Is There Anything More Important than Returning to Our FIRST LOVE for the Lord? by Dr Michael Brown for Ask Dr Brown
Amidst endless speculation about resets and shifts, both natural and spiritual, the message that resonates most with me is simple:
It is back to the basics. It is making the main thing the main thing.
It is returning to our first love for the Lord.
Now is your chance to support Gospel News Network.
We love helping others and believe that’s one of the reasons we are chosen as Ambassadors of the Kingdom, to serve God’s children. We look to the Greatest Commandment as our Powering force.
With that in place, everything else will fall into place.
- When we walk in our first love, we are passionate about the Lord.
- We long to spend quality time in His presence.
- We love to pray and study the Word. We love to share our faith. We love to worship and sing God’s praises.
- We are quick to humble ourselves and apologize. We are quick to forgive others, being so conscious of how greatly the Lord has forgiven us.
- We find it easy to believe, easy to trust, easy to obey.
Why not?
We have been redeemed and transformed. We are living brand new lives. And as real as our troubles and tests may be, God is even more real.
That is the beauty of our first love relationship with the Lord.
The words of the old hymns (or the contemporary songs of worship, whichever are special to us) become our own words, words of adoration and awe and amazement.
Nothing is more precious to us than the cross, nothing more profound, nothing more glorious.
In the words of one of those old hymns, “Jesus paid it all, all to Him I owe. Sin had left a crimson stain. He washed it white as snow.”
When I came to faith in Jesus in late 1971, everything was foreign to me.
As a Jewish teenager, I had never been in church before.
As a rock drummer and rock music lover, the hymns sounded old-fashioned. (Compare “Make Me a Blessing” to Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused.”
As for the words of those hymns, why on earth were we singing so much about blood? And what on earth was Calvary? (A young man I helped lead to the Lord in high school kept wondering about why we were singing about the cavalry. What did the cavalry have to do with the forgiveness of our sins?)
