My wife is always cautious that we must never loose the flavor of our first love, the charm of our marriage as we had since beginning. Sometimes when she sees an evident lack of communication or lack of care or lack of passion, she does complain; however, this does not disappoint her, neither she looses her heart but she tries more and more to keep our married life fresh as ever.
I admit that sometimes I fail in keeping up and therefore I need to make it up to her when she points out the lack of love or any such mistake on my part. Probably I would cook for her, or take her out or just spend some quality time with her leaving everything (which seems to be important always). Sometimes I just need to lend my ear because she has many things to say and I must not intervene – just listen.
What do we do when the Spirit of the Lord convicts us of the same?
Our relationship with our God (in Jesus Christ) has to be the same. Jesus said that ‘the Church’ – the body of Christ – made of his every individual disciples who follow him in faith and love, is his bride who must prepare herself to welcome the bridegroom who has promised to come soon. At times, we simply leave the responsibility of preparing the bride on God himself giving a reasoning of us being frail human beings who are weak and therefore cannot live to the expectations of God, while according to the scriptures, we are called to prepare ourselves as bride.
Listen carefully to the words of Christ (Matthew 25:1-13), where he mentions of the ten virgins who prepared themselves and were waiting for the bridegroom to come. Five of them actually did not prepare themselves well and so they lost the opportunity to meet the bridegroom when he came at a time when they did not expect him to come (they did not anticipate how much time the bridegroom would take, or in other words, they were just irresponsible towards this life-time opportunity)!
In the course of our preparation, what Jesus demands himself from us is our FIRST LOVE for Christ – our bridegroom. Look at the following passage:
I know thy works, and thy labour, and thy patience, and how thou canst not bear them which are evil: and thou hast tried them which say they are apostles, and are not, and hast found them liars: And hast borne, and hast patience, and for my name’s sake hast laboured, and hast not fainted. Nevertheless I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy FIRST LOVE.
[Revelation 2:2-4](emphasis added)
God has not called us to be servants but to have a love relationship with him. If we spend all our energy in doing various sort of religious activities to impress God but we feel exhausted when it comes to express our love for him through regular communion, I am sure that Jesus has the right to complain about lack of love from our side.
He always keep reminding us through his Word and Spirit to keep our union fresh with him as from the beginning; however, what are we going to do about it. Are we equally concerned as my wife is to keep our marriage (our union with God through Jesus) fresh and loving as it was from the beginning? Are we going to make it up today? Would we spend some quality time with the Spirit of God whom we grieved for long?
May God bless you as you think about it! Lets pray:
God, we thank you for talking to us from your scriptures and speaking in our hearts by your Holy Spirit. Lord we know that we have grieved you many times, specially when you wanted to commune with us, but we did not have time for you. We wish to refresh our love today and ignite the same passion as we have in the beginning. Please help and bless us. In Jesus name we pray, Amen.