Remember Your First Love

 

Scripture: Revelation 2.2-5 (ESV)

 ‘I know your works, your toil and your patient endurance, and how you cannot bear with those who are evil but have tested those who call themselves apostles and are not and found them to be false. ³ I know you are enduring patiently and bearing up for my name’s sake, and you have not grown weary. ⁴ But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. ⁵ Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent and do the works you did at first.

Devotion:

            These words are spoken by the resurrected and glorified Jesus. He is speaking here to seven churches through the apostle John each church getting their own letter. This passage is from the letter to the Ephesians.

            Jesus has many reasons to praise this church. Apparently, they were solidly grounded in the gospel. They knew the gospel well enough to test travelling teachers who came to them and found them to be either true teachers or false teachers. They recognized evil and shunned it. They were a patient church waiting for the final judgement. And they were able to do all this without growing weary or tired but were serving God as best they could.

            However, Jesus has one thing against them, and it is a deadly flaw. They have abandoned the love they had at first. It is not clear from the text whether Jesus means they have lost their love for him, each other, or people in general. Perhaps all three are in view here. This is a serious problem that must be dealt with quickly. The church is told to remember from where they had fallen in regard to love and repent and do the works of love that they did when they first encountered Jesus.

            How does today’s church stack up against the church at Ephesus? The 21^st century church in America has much in common with that ancient church. We are fighting in a war for the soul of our country and the freedom of the church. We have examined much of what contemporary culture is doing and found it to be false. We have removed false teachers from among us. We have not grown weary in keeping sound doctrine.

            However, something is missing in the life and vitality of the church today. We do not have the love we had when we were younger in the faith. We fail to do the deeds of self-sacrifice and loving kindness that we did before. We have become so fixated on trying to stop the cultural decay we see around us that we forget the reason for our fight. We forget the lover of our souls and we suffer for it. We must repent, change our hearts toward Jesus, our fellow believers, and the world at large if we are to be victorious in the battle that rages around us. We will need God’s help to recover our first love, Let us pray for that right now:

Prayer

            Holy Lord, we come before you as a church that is trying to live the Christian life without your love dwelling within us. Restore to us we pray the joy of our salvation. We remember our willingness to go above and beyond the necessary duties of life in Christ because we could knew and could feel your love pulsing within us. We were so excited by the new love we had found in Christ that we served Christ, our church, and our neighbors in the world with a true and contagious joy. Fill us again with that love. Help us to serve you now as we did at first. Amen.