2 I know your deeds, your hard work and your perseverance. I know that you cannot tolerate wicked people, that you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them false. 3 You have persevered and have endured hardships for my name, and have not grown weary.
4 Yet I hold this against you: you have forsaken the love you had at first. Rev 2:2-4

Isn’t it funny how as human beings, as long as we are doing something, we think we are fulfilling some sort of requirements. As a husband, as long as I’m working hard and putting food on the table, I have a sense that my wife and children should be happy and satisfied with that. At church, we tend to try and tick all the right boxes and do all the right things. The church in Ephesus was a bit like that. It’s like these guys had an impeccable record in terms of what they were doing.

And then God dropped the bombshell, that actually they weren’t doing so well and needed to repent. Their problem was that they had forgotten their first love. We don’t realise it but when we are busy doing, doing, doing, our love tends to go cold and then after a while we start to have a skewed view of love where we think, because I’m doing so much, I must be loving. God calls us to go back to when we first fell in love with him, when we loved way before we did anything, and then we did because of how much we loved. There’s a difference.

I remember when I first discovered the love of God – I longed to be with Him and listen to His Words and to soak them up in my heart. I prayed into the dead of the night because God’s presence was Heaven to me. I saw the world through the eyes of the love of the Father and dealt with people that way. I know I’ve lost some of that and now I’m so busy doing a whole heap of stuff more than I am simply enjoying His love.

Cay you relate to this? God’s message to the Church in Ephesus was this: “Consider how far you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first.” You and I need to take heed, We may think because we are doing so many things that we are making God happy and not realise that when all is said and done, we may be doing all the wrong things. What we need to do today is to start by enjoying the love of God and immersing ourselves in it. Relationship with Him is more important than all the things we could ever do for Him.

So pray right now and ask Him to help you to come back to your first love!

Comments

comments