Remember when you fell in love
with the one you hoped to marry one day? It was a relationship that was
overflowing with excitement. Both of you were
drinking and plunging headlong into that fountain of pleasing one another, delighting
in being crazy in love. Nothing was mundane but impulsive, daring,
indulgent, and exhilarating. Each was responsive to the slightest
wants and needs of the other. There was no thought of being put out.
Dominating the heart and mind
was a deep sense of longing and enjoying to be in each other’s presence, and
when together the world faded away. Any separation proved to be painful.
It has been called
“puppy love” by the world because, sadly, most if not all grow up and out of
it, and for many couples, there came a time when love was no longer the
priority; other things were. It didn’t mean that they no
longer loved and cared for each other, but somewhere along the line, they
stopped loving one another with their whole being as in the beginning when their
eyes were locked on each other.
There was a gradual erosion taking place over
time that went unnoticed until it was too late. Every day there were grains of
their relationship shifting and moving along the ruts with the rain of time and
circumstance. One day the furrows became too large to ignore. The landscape
that once was love had changed into something harsh and difficult.
Enthusiasm and spontaneity were
no longer evident between them. Delight had turned into a duty; callousness had
replaced sensitivity. The soil that once was fertile and full of nutrients and
possibilities was barren and too harsh an environment to start over. Longing
and enjoying one another were consigned to the youthful play of the past. There
were greater demands and responsibilities that crept in between them and
spontaneity slowly faced a headwind, losing ground. Attitudes became more
resistant to voluntary response or fell into the cracks of neglect or upon deaf
ears.
They had, in short, left their
first love, declaring themselves to be the victims of circumstances, but they
were actually volunteers in denial, asking with incredulity, “Why are we not
blessed?” The telling signs of
losing their first love were the loss of spontaneity in taking joy in one
another and failing to serve each other in genuine love.
I agree with Oswald Chambers
that “the characteristic of love is spontaneity” (https://utmost.org/spontaneous-love/).
It is one thing to talk about a relationship between two believers expressing
supernatural love (agape) and then substituting it for natural love; it
is quite another matter in our relationship with God because it is only through
the spontaneity of obedience that we show our love for Him (cf. Jn 14:15).
In a human-to-human relationship
both parties are responsible to God in allowing the Holy Spirit to enable them
to safeguard spontaneity, the willingly and effortless responses to one
another that is not deliberate but a natural outflow of being in love. It is
the same with our love toward God, “…when His Spirit is having His way with us,
we live according to His standard without
even realizing it” (Ibid., emphasis mine).
According to O.C., “If we try to
prove to God how much we love Him, it is a sure sign that we really don’t love
Him. The evidence of our love for Him is the absolute spontaneity of our love
which flows naturally from His nature within us …. The life of God exhibits
itself in this spontaneous way because the fountains of His love are in the Holy
Spirit” (Ibid., cf. Rom 5:5).
The absence of spontaneity,
regardless of church involvement, my friends, may be key to understanding just how
the second-generation church of Ephesus left (Rev 2:4, not lost) their “first
love” when their spontaneity transformed itself into a struggle with the great command of Scripture to
love God with everything they have (intellectually, emotionally, and
volitionally, Deut 6:5; Mk 12:30)!
It is very comforting to know
that God Almighty can love us no less or no more because His love is eternal,
infinite, and unchangeable, unlike human love. In other words, whether we are faithful
or not, absolutely nothing can come between God’s love for us (Rom 8:39). Even
when we are unfaithful, He remains faithful (2 Tim 2:13). We couldn’t love
Him at all if He had not loved us first (1 Jn 4:19; Jn 3:16; Rom 5:8) and gave
us the ability to express agape love toward Him and others by giving
us His Holy Spirit who poured God’s love into our hearts at regeneration (Rom
5:5; cf. 1 Jn 4:21).
If there is resistance or push-back in
loving and serving God, there is a love problem toward Him revealed by the
absence of the absolute spontaneity factor in our lives. It is not about making
spontaneity happen; it just happens without even realizing it when we are truly
in love with Jesus. The Holy Spirit knows way before we will should we ever
leave our first love of Yahweh. Hint for us: what used to be spontaneous for
Yahweh is now an effort. <><
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