Revelation 2:1-7 To the angel of the church of Ephesus write; These things said he that holds the seven stars in his right hand… I. THE RELATION OF THE FIRST LOVE, OR THE BEGINNING OF THE CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESHIP, TO THE SUBSEQUENT LIFE. — What we call conversion is not a change distinctly traceable in the experience of all disciples, though it is and must be a realised fact in all. There are many that grew up out of their infancy, or childhood, in the grace of Christ, and remember no time when they began to love Him. Even such, however, will commonly remember a time when their love to God and Divine things became a fact so fresh, so newly conscious, as to raise a doubt whether it was not then for the first time kindled. In other cases there is no doubt of a beginning — a real, conscious, definitely-remembered beginning — a new turning to God, a fresh-born Christian love. It is now realised, as far as it can be — the very citizenship of the soul is changed; it has gone over into a new world, and is entered there into new relations. But it has not made acquaintance there; it scarcely knows how it came in, or how to stay, and the whole problem of the life-struggle is to become established in what has before been initiated. What was initiated as feeling must be matured by holy application, till it becomes one of the soul's own habits. A mere glance at the new-born state of love discovers how incomplete and unreliable it is. Regarded in the mere form of feeling, it is all beauty and life. A halo of innocence rests upon it, and it seems a fresh made creature, reeking in the dews of its first morning. But how strange a creature is it to itself — waking to the discovery of its existence, bewildered by the mystery of existence. An angel, as it were, in feeling, it is yet a child in self-understanding. The sacred and pure feeling you may plainly see is environed by all manner of defects, weaknesses, and half-con-quered mischiefs, just ready to roll back upon it and stifle its life. It certainly would not be strange if the disciple, beset by so many defects, and so little ripe in his experience, should seem for a while to lose ground, even while strenuously careful to maintain his fidelity. And then Christ will have somewhat against him. He will not judge him harshly, and charge it against him as a crime that has no mitigations; it will only be a fatal impeachment of his discipleship, when he finally surrenders the struggle, and relapses into a prayerless and worldly life. II. THE SUBSEQUENT LIFE, AS RELATED TO THE BEGINNING, OR FIRST LOVE. The paradise of first love is a germ, we may conceive, in the soul's feeling of the paradise to be fulfilled in its wisdom. And when the heavenly in feeling becomes the heavenly in choice, thought, judgment, and habit, so that the whole nature consents and rests in it as a known state, then it is fulfilled or completed. At first the disciple knows, we shall see, very little of himself, and still less how to carry himself so as to meet the new state of Divine consciousness into which he is born. At first nothing co-operates in settled harmony with his new life, but if he is faithful, he will learn how to make everything in him work with it, and assist the edifying of his soul in love. A very great point to be gained, by the struggle of experience, is to learn when, one has a right to the state of confidence and rest. At first the disciple measures himself wholly by his feeling. If feeling changes, as it will and must at times, then he condemns himself, and condemning himself perhaps without reason, he breaks his confidence towards God and stifles his peace. Then he is ready to die to get back his confidence, but not knowing how he lost it, he knows not where to find it. But finally, after battering down his own confidence and stifling his love in this manner by self-discouragement for many years, he is corrected by God's Spirit and led into a discovery of himself and the world that is more just, ceases to condemn himself in that which he alloweth, so to allow himself in anything which he condemneth; and now behold what a morning it is for his love! His perturbed, anxious state is gone. God's smile is always upon him: first love returns, henceforth to abide and never depart. Everywhere it goes with him, into all the callings of industry and business, into social pleasures and recreations, bathing his soul as a divine element. By a similar process he learns how to modulate and operate his will. On one side his soul was in the Divine love. On the other he had his will. But, how to work his will so as perfectly to suit his love, he at first did not know. He accordingly took his love into the care of his will; for assuredly he must do all that is possible to keep it alive. He thus deranged all right order and health within by his violent superintendence, battered down the joy he wished to keep, and could not understand what he should do more; for, as yet, all he had done seemed to be killing his love. He had not learned that love flows down only from God, who is its object, and cannot be manufactured within ourselves. But he discovers finally that it was first kindled by losing, for the time, his will. Understanding now that he is to lose his will in God's will, and abandon himself wholly to God, to rest in Him and receive of His fulness; finding, too, that will is only a form of self-seeking, he makes a total loss of will, self, and all his sufficiency; whereupon the first love floods his nature again, and bathes him like a sea without a shore. And yet it will not be strange if he finds, within a year, that, as he once overacted his will in self-conduct, so now he is underacting it in quietism; that his love grows thin for want of energy, and, returning to his will again, he takes it up in God; dares to have plans and ends, and to be a person; wrestles with God and prevails with Him; and so becomes, at last, a prince, acknowledged and crowned before him. At first he had a very perplexing war with his motives. He feared that his motive was selfish, and then he feared that his fear was selfish. He dug at himself so intently, to detect his selfishness, as to create the selfishness he feared. The complications of his heart were infinite, and he became confused in his attempt to untwist them. He blamed His love to God because he loved Him for His goodness, and then tried to love Him more without any thought of His goodness. He was so curious, in fact, to know his motives that he knew nothing of them; and finally stifled his love in the effort to understand it, and act the critic over it. At length, after months or years, it may be, of desolation, he discovers, as he had never done before, that he was a child in his first love, and had a child's simplicity. And now he has learned simplicity by his trial! Falling now into that first simplicity, there to abide, because he knows it, the first love blooms again — blooms as a flower, let us hope, that is never to wither. His motive is pure because it is simple; and his eye, being single toward God, his whole body is full of light. You perceive, in this review, how everything in the subsequent life of the disciple is designed of God to fulfil the first love. A great part of the struggle which we call experience, appears to operate exactly the other way; to confuse and stifle the first fire of the Spirit. Still the process of God is contrived to bring us round, at last, to the simple state which we embraced, in feeling, and help us to embrace it in wisdom. Then the first love fills the whole nature, and the divine beauty of the child is perfected in the divine beauty of a vigorous and victorious manhood. The beginning is the beginning of the end — the end the child and fruit of the beginning. Where the transition to this state of Divine consciousness, from a merely self-conscious life under sin, is inartificially made, and distorted by no mixtures of tumult from the subject's own eagerness, it is in the birth, a kind of celestial state, like that of the glorified — clear, clean, peaceful and full, wanting nothing but what, for the time, it does not know it wants — the settled confidence, the practically-instructed wisdom, the established and tried character of the glori-fled. And yet all the better is it, imparadised in this glory, this first love, this regenerative life, this inward lifting of the soul's order, that a prize so transcendent is still, in a sense, to be won or fought out and gained as a victory. For life has now a meaning, and its work is great — as great, in fact. in the humblest walks and affairs as in the highest. (H. Bushnell, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Unto the angel of the church of Ephesus write; These things saith he that holdeth the seven stars in his right hand, who walketh in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks; |
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