First Love Demonstrated
Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken your first love. Remember the height from which you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first. If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lamp-stand from its place. Revelation 2:4,5
The church in Ephesus had a lot going for it. They were hard working, spiritually discerning and upheld truth. This would make them the envy of countless churches today.
Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken your first love. A Christian without love is just a shell. Jesus specifically challenges them about first love, the more passionate, over the top, touchy-feely, affectionate love a couple feels and shows each other in the early part of a developing relationship.
Jesus never gave up His first love for each of us and doesn’t want any of us to give up our first love for Him.
Remember the height from which you have fallen! The height was our first love. The church might have justified its gradual change as ‘maturity’ but Jesus saw it as a fall from a great height. ‘First love’ was the height. Anything less than that was down.
Repent and do the things you did at first. Repentance literally means a change of mind. Because the Bible closely links our thinking to our behaviour, repentance infers a change in how we act. Think differently and you will act differently.
And how are we to act? In a way that demonstrates our first love for Jesus. This is what doing the things you did at first looks like.
If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lamp-stand from its place. Jesus’ discipline was not irrevocable. There was a choice. The church was being given the opportunity to choose to go a different way.
Refusal would mean Jesus removing their lamp-stand from its place. We know from Revelation 1:20 that the lamp-stand was the church’s existence and resulting witness in its city. So Jesus was warning the church that despite their hard work, discernment and holding on to truth, failure to have first love as the foundation would result in the church’s witness disappearing because the church was gone.
These are extraordinarily challenging words (and this is just the first of the seven churches in Revelation!).
Not all churches are the same but this first church sounds too much like most Western evangelical churches – trying to hang on to truth in a pluralistic environment and trying to keep the congregation focused in a world vying for their time and attention.
Jesus says so clearly we need to return to first love. The Holy Spirit is more than willing to restore first love to anyone who continues to ask with a sincere heart. So what are you waiting for?
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