When you forget your first love...

Some days are such a battle where you just compare yourself to everyone. You look across that room and its so easy to feel worthless, its so easy to be in a situation where you feel like you can't handle it and you wish you were like someone else.Its really easy to get lost in your own thoughts about how you should be, to get lost in your own self righteousness - in the sense that you feel that people ought to tell you "well done". You continue along that road waiting for someone to give you approval and you live for it. How it satisfies your heart for about two seconds as you hear your name in a sentence of approval. Your heart lives for it. 

My heart lives for it. I live a life of wanting approval from everyone. Believe me I want to be the best staff worker not because of Jesus, but because people think I am. I want people to think I am creative,intelligent, an amazing evangelist, theologian and apologist oh and also sociable and the best friend they have ever had. I want their approval and I will strive to get it until I am exhausted and crying. Believe me this will only end in tears and a broken heart. It will end in a breaking point where I am so worried about what people think of me and if they think I am doing a good job, that I only fix my eyes on this and my insides begin to rot, my heart becomes hard and my first love is no longer Jesus but myself and approval. I will become a very sick person.

You know what needs to be done? I have discovered two things:

1. Repent - if this is you...repent and believe. I need to pour my heart out before God and say I'm sorry and ask him to soften that hard heart... 

2. Remind yourself of the Gospel and your status- Oh we have a sweet sweet Gospel. And this is because of our sweet Jesus and how beautiful He is. Everything is about Him and we need to come back to our wonderful Jesus. Pray for our hearts to yearn for Him and love Him because He is worthy and He is love. And do you know what? Your status is in Christ and this is not trashing your character, but its bringing you into the best relationship you will ever have and you will be adopted as a son or daughter. God "lavishes" his Grace upon us (Ephesians 1:7-8). This isn't a sprinkle its a lavishing, its plentiful and its right there in your relationship with Christ. So come back to Him because He gives you a beautiful status that is never changing and your approval continues to be in Him and continues to be by Him. Come back to Christ as your first love and be reminded of the glorious riches of His Grace...this speaks straight to my heart, I need to come back to Christ and have Him as my first love.

How much better it is to truly know who you are in Christ and to love Him with your whole heart. No longer are you fighting for other people to tell you what you are worth, but Christ gives you your worth. Its wonderful to be a Christian, its wonderful to know Jesus and to be loved by Him and no longer needing approval from anyone.

To render your heart

 To rend your heart is not a common word we use or a word that we perhaps know the full meaning of. In the book of Joel, chapter 2, the Lord says:
 





[12]“Yet even now,” declares the LORD,
        “return to me with all your heart,
   with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning;  
[13] and rend your hearts and not your garments.”
 (Joel 2:12-13 ESV)

It would be too easy to see "rend your heart" as more of a "give your heart to the Lord". But when you look at the meaning of the word "rend", there is something quite shocking and striking about it.

To rend means to "tear (something) into pieces" or to "cause great emotional pain to" (Oxford Dictionary). To rend means more then I thought, which was to give everything to God. However it actually means to tear into pieces. And here God is saying that our hearts need to be torn into pieces instead of our garments. This makes sense if we know from other stories in the Old Testament where it was common to tear clothes and put on sackcloth as a sign of repentance. But the problem with this is that it can be counted as just another religious thing we do to justify ourselves with. But God wants more then just an outward sign of repentance - he wants our hearts to be torn, deeply repenting and feeling sorrow as a sign of turning back to God.

Isn't that astounding? God was calling Israel back to Him and be truly repentant, which can echo in our lives today. It is easy to go through religious emotion with our hearts never flinching. Yet within a relationship with Jesus, our hearts are warmed by the Gospel and they are called by the Gospel to be torn and broken in repentance because of how disgusting sin is and yet feel the soothing joy of the Gospel because of the reality of forgiveness on the Cross.