First Love

Keeping Passion for Jesus in a World Growing Cold

Dana Candler

• Publisher: Chosen Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780800762568
• eBook ISBN: 9781493437474
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

He's inviting you to sustained and unquenchable love.

Jesus is worthy of a love that burns in the likeness of His love for us. But threats to our passion for Him come with the storms and setbacks we face. With vulnerable perspective and insight, Dana Candler shares her own battles with keeping first love and how the Lord breaks in with vital truth and fresh desire to her soul--and how He yearns to do the same for you.

Discover how to overcome the enemies of holy passion and tangibly experience His love. When you do, He will consume your heart with thriving joy, delight and passion for Him, burning bright all your days.

"First Love equips you to say yes to God's invitation to a life marked by confident trust, deep-rooted joy and a love that overflows and impacts all that you do!"--JODIE BERNDT, bestselling author, Praying the Scriptures for Your Children

"This book will strengthen your confidence in the One who never starts a fire and walks away."--BOB SORGE, bestselling author, Secrets of the Secret Place

"I pray every reader of this book will be encouraged to live from the secret place of prayer so that they may also stand in the peace of God."--HEIDI G. BAKER, Ph.D., co-founder and executive chairman of the board, Iris Global

1
Hearing Jesus Call Us to First Love

We sat there on the floor, facing one another in wonder, just taking each other in, it all hitting us in waves simultaneously. When he finally spoke, it was only to confirm what our hearts and eyes had already been communicating: So this is what you look like. I’ve waited for you, prayed for you, wondered what you’d be like, and here you are.

I don’t think I could pinpoint the exact moment I fell in love with Matt Candler, but I could spend hours describing the first days, weeks and months of our relationship. The vulnerability, lovesickness-when-apart, openheartedness and wonder are etched in full color and emotion in my memory as if it were yesterday. The written words on pages, the endless hours of conversations, the laughter, the tears. He was everything I’d ever hoped for and everything I never knew I needed all in one.

I remember the overwhelming feeling of trying to catch him up—and he me—on 22 years of life, the years we’d missed of each other’s lives prior. Separated by geography, we spent our driving hours to meet each other—crisscrossing Missouri and Oklahoma—with a tape recorder in hand, recounting all the old stories we could think of from our childhoods, our youth, our families, our pains and our joys—everything that had formed who we were. We wanted each other to know it all, to receive the whole package and the whole story. Newly in love, we wanted to know one another fully as we ran arm in arm into the future together.

First Love in Christ

What is first love? We know it intuitively, what it means and what it looks like, even if we’ve never tried to put it into words or never experienced it in a personal way. First love is notorious for its contagious joy and exuberance and its passionate, uninhibited nature. When love is new and freshly awakened, wonder and delight are abundant, desire is full, sacrifice and striving are foreign concepts, and full givenness, one to another, is the only conceivable way to live. Our first love for the Lord is no exception.

There’s nothing in the world that can compare with the awakening of the human heart to the beauty and love of Christ—the arising passion in the wake of catching sight of and being overcome by His great love for us. No other experience in all of life is equal to when the Lord comes and arrests our affections by His Spirit—winning them over to Himself—by giving us a taste of His kindness and a glimpse of His majesty (Romans 5:5). In these awakenings, He stirs us to peer into the vast mystery of His love for us, opening the eyes of our hearts to see the One “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:3). He awakens hunger through the tasting and draws us into a seeking by giving us a glimpse (1 Peter 2:2–3).

When the Lord stirs first love in us like this, we are never quite the same. When He rushes in to fill the innate inward ache of the human soul with the only fulfillment that can answer and satisfy, we are changed. He who has seen Jesus cannot unsee Him, and she who has tasted cannot forget the sweetness.

Something at the deepest level has taken place. An irrevocable exchange has transpired, and we’ve been marked by Him forever. He wins us to Himself here in ways that are far more strategic than we might have imagined. After all, first love is not meant by the Lord to be just a fiery beginning that fades out with time. It is to be the first fire and catalyst of a love that only increases in its strength, passion and devotion through all the seasons of our lives . . . until we see the Lord.

Whenever there is a waning, a loss, a tempering of fervency, it is to serve as the spark that ignites the fire once again. First love is never to be the high point, followed by a declining trajectory, but rather it is the necessary starting point for a love that continues to increase and abound in His grace.

First Fire to Fuel the Future

My early days of loving Jesus, when He won me over with His unrelenting love, evidenced a strong passion for Him. I was simply overcome by a God who desired more than a relationship of function or legal position with His people. He longed for a relationship of deep affection. He is a Bridegroom God who had profound tenderness toward me and desired closest relationship and partnership with me.

