A Word in Season: Back to the Beginning (Revelation 2:5)

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Many Christians can remember sweet moments or seasons in their early spiritual experience.

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It may be that sermon in which the preacher was seeking to hold up Jesus Christ, and under the influence of the gracious Spirit, your eyes were opened to His sufficiency as a

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Saviour, and you trusted in Him, and peace with God flooded your soul. It may be that after a season of long wrestling in which your sins appeared dreadful to you, and you wondered whether or not

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God could or would ever save a wretch like you, that the excellence of Christ was at last made clear to you, and assurance came into your heart, and you knew that God had made you

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His, and that He had become yours. It may be some distinct operation of the

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Holy Spirit that you remember from those days when your eyes and your heart were full of the Lord, and there was a sense of spiritual reality that thrilled your soul.

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At that time you might have felt that you could and would do anything for your Saviour, that the

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Triune God in all His matchless glory, who called you to be His, would have everything that you were, everything that you had, without any question.

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And it's likely that if you've been walking as a Christian for some time, that that early gush, the bubbling stream of your early spiritual experience, has broadened out.

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There's a greater stability, and there's a proven faithfulness. Christ might speak of you the way that He did of the church in Ephesus in Revelation in chapter 2.

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I know your works, your labour, your patience, and that you cannot bear those who are evil.

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And you have tested those who say they are apostles and are not, and have found them liars. And you have persevered and have patience, and have laboured for my name's sake, and have not become weary.

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You listen to that and you think, well, this is a marvellous church, and in some respects it is.

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There's a doctrinal accuracy and a practical orthodoxy.

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These are people who can discern the truth and have exposed error. They have laboured with patience and perseverance.

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They have done that for the sake of the Lord Jesus Christ, and they haven't become weary in so doing.

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In many respects they are commendable, stable, solid, sincere, pressing on.

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And that's good, and Christ knows that it is good, and says that it is good for their encouragement.

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Nevertheless, He still has something against them, that they have left their first love.

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Now that doesn't mean they've turned their backs upon Christ, that's quite clear from what else the Lord says. But it does mean that those early affections have cooled.

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They don't dwell upon Christ in the same way that they once did. Those motives for service have perhaps become a little bit more remote.

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There's not the same burning and fervent affection for God in His glory, for the

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Father in His saving purpose, for the Son in His incredible sacrifice, for the

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Spirit in His application of that finished work to our hearts and the indwelling of His people.

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The wonder of redeeming love has perhaps dimmed a little bit, and we can sing with the same doctrinal accuracy, but perhaps not the same affectionate sincerity, amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.

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And Christ says that we need then to repent and do the first works, to remember from where we have fallen, to consider that that lack of fervent affection, that love of sincere adoration, that relative coolness in otherwise sincere and orthodox believing and behaving, is not everything that Christ requires of us.

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And so we need to repent, repent of our coolness and our distance and our carelessness, and perhaps go right back to the beginning, and to remember where we were when

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God found us, and how Christ died for us when we were still in our sins, and the saving operations of the

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Holy Spirit in our souls, when He applied the blood to our hearts. And perhaps the first thing that we need to do, for all our motives and endeavours, is to remember that we are sinners saved by the grace of God in Christ Jesus our

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Lord, and to gaze once more upon Him, and to remember that this is the

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Son of God who loved us and gave Himself for us, and to rekindle our love for Him.