Duty and Delight: Returning to Our First Love

July 12th, 2026
by RHC Sermon

There's a particular kind of exhaustion that doesn't come from doing too little for God - it comes from doing so much that somewhere along the way, the doing became the point. It's possible to walk from the sin of doing nothing straight into the sin of doing everything, and never once stop to ask whether we actually love the God we're working for. That's the tension worth sitting with this week: not duty versus delight, but the discovery that one was never meant to exist without the other.

The starting point is Jesus' letter to the church in Ephesus (Revelation 2:2-7). It's a remarkable commendation before it's anything else. Jesus knows their works, their toil, their patient endurance. He knows they can't tolerate evil, that they've tested false apostles and found them wanting, that they've endured for His name's sake without growing weary. This is, by any measure, a strong, discerning, hardworking church. And yet Jesus says one thing against them: "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, He warns, He will remove their lampstand - unless they repent.

Let's do ourselves a favor: don't be the church in Ephesus. Not because we're already there, but because the warning fits any congregation that works hard, cares about theology, and stays busy - which, honestly, describes a lot of healthy churches. It's dangerously easy to delight in the work itself rather than God Himself. When that happens, the ministry becomes the prime focus, almost as if God wasn't the one who gave the work in the first place. We get swamped, bogged down, burnt out - and bitter.

Scripture gives two pictures of exactly this trap. The first is the prodigal son's older brother (Luke 15:25-30), who hears music and dancing and refuses to go inside. "These many years I have served you," he tells his father, "and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends." Talk about a man with a high regard for duty. And right under his nose, his younger brother had just been brought from death to life - but consumed with his own duty, the older brother was blind to the delight in front of him.

The second picture is Martha (Luke 10:38-42), "distracted with much serving," while her sister Mary sits at Jesus' feet and simply listens. Martha, pent up and stressed, asks Jesus why He doesn't care that she's been left to serve alone. It's a question anyone who leans toward duty over delight will recognize - the quiet bitterness of watching someone else not carry what you're carrying. But that bitterness is a warning sign, not a badge of honor. A good thing has quietly become a god thing.

John Piper puts words to the remedy in Desiring God:

"The real duty of worship is not the outward duty to say or do the liturgy. It is the inward duty, the command: 'Delight yourself in the Lord'! ... 'Be glad in the Lord, and rejoice!' The reason this is the real duty of worship is that it honors God, while the empty performance of ritual does not."

- John Piper, Desiring God

He illustrates it with a marriage: if a husband takes his wife out for their anniversary and she asks why, the answer that honors her is "Because nothing makes me happier tonight than to be with you" - not "It's my duty." Duty dishonors; joy honors. Don't let your honeymoon phase with God die out.

None of this erases the place of works. Ephesians 2:8-10 is clear: salvation is by grace through faith, not of works, so that no one may boast - and yet we are His workmanship, created for good works prepared beforehand. We are not saved by works. We are saved for works. That truth leaves no room for comparing our sanctification to anyone else's, since, as 2 Corinthians 3:4-5 reminds us, our sufficiency was never in ourselves to begin with.

So how do we hold both duty and delight together? Jesus answers plainly in John 15:4-6: abide in Him, the way a branch abides in the vine, because apart from Him we can do nothing. Abiding isn't a suggestion - it's a command, a command to intimately know the Lord (John 17:2-3), not merely to know facts about Him. Jeremiah 9:24, Hosea 6:6, Psalm 46:10, and Philippians 3:8 all point the same direction: God desires steadfast love and the knowledge of Him more than sacrifice, ritual, or religious busyness. Put down the five study Bibles, the six highlighters, the stack of sticky notes and podcasts for a moment, and simply behold Christ. He is worth it. "Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you" (Psalm 73:25).

If that's not how we delight in the Lord, the answer is simple: repent. Turn back. Faith that never manifests in action isn't faith at all (John 14:15; 1 John 3:24; Matthew 22:37) - so yes, serve, obey, keep every spiritual discipline. That's duty. But let it flow from delight, not replace it. This is not duty or delight, not duty versus delight - it's duty and delight, duty from delight.

Paul's prayer for the Ephesians is a fitting place to land: that Christ would dwell in our hearts through faith, that we, rooted and grounded in love, would grasp the breadth and length and height and depth of His love that surpasses knowledge, and be filled with all the fullness of God (Ephesians 3:14-19). That's the invitation this week - not to work harder, but to return, delight, and abide.

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Scripture References (ESV)