Scripture readings: Acts
10:1-23; John 15:9-17
There’s a kid I know who’s in the pep and marching
bands at the University
of Montana
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| Photos Taken Walking by Crab Creek, Grant County, WA January 2016 |
The second-long segments fly into each other. There’s
the campus, her dormitory room, her friends, the band, ducks in a pond, a farm
that might be her home. And there is this one boy who must be her boyfriend
because he is in almost half the segments. So if you watch her video I think
you can pick out the one she loves.
I wonder if he will be the one. At least all the
pictures show that she’s in the crazy first stages. It’s a thing you could call
“first love”.
There’s a verse from The Book of Revelation in which
the risen Jesus gave a message to one of his churches. It was a warning. “Yet I
hold this against you: You have forsaken your first love. Remember the height
from which you have fallen. Repent and do the things you did at first.”
(Revelation 2:4-5)
There are things you do at first. There is this
enormous happiness to be with the one you love, and you would like to be with
them all the time, and you probably find ways of doing just that. My greatest
love happened when I was a junior in college.
I was insane; but of course I was also a nineteen
year old turning twenty. I was happy, and excited, and scared to death at the
same time all the time.
As she and I sort of got used to being together we
got more serious about what we shared about ourselves. I think things began to
go wrong when I started giving her advice. She would tell me about difficult
things and I would try to help her sort those things out. But I think that’s
not why women talk to men.
I also think that’s not why God talks to us, but the
more we are together with God, the more we try to give him advice and help him
sort things out.
Things change after the first signs of love, yet
knowing that other person in a whole new way might bring you back to your first
love for that person. Knowing God in a new way, knowing what you never knew
before, brings your love for God back to your first love, even if you seem to
have known him all your life.
We don’t see usually God, but his presence wears a
face that is better than any other face. We don’t usually hear God with our
ears, but his voice holds a kind of wonder for us, like music. Everything makes
you think of him, and you see him in everything.
You find that other people know that you love him,
and some of them might be amused or even annoyed at you, and you don’t think
you’ve said anything about it at all. My family apparently knew when I was in
love, and I wasn’t aware of having told them at all, except that there was this
girl.
With Jesus, there is this first love and there is a
secret for keeping yourself in that first love. Jesus said, “Abide in my love.
Remain in my love. Make your home in my love.” (John 15:9; RSV; NIV; “The
Message”)
With Jesus, it’s easy to know what it means to abide,
and to remain, and to make yourself at home in his love. I think it’s easy to
know. What would you say it was? What does it mean to “abide”?
I would have said that prayer was the way to abide in
Jesus and his love. But prayer could also be like the thermometer that measures
the warmth of our love.
My girlfriend and I talked a lot, but it changed from
our first love: or I changed. She wanted me to be willing to do nothing but
listen, and I wanted to give her advice. In our first love with Jesus maybe our
first lesson in prayer is to do nothing but say “I love you” and then listen;
but we slack off and we forsake the prayer of first love.
The other ways of abiding in Jesus work out in
similar patterns. In our first love with Jesus, the Bible is simply his
wonderful voice. When we forsake our first love, the Bible becomes our textbook
for sizing up what other people say, or for finding out what we’re supposed to
think and do. It sounds very grown-up for us to read the Bible this way, and it
even has a kind of passion; but not the passion of first love.
The worship that abides in our first love for Jesus
is probably more like resting our head on his shoulder, or manfully shaking his
hand. When we forsake our first love, worship becomes more about our style, and
our preferences, and the quality of the performance.
The words of Jesus that we have read from the Gospel
of John, this morning, surprised me with a way of abiding that I had never put
together before. We abide in Jesus when we never hesitate to do what he said
about other people. Jesus said, “Love one another, as I have loved you.” (John
15:12)
I clearly remember that, in the great revival of my
first love with Jesus, I simply loved other Christians. I loved the other
followers of Jesus and I didn’t question them. I simply enjoyed them.
I think I still do that. I am sort of afraid of
people, because I am painfully shy and introverted. But I know (from having
been in love) that love and fear can gladly go together. I think I gladly love
other Christians at first sight, until they scare me in a way that is different
from the fear of shyness. I don’t have to size them up.
Different experiences can make us forsake our first
love with Jesus. We can learn caution that steals our passion. We can let other
people teach us that, since such things as prayer, and the Bible, and worship,
and fellowship with other Christians is a duty, that we must take them very
seriously.
I remember a young couple I knew, and how we were
walking together in the park. The girl put her arms around the boy’s neck from
behind, and he grabbed up her legs in his arms and ran with her, piggy-back,
across the park. They were in their first love.
Of course, as they have grown older, they might not
do that anymore. But they might carry each other in different ways. They would
do that for love, and they would love doing it. A love like that will bear much
fruit. Their love would still be their first love.
Jesus is timeless. There is always that first love,
in him, for us, as he holds all time in his heart. He has not forgotten his
first love for you.
