Sermon of the Week: “Declension from First Love”
Have you lost your zeal for the Lord? Nearly every follower of Christ experiences a cooling of their affections at some point. In Spurgeon’s sermon on Revelation 2:4, titled “Declension from First Love,” he addresses this very issue. Like the church at Ephesus had lost their first love toward Christ, we too can lose our zeal as the distractions of life mount.
Spurgeon first addresses the substance of that first love we once possessed. He harkens back to a time when we had youthful passion and lively desire to pursue Christ. “Oh, what love was that which I had to my Saviour the first time he forgave my sins. I remember it. You remember each for yourselves, I dare say, that happy hour when the Lord appeared to us…” In that moment, we would have easily done anything to advance the cause of Christ, but the burdens of this world quickly arrest our gaze.
So how did we get here? Perhaps it is because we have become too acquainted with the world that time with Christ has taken a back seat. Possibly even more pernicious is the busyness of ministry! “Has there not been, sometimes, this temptation to do a great deal for Christ, but not to live a great deal with Christ? One of my besetting sins, I feel, is this.” Christians, while earnestly laboring in the ministry, can easily neglect stoking the embers of their own relationship with Christ.
Spurgeon’s solution? Draw near to Christ, and He will draw near to you. We must discipline ourselves to have consistent communion with our Creator. Through Scripture reading, meditation, and prayer, we fan the flames of our love. “It is just like the planets and the sun. Why are some of the planets cold? Why do they move at so slow a rate? Simply because they are so far from the sun: put them where the planet Mercury is, and they will be in a boiling heat, and spin round the sun in rapid orbits. So, beloved, if we live near to Christ, we cannot help loving him: the heart that is near Jesus must be full of his love.”
Excerpt:
Why, I confess I have heard a poor illiterate Primitive Methodist preach the gospel, and I felt as if I could jump for joy all the while I was listening to him, and yet he never gave me a new thought or a pretty expression, nor one figure that I could remember, but he talked about Christ; and even his common things were to my hungry spirit like dainty meats. And I have to acknowledge, and, perhaps, you have to acknowledge the same—that I have heard sermons from which I ought to have profited, but I have been thinking on the man’s style, or some little mistakes in grammar. When I might have been holding fellowships with Christ in and through the ministry, I have, instead thereof, been getting abroad in my thoughts even to the ends of the earth. And what is the reason for this, but that I have lost my first love.
Read the rest of the sermon here.