Reasons for Leaving the First Love
We continue in this lecture our talks about the particular reasons for the Lord’s saying: “I have this against you, that you have left your first love.”
And perhaps among the reasons for the cooling of the first love are: the routine of spiritual life, the stopping of its growth, and the looseness of the conscience.
Reasons for leaving the first love.¹
Routine and lack of growth:
The repentant person is possessed by spiritual warmth in his heart, because he feels the great difference between his life in repentance and his former life in sin.
He feels that he has begun to know God and to know His way, and his feeling of this change fills him with warmth. Some denominations even call this change “renewal.”
But this new life, if routine takes hold of it, the warmth of the heart cools.
A single monotonous pattern may sometimes bring sleep…
Therefore you must feel continuous change in your life, and feel movement within it.
And the change is not only tied to repentance, but continues throughout life: it is a change toward the better, a growth, and a reaching forward…
Repentance is not a stage you pass through; it is the whole life… And so is the change in your life… every day you develop, and your knowledge of God increases, and your knowledge of yourself also increases. How can this be?
God—in His love—does not reveal to you all your sins and shortcomings at the beginning of your repentance, lest you fall into despair and find the way too difficult.
But He reveals first the hideous sins, and you confess them… You may be troubled by a major sin, such as adultery, or theft, or lying, or cursing, or injustice… and when you get rid of it, you think that you have repented, that your life has changed, and that you have known God…
Meanwhile, you forget other sins that grow within you without your noticing… Therefore the wise penitent always searches within himself to discover his weaknesses and shortcomings, and offers repentance for them.
By this searching for his small sins, he enters into a life of carefulness, and by continuous repentance, he enters into a life of contrition, which brings him warmth.
Such a person continually perseveres in correcting himself, perseveres in growth, and his life is transformed every day to something better…
If you do not advance every day, you are exposed to returning backward. The spiritual life is a life constantly in motion, not stopping…
Take for example the repentant person’s stance toward prayer…
Before repentance, you did not pray. When you came to know prayer, and stopped at that point, your life cooled. But the spiritual person grows:
He trains himself in understanding, meditation, and depth in prayer, and in praying with reverence—whether reverence of spirit or of body. And he also trains himself to pray with contrition, remembering his sins. Then he trains himself to pray with feeling, with longing for God, with love… And his conscience reproaches him if he loses any of these elements.
His conscience used to reproach him previously when he did not pray. But now his conscience reproaches him despite his prayer, because it is not as spiritual as it ought to be.
After that comes training in constant prayer—during work, on the road, in every meeting, at the beginning of every task… Prayer becomes serious and intentional, not mere routine. And the one who prays feels himself in the presence of God and the connection that binds him to Him…
And if prayer occupies him, it leads him to silence, because talking distracts him. And silence leads him to solitude, because being with people embarrasses him…
He experiences continual murmuring with the words of prayer, and the meanings of prayer begin to open before him. Each time he discovers a new meditation, and the words of prayer become sweet in his mouth until he cannot leave his prayer.
With all this growth, he often feels his deficiency in prayer.
Where is he compared to the prayer of the apostles which shook the place, or the prayer of Elijah which opened the heavens, or the prayer of David which brought about response, or the prayers of the saints which worked miracles?? And where is he compared to the high degrees of prayer, and the amazement in God…?!
If you put before you a true program of spiritual depth, you constantly feel that you are weighed and found wanting, that you have not yet attained…
We lose our warmth sometimes because our spiritual measurements are limited…
Just two or three psalms are enough to soothe our consciences, perhaps even giving us self-righteousness, while our prayers are shallow and weak!!
You can feel the sweetness of prayer when you love prayer more than anything else, and everything becomes trivial beside it.
The person who always stretches forward is possessed by warmth, because much movement generates heat, and the one who does not move becomes sluggish and cold.
Among the reasons that lead to coldness is caring for worship only while leaving purity of heart… How so?
