arises from—and to the holy escort of His grace, where all things are possible to the one who believes.[3]
Keeping First Love for Jesus is Possible
When I found myself in a crisis of waned passion, as I turned to the Word of God for the answers, and cried out to Him in wrestling prayer, I found the burning light of truth that He wants to offer each of us who are in this holy wrestle: keeping first love for Jesus is possible. And when it gets sidelined or grows dim, renewed, burning passion is the future of any who are willing to heed His voice and respond to His grace.
The disruptions and troubles of the recent years and the turmoil of the culture all around us—compounded with the unavoidable disappointments, the piling up of accusations from the accuser and from our own hearts, the exposing of our own shortcomings and deficiencies, and the pain and confusion of unforeseen twists and turns, as years unfold—are not neutral to the heart. Many foes oppose the tenderness and openheartedness here in this sacred space of our intimacy with Jesus. Unless vehemently guarded, the interior fire of our love and friendship with Jesus can gradually wane or even shut down. And if we are not careful, we will accept this declining ardor in our hearts as the inevitable trajectory of life.
In light of the circumstantial heaviness and setbacks we face, we might almost expect the Lord to back off from His insistence on keeping our first love for Him. Such a demand in the face of our legitimate disheartenment can feel unreasonable. His adamancy in this can strike our hearts as though He’s out of touch. Yet such disconnectedness couldn’t be further from the truth. He knows who we are so much better than we do. He knows the fullness of His calling over our lives and of the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe.[4] He does not relent, continuing to insist upon our full fervency and entire devotion, irrespective of what unfolds in our lives. To demand less would not be love. This is not His being unreasonable. No, it’s simply His being unwilling to deny us our full inheritance and His full inheritance in us. We were made for wholehearted love, and He refuses to relent in establishing that in us.
Thus, with holy zeal and a deep tenderness more powerful than the strongest man’s resistance, He calls each of us by name. He calls you. He calls me. My love for Him is not an insignificant thing to Him. Your love for Him is not minor to Him. He calls us to return to a full love, a full trust and a full fidelity to Him. If we have left it, He calls us back. If we have never known it, He calls us near, to come lay hold of it. This fire of love He kindles within us is not something He is ever willing to let dwindle into a former affection.
The Glorious Future of the Church
When I felt pain over the seeming diminishing of my love for Jesus, I not only was strengthened by Jesus’ command to return to first love—seeing in His call a promise of His grace to keep it—but I found assurance by what the Word of God reveals of the Church and where He is leading her as His return draws near. His Word promises that He will return to a Bride who loves Him with such fervent and holy love.[5]
To possess and keep first love for Jesus is not simply the ideal for the individual heart; it’s the undeniable future of the Church. My heart’s renewal and your heart’s reviving to the place of fervent passion, loyalty and childlike faith are only part of the bigger story. Personal revival into fervent love is the starting point for our glorious future together: the Church made ready for the Lamb of God.[6]
The biblical story does not end with a fainting church, but with the people of God knowing who they are and prepared as His Bride, filled with a consuming love for Jesus and crying out for His return.[7] In short, He returns to a bride in first love. The final portrait of the Body of Christ is that of a bride made ready, possessing the quintessential qualities of first love: loyal devotion, full desire, untainted joy, and undivided affection. She is not weary, jaded, cynical or lukewarm. She is not sidelined in unbelief or hope lost. We do not find a Church who barely survived in love, but rather, one burning in the most fervent devotion possible.
It is with the full weight of this future and the full heart of this Holy Husband that Jesus’ appeal to return to first love comes— a call increasingly poignant as this present age culminates. Jesus beckons His Church, individually and corporately. He calls as a bridegroom, with the heart and message He has always faithfully conveyed: He wants love at the center, and He refuses that love to grow cold.[8]
Jesus never starts a fire and walks away. He never awakens desire without tending to its flame. Wherever He finds in us even a smoldering wick of sincere love, He blows upon the embers—unwilling for it to be quenched.[9] He is the Keeper of the flame. He is the Author, Restorer and Preserver of our first love as we respond to Him. With a zeal that never wanes and a faithfulness older than the stars, He stands poised and ready to give the willing heart every grace and to fan our love into full fire again, and forever.
Dana Candler is an esteemed speaker and writer. She serves as a senior leader at the International House of Prayer in Kansas City and a Bible instructor at the International House of Prayer University. Learn more at danacandler.com.
[1] Revelation. 2:1–7
[2] Matthew 22:37
[3] 1 John 4:19, Mark 9:23
[4] Ephesians 1:18,19
[5] 1 Corinthians1:7–9, Ephesians 5:27, Revelation 19:6–9, Revelation 22:17
[6] Revelation 19:7
[7] Revelation 22:17
[8] Matthew 22:37, Matthew 24:12
[9] Isaiah 42:3
