First Love

Christian Working Woman Transcript

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Do you know what first love is? It's that exciting, special aura which surrounds you when you're first in love.

Think about a couple you know who are engaged or newly married. That first love causes certain patterns of behavior, right? With first love you think about the other person an awful lot. You try to please them in every way you can. You delight in their company. You want to spend all your time with them. First love is consuming.

But first love will fade rather quickly if it is not nurtured and carefully protected. The breakup of marriages and relationships we see all around us is testimony to the fact that something has happened to that first love. Those people at one point were in first love–with all the excitement and promises it held for them. But it didn't last. Far too often even relationships that don't split are humdrum and lifeless because that first love is abandoned.

That's what had happened to these dear people in the church at Ephesus. They were doing the right things, but they had forsaken their first love. It didn't just die on them. They forsook it.

In Revelations 2, the Apostle John gave this church the remedy for this problem. He said, Remember the heights from which you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first.

Remember, repent, and do what you used to do. That was the prescription for regaining that first love, for keeping it alive. It's the same for us today. If we don't work at remembering and repenting and doing the things that keep first love fresh, we'll forsake our first love for Christ.

Remembering is not something that just automatically happens. We have to work at it. The older I get, the more I have to work at remembering, and the more I see what happens when I forget! It's so easy to forget! I think this is one of the biggest problems we Christians face: We don't make a conscious effort to remember. It was the curse of the children of Israel throughout Old Testament history. They kept forsaking God and getting into sin and idolatry and all kinds of trouble because they forgot what God had done for them in the past. God gives us many ways to help us remember, so that we won't leave our first love.