“As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love.”
John 15:9 (NIV)
I think about a kid I knew at 19.
He had a guitar and three chords and a battered NIV with notes in the margins from a youth pastor who had spent six months teaching him to read scripture as if Jesus was actually in the room. The kid sang badly. The kid didn’t know what he was doing on Sunday morning. The kid was so in love with Jesus that he would lead worship for the small group at his college on Tuesday nights and walk home talking to God under his breath.
That kid was me.
I want to be careful here, because I am not going to romanticize what 19 was. 19 had its own problems. 19 didn’t know what it didn’t know. 19 hadn’t been through the things that 38 has been through.
But 19 had a thing 38 has been quietly losing. 19 had a love for Jesus that started everything. The music came out of the love. The leading came out of the love. The reading of scripture came out of the love. The love was first, and the ministry was downstream of it.
At some point the order flipped.
The ministry became the engine and the love became the byproduct. I started reading scripture for the set list theme. I started praying for breakthrough at the service. I started singing because Sunday was coming. The thing in the middle, the thing the kid had at 19, started to get crowded out by all the things that grew up around it.
That is the drift Jesus is naming in John 15:9. Not in those words. But the verse is right next to it.
As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love.
Remain. Abide. Stay there. He’s not telling them to go do more. He’s telling them to stay in the love. The work will be downstream of the staying. The fruit will come from the abiding. He is naming the order. Love first. Everything else after.
Why this matters more for the worship leader
You can drift from your first love in any vocation. The carpenter can drift. The teacher can drift. The mom can drift. Drift is a human pattern, not a ministry pattern.
But the worship leader’s drift has a particular cruelty to it.
Because the worship leader’s vocation is to lead a room into love for God. You are inviting people to do the thing you are slowly losing. You are putting your hands on something you can feel slipping out of your own grip.
And you can’t stop doing the job while you figure out the drift. The job continues. Sunday comes whether the love is in you or not. The setlist still needs to go in Planning Center. The band still needs charts. The room still needs to be led.
So you keep leading. From competence. From muscle memory. From the songs that still work even when you don’t feel them. From the prayer voice you have learned to use on stage. The room doesn’t always notice. The team notices a little. Your spouse notices more. You notice most.
Revelation 2 has this strange letter to the church at Ephesus. Jesus tells them, I know your deeds, your hard work and your perseverance. I know that you cannot tolerate wicked people, that you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them false. He affirms them. They are doing a lot of things right.
Then he says, yet I hold this against you. You have forsaken the love you had at first.
That is the worship leader’s letter.
You are doing a lot of things right. The team is in place. The rotation is solid. The setlists are theologically careful. The room is being served. The work is real.
Yet you have forsaken the love you had at first.
That can be true at the same time as the rest of it being true. The competence is real. The drift is also real. Both at once.
How abiding actually works
Jesus does not tell the disciples to go manufacture love. He does not tell them to love harder. He tells them to remain in my love. The verb is passive in a way. The love is already given. You are placed in it. The instruction is to stay there.
Most of the drift back from the first-love happens when we forget that we don’t generate the love. The love is already given. We were in the love. We left.
Coming back is not the work of producing a new feeling toward God. It is the work of returning to a place you used to live.
I want to describe what returning has looked like for me, not as a model but as one person’s experience.
It looks like reading scripture in a chair before I open my laptop. Not for the set. For me. The Psalms work for this. The Gospels work for this. Any passage that lets me see Jesus in the room with me.
It looks like sitting in silence for ten minutes some mornings without a goal. Not journaling. Not praying with words. Just sitting with God, the way I would sit on a porch with a friend without needing to fill the air.
It looks like asking, on a Tuesday afternoon, do I love Jesus more this month than last month? And being honest if the answer is no. Not as accusation. As inventory. So I know where I am.
It looks like worshiping when no one is watching. In the car. At the piano with the lights off. In the shower. With a song I’m not going to use in a set. With my own voice and no in-ear and no monitor and no record button.
It looks like telling God, out loud sometimes, I miss the way I loved you at 19. I want that back. Please bring me back.
That last one is the prayer that does the work. Not the technique. The asking.
The thing nobody tells you about coming back
Here’s a thing I did not know in my early thirties that I know now.
The first love is not gone. It got buried under the ministry. The competence layer accumulated on top of it. The structure layer accumulated on top of that. The performance layer accumulated on top of all of it. The first love is at the bottom of the pile. It is not dead. It is covered.
The work of returning is the work of taking layers off. Slowly. One at a time.
You don’t take the ministry layer off. You can’t. You don’t quit your job. You don’t blow up your team. You don’t leave the church. You don’t even necessarily change anything visible.
You take off the performance layer. You take off the I have to produce something this Sunday layer. You take off the I am responsible for the spiritual temperature of this room layer. You take off the I cannot show up to God empty layer. You take off the I have to feel something layer.
When those come off, the love underneath is still there. The same love that was in the 19-year-old kid.
Jesus says it himself. As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Past tense. He has loved you. The love is already done. Your job is to remain in it. Not to earn it back. Not to manufacture it. Not to fix yourself enough to be loved again.
Remain in the love that was always there.
A practice for the week
This week, do one thing. Find a time when you can sit with God for 15 minutes with no agenda.
Not to plan a set. Not to read for the sermon. Not to prep for Sunday. Not to journal. Not to fix anything. Not even to repent.
Just to be with him.
If you can’t think of anything to say, say this. I have not been here in a long time. I am here now. I want to remain in your love.
Then sit.
The first love is not dead. It is buried. The work of unburying it is slow. It does not happen in a weekend retreat. It happens in 15-minute sits that compound over months.
Start the compound this week.
Ryan
Going deeper: we walked this verse slowly on the podcast in John 15:9 | When Ministry Replaced the Love That Started It.
This devotional is part of The Church Collective’s free 52-week worship team devotional series. Get the first 12 as a free PDF and a fresh devotional in your inbox every Monday morning.
The Slow Drift From Joy