Sermon, May 15 2005
Jesus People USA Evangelical Covenant Church

Reflections on First Love

by Jon Trott

The Song of Solomon, also known as Song of Songs, is a book about love. Primarily it is a book about First Love. Historically, both Jews and Christians tended to say this book was strictly about spiritual, not erotic, things. Almost all theologians agree today that the Song of Solomon – also known as the Song of Songs, or Canticles – is a open and frankly erotic poem about romantic love. But many also agree that agape – the love of God for his people and our love for him – is mirrored in Song of Songs.

Whether we are called to singleness, married, or about to be married, the Song of Songs has things to say that we ought to hear.

First love is rooted in that sense of discovery, someone new and mysterious and so different than ourselves. And we’re drawn by God’s beautiful gift of eros – romantic, even erotically charged love. We’re drawn toward wanting to come into union with that other person, to get literally as close as two human beings can be. Yet the physical doesn’t by itself really get us as close as we want to be, as we dream of being. That is why lovers go far beyond merely the sensual in the way they respond toward each other. As someone once said of their lover, “Love you? I am you!”

Have you ever watched two people in love? They are so gentle with each other, so considerate of the other’s feelings, so ready to go the second, third and fourth miles if necessary in order to please the other with the smallest gift or favor. Have you ever watched two lovers touch each other? His hand goes to her face as softly as if it were caressing a newborn child. Her head slowly leans upon his shoulder in an act of tender acquiescence. It is not duty that drives first love, but joy in losing ourselves for the other. The lover is single in purpose – his entire goal is to be with her, to please her, to be devoted to her. And she in turn responds: “I am my beloved's, and his desire is for me.”

Have you ever noticed the looks lovers leave only for one another? Those are perhaps more private than anything else we, the observers, are allowed to see between lovers. As the male lover in the biblical Song of Solomon puts it regarding his betrothed on their wedding night, “You have ravished my heart, my sister, my bride, you have ravished my heart with a glance of your eyes, with one jewel of your necklace.” Oh, yes, for the lovers even the jewelry or clothes each wears, even one strand of hair, is precious beyond reason.

Can we be as close to God as that? Can we dwell as intimately in the presence of Jesus as the lovers in Song of Songs dwell in the presence of one another?

In marriage, as time passes, we begin to see that mysterious other in all sorts of drab, everyday situations. She doesn’t look quite the way she did before. That ravishing glance of hers, that jeweled necklace, doesn’t ravish or sparkle quite the way it used to. She’s part of my life, part of the everyday existence I have. And as part of that existence, she begins slowly, without either of us noticing, to become invisible. At least, that is certainly what can happen. But she isn’t invisible. Instead, though my eyes may be fine, my inner eye has forgotten how to see her, to feel the fierce joy of her mysterious otherness: "Who is this that looks forth like the dawn, fair as the moon, bright as the sun, terrible as an army with banners?"

It seems rude to say you have to work at staying in love with your wife or your husband; isn’t that intoxication with one another just supposed to come naturally? No, it does not. In fact, first love is an unnatural state; we don’t get to stay there without effort. Remember when you met Jesus? It was easy at first, wasn’t it? Love carries us. Look, is being a marathon runner natural? No. Our natural state is to be a couch potato; that takes no work at all. Our natural state is to be selfish, not to take into account her or his needs, desires, and hopes.

So first love, that romantic intoxication, is a temporary gift God gives us, one that our sexuality conspires with Him to create in us. We’re initially blown away, dazzled by our beloved. He tricks us, you know. We’re pulled into love before we knew what hit us, and only then do we find out how hard the work involved in remaining in love is. But I promise you this: You can indeed experience that intoxication, that deep joy, throughout your life with your beloved. And all the moreso is this true when our beloved is Jesus Christ.

