Advent - first week reflections
Don’t let your love for Him grow cold
I love advent. Taking time, set aside, to focus on the season, on Jesus, and what God is speaking during this time of year has always produces a good outcome and harvest in my heart and life. This year, in my reading it opens space for reflecting on the last weeks reading and notes. It asks, “what is God speaking?” So, I began to write what I noticed from each day. And then BAM, I saw what God was speaking. When light comes flooding in, we see!
My Reflection Notes
Seek first to surrender to the Lord
Don’t let your love for Him grow cold
Do not fret - don’t rub your heart and conscience raw with worry and stress
Feed on His faithfulness
Ask, “Open my ears Lord, help me to hear.”
God the Lord is speaking
I heard Him say, “A lot of people need a lot of love.”
Lord, show me how to love people.
As I had wrote these things I remembered that about day 5 - in the middle of my note taking I had written down, prompted by a podcast that I had listen to, a to-love list. I wrote names of people I have relationship that I want to keep.
The podcaster from Redeeming Productivity said, “Stop forgetting the people God has put into your life. Remember to love them. It’s the only debt we owe. To love one another.”
Romans 13:8 Owe no man anything, but to love one another
As I sat with my notes, what the Lord said about “A lot of people need a lot of love.” and the podcasts call to love I noticed something. One line of the notes stood out:
Don’t let your love for Him grow cold
Cold love has no warmth in it. There is an iciness toward others. The lack of love allows for no problem with betraying a brother or sister (familial) or betraying a brother or sister in Christ. This cold love is a hypocritical love. This is pretending to care for someone while having ulterior motives. Romans 12:9 tells us to let love be “without hypocrisy,” it challenges us to ensure that our love is sincere.
How do we get to a place where we pretend to love people?
Matthew 24:12 tells us that because of lawlessness - the love of many will grow cold. What is lawlessness? Lawlessness is when you will not allow another to tell you. You will not submit to authority. It’s an attitude that breeds hostility toward authority that births lawlessness. In the last days - many will refuse to yield to anyone or anything except self.
Romans 8:7-8 The mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law, (that’s Lawlessness) nor can it do so. 8 Those who are in the realm of the flesh cannot please God.
When we see lawlessness abounding - people all over refusing to yield to truth, God, authority, or anything - know that this is an abounding and upsurge of SELF. In the last days (in and out of the church) lawlessness will be rampant. I’d say that it is certainly abounding.
How do we fight cold love in ourselves?
We have to fight and resist becoming cold in our love. We have to turn our mind away from the flesh and to the Spirit of God.
Romans 8:6 The mind governed by the flesh is death, but the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace.
The flesh is all about you. (Me,me,me) It desires to make you the center, the best, the greatest, to be your own god.
We have to stamp out:
pride
arrogance
self-sufficiency
creating your own meaning
creating your own identity
creating your own reality
creating your own rules
To do what? We have to surrender and let God be God.
The Word gives us very specific instruction for keeping our love warm.
Hebrews 10:23-25 Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how we may stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.
HOLD UNSWERVINGLY TO THE HOPE WE PROFESS - everyday get up declaring your love and hope in the One who saved you. Speak out loud to yourself and others about the Hope you have in Jesus Christ. Why? Because He is faithful.
CONSIDER HOW WE MAY STIR UP ONE ANOTHER TO LOVE AND GOOD WORKS - notice it doesn’t say go love others and do good work (those would be fine) but we are learning how to keep love warm. What sorts of ways we can think and feel and talk and act that will stir each other up to love and to do good deeds? How can we help others become warm loving people? “Consider” literally means to think about, ponder, be deliberate, meditate, mull over — other people, with this goal in mind: what can I do today so that they will be stirred up to love and to good deeds?
GATHER AND ENCOURAGE ONE ANOTHER - Get together, small groups, large groups, in the church building and out of the building. It says, “Don’t forsake it” don’t object to, oppose, refuse, deny; give up, or renounce gathering together with like-minded believers who also hope in Jesus. The habit of some has been this, they have chosen and fallen into the habit of going it alone, isolating, and choosing to be “other” and “outsider.” Refuse to do that. Go. Get together. Gather. And not just to be encouraged but rather to purposely “be encouraging” to others. Be involved in mutual encouragement.
The key to love, in the New Testament — the kind of love that magnifies God and not man — is hope rooted in the faithfulness of God. Embrace your hope! Cherish your hope!
Because God is faithful. He keeps his promises.
John Piper
And as we see the day approaching … What day?
The day when Christ returns! How do we know that we are closer to that day?
Because we will see lawlessness abounding. When you see that “everyone all around is all about themselves, and cold as ice in their kind of love toward each other” this is when the writer of Hebrews say we are to do these actions (1,2, and 3) all the more to keep our love warm.