01.04. Affection for Christ: Its Revival

Affection for Christ: Its Revival

I will now turn to one or two scriptures which bring before us the ways of the Lord in His restoring grace when the hearts of His own have got away from Him.

* And in connection with this I may say that we are as dependent on the Lord for restoration when we wander as we were at the beginning for salvation.

* How sweet to know that He does not, and will not give us up.

* The secret of all His gracious dealings with us lies in the fact that He loves us, and nothing but love will satisfy love.

* He is jealous over us; He must have the affection of our hearts; He values it; it is the chosen satisfaction of His love. In bringing about restoration the Lord makes use of two great agencies – Ministry and Government; or to put it in simpler words, He reaches us by His voice or by His hand.

* I am not forgetting His advocacy with the Father, for this lies behind it all.

* He takes up our whole case with the Father before there is a movement of restoring grace towards us, or any response to that movement in our souls.

* That advocacy which is in all the value of His own nearness to the Father and based upon His sin-atoning work, is the unfailing outcome of His love.

* Our sin becomes the immediate occasion for His love to concern itself on our behalf, and this with the Father.

* Then consequent upon this perfect and prevailing advocacy, there is the activity of His restoring grace toward us, and it is of this that I now speak.

"I know thy works, and thy labour, and thy patience, and how thou canst not bear them which are evil: and thou hast tried them which say they are apostles, and are not, and hast found them liars:

* "and hast borne, and hast patience and for my name’s sake hast laboured, and hast not fainted.

* "Nevertheless I have against thee that thou hast left thy first love.

* "Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen and repent, and do the first works; or else I will come unto thee and will remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent," Revelation 2:2-5.

Here we have ministry, or the Lord’s voice, addressing itself to those whose hearts had left their first love, and seeking to call them to repentance. o How solemn is the picture here presented to our view.

* We see an assembly that was apparently in the most perfect outward order, and in which was found an extraordinary measure of faithfulness and spiritual energy, yet lacking the one thing which alone could satisfy the heart of Christ.

* No human eye might have been able to discern that anything was lacking; there was service, fidelity, suffering for Christ’s name’s sake and endurance of no ordinary kind.

* If we knew such an assembly we should probably think they were everything that could be desired.

* But the love of their espousals had waned; they had left the bright "first love" to which Christ Himself was everything.

* Alas! it is possible for our service, our fidelity, and our testimony for Christ to become prominent in our minds, o and for these things, so excellent in themselves, to usurp the place which Christ longs to hold in our affections.

* It may have been so at Ephesus, for Satan will use even such things as these to corrupt our minds from simplicity as to the Christ, and it is often thus that the decline of affections begins.

How touching is that word, "Remember from whence thou art fallen".

* We have already seen how the Lord remembers the "first love" of His saints; He delights to call it to mind; and He counts upon it being also a sweet memory to the hearts of his own.

* This is the first effort of His restoring grace – to recall the memory of those precious hours when the holy rapture of "first love" filled the heart, and He was really everything to the soul.

* Are the best and brightest seasons of your soul’s history somewhere far behind?

* Have you to look back through the mist of intervening years to find a moment of deep joy in which Christ filled the whole vision of your soul, and His love satisfied every longing of your heart?

* Sorrowfully, but in tender love, the Lord calls you now to "remember".

* Do not allow yourself to be deceived by the fact that you know more, and that many truths are clearer to your mind.

* This may be so while the affections wither, and the soul is as dry as the desert sand.

* May the voice of the Lord really reach and recall in power every heart that has left its first love.

"And repent". I think there is an immensity of grace in that word.

* It opens the door for the aroused heart to trace its way back to the point where the decline began.

* It is, so to speak, the Lord inviting us to return to the happiness and intimacy of "first love".

* It is sad and humbling that the Lord has to use such a word to his own, but there is precious grace and comfort in it for the exercised heart.

* Instead of putting any difficulty or discouragement in the way of our return, He invites us – calls upon us – to retrace our steps.

* Yet we must needs return in a way that really sets us free in the presence of His love from the things that had diverted us from Him. Hence He says "Repent".

* It is by the judgment in His presence of the whole course by which our hearts have wandered that we are brought back to the point where the decline began.

* The soul has to travel back over its course, and to judge the presence of the Lord the true character of the things that have turned it aside, o and in doing so to judge itself for that condition which gave these things their power over it.

* This is a deep, solemn, searching process, but infinite love calls us into it, and will carry us through if we respond to that call.

* I can quite understand a backslider saying, ’But my course has been so crooked and intricate that I could never trace it out; and the beginnings of my decline were so subtle, and the stages so imperceptible, that I am quite at a loss’.

* This may serve to prove that you cannot restore yourself.

* The Lord alone can lead us back over the history of our souls, and if our hearts really turn to Him He will do it.

* He can show us exactly what turned us aside, and what it was that prepared us to be turned aside, and He can give us His own judgment about it all.

* There is no legal effort about this, but the soul, sitting down before the Lord to judge with Him the whole course of departure.

