Morning Prayer Summary for Tuesday, February 4, 2025

Morning Chapel Prayer Playlist
Morning Chapel Prayer Today

Pastor Heather…

Well, good morning, everyone. Welcome to morning prayer. Thank you for being here.

Come back to your first love…

As I was praying for where the Lord wanted to go this morning, I heard distinctly: “Come back to your first love… come back to your first love.” For those of you who know just a little of my story, my mom got pregnant with me when she was 17. My biological father wasn’t ready to be a father. He was young. And throughout my life, there was a pattern of fathers that were supposed to be there, but weren’t. And so the first part of my life was really looking for love, looking for a father to love me. I didn’t know that that was something that I was looking for, craving until I found Jesus.

And when I got born again when I was 18, I can remember the feeling of coming home, knowing that He was with me the whole time, even though I didn’t know He was there. I think it would do us all well to just remember that first love. And everybody here probably has an amazing story. Maybe you found Him when you were two or three and you’re praying with your parents at your bedside. That’s not my story. Maybe your story is more like mine. You search for Him for a while and you know what it’s like to live without His presence. And you know what it’s like to live in His presence. And you know how that just transformed every part of your life. Or maybe you’re somewhere in the middle and you have good days and bad days.

Where are you in your relationship with the Lord?

But I was thinking of that today when He said, “Come back to your first love.” And if anybody asked me, “Where are you at with the Lord?” I would say, “I love Him so much. I’m so on fire for Him.” Right? I hope we would all say that. But then I thought, “Do my actions show that what I do every day, where I’m spending my time, where I am spending my thoughts, how I am representing Him.”

I found out that God wasn’t mad at me…

And I think back to just how exciting it was to find this God, this Savior that loved me, that He wasn’t coming to judge me. He wasn’t mad at me. That’s how I thought God was. I thought He was just a faraway distant God that was mad and was racking up all of my shortcomings. But when I found a beautiful, beautiful Savior that took all those shortcomings on Himself, because He loves me so much, it was such a beautiful, freeing thing. And it took me a very long time to feel deserving of that love. And I realized how much I had been damaged growing up, of thinking I had just had to do everything on my own and figure it all out and be good and don’t make mistakes. And I don’t need help. I don’t need anybody’s help. I can do this all by myself. I’m going to show everybody. I didn’t need a dad anyways.

But I did. I really needed a father. I really needed a protector in my life.

And so what’s your story?

When did you find that first love and where are you at with Him today? Just like a marriage, we can get so comfortable with Him. We can get comfortable with our spouses, and we love them, but when we were first dating, you get all the makeup on, you do all the things, you get excited to be with that person. You can’t wait. You’re thinking of them 24/7, right? And then 30 years later, you come down in sweatpants and the sound of his chewing is like… Right?

But you love them.

There’s a familiarity, right? And we need to guard our hearts from that familiarity with God… that just like marriage, it’s work. It’s work! Anybody that’s been married… I’m going to be 33 years in June. It’s work. And you love that person, but you also have to be intentional about how you love that person. It’s no different with God. I don’t want to say it’s work, but it takes intentionality to keep our hearts pure and moldable before Him and hungry and on fire and passionate. Because we can get so caught up in the day to day, or the troubles, or the works, or the even serving the good things we can get so caught up in that, that we forget.

Pastor Heather’s testimony in seeking the baptism…

I think I might have told the story before. I was born again when I was 18, and then for a year I was trying to get the infilling of the Holy Spirit. I would go up for every prayer call and have hands laid on me. Repeatedly. I could not get past my head. It was so hard for me to understand “how is God going to speak through my mouth? I do not understand that.” I have to understand everything. And I’ll never forget, I was at a youth summer camp. I was a co-leader. We were doing the Champion by Carmen. We were doing a skit. I had my face painted like an angel. Had a big gold star over one eye and a long white robe on and we were getting ready… glitter in my hair. It was the nineties.

I remember one of my friends ran down from the chapel. The service had started, but we were getting ready for our big drama; we’re going to bring the house down with us. And she comes running down and she said, “Heather, they’re praying for people to be filled with the Holy Spirit.” I said, “Okay.” I know I’ve shared this before but forgive me for just having a moment with Him… running up this dirt hill to the chapel and I was so excited. My heart was just pounding. I’m like, “I’m going to receive the Holy Spirit today. I’m going to speak in other tongues. I’m going to get this today.”

Where did that 19-year-old go?

And I’m running up the chapel and tears are going down my little pretty star face. And I just think of that 19-year-old, like, where did she go? Where is she?

And I got in there and he laid hands on me and all I said was, “duh, duh, duh.” And he’s like, “You got it.” “Duh, duh.” “Just keep going.” “Duh, duh…” Feeling so silly. And then it turned into Yada, Yada, Yada. And I just kept saying that for a while until I developed my prayer language.

Later I found out Yada means “to intimately know Him.”

And that has been the cry of my heart—to intimately know Him. But then also to know that He intimately knows me. And I needed a father that knew me, that saw everything that I had walked through and loved me in spite of it, loved me through every minute of it. And that is my first love story.

What is your first love story?

