The Fire Can Return

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When Faith Goes Cold: The Thing Jesus Tells You to Do First

When faith goes cold, it rarely announces itself. It doesn’t happen all at once — there’s no moment where you decide to stop caring. It just quietly happens, the way a fire goes out when nobody’s tending it. And one day you look up and realize the warmth is gone.

I’ve experienced this and it’s pretty damaging – and scary. It’s difficult to move down the right path when it feels like the right path does nothing for you. It can make you wonder what the next step is.

If you’re still showing up but feeling nothing — maybe still going through the motions — this passage was written for you. There’s something here that most in that place never hear, and it might change the way you understand what’s happening inside you.

A good place to go here is Revelation 2:4-5

“But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first. If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent.”

 Christ is speaking directly to the church at Ephesus — a church that had everything right on the outside. Doctrinally sound. Hard-working. Enduring. But Christ, who sees past the outside, calls out a problem - not what they’re doing. What they’ve lost.

Jesus doesn’t just see your attendance record. He sees what’s happening inside you. And what he says to a cold heart isn’t what most of us expect him to say.

And what he says to a cold heart isn't what we probably expect him to say.

Think about what it feels like to be reminded of something you almost forgot you had.

It’s like a man is cleaning out a drawer and finds a stack of old letters — handwritten, from early in his marriage, before texts and emails made long words unnecessary. He reads one. He didn’t remember writing it, but there’s his handwriting, and there’s the feeling he had when he wrote it, pressed right into the paper. He hadn’t lost the love. He’d just stopped feeding it. The letter didn’t create something new — it reminded him of something real that was already there, waiting to be returned to.

Look at the sequence of what Christ actually says in verse 5. He doesn’t lead with “do more.” He leads with remember. “Remember from where you have fallen” — which means: remember the grace that lifted you in the first place. The first love he’s talking about wasn’t something you worked up on your own. It was kindled in you by the Holy Spirit when the gospel of Jesus first landed on your heart as real. That’s where the fire came from. And that’s where the path back begins — not in new effort, but in remembered grace.

As John puts it plainly in 1 John 4:19: “We love because he first loved us.” The love was always his before it was yours. And his love hasn’t gone cold.  

“Even the idea of remembering the kindness of Jesus to me creates more thankful moments than I can name.”

What the text says here is, Christ confronts the church at Ephesus not for what they’ve done wrong outwardly, but for the love they’ve quietly let go — and he gives them a specific, ordered path back. He leads with memory, not effort. The grace that produced the first love is still available, because it was never theirs to begin with.

And this is a call to repent — but repentance of a specific kind. Not the white-knuckled resolve to feel more or do better. Rather, a turning back toward the grace that was there before the coldness set in. God has already done the work that makes this return possible. Christ pursued the Ephesian church when they had grown cold — he didn’t wait for them to warm up first. He speaks. He confronts. He calls them back. That pursuit is itself the proof that the fire can return — because the one who kindled it in the first place is still present, still speaking, and still able to restore what drift has quietly taken.

Before we pray about this, I’ve put together a free seven-day prayer guide to help you pray through a cold season — one short prayer for each day, drawn directly from this passage.

So, now let’s pray about this:

Father, you are the one who kindles love in hearts that were cold before you found them.

Forgive us for thinking the answer to spiritual numbness was just more effort on our part.

Thank you Jesus for pursuing cold hearts — that he spoke to Ephesus, and that he speaks to us.

Restore in us the fire that only you can light — and lead us back through the grace we first received.

In Jesus’ name we pray —

Remember: the fire that went out was lit by God in the first place — and this means the path back runs through his grace, not your effort.