In my early twenties, having known the Lord all my life prior, I experienced something in Him unlike anything I had yet encountered. It was as if the love of Christ broke through to a greater depth than ever before, reaching the inner places of my heart and soul, getting beneath all my performing, all my arguments, all my resistances, down to the hidden and most vulnerable parts of me. His love won me over. Grace broke through to my inner being in a way it never had before. Overwhelming worship followed as I marveled that He loved me personally, profoundly, invasively. I was undone by it, irrevocably undone.

In the wake of such love, I responded with all my heart. With vision clear of any fog that seems to settle without warning over time, sheer joy over the treasure I had found in Him compelled me forward. Vows to be faithful and true were easy, and denying self was effortless and heartfelt. I made bold, earnest promises to love Him entirely, without reservation, until I saw Him face-to-face.

Such fervor and strain-free strides were not wrong, but exceedingly right. They were first love in motion—a wholehearted loving of the One who loved me first (1 John 4:19). Though I was admittedly naïve as to how fierce the battle and the opponents, and how robust the perseverance required, the level to which His love laid hold of me and then my corresponding wholehearted response to Him were the necessary beginnings for the sustenance of that very love. And Jesus knew it all along. He knows it with each of us.

The fire of passion He ignites in us at first is part of His knowing the future testing and struggles. He knows how exceedingly dependent we must become upon Him—a slow dying to our own self-strength—in order that we might fulfill those early vows. He knows His purpose in our lives is not just the maintaining of early affection, nor the surviving of faith. It goes far beyond merely subsisting. Jesus zealously purposes that our faith and love come through the testing of fire like gold, abounding more and more, and be found to praise, honor and glory at His coming (Philippians 1:9; 1 Peter 1:7). He knows His full intention to finish the good work He began in us and to bring each of us forth into victorious love as we respond to Him and partner with Him in this glorious call (Philippians 1:6).

The Zeal of the Lord to Bring Forth Love

At the heart of all that we are and all that we do is a Person: the Man Christ Jesus, who is the Lord seated at the right hand of God the Father. The inward fire of our intimacy with Him is the center of everything—both individually and corporately as His Church. He didn’t always have a human frame. He was from everlasting, but in the fullness of time He came and wrapped Himself in garments of flesh. Amid mostly scorned love, He set His face like flint and went to His death on the cross. He gave His life for us that He might bring us to God. He died. He rose. He ascended. He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, with a future and a plan ahead of Him. There He sits, that pulsating, consuming, impassioned heart—seated there only for a time, until the day He returns and commences the restoration of all things and “the day of the gladness of His heart” (Song of Songs 3:11).

Peter said: Having not seen Him, you love Him (1 Peter 1:8). We love a real Person, and that love is the central passion of all we are. He wants the hearts of His people—those whom He has ransomed back to Himself—to receive and abide in His love and to respond voluntarily with an all-consuming, fervent devotion.

The Father desires to give His Son the inheritance of a Church that loves the Son of God with a wholehearted love, a Bride who unreservedly agrees with Him in all that He is and all that He does and will do. He wants a Church that gives witness with the whole of their hearts and lives: All that You are is beautiful. His purpose is to shine in the hearts of His people, to give us “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6), so that with every increasing measure of knowledge, we would have a simultaneous increase in our love for Him. That the Church would not love the Lord with fractions, but in fullness. That His Bride would not pick and choose and only embrace parts of Him, but that our love would abound for Him in every aspect of who He is.

Jesus wants His Church to live perpetually in an ardent, joyful loyalty to Himself. He is not after a lukewarm, indifferent, divided love—or a love that started fiery and becomes tempered over time. He gave all for the gut-level, wholly devoted love of His Bride, the Church, the worthy love befitting the love He demonstrated for her. He wants our deepest affections.

In John 17, Jesus prayed that the very love with which the Father loved Him would be in us. Paul picked up on this prayer—specifically for the church of Ephesus—in Ephesians 3, praying for rooting and grounding in the love of Christ, the comprehension of His love, in all its vastness. The words of Jesus in Revelation are perhaps the most unfiltered and straightforward of all. Jesus pleaded that we would persevere and keep our first love for Him alive until He comes (Revelation 2:4).

Jesus demands a love that burns bright from beginning to end. He calls us to love Him with all our heart, soul, mind and strength and then demands that we never lose that wholehearted, fervent devotion. The Father has no intention of offering His Son a dull and disconnected church as His inheritance. The Son will return to a fervent Bride, from every tongue and tribe and nation, who loves Him with the entirety of her existence (Revelation 19:7; 22:17). He wants a Church living in the grace and fervency of first love all the way to the end.

Jesus is fully invested in us. We are His inheritance, and He has full intention of keeping our love alive for Him—that He might present us to Himself pure and spotless (Ephesians 1:18; 5:27). He did not descend from His glory and endure the affliction of dying for us only to culminate in a lukewarm flame of love—cooled by all the difficulties and cares of life. He has zeal that our passion for Him would not only survive, but that it would thrive until the day we see Him face-to-face. The biblical story does not end with a fainting church, but with the people of God knowing who they are and prepared as His Bride, filled with a consuming love for Jesus and crying out for His return (Revelation 19:7; 22:17).

