I am sure her husband, for a long time, would have praised his wife for breaking a sweat to add so much materialism to their family. But she had invested all her energies in her profession, making her marital relationship very ragged.
She invested and endured in the workplace. She became a valued employee who was promoted for her performance. This is exactly what occurred in the church at Ephesus—the focus on enduring replaced the focus on the relationship. The next thing we find in this passage is an accusation against the church.
The risen Christ says, “I have somewhat against you!”
In observing this passage, Barclay observes (p. 10), “…the rapture of and Christian fellowship [love for Christ] and love for the brotherhood is gone. In the first days, the church members of Ephesus had really loved [Christ and] each other; they had been a band of brothers; dissension had never reared its head; the heart was ready to kindle, and the hand was ready to help. But something went wrong. It may be that heresy-hunting had killed love; it may well be that energy invested in rooting out all men with erroneous views had ended in a sour and rigid orthodoxy (right people with right doctrine without relationships). It may be that orthodoxy [success] had been achieved but at the price of fellowship…It is so often true that when a minister is first settled in a new call, there is a warmth of relationship and a wealth of goodwill, then something goes wrong, and the relationship is marred by bickering, gossip, backbiting, and a host of other relationship destroying behaviors. The first love diminishes1.
In my Marriage and Family Counseling course, I often discuss the “Zingless” marriage. The “Zingless” marriage has lost its first love. Other responsibilities have diminished the love in life. Energies have been so heavily invested in things to support the relationship that the relationship withers from neglect.
Whether the relationship is with Christ, our marriage partner, or our good friend, the first love (the intimacy of the people involved) will not be lost if we intentionally focus on maintaining, refreshing, and growing (knowing one another) the relationship.
Two weeks ago, my friend and colleague, Dave Matthews, and I walked down the hall together on our way to a meeting and virtually simultaneously said, “We need to get back to eating lunch together regularly.” We both felt the strain of other good things diminishing our intimate friendship.
Christ’s Paradigm (for a refreshing, rebuilding, restoring relationships to intimacy). A paradigm for marriage counseling!
Remember (Lk. 15:17-23)
God used this son coming to the end of his resources to remember his relationship with his father. If you are not careful, you will think it was only because he was broken and hungry that he remembered. But a perceptive reading of the passage will tell you otherwise. He remembered all that he had in the relationship with his father. He did not believe he could ask for it to be restored, but he could be back in his father’s presence (relationship) and have a job on his father’s staff.
Remembering was the first step to regaining the relationship.
Remembering the early joy of our marriage relationship is the first step – it motivates us to the next step that Christ enjoins.
Repent
Notice carefully: I will repent!
I – will repent. He does not blame his father for giving him the inheritance and allowing him to spend it foolishly. He does not blame his brother because he had the place of honor as the older brother.
If our marital relationship has grown cold and troubled, we must begin the restoration by looking at our failures, owning them, and not blaming our mates for our failures. We must repent by both changing our thinking and our behavior. This young man changed his thinking from what he deserved to appreciating what he had. He changed his behavior. He stopped running, and he started returning.
I Will – repent. He determines that he will take responsibility for the broken relationship. He determines that he will do something about the broken relationship. Too often, people bemoan broken relationships, indulge in self-pity over the loss of relationships, and remember the intimacy only to cry over its loss. They fail to take action to change the situation.
I will Repent – I will repent. I will take the responsibility to confess my sin and seek forgiveness. He does not go to his father and say, “You did this, and my brother did that, so I got mad and took my rightful money and left.” No! He says, “I have sinned,” and asks only to be allowed back in the household.
How instructive! If you want to rebuild a relationship or reestablish intimacy with someone, don’t blame him or her for the relationship crumbling. Go humbly, confess your sin and seek forgiveness. Husbands, don’t say to their wives, “Honey, I am sorry that I’ve not given you the time our relationship needed, but you need to understand that it took everything I had to provide everything we have.” No! No, you say, “Honey, I’ve come to realize that I have put providing you with things above giving you my time, attention, and affection. I have allowed my love to grow cold. I have allowed our relationship to grow cold. I’ve diminished our intimacy. Please forgive me and help me restore our relationship”.
Reproduce or Revive
Christ’s third step in this restoration of intimacy process is to reproduce what they knew contributed to building the relationship and intimacy in the beginning.
For this church, it meant re-cultivating the love for Christ and love for the brotherhood and working at maintaining the unity of the body in the Spirit (something Paul had taught them 30 years earlier).
For our relationships, it means:
Love—Love is giving of myself for the sake of the other. Paul tells husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church, giving himself for her. When we began our relationships, each of us desired to be married and enjoy all the blessings we perceived that relationship would bring to us. However, we established the relationship by giving ourselves to minister to the other. In the process, we planted and grew the feelings of love to the point of saying we “fell in love.” The reality is we cultivated the chemistry (science is now beginning to confirm a chemical connection when we cultivate a relationship and brain connection when we engage in a sexual relationship) that we began to feel; we did not fall in love; we manufactured love. Now we need to remanufacture it.
Love in action emanates through the following:
Time – No relationship grows without time. We cannot say, “Okay, we have ten minutes; let’s relate and develop our intimacy.”
Energy – Unfortunately, sometimes we have the time, but no energy left. It takes energy to enjoy each other, to do things together…
Listening – To know someone, you must listen to that person.
Giving – Intimacy involves our giving to the other person or ourselves. It means investing energy in getting to know and self-revealing so the other person can know us.
Caring – Intimacy involves meeting the other person’s expressed and/or observed needs. These things initially brought the relationship into existence, whether a friendship or a marriage. They are what refresh it. They are what bring it back to life. And they are what maintain its life.
One anothering – I don’t have time to develop them here, for they are the makings of a seminar2. I call these. passages God’s protocol for Christian relationships. These increase in intensity in a Christian marriage and appropriate intimacy in other relationships.
This is the Lord’s paradigm for restoring intimacy and rebuilding relationships. The model is expressed in terms of our relationship with Him, but it applies to all relationships.
Conclusion
Remember Jack and Jill and Bill and Susie? Their relationship was in the “pig pen.” When Susie discovers the emails between Jill and Bill, she confronts Bill. Bill agreed to meet with the Pastor. After several sessions, Bill admitted to being in the “pig pen.” Susie also began to see how she had changed from a woman who engaged with Bill in various activities to a recluse who told him, “Go play tennis.” Remembering what they had experienced early in the relationship brought them to repentance. Seeing how God worked in both couples to bring those remembrances to the surface was interesting. Then, through a reconciliation session with a pastor following Jesus’ paradigm, they were reconciled and began to reproduce the previous actions that initially contributed to building their marital relationship.
Application–Implementation
Let me ask you this morning: have you realized this weekend that your relationship with Christ has grown cold or that your marriage has grown cold? Sit down with a piece of paper and evaluate your relationships with Christ’s paradigm. Seek His forgiveness and repent for allowing your love for Christ and your mate [or friend] to grow cold. Follow this with a written plan to reproduce or revive those things that built these relationships initially.
1 Barclay, William, Letters to the Seven Churches. Westminster John Knox Press, 2001, 204 pages.
2 See my book, Thirty-Seven Biblical Strategies for Making Marriage Joyful.