Walking With Jesus Again: Back to Your First Love in Gisborne

From the sermon preached on July 26, 2026

Returning to walking with Jesus after a season of drifting starts with three simple moves: remembering where you first knew God, getting honest about the truth you have quietly stopped believing, and taking one real step forward. Paul makes this case to the church in Galatia, a group of Christians who had started strong and slowly lost their footing.

He does not shame them for it. He simply asks them to look back, get honest, and move again.

That is the heart of this message. If you have noticed your own faith feels thinner than it used to, walking with Jesus can start to feel like a memory instead of a daily reality.

The good news is that finding your way back does not require a dramatic moment. It starts with three ordinary, doable steps, and Paul walks through all three in Galatians chapter 4.

Returning to God spiritually always starts the same way: by remembering where you came from. Pastor Greg Freyer opened this message with a memory of hunting rabbits with his father as a boy, walking deep into the bush with no GPS and never once getting lost.

His father knew the landmarks. He knew the way back because he had walked it before.

Paul uses that same idea in Galatians 4:9, reminding the Galatian believers of who they were before they knew God: serving things that were "no gods" by nature, chasing a system that never delivered peace. Returning to God spiritually means going back to that landmark, the moment everything changed, and remembering what life was like before Christ and how different it became after.

Paul is not asking them to feel guilty. He is asking them to remember, because remembering is what makes returning to God spiritually possible in the first place.

Today, try writing down one specific memory: the moment your faith first became real to you, not something you inherited but something you owned. Let that memory become the landmark you return to whenever the path feels unclear.

Walking the right path again means getting honest about the truth, not just remembering the past. Paul tells the Galatians plainly that false teachers had come in "zealously" trying to pull them away from what he had taught them. Walking the right path requires naming that pull instead of pretending it is not there.

Pastor Greg shared advice from a mentor: "If you ever feel like you're away from God, God isn't the one who changed. He's still there." Walking the right path back to God does not begin with fixing everything at once. It begins with locating the exact point where things went sideways and being honest about it, the same way Paul was honest about his own weakness and suffering while he kept preaching anyway.

Paul's own example matters here. He mentions an ongoing "infirmity of the flesh," widely believed by historians to have been an eye condition, yet he never stopped preaching because of it. He calls the Galatians toward maturity too, moving from spiritual milk to solid food rather than staying stuck as "little children."

Today, name one specific area where you have quietly stopped believing you need Jesus, and say that sentence out loud to God rather than keeping it private. That one honest admission is often the actual turning point.

Coming back to your first love is the climax of this message, the moment remembering and honesty turn into action. Paul references the church at Ephesus in Revelation, a church doing plenty of good work but who had "left thy first love." Coming back to your first love means more than admiring where you used to be; it means actually walking there again.

James 4:8 gives the promise underneath all of it: "Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you." That is not a demand to earn your way back. It is an invitation. Jesus tells a parallel story in Luke 15 about a shepherd who leaves ninety-nine sheep to chase one that wandered off, and when he finds it, he does not scold it, he carries it home rejoicing.

Coming back to your first love, then, is not about proving anything to God. It is about letting yourself be found, the same way that sheep were carried home on the shepherd's shoulders. Pastor Greg closed the message with a simple line worth sitting with: there is no greater joy than walking in the truth of Jesus Christ, whether you are coming back to Him after years away or coming to Him for the very first time.

Today, take one concrete step forward instead of only feeling the emotion of this message: send a text, write a prayer, or simply say out loud that you are ready to walk again. Small, real movement matters more than a perfect feeling.

Galatians 4 draws a clear line between two ways of living, the kind of contrast that makes the choice easier to see.

This is the same contrast Pastor Greg described: a life that looks fine on paper but leads nowhere, next to a life where you are genuinely known by God and free to walk toward Him rather than away from Him.

Feeling far from where your faith used to be can be a lonely thing to sit with, especially when Monday through Friday already asks so much of you. Whether that quiet distance from God has been building for months or you only noticed it this week, you are not the only one in Gisborne carrying it.

Bay Light Baptist Church meets each Sunday at Mangapapa School Hall on Rua Street, and folks come from right across town, whether you are closer to Kaiti or out toward the wider Tairāwhiti region. There is no pressure to have it figured out before you show up; you are simply welcome to come as you are.

Paul's message to the Galatians was never about perfection; it was about remembering where they came from, getting honest about the truth, and choosing to walk again. Pastor Greg's closing thought captures it well: there is no greater joy than walking in the truth of Jesus Christ, no matter how far you feel you have wandered.

If you would rather start with a conversation before you ever walk through a door, Pastor Greg is happy to have one; join us here.

If you want to take a next step toward Bay Light, plan your visit here.