Do you ever wonder why you have a nagging emptiness, a dullness, a joylessness, a distance that penetrates your inner spirit? Is it because your love for Jesus has grown lukewarm? For us to flourish in our relationship with Christ, our affection for Him needs to be hot. Revelation 3:16 says, “But since you are like lukewarm water, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth!” Harsh words. But it’s a serious thing when our hearts grow cold in our relationship with Jesus. Hopefully, the sting of these words will drive all of us to do a little self-reflection this week to examine just how much we love Jesus. Is our love for Him hot or cold or just lukewarm?
The Christian life is all about loving Jesus with our whole hearts and staying in love with Him. Unfortunately, there are so many things—even good things—that can get in the way of keeping Him at the center of our hearts, of keeping our affections in the right place spiritually. And when we start to neglect the inner fire, there’s a slow cooling in our relationship with Christ that happens. And it can come ever so subtly.
We may think we no longer have time to meet with God daily or get into His Word, or we’ve squeezed Him out of our thoughts and life with busy activities. We need to beware of the spiritual barrenness of a busy life. It’s certainly one of the number one tactics of the enemy to cool our relationship with Christ. And sometimes it even comes as we serve in the church. Oswald Chambers said, “We must love the Lord of the work more than the work of the Lord.”
Let’s FALL in love with Jesus again and run into His waiting arms to meet with Him in all kinds of new ways. Let’s pray that it won’t be said of you or me that we are lukewarm lovers of Jesus.
One of the biggest challenges for us is to keep first things first—to keep our love relationship for Christ passionate and alive. If we don’t…we will slip into what the Laodicea Church in Revelation was being rebuked for and become lukewarm in our faith, too
God has so much more for us. He wants us to be enjoying a deep, growing, and close love relationship with Him, but there’s a catch—it’s two-way. A.W. Tozer said, “God waits to be wanted, but to be bad for so many of us He waits so long, so very long in vain.”
Let’s FALL in love with Jesus again and run into His waiting arms to meet with Him in all kinds of new ways. Let’s pray that it won’t be said of you or me that we are lukewarm lovers of Jesus.
Take advantage of the opportunities to grow closer to His heart through His Word and spiritual activities and practices that will ignite your love for Him. And let’s prioritize our time with God, the lover of our souls, so our love for Him is a passionate love. Let’s all fall in love with Jesus…again!