There’s no rest. You go forward or you go backward, you go upward or you go down. This is especially true in matters of the heart, the deep things, the things that have to do with relationships rather than ideas or stuff. Maybe that’s where the only biblical use of the actual term “first love” – which occurs in the book of Revelation, Chapter 2, and is a warning from Jesus to the Church at Ephesus – comes in:

What’s lessened is our wakefulness to our desires, the true desires that God Himself placed within us. Awake o sleeper! Rise from the dead!

When Jesus Christ entered my heart – and I know this experience is as different for each of us as a wedding night is for those who are married or will be married – that entrance was one that literally baptized me in the most intense sense of love I’ve ever known. God – the God of the Universe, the God of Perfection, the God of unapproachable holiness who put the stars in their places and Who appeared to Israel as a burning column of fire by night, the God Who owes me nothing and Who in fact I treated with contempt and disgust, that God sought me out using both seduction and a few good scares. He sought me out because he loved me, he wanted me – me! – and finally I gave in to his seduction and he had me.

But that was in 1973, and I was sixteen. Now I’m comfortable. Now I’ve been a Christian longer than most of you have been alive. And I’m a little out of love. I’m preaching for me today – you’re all here as much to witness my confession as to think on these things for yourselves.

Listen to how the bride in Song of Songs disses her groom. It is amazing how quickly we take our beloved for granted:

Her lover is at the door, dying to rain kisses and more on his bride, and all she can do is say, “Honey, I don’t want to have to get out of bed and be all cold and get my feet dirty.” Have you ever done that to Jesus? I absolutely know I have, probably on a weekly, sometimes daily, basis. “Nah, we can get together later. This CSI episode only airs once!” It isn’t funny, though, really. It is unbearable to think I would dismiss the Lord of Love because I’m too lazy to rise up and answer when he knocks. Remember the verse in Revelation 3, “Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me.” As many of you know, that is not a verse for unbelievers. It is a verse aimed right at the church, and is part of a long passage reproving various churches for losing their love of Christ.

Like the lover in Song of Songs, he doesn’t only knock. He rattles the door, he tries to work one hand in through an opening. Any opening he can find, he’ll use, though he won’t break it down. And then when we finally wake up to our heart’s yearning for Him, he hides from us. Can you guess why? God invented love. He knows how it works. If he hides from us, we’ll want him all the more, become all the more aware of our absolute need of him. He’s a sly lover, God is. If we diss him, he just might play a little hard to get.

By the time her lover is done with her, and by the time she’s wandered the city looking for him (and gotten hassled by the local police), she calls to her friends: “if you find my beloved, tell him this: I am faint with love.”

First love is a love that comes before, precedes all others. Who or what are these others being preceded? Other loves? Certainly. John wrote, “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” So truthfully, first love is love that God started. God comes before and precedes all, everything, everyone, every thought and dream and desire and hope. If he does not come before, he does not come at all. God must come first, because we are blind, deaf, and dumb to real love unless Love reveals Himself to us.

The Lord speaks first to us. His voice is the one calling to us to come out of our dark places, our loneliness and despair and worship of the emptiness we call pleasure. He woos us with his love. And as his love calls to us, attracts us, we find ourselves seduced. It is as C. S. Lewis once wrote, “"God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love."

God is the love we do not know we hunger for until he himself reveals it to us.

First love initiates, introduces, and opens. What does God’s love initiate in us? First, it initiates awareness, being awake. “I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, do not stir up or awaken love until it is ready!” Love is ready when God succeeds in awakening us to its presence. When we awaken, we become aware that our world, which seemed so empty and meaningless and frothy moments earlier, is suddenly populated with layer upon layer upon layer of meaning. Every breath we draw has meaning, every smallest act of kindness, cruelty, or desire takes on cosmic significance. Our minds and hearts are initiated into the mystery of love and also into its twinned siblings, the mysteries of joy and suffering. We are filled with joy, astonished that Love is an actuality – in fact, THE actuality – rather than an accident of biological chance. We suffer as we begin to realize that Love places demands upon us, demands of fidelity, chastity, forsaking of all others.

