PEOPLE ARE OUT THERE TRYING TO PUSH SATANIC AGENDAS WITH AGGRESSION AND PASSION, WE MUST STIR OURSELVES TO ACT AND PREACH THE GOSPEL IN THE WORLD NOT JUST COME TO CHURCH.
THE WORLD IS VERY ACTIVE ABOUT DIRECTING AND INFLUENCINCING PEOPLE WITH ALL SORT OF EVIL THINGS, THE CHURCH CANNOT BE PASSIVE ABOUT WINNING SOULS.
- Bishop Dag Heward-Mills at Sunday Prophetic Encounter Service, First Love Centre HQ, Accra Ghana
Lift your hands and pray for the Spirit of revelation to be upon your life as we hear the word of God. Father we thank you for everything you are doing in our lives, we love you and we praise you in Jesus name we pray.
Our subject is MY FIRST LOVE.
Revelation 2:2-4
First love is love that is usually first. It is a love for God which most be first, the love for God has a lot of similarities with the love you have for a man or woman. What is going to be the result of you not having first love for God? Church Gist. It is that your candle stick will be removed from it’s place except you repent. Jesus is in the middle of these candle sticks and He said he is going to take your candle stick from it’s place and put it in the back not because of adultery or immorality but because you have left your first love.
Mathew 22:36-37
The greatest commandment is to love God, loving God is something God is looking forward to. If you are going to find a partner, the first thing anyone would want is for the person to love you.
Love has different kinds and there is something called first love. When you get a girl who has for the first time been told I love you and she is been shown interest by a man, she is innocent and would want to commit her whole life to it and go anywhere. That is a nice experience. Church Gist. I hear some people say that there is going to be a number of innocent girls as a reward for whatever they do. It is because of the attraction that there seems to be in having an innocent person, her innocent is attractive and that innocence leads to first love and that love is a wonderful thing to experience.
Jeremiah 2:2
Some people are married and they don’t know what it means for someone to like them. What we do for God doesn’t hold water to how much we love God. If you marry a girl who is very good at her job, she is good with I.T. and every other thing which is good but the desire for you is your main concern, that they want you is a wonderful thing you can’t buy it. That is why God says that He is determining your position relative to him by your first love. Church Gist. If you look at churches, there are many grown up churches that have been there for centuries who have rules and regulations that show good morals, good characteristics and many things they don’t accept which are all good but whether they love God with a passion and energy in the Church or is the Church made up of lovers, that is where you find a difference.
So many people can go through rituals and saying of words and we are just sitting there not feeling what we are saying. God wants to have people with feelings and passion. I totally agree with God that if He has to chose from His many brides, which one would He choose, the most principled one? The most computerized one? The most organized one? The one who cooks and stocks it in the freezer with a menu for each day of the week? I think that if God was choosing a bride He would go for one that has passion and natural feelings for Him. Feelings any day. God is looking for people who don’t have to be told “Do this or don’t do this”.
God wants people with feeling and if you look at Churches all over the world, you will see that there are Churches which are dead. I have attended a lot of dead Churches where you feel like sleeping in the Church because it is dead quiet. God in his own wisdom has given this message to the church that you have left your first love. Church Gist. First Love gives rise to first works. I don’t really like the fact that I am teaching on first love because first love is not something you can really teach. You can describe it but it is something that comes spontaneously from within. I can describe it but it doesn’t mean you have learnt it but it would help you to see that you are not a first lover.
When you have first love and the person says “I am taking you to Mali”, you say “If you are there and I am there, that’s all”. If they say “I eat only Fufu”, you will say “I will learn how to make it, if you like it then I like it too”. First love is blind love, when you are filled with complains and murmuring, then you are not filled with first love. Church Gist. An innocent guy who is following a guy who she really loves, she doesn’t find anything wrong with anything the guy does.
I remember one Lawyer I used to know who fell in love with a Tailor, I am not saying Tailoring is not a good profession. She used to live in the same street with the guy before she went to school and became a lawyer but the guy was still a tailor in a wooden kiosk. Everybody kept telling her that this Tailor-Lawyer alliance would not work but she didn’t listen and she married the tailor because that is her first love. Once you start seeing the faults, first love has gone. During first love you don’t notice things.
The prophetic Book of The Songs of Solomon is a song of a first lover.
Songs of Solomon 1:1
i. First love is the love which is without restraint.
First love is the love when nothing is too extreme, nothing is too tiring, no sacrifice is too great to make. It is the love of someone who has not been hurt, that is why you must try to overcome the things which hurt you because when you are hurt, it is like you got punctured and when you are punctured the air starts to escape from your life and gradually love goes down.
Acts 20:23-24
You must finish your race on this earth bubbling with joy in spite of the afflictions and bonds of this world. You must be able to keep going on the race with God with joy, with laughter, with excitement, with happiness and not become more and more depressed and sad as the years goes by. You must finish your course with joy. We will be doing First Loving Things with joy until the end of our course. Paul said “none of these things move me”. I am too busy feeling love for God to feel depressed.