His first love is really always first. “You did not
choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit: fruit that
will abide (fruit that will not spoil).” (John 15:16)
In my first church there was a woman named Margaret.
She was in her eighties and she had long been a widow, but her face lit up as
she told me her first memory of the man she would marry. One day, when she was
young, she was walking down the street, and there were two men leaning against
a storefront and looking at her, and she heard one of them say to the other,
“I’m gonna marry that girl.”
He chose her before she chose him, and she had a
fruitful life that was full of love and sorrow, and love and thankfulness. It
was fruit that did not spoil.
When Jesus said, “Greater love has no one than this;
that he lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13) This makes me think of
Jesus and his cross. Dying for us is Jesus’ way of seeing us, loving us,
choosing us, calling us, and empowering us. It’s why I am afraid to say “no” to
him. It comes from my first love. It’s as if Jesus tattooed my name on his
wrists by having nails driven into them.
This always puts me in mind of what the writer of the
Letter to the Hebrews said, “Let us fix our eyes upon Jesus, the author and
perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross,
despising the shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”
(Hebrews 12:2)
This focus on Jesus and his love is at the heart of
true Christian prayer and all our abiding in him. Prayer always looks, and
always sees love, and always returns that love. There are times when you don’t
know how to do anything else. It may sound strange, but this is our first love
for Jesus, and nothing should ever replace it.
With this first love you see Jesus in prayer, in the
Bible, in worship, and in your brothers and sisters in Christ. Without this
love nothing is quite right.
There are a couple of strange verses in the gospel of
Matthew. They are about prayer, but mostly about the kind of prayer that deals
with sin, and forgiveness, and our fellowship together. Jesus said this:
“Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose (or
set loose) on earth will be loosed in heaven.” (Matthew 18:18) This has to do
with prayer for the forgiveness and the putting away of sin from the followers
of Jesus, but it also hints at some things about all kinds of praying.
Prayer can set the gospel free. Prayer is for setting
loose the kingdom
of God Father .
Here is what I would say about prayer and abiding and
asking. When I first came to this place, I spent my first couple weeks abiding
at Ruth and Cliff’s house. I think it was because they were so completely
hospitable and gracious to me, as hosts, that I never thoroughly learned the
contents of Ruth’s refrigerator and cupboards. Ruth and Cliff would wait upon
me out of the abundance of their refrigerator and cupboards. So asking depended
on what they knew, and not on what I knew.
Prayer is like that, even in your first love, and in
your first love you don’t really care. Our asking depends on what the Father knows and not on what we know.
The Father
can give you anything he wants, and you are in love so anything he wants makes
you happy. When you abide in Jesus and keep abiding, then you learn what he has
in his refrigerator and cupboards.
Jesus, in his love that’s always new, knows what you
are inclined to ask for. But he also knows what’s best for you and me. You and
I are still learning what’s best for us, and for others. In our first love for
Jesus, we will never be afraid to ask, and we will never be afraid to learn,
and we will also learn the best fruits that Jesus and his Father want to give us.
The Book of Acts is full of prayer. There is a lot of
answered prayer, and there are a lot of places where God says “no”. He blocks
the way. He makes people move. The prayer never stops; and the first love, in
most of the people there, never stops.
If you look closely, you will see a continual element
of surprise in prayer. People have no idea what their prayers mean, or where
their prayers will take them.
In the tenth chapter of Acts you have different
people, in different places, praying as usual, and the Lord interrupts them and
tells to think about something else. The Lord tells them to do something that
was never part of their plans or in their prayers.
The Lord said to Peter, “Simon (Simon was one of
Peter’s many names), three men are looking for you. So get up and go
downstairs. Do not hesitate to go with them, for I have sent them.”
The Lord interrupted Simon Peter’s prayers to tell
him, first of all, what he ought to be praying about. Then the Lord told Simon
Peter to do something that he never would have done. The Lord told him to visit
and work with people he would never have chosen to work with. Peter didn’t
hesitate because he was living in his first love.
When you ask the Lord to guide you and help you to
grow and serve him, the Lord may tell you something on that order. The Lord may
tell you to think and pray about something else. The Lord may make you change
your plans or your expectations. The Lord may tell you to do something you
didn’t want to do. The Lord may require you to love and work with people you
thought you were free to not love and work with.
When you are abiding in your first love for Jesus,
you do it.
If you want to talk about the power of prayer, that
is the real power of prayer. It’s true that prayer changes things; but it takes
the most powerful of all prayers to change you and me and how we live and work
together.
That’s what we must be ready for, or else we have
become too ready to give advice and not to take advice. We have become
estranged from our first love.
God gives us this strange power for setting him loose
only if we are willing to set God loose on us. We will receive this power only
if we are willing to forgive, if we are willing to change, if we are willing to
love others and put ourselves on the line for them, and if we are willing to
abide in the heat of our first love for Jesus.
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