Because His leadership is perfect, His plan is sure and His heart is always engaged, Jesus never settles in and leans back with us in our waned passion, accepting it. To do so would be to leave us in a way of life beneath what He desired for us and less than our holy destinies in Him—what He gave His life to provide for us. Thus, His call to His Church to keep first love is not overreaching, but fitting. Furthermore, His expectation that we heed Him in this call is not too demanding, but perfect and right.

The Difficulty of the Call

This is where most of us halt. It’s in the difficulty with His call. We sign off relatively easily on the possibility of loving Him to the end in a general sense—just like any marriage vow promises to love to the end. Yet His call goes deeper and is far more extensive than this. He not only wants us generally to love Him all of our days, but He wants us to love Him with entirety and full fervency until the day we see Him face-to-face.

His call to love Him with everything is truly the first and greatest commandment; thus, the continuous fight to have and keep Him first in our affections is undeniably the highest and worthiest battle of our lives (Matthew 22:36–40). Yet the adversary makes his aim straight at the heart, and the threats to that love are countless along life’s path. Confusion hits. Doubts assail. Unbelief hovers. Betrayals level. And the gravity weighs heavy upon us as the years and difficult circumstances unfold one by one. Without realizing it, what began as a heart-wide-open, fully abandoned responsiveness to Jesus can subtly wane and even wither away over time if we do not continually cultivate and persevere in it.

As the years have transpired in my life, so too have the disappointments, the piling up of the accusations from the accuser and from my own heart, the exposing of my own shortcomings and deficiencies, the pain and confusion of unforeseen twists and turns. This unfolding of life and circumstances is foreign to no one as we sojourn forward in following Jesus. We might almost expect the Lord to back off from His insistence on keeping our first love for Him. Such a demand in the face of legitimate disheartenment can feel unreasonable. His adamancy in this can strike our hearts as though He’s out of touch. Yet He does not relent, continuing to insist upon our full fervency and entire devotion, irrespective of what unfolds in our lives. To demand less would not be love. This is not His being unreasonable. No, it’s simply His being unwilling to deny us our full inheritance and His full inheritance in us. We were made for wholehearted love, and He refuses to relent in establishing that in us.

Keeping First Love Is Possible

I never planned for anything to change in my fervency and passion for Jesus. Maybe I was like Peter, sure that even if all the others left the Lord, I wouldn’t—sure that mine would be the passion that would endure (Matthew 26:35). Yet even when we watch over our hearts with all diligence, even when we are faithful to war against and overcome some of the giants that shut down love—such as offense and bitterness—there are still many subtle thieves seeking to creep in and steal (Proverbs 4:23). Misunderstanding confounds. Discouragement lurks. Weariness born of the weight of being accused day after day takes its toll. Sometimes it’s not the adversaries that come through the front door, but the enemies that sneak in silently through the cracked-open windows of our souls. These move in stealthily and incrementally, overtaking our love for Jesus. It can feel as though it’s over—like we’ll never love Jesus with wholehearted, untainted passion again. But this perspective shortchanges and greatly underestimates the leadership and power of Jesus.

This trajectory of waning passion is real and mournfully common in God’s people, but that does not mean it is inevitable or what we should expect from the heart that loves Him. Our assumptions must be confronted and renewed by the truth of the Gospel and all that the New Testament claims as the normal course for the heart and lives of those in Christ. And the testimony of Scripture should provoke us into the wrestling over our own hearts, the crying out and contending with the Lord that ours would be the trajectory put forth by Scripture, that we would love Him with an abounding love and walk in a path that burns brighter and brighter until the perfect day (Proverbs 4:18; Philippians 1:9–11).

His Love Is Our Love’s Source

This is where we need to hear the words of Jesus with fresh faith. His perspective here is, in fact, opposite of ours. We start with our circumstances and heartaches and conclude that they are too much for love to continue as it once did. Or perhaps we start with our limp love, uncertain of when and where something got in to decrease the flame...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Hearing Jesus Call Us to First Love
• 2. Returning to the Bridegroom Who Loved Us First
• 3. Embracing the Ache of Holy, Vulnerable Desire for God
• 4. Repenting of Unbelief and Recovering Confident Trust
• 5. Setting Our Hearts toward the Wilderness Pathway
• 6. Enduring God’s Loving Chastening in Our Friendship with Jesus
• 7. Walking in Forgiving and Fervent Love for One Another
• 8. Overcoming the Trouble of Accusation and Betrayal
• 9. Laying Hold of the Promise of Light, Love and Joy Together
• 10. Burning with Unquenchable Love until He Comes
• Notes
• About the Author
• Back Cover