You Have Left Your First Love?

How is it that someone can learn to love and then turn away from that love? Why do people leave their first love? More importantly, how can those people retrieve that love if they have left it?
   Revelation 2:1-7 tells us about the church in Ephesus. They had learned to love. The church had been formed some time after the establishment of the Church in Acts 2. Converted people went to Ephesus and started the church in the place. Later, Paul came to that city on his second missionary and found an active church. It became the place from which Paul launched further missionary efforts staying there for 3 years, longer than he had stayed in any other place.
   Those early years (40-50 AD) were the years of first love. They operated with this new-found zeal to be mission-minded from the very beginning. However, by the time that John penned the Revelation (about 40 years later), he was instructed to say to them, “Nevertheless I have this against you, that you have left your first love.” (Revelation 2:4).
   How did they so quickly leave that first love? Just before he penned those words, John wrote something else that might help us see why they had left that first love. He commended them for their “works…labor…patience…you have tested those who say they are apostles and are not and have found them liars…” (Revelation 2:2). They were busy people. They were a busy church. These are excellent qualities. But…“…you have left your first love.”
   How did this happen? The key might be in verse 3. John wrote something that sounds like a compliment but it may be the criticism that reveals how they could have left. He said that they “have not become weary.” That sounds like a compliment. However, it could mean that though they were busy (look at the compliment list again) but they were not engaged. Over time their religion had become routine. Their former motivation was just a memory.
   Those Christians needed to know how to get back that religious motivation with which they had begun their spiritual journey. So, John gave them 3 words to help them—remember, repent, and resolve. Remember those first works. Remember how it was! They were still doing them but now they were just actions. They were routine practices.
   Repent and do the first works. Repent for how it is! But, they were doing them! Yes, but Jesus wanted them to understand that they needed to do more than just unconsciously carry out some religious actions. He wanted them to do the first works with the first love—that motivation and excitement that characterized the beginning of their Christian walk.
   Resolve to make how it was become how it is again! Go back and think about how you felt in those early years. What consumed your thoughts? What moved you to emotional response? Do those things in those ways!
Jesus also gave a warning. He told the church that if they did not do this, He would remove their candlestick. He would remove their light influence. They would no longer be a beacon of light.
   It is so sad when people leave their first love! It is even sadder when they don’t want to get it back. Our challenge is to keep the first-love-fires burning and if they go out to fan the embers that are dying back into the fervent first-love-fire again!

— Mike Johnson