My First Love

My first love,

I remember the first time I took a deep dive into my bible. The book was Jeremiah. One day, I was at Point-Loma Nazareth University in San Diego for a youth group church retreat. It was 6 am early in the summer and I decided I wanted to spend some time with God out on the cliff leading down to the ocean, right off of from where the student freshman dorms were. As I sat down contemplating what book to read, I did the flipping of the pages to see where I landed and “knew God had directed me to read this book”. Has anyone else ever done that before? As I sat to read the book of Jeremiah, I became fearful, yet intrigued, and curious. The way God was speaking to Jeremiah about the disobedience of His people, and yet how much God believed and trusted in Jeremiah with such passion and love, moved me to keep reading. Who would have known that from that day forward, my first love would have been made clear? That for some reason, this God people talked about seemed to become real. As I read the words on paper, it was as if I was looking down into my soul, seeing all my shortcomings, and failures as an image of what the people of God were doing. Yet seeing myself in Jeremiah as I believe, God was prompting my heart to become a leader in a world of followers. See God was my first love from the time He created me but God had not yet revealed himself to me that I would see Him for who He was. A righteous God, a powerful God, a loving God. By God showing me who I was, I was then able to appreciate Who He Is. He is and always will be my first love and I will continue to seek after Him.

Jeremiah 33 New King James Version (NKJV)

Excellence of the Restored Nation

33 Moreover, the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah a second time, while he was still shut up in the court of the prison, saying, 2 “Thus says the Lord who made it, the Lord who formed it to establish it (the[a] Lord is His name): 3 ‘Call to Me, and I will answer you, and show you great and [b]mighty things, which you do not know.’

4 “For thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, concerning the houses of this city and the houses of the kings of Judah, which have been pulled down to fortify against the siege mounds and the sword: 5 ‘They come to fight with the Chaldeans, but only to fill their places with the dead bodies of men whom I will slay in My anger and My fury, all for whose wickedness I have hidden My face from this city.

6 Behold, I will bring it health and healing; I will heal them and reveal to them the abundance of peace and truth. 7 And I will cause the captives of Judah and the captives of Israel to return, and will rebuild those places as at the first. 8 I will cleanse them from all their iniquity by which they have sinned against Me, and I will pardon all their iniquities by which they have sinned and by which they have transgressed against Me. 9 Then it shall be to Me a name of joy, a praise, and an honor before all nations of the earth, who shall hear all the good that I do to them; they shall fear and tremble for all the goodness and all the prosperity that I provide for it.’