And you all have a first love story. When’s the last time you just got excited and your heart was pounding to go receive something from Him? Revelation 2:1–7, from the Amplified…

“To the angel messenger of the assembly, church in Ephesus, write, These are the words of him who holds the seven stars which are the messengers of the seven churches in His right hand, who goes about among the seven golden lampstands, which are the seven churches. I know your industry and activities, laborious toil and trouble, and your patient endurance, and how you cannot tolerate wicked men and have tested and critically appraised those who call themselves apostles and yet are not. And you have found them to be imposters and liars. I know you are enduring patiently and are bearing up for My name’s sake, and you have not fainted or become exhausted or grown weary. But I have this one charge to make against you: that you have left, abandoned the love that you had at first, that you have deserted Me, your first love. Remember then from what heights you have fallen. Repent. Change the inner man to meet God’s will and do the works you previously did when you first knew the Lord, or else I will visit you and remove your lampstand from its place unless you change your mind and repent. Yet you have this in your favor, in your credit, you hate the works of the Nicolaitans, what they are doing as corruptors of the people, which I myself also detest. He who is able to hear, let him listen and give heed to what the Spirit says to the assemblies or the churches. To him who overcomes is victorious, I will grant to eat the fruit of the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God.”

First love…

“You have abandoned your first love.” The Greek word there for “first,” protos means foremost, best, paramount, supreme crowning, number one. I always thought it was like first love, like the first time you felt the love. But it’s like the first, the best of what you could give Him. Jesus is referring to an exclusive love that has to take first place in our hearts above all else. Our first love is the God that love has for us because He first loved us, right? Being loved deeply and eternally is the definition of our first love. So He’s saying we have lost our foremost love, our best love, our paramount love, our supreme love, our crowning love, our number one love.

And then He says, “Remember from what heights you have fallen.” The Greek word here for remember means to remember, to recall, to call to mind, to make mention of, to hold in remembrance, to be mindful. The verb is used in the New Testament to denote the act of remembering or calling something to mind. It can imply both a mental recollection and a verbal mention. The term is often used in context where remembering is associated with faithfulness, gratitude, or obedience to God’s commands. In other words, let’s remember, let’s call to mine, let’s make mention of, let’s hold in remembrance, let’s be mindful of how far we have fallen away from our first love.

And then obviously He says, repent. Which means to change the inner man to meet God’s will. The Greek word means more than simply changing your mind. It means to take another mind. We need to take on the mind of Christ, another mind. It’s primarily used in the New Testament to denote a profound change of mind and heart, often associated with turning away from sin and turning toward God. It involves recognition of wrongdoing, sincere regret or remorse and a commitment to change one’s behavior and align with God’s will.

And then he says, “And do the works you previously did when you first knew the Lord. Or you could say, return to your passion for Me, that motivated you at the first.” And then he says, “Or else I will visit you and remove your lampstand from its place.”

What’s the lampstand?

The seven golden lampstands represented the seven churches. The lampstand, or the Menorah, becomes a symbol of the burning presence of Christ. They are golden for Christ has purified and made holy His church. In the New Testament, it’s often metaphorically to represent the church or the presence of God’s light in the world. The lampstand is a symbol of illumination, guidance, and the presence of God among His people.

In ancient Jewish culture, the lampstand held significant religious importance, particularly in the context of the Tabernacle and the Temple.

The Menorah, a seven-branch lampstand was a central fixture in the tabernacle and later in the temple in Jerusalem. It symbolized the light of God’s presence and His guidance for the Israelites. The menorah was crafted from pure gold and was kept burning continually as a perpetual light before the Lord.

He will remove His lampstand unless we repent…

He will remove His presence, His light, His illumination, His guidance unless we change our mind, we repent. We remind ourselves of that first love. And I just saw such a severe warning there. I’ve lived my life without His presence. I don’t want to do that again. Not knowingly or unknowingly. And it’s little degrees. Obviously, He will never leave us nor forsake us, so hear my heart.

We need His presence…

But we need His presence to light and to guide and to move through us. We need that. And if there are ways in our hearts that we’re turning away from that first love in little ways, He’s going to take that light, is what this says. We can see that for the church as a whole. We can see that for Living Word. We can see that for the body of Christ. But we can also see that in our personal lives, like we have to come back to our first love to keep the light of His presence burning. So we’re not just here going through motions. We’re not here just teaching empty messages. We’re not just getting up and reading scriptures that aren’t changing us and moving through us. We’re not just walking through life just waiting for Him to come back, right?

We have to keep the fire burning…

We have to have His presence. We have to keep that fire and that passion burning. And that’s what I heard Him say today. “Come back. Come back to your first love.” I would say most of us are probably not too far away from that, right? But there’s little nuances, there’s little ways, there’s little patterns, there’s little things that can get in there and draw our attention away from Him.

What are the little foxes that spoil the vine?

And so today we’re going to pray. And I just want you to just allow Him to speak to your heart. What are those things? It’s the little foxes that spoil the vine, right? What are those little things that are just eating away or pulling your attention away from your first love? Maybe they’re stealing a little of that love away. Or you’re overcome with cares of the world. Maybe you’re dealing with things… but whatever it is, what are those things that are stealing you away from your first love? What are some things that you put on the throne of your heart where only He’s supposed to sit?

Prayed…

So thank you, Father, you show us where we’ve lost our first love. You remind us of those days when we had that passion and that excitement. If we’ve let that wane, Lord, how do we fan that again? How do we remind ourselves of how good you’ve been to us?

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