This is the eighth in my series on the word LET in the Bible.

I John 2:24 Let what you heard from the beginning abide in you. If what you heard from the beginning abides in you, then you too will abide in the Son and in the Father. 

This scripture is simple to understand yet quite challenging to apply as we age.  While John obviously had certain things in mind when he wrote this, the principle applies to us all. For those that have just come to Christ, the first days, weeks, months, and maybe years are full of discovery, revelations, joy, and a great deal of learning.

But all the while, life has been going on, and its very real struggles can begin to pour water on the flame of our hearts. It’s not that we turn into cynical, frustrated people; we just let the challenges of everyday life cause us to become “realistic,” which for many of us mean less joy in the Lord and dampened expectations about our lives and our futures. We could even look back on those early post-salvation times as quaint and dismiss that joy and godly optimism as juvenile, or worse, foolish. After all, we’re all grown up now, and we can wrongly put these in Paul’s category of the childish ways that we should be putting away (I Corinthians 13:11). (We may never say that out loud, but we can fall into this erroneous thinking.)

Yes, the writer of Hebrews tells us to “leave the elementary doctrines of Christ and go on to maturity.” But he’s talking about continued learning and growing, not leaving the joy of the Lord behind as a relic of our early days. He’s also not writing about leaving behind great and fundamental truths that we learned in those days.

Some of those truths are that He works everything together for good, that we walk in His path of victory, that in Christ He has not just accepted us but deeply loves us. Also, He is King of all the earth, He will return in power, and we are complete in Christ. Of course, there are many more, but can we see how easy it is to let these glorious truths (and the accompanying joy we experience in believing and walking in them) just slip away as the years go by?

These truths are still there, waiting to be as enjoyed as before, if we will “let” what we learned from the beginning abide in us. We could do a spiritual inventory of what we used to rejoice in but have allowed to erode over the years. Or we could look at the boundless enthusiasms of young believers, and open our hearts again to receive what they’re enjoying. They aren’t being immature or foolish or quaint; they are just walking in what some of us have let slide away with the years. If they have infectious joy, then let them infect you!