* The results of it is that we are brought back, with a deepened knowledge of self and a truer judgment of the world, to find our entire satisfaction in the unchanging love of His heart.

* We are brought back to the freshness and simplicity of that "first love" to which Christ is everything. But there is another agency employed by the Lord to reach the consciences and hearts of His backsliding people, and that is Government.

* To bring this before you, I will read from the Old Testament: o "Therefore, behold, I will hedge up thy way with thorns, and make a wall, that she shall not find her paths. o "And she shall follow after her lovers, but she shall not overtake them; and she shall seek them, but shall not find them: then shall she say, I will go and return to my first husband; for then was it better with me than now," Hosea 2:6-7.

* Here we see the movement of the Lord’s hand in restoring grace.

* He will not allow the backslider to go unchecked in his self-chosen way; He hedges it up with thorns, and builds a wall across it. Do not our hearts know something of this?

* We thought to take a seemingly pleasant path, but Christ was not before our hearts when we entered it, and every step in it was taking us further from Him, and in His grace He put a hedge of thorns across it.

* He allowed our path to land us in painful circumstances, and the thorns tore our flesh.

* Did we consider that it was restoring grace which hedged up our way?

* Then again, we thought we saw a straight smooth way before us; it fell in with our wishes, our judgment approved it, and we entered on it with the greatest assurance.

* But presently we came to a dead block; there was a wall right across the road, we could neither get over it nor round it.

* Ah! it was restoring grace which built that wall, and which seeks to remind us by it that Christ was not before us when we turned that way. Have you ever pursued an object without any success, and been mortified by the disappointment?

* Or, having obtained the desired end, found it very different from what you had expected?

* Have you ever sought gratification in things here, and been surprised that they yielded so little?

* You have followed without overtaking, and you have sought without finding.

* You have been proving that the cisterns here are broken and can hold no water.

* Does not the dealing of the Lord’s hand with you constrain you to say, "I will go and return to my first husband; for then it was better than now"?

Let us read further. "Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak comfortably to her (margin, "to her heart")", Hosea 2:14.

* If our affections are true to Christ, they will make this world a wilderness to us; but if our affections do not make it a wilderness, His government will.

* He loves us too well to allow our hearts to nestle here; and He makes us conscious that it is a wilderness that He may have opportunity in our loneliness and our sorrow to speak to our hearts.

* The Voice that could not be heard in the din and bustle, and amid the laughter of the city, can be heard in the silence and solitude of the wilderness.

* Have you never had a wilderness interview with the Lover of your soul?

Then further. "And I will give her vineyards from thence, and the valley of Achor for a door of hope," Hosea 2:15.

* How significant is this! The valley of Achor (trouble) was the place where Achan was stoned, and he and his family, and his ill-gotten spoil, were burned with fire.

* This is very remarkable, for the sin of Achan was the first movement of departure after the people got into the land, o and the place where that first movement was so thoroughly judged is the place given as a "door of hope" for a backsliding people.

* Does it not again impress upon our hearts the solemn and imperative necessity of judging the root and secret cause of the first symptom of decline?

* It is the allowance of the flesh – the toleration of its tastes and tendencies – which is the root of all.

* We allow ourselves to be swayed by a man who thinks more of a "goodly Babylonish garment," or a little silver or gold, than he does of Christ.

* You may depend upon it that if Christ loses His place in our affections, we are henceforth controlled by either the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, or the pride of life.

* May the Lord conduct each backsliding heart through the valley of Achor, and give each one a thorough root-judgment of the flesh and the world. A few words more. "And she shall sing there, as in the days of her youth, and as in the day when she came up out of the land of Egypt … And I will betroth thee unto me for ever … I will even betroth thee unto me in faithfulness; and thou shalt know the Lord," Hosea 2:15, Hosea 2:19-20.

* What a triumph of grace! Poor backsliding Israel, after more than 3000 years of wandering and rebellion, will be brought back to the kindness of her youth and to the love of her espousals.

* She will know Jehovah in His infinite grace as she has never known Him before – no longer as her Master, but as her Husband (see verse 16) – and she will enter afresh and for ever into the joy of her betrothal to Him.

Beloved brethren, if this is the manner of His grace to Israel, surely our hearts are entitled to appropriate its sweetness to ourselves, who are called, through infinite love, to know Him in a closer relationship.

* I know that when the heart has long been a stranger to the joy of first love, o there is a great tendency to settle down and go on with things as they are, as though it were hopeless to expect to be restored.

* I am sure that if the Lord gives your heart a fresh consciousness that He really loves you, that despairing and depressing idea will be banished from your soul.

* You will awake to the blessed reality of the fact that He yearns over you in rich boundless love, and that He is ready to lead you into communion with Himself o in the judgment of the things that have turned you aside, and of yourself for giving them a place in your thoughts.

* Your heart will leap for joy to think that His love is really unchanged.

* Thus restored, "first love," with all that it means for you and for Him, will again fill your heart. You will sing as in the days of your youth.

* You will come back with a subdued and chastened spirit – with a humbled heart and a broken will – to the joy of that moment of espousal when Christ was everything to your heart.

C. A. C.