Our First Love

Revelation 2:4

“Thou hast left thy first love.”

We have left our first love? Yes, we have wandered far from it as a continent, a country, a home, an individual. We have forsaken it—“it” that should be our consuming passion—for the fleeting pleasures of this world.

So what is “it”?

I have read Revelations 2:4 many times, but I had never really stopped to think about it. The 1^st of the Ten Commandments is “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” (Ex.20:3). God the Father was to be the Israelites’ only God. Nothing else was to take His place in their emotions or actions. When Christ came to earth, He furthered this command:

  “Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment.” (Matt. 22.37-38)

The first commandment was to love God first above all else. Our first love. The love that was to consume our heart, take over our mind, and fill our heart. “It” is our first love. Our countries and homes have now replaced God with their other “loves”: money, friends, work, material gain, success, and just life in general.

Why should it be our first love? We should love God because “he first loved us.” His love was so great that He could send His most precious “possession”—His Son—to earth to be enslaved among His own people, to carry the awful load of sin, to endure separation from His Father, and to come in human form from a perfect Heaven to a darkening world. That is love.

We should love Him because He commanded it, and if we are true children of His we will want to love Him. That will become one of our desires and passions. When Christ’s love dwells in us we cannot help loving Him in return because His love is flawless. His perfection makes our imperfect love, perfect. He commands us to love Him, yet He provides a way for doing so, because we as sinners could not do it on our own.

To love God and others is to fulfill God’s law. “Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law. Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.” (Rom. 13: 8, 10) Fulfilling God’s law (loving God and fellow man) is something we should be doing until Jesus returns. Our love is to increase and abound as we live in this world, not die out as other more “important” things replace it. “And the Lord make you to increase and abound in love one toward another, and toward all men, even as we do toward you.” (1 Thess. 3:12) An increasing love is not going to decrease when other “treasures” of this world try to take priority.

It will be a struggle to continually “abound in love”, because in this culture God has been forgotten and replaced by all the busyness of life. But God has commanded us to increase in our first love and to make continual progress forward. “…and the love all of you have for one another is increasing.” (2 Thess.1:3) Because we are “confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.” (Phil.1:6) We have to be willing to change though. We can’t stay the same. Just because we have increased a little, doesn’t mean we’re finished. Increasing in love is a continual progress, and one that won’t be completed until we have reached heaven. (Phil.1:9-11)

So let us return to our first love. The love that bore our sins and took them as far as the east is from the west. The love that will hold us up when we fall. That love that always brings us back to the Shepherd’s arms. The love that says “I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee” (Heb.13:6) and “Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it.” (1 Thess.5:24) The love that will bring us to our knees to cry “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty. Our first love.

By His grace…we have been saved

Rescued from the grave

And through his blood we have new life

May the passion of our first love

Bring us to our knees

We can know the heart of God

If we believe.

Oh, come, let us return to the Lord

Let our hearts yearn for the Lord

Only His love will save us

For though our lives are broken

He will mend and restore our hope again

Let us return to the Lord.