And as we forsake all, accepting momentary suffering for the joy of our beloved, we are opened by love to the One. As Genesis says, “Therefore a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.” The man is opened to his wife alone, and she to him alone, and through that opening they are initiated into marital love. Paul, writing in the fifth chapter of Ephesians, says of the one-flesh verse, “This is a great mystery, and I am applying it to Christ and the Church.” Yes, we become one with Christ as Christ Himself becomes our entrance into union with God. And that union happens only when we surrender, as the bride in Song of Songs at last does to her groom: “Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat its choicest fruits.”

Isn’t that strange, that the Almighty God of the Universe would hold himself captive to the will of single, minute creatures whom he could overpower effortlessly? Isn’t it wonderfully strange that he instead yields to us, even giving us the sense that we are pursuing Him? God is so desirable, yet our wounds, sins, and weakness make that so hard for us to see. He woos us patiently and without regard to His own reputation. As Philippians so painfully records in its second chapter, Christ emptied Himself of nearly all Divine Right in order to become quite literally the sacrifice Who’s first love opened to us the way of salvation.

First love is above, has priority. God, of course, has priority over everything and is above everything, though paradoxically, he also in Jesus put himself under us, even to being persecuted and crucified for love. This mystery is so outrageous! It is the love that the world cannot endure – nor the Church can often endure, for that matter. We grasp after power and material wealth and notoriety like contestants on Fear Factor eating hissing cockroaches and drinking donkey bile; the taste is terrible but surely there’s a worthwhile reward later on? Right?

There is not a single doubt as to where we are in God’s priorities. We are first. He went as far as He could possibly go while leaving us freedom to refuse him. He lived a life that should have drawn every human heart to Him. He died a death that should break every human heart in the most abject moment of horrible self-realization there is: the moment at which a deeply thoughtful person realizes, as Soren Keirkegaard once wrote, that God is everywhere in the universe – in the stars, the trees, the smallest and largest animals, the sub-atomic particles that spin and dance – he is everywhere except one place. He is everywhere except within our own empty hearts. He is not our lover until we make him our lover, and he is not our Lord until we surrender everything we are, have, and want to Him.

Listen to the Song of Songs:

This is the First Love. Have you ever been kissed by Christ? The kiss of Jesus Christ is the kiss of one who loves you with a fire so gentle yet so filled with power that you cannot endure it, yet yearn to be kissed again. It is the falling of the Holy Spirit upon a sixteen year old boy—this boy—kneeling on a farmhouse floor in 1973. It is that boy opening his mouth and speaking in strange tongues, but not caring about that, not caring the other people there or the fact that he is praying with his head thrown back and hands raised, no, not caring about anything but the fact that he is loved. He sees Moses’ fiery bush burning not outside where only physical eyes could observe it, but burning inside, down in the previously broken and empty and lonely places where his angst, sexuality, confusion, rage, and hopelessness lie together. The fiery love kisses his heart, and there is no parallel he can draw, no poetry he can cite, to describe that singularly eternal moment, which colors all his life and all that will follow from that single second of time.

That was the moment of First Love for me. I fell in love with Jesus after His Love fell on me and came within me. The thing now is to rekindle that love. Read his love poetry to me, the Song of Songs, yes, and also the other wonderful, mysterious, and sometimes hard things he says to me through His Word. Talk to him like I talk to my wife, about the little things. It is still, after all these years, hard to believe that the God of the Universe could care less about I think or feel about anything. But he does! He is passionate for us. He is jealous over us. He wants me to let him love me, to let him draw near to my heart and mind’s every thought, desire, and hope. I am His love.

The question is, Is He my love? Do I feel about Him the way the lovers felt about one another in the Song of Songs? Listen:

Compared to Love – and God is Love, you know – there is nothing else worth anything.

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