It was a good sermon and it took her apart.
The text was Revelation two, and the preacher was not harsh, and the point was well made and she agreed with all of it. He described what it is to have everything correct and to have lost the thing underneath, and she sat there with the recognition landing on her like weather.
She has been at it three years since.
Three years of trying to feel what she felt at nineteen. Music from that period. The place she used to walk. Two conferences. A great deal of self-examination and one weekend she describes as the worst of her adult life.
Nothing has come back, and now the failure to get it back has become its own layer, and she is further from the thing than she was on the night of the sermon.
Here is the sentence she has never said out loud.
She thinks she is a person who had something real once and lost it, and that the loss is probably permanent, and that everything she does now is somebody going through the motions competently.
Read the verse after the diagnosis
There is a sentence in Revelation two that is quoted constantly, and the one immediately after it is quoted almost never.
Nevertheless I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love. Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works.Revelation 2:4-5
Remember. Repent. Do the first works.
Three instructions, and look at what they are. Remember, which is an act of the mind. Repent, which is a turn of direction. Do the first works, which is a matter of the hands.
Not one of them is feel. He does not tell them to recover the emotion, or to try to want Him the way they used to, or to search themselves for what has cooled. He gives a diagnosis and then hands them three things that can be done on a Tuesday by somebody who feels absolutely nothing.
Your way back is three doable instructions rather than a feeling you must produce, and Revelation 2:5 says remember, repent, and do the first works. That is what the word actually prescribes, not a shortcut I am offering, and the Holy Spirit is the One who works in a woman doing the first works with nothing in her chest.
Three years on the wrong instruction
Now the plain thing, and I say it with real sympathy for what those three years have cost.
You've been working at the one thing the verse does not ask for.
That is not stupidity, and it is not the preacher's fault either, and I would not have you go back and blame a man who preached a true text. The sentence about first love is so vivid that it takes all the attention, and the remedy verse gets read as a general call to repentance rather than as the specific, practical, three-part answer it is.
And the cost is exactly what you would expect from three years of straining at an emotion. Emotions are not directly operable. Working at one produces self-consciousness, and self-consciousness is the thing that most reliably kills the affection you were reaching for.
And nothing about three fruitless years has ever put you further from Him. Scripture answers the diagnosis with works of the hands rather than with a demand for warmth, and the Holy Spirit is not asking a tired woman to manufacture what she felt at nineteen.
Do one first work
Here is the practical piece, and it is aggressively concrete.
Name one thing you actually did at the beginning, and do it this week, in the same form.
Not the feeling that went with it. The action. If you read four chapters standing up in a kitchen at nineteen because you could not wait to sit down, read four chapters standing up in a kitchen. If you rang people on Sunday afternoons, ring somebody. If you gave away money in a way that was slightly reckless, give some away.
Do it badly. Do it with nothing in you. That is not a compromise, and it is not going through the motions in the bad sense, because the verse instructs the motions and says nothing at all about what accompanies them.
You are able to do a first work today, and the doing was named rather than the feeling. Revelation 2:5 says do the first works to people who had already lost it, and the Holy Spirit is the One who moves in a kitchen where a woman is reading standing up with nothing in her chest.
So here is the turn, and it is this week, in the kitchen.
Do the works.
Not to trigger the feeling. If you do it as a technique for producing warmth you've simply moved the same three years into a new room, and you will be checking every day whether it has worked, and the checking is the whole problem.
Do the works because that is the instruction that was actually written under the diagnosis, and because you have spent three years obeying a command that is not in the text while the one that is has been sitting there in the next verse.
You are able to begin again today, and the beginning was always in your hands rather than in your chest. Revelation 2:5 says remember, repent, do the first works, and the Holy Spirit is with a woman who has been trying to feel her way home for three years.
Now the honest half. Nothing here promises the affection returns this year, or in the same form it took at nineteen, and it may return so gradually that you never identify a day. However He answers, the outcome is His and not ours to sell, and three straining years are never evidence against you. What is settled is which instruction was given.
Three years of reaching for a feeling. Go and do one first work.
Declare this over yourself
Say them out loud. The standing to speak them is yours because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and the authority is not your own: it is His, delegated and carried in His Name, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes the word live in a tired woman's mouth. However He answers, and whether or not anything is felt this year, the outcome is His, and three years of trying are never evidence against you.
- Verdict I took from that sermon, you are a diagnosis with the remedy cut off. Revelation 2:5 answers the whole thing with remember, repent, and do the first works. You are not conviction, and you are half a verse.
- Three years of straining at an emotion, get out in the name of Jesus. You have taken a good woman further from the thing she was reaching for, and God has never once instructed anybody to manufacture a feeling. He named actions of the hands.
- Lord, You told them to do the first works, and Scripture puts that instruction under the diagnosis rather than a demand for warmth. It is doable on a Tuesday by somebody who feels nothing, and the Holy Spirit is with me in my own kitchen. I am doing one first work this week, exactly as I used to do it.
Revelation 2:4
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