Songs of Solomon 1:2
ii. First love desires physical contact. Where is your contact with this God you claim you love? Physical contact is a sign of love. You can’t sit in the house and say “I am a first lover” when all you do is sit in the house and watch on your phone and you are happy with it. Church Gist. You can’t be a first lover and you are not present in the gathering of lovers. If somebody has to call you to come to church, you are not a first lover. God has many brides over the world and when He is choosing the bride to sit by His side, which bride would He choose? The one they have to call to come for service? If we still have to do roll call to see whether you are present, Ha! Charlie you are far from first love.
iii. A person with first love smells the Lord
When my father died, even though I was not seeing him much, but I noticed it and I sensed it. You should check where you are and the depression that you are going through, when you are in church do you feel depressed? It is when you are at home because the savour of the sweet ointment is not there. In the House of the Lord, the savour of the good ointment is there.
iv. A person with First Love is drawn to the Lord
Song of Solomon 1:4 – “Draw me, we will run after thee: the king hath brought me into his chambers: we will be glad and rejoice in thee, we will remember thy love more than wine: the upright love thee”
First love is full of energy, when you are experiencing first love, something draws you. Don’t take it likely when you are drawn to something especially spiritual things. Church Gist. I can tell you a time would come when you would no longer be drawn. I remember one time a brother told us he was going to marry somebody soon and we were waiting to see who he would marry. You wait and wait, God is moving and at a point we saw that he was not drawn to anybody. When you are drawn to someone it is a miraculous thing. So when you see that a good brother has been drawn to you, you don’t have to take it likely. One day I met a brother, for fifty years he has not been drawn to anyone, now he was 55 and he said “I have given up, I don’t feel anything for anybody”
v. A person with first love sees the Lord as a bundle of blessings
When you see someone with first love, the person’s eyes see what others don’t see. “Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder” said the elephant as it kissed the pig, “you may not know why I am kissing this pig but I see many things you can’t see”.
Songs of Solomon 1:12-13
When you are full of first love, you see the person that you love as a bundle of things not just one thing. Church Gist. God is many things to us, Church is many things to us. Many things are connected to God and when you are not filled with first love you don’t see the bundle. Brothers and Sisters it is time for you to see what God is, some of us have only seen God as ‘don’t do this, don’t do that, don’t fornicate, don’t lie’ and that is all God is to you. God is far more, He is a bundle of sweet smelling things. If you can’t see all the wonderful things in God, something is wrong with you. God gave me a love for the church many years ago, people don’t see what I see in God’s house. Through out my life, I have had many opportunities to do different businesses but I don’t know where I will get the time. I am looking at souls and people don’t know how beautiful God is. That is why giving myself all out to build the house of God in my 20’s when there was nothing like a salary was the best decision i made.
vi. A person with first love sees the Lord and His work as a lily among thorns
Songs of Solomon 2:1-2
When you have first love you see God’s work as something good and every thing else as painful things. God is the lily and every other thing is a thorn, you don’t have to live your life chasing thorns and when you are 70, you realize that God is truly the lily. Loving God is like loving a Lily in the midst of thorns, this world is full of pain and thorns and I am telling you that even the happiest of the things that we do on earth will end in sorrow but our love for Him and our choosing Him is what really gives pleasure.
Those who have first love are well positioned around Him, I remember travelling to a country and I was giving a lecture and a millionaire asked me “how do you choose people who work for you”, I said by love. Church Gist. I look into their eyes and I can feel some people love me and I prefer to work with those people, I don’t really know what you learnt in school. Your school cannot help much because most of the things you learn you forget them before you even graduate. I believe God equally chooses those who love Him. David is a man who everything about him showed he loved God, God made him a star and today he is the flag of Israel. Yes! You are moral, yes you did all of these other things but do you love God? David loved God.
Malachi 3:17
Brothers and sisters remember your position is determined by love and your love must be first love.
vii. A person that has first love is constantly feeding and banqueting with the Lord and His anointing
Songs of Solomon 2:3-4
It is nice to be with a first loving person, I wish that for you in marriage not someone who is loving you out of calculations and asking you what passport do you have?
Once you have first love, you will be brought to the banqueting house to come and eat and feed.
viii. A person with first love is fully engaged
Songs of Solomon 2:6
Most of us just wants to serve God once a week with just your left toe. First love is full time, all out. Total embrace.
ix. A person with first love is somebody who can be stirred into action
Songs of Solomon 2:7
When you don’t have first love, I can preach but I cannot stir you up. There are ‘unstirrable people. But when you are with someone with first love, once you make little contact the person is stirred. Move away from any body who is in the eighteenth love zone.
Many of you are in this service but there is nothing that you do for the Lord and it is as if you are dead. I can mention 100 schools in Accra with hundreds of students and many of you are here who do nothing to win souls. Church Gist. Let it be that there are 30 to 40 students who would come to church because of you.
Why do we keep coming to church alone? Where are the people feeding from you? People are out there with an aggression trying to push some satanic agenda, we cannot remain in the church and be shouting Amen. There is an active effort going on to direct and influence people along a certain line and we cannot sit down and be shouting Amen in the church. It’s time for you to be stirred up to show God you love Him no just saying it.
We are not in need of members, we are in need of showing our love to God. We are not in need of money either, it is our spontaneous love for God. We are talking about vulnerable souls who need God at a certain tender age. When I was in secondary school, a man called Uncle James he came with his car and parked outside my school every day and he would just talk to us. Gradually he became a major influence in my whole life.
Stir up your love, don’t just attend church, there are people who would be lost completely because you are not stirrable. God wants to stir you up to join the work force not just the attending force, there is only one work we have here: winning souls and stabilizing them in God. A time has come to stop blowing hot air, we must get to work. A lazy person is not a good lover, it takes energy to love.
John 21:15
Reach out to those in secondary schools, they are the lambs which are still soft and succulent but as you get older your meat is hardened. They are soft enough for you to touch their hearts, reach out to them this week.
Speak to God and tell Him you want to love Him more, you want to love Him with the love of the Lord. Lift your holy hands and speak to God.
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