Despite his worship, there may exist in his heart a little pride, or self-righteousness, or lack of love toward neighbor, or little faith, or little hope… and he is not concerned, thinking that mere worship is enough…!
Formerly, when you were in the world, major sins fought you. But now sins you consider small fight you. Thus the Song says, “Take us the foxes, the little foxes that spoil the vines…”
Some sins even wear sheep’s clothing!!
They take the form of virtues while they are sins!! How does this happen?
Anger takes the form of holy zeal… So a person gets angry and erupts, perhaps curses and rebukes, becomes harsh and severe, judges others, fills the world with noise, and thinks that he does all this for God!!
He may even bring verses to justify his position, lest his conscience reproach him!
He recalls the Scripture: “Reprove, rebuke, exhort.” And recalls that the Lord Christ held a whip and cleansed the temple, and His saying, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites.” And he cites Paul’s words, “O foolish Galatians,” and the Baptist’s words, “O brood of vipers”…
And he recalls nothing else from Scripture…!!
In his own eyes he is a new Baptist, a new Elijah, saying, “Let fire come down from heaven and consume the fifty.” And in all this he loses his humility!
Formerly—when he was far from God—he was hard-hearted, harsh, violent. People were troubled by his severity. He thought he had repented and changed, because he left some obvious sins… But still the harshness remains in him… He judges people inside the church with utmost severity… and it appears as though people of the world are gentler, more meek, and more refined than he is.
The strange thing in all this is that the conscience does not reproach. The devil has taken the form of an angel of light, and the sin has taken the name of a virtue!
Judgment has become “correction,” harshness has become “strictness,” irritability has become “zeal”… and the verses now cover the sins!!
The conscience has become wide, able to swallow many sins…
Stranger still is that he sins, yet is fought by vainglory…
In all his harshness, judgment of others, and loud tongue full of rebuke, he sees himself the only one fulfilling the Scripture, “Have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them” (Eph 5:11).
There is a big difference between one person and another: one is appointed by God to reprove people, with the Holy Spirit reproving through his tongue with words from divine inspiration, as Elijah and the Baptist did. Another reproves with a harsh heart and a loud tongue, because his character is bad and he has not yet repented of it…
And this same person who justifies sin also justifies his neglect in worship:
Just as he justifies sin by verses and examples that do not apply to him, he also justifies his negligence in prayers, meditations, and spiritual readings by saying he is busy in service!! My advice to such people is this:
Every new virtue that comes to you while destroying another virtue within you—reject it, and say to yourself: I do not want it, for it is not from God.
The righteousness the Lord gives you does not destroy another existing righteousness, but builds upon it, because the works of the Lord do not destroy one another…
But the devil—wise in evil, for it is said of the serpent that it is “more cunning than any beast of the field”—destroys what he finds in you of virtues, promising you others… He destroys your meekness and humility in the name of zeal, and wastes your prayers in the name of service… then deprives you of the blessing of zeal and service through judgment and anger…
If he says to you: Leave your humility so that you may admonish, rebuke, and correct, say to him: I do not want this preaching; leave it to the elders. If he says to you, “You have grown and taken responsibilities and are no longer young as before,” say to him: I wish to remain small all my life.
The devil fights all: he fights the children of the world with sin and lust, and he fights the children of God with virtue—the virtue that destroys another virtue!!
As for you, let your life be founded on humility and contrition, upon which you build all your spiritual life… This contrition that brings you spiritual warmth, and by this warmth you grow in the knowledge of God—a knowledge that deepens your love, not a knowledge that leads you astray into misleading paths…
Climb the ladder of virtues with steadiness, wisdom, and counsel, and do not rise to a degree until your feet are firmly established in the previous one. Every degree is built upon the previous one, not contradicting or destroying it.
Let your spiritual work be orderly, for the works of the devil are disorderly.
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Article by His Holiness Pope Shenouda III – Al-Keraza Magazine – Year 8 – Issue 47 (25-11-1977)
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