The Love of Many Shall Wax Cold

The Flame

Jesus names a specific, sobering mechanism here, iniquity abounding, producing love waxing cold, worth taking seriously as a genuine, ordinary pattern, not a rare, unusual exception, but something Jesus himself names as expected, worth actively guarding against rather than assuming your own love is somehow automatically immune.

This second movement, turning from the first movement’s exploration of genuine, kindled love toward honest examination of what actually tests and cools it, opens with this direct naming. Cooling love is not primarily mysterious or unpredictable. It is connected here to a specific, identifiable cause, abounding iniquity.

This is worth examining against however much surrounding compromise, cultural or personal, may have quietly contributed to your own love’s gradual cooling, not through one dramatic failure, but through this named, ordinary mechanism, iniquity abounding, gradually, quietly producing exactly the cold love this verse describes directly.

Consider today what abounding iniquity, in your own surroundings or your own gradual compromises, may have actually contributed to whatever cooling you can honestly identify in your own love for God. Name this mechanism directly, not to increase despair, but because this whole movement’s honest naming is what genuine warming actually requires.