In speaking to the church of Ephesus in the book of Revelation, Jesus gave this charge to not let go of your First Love. 
The church of Ephesus had done some very impressive and noteworthy things.  Jesus commended them for all their labor in the work of God without their growing weary, their perseverance, their stand against evil, liars, and false apostles, and for their hatred for the deeds of the Nicolaitans, which He also hated.  But when all was said and done, the one thing Jesus had against them was that they had left their first love.

They were doing a lot of great stuff for God, laboring diligently for His cause – but they had forgotten and let slide their original, sweet, fiery love for Him which they had lived for in the beginning.

It isn’t that Jesus is unappreciable for the things we do for Him in obedience to His Word.  It does please Him that we diligently seek to do His will and advance His Kingdom.  But He never intended for our works and labors for Him to be the basis of our relationship with Him.

It was upon Love and through Love that God first drew us to Himself and upon which our relationship with Him was founded.  Everything else hangs on that establishment.  There should be only one reason why we do what we do, and that is that we do it for the sake of loving Him.  He alone is the reason for life and for living and He is all so worthy and deserving of our love.

The word “first” in Revelation 2.4 is the Greek word “protos” and it means foremost (in time, place, order, or importance).  We must never forsake or forget our foremost love – the love which is foremost in time, place, order, and importance; the love which is way over and above every other love.

Our first and foremost love is to be the love we hold for the Lord our God.  Our love for Him must always be the love that is of most importance and unequalled by any love that we hold.  We must keep our love for Him always foremost in our time, foremost in what we deem as important, foremost in position and order we place Him in our relationships, our schedule, our work, our family, and in what we depend or rely on for help and making our decisions.

In the increase of activities and demands in our lives, or just even settling into day-to-day routines, it is easy to let your first love slide to a lower position, or even leave altogether, and not even be aware of it happening. Revelation 2.5 states that we should “remember” or continually “call to mind, exercise  memory, and be mindful”  of any area where we have “fallen” or “dropped away, or become inefficient” in keeping Jesus as our foremost love.

This should be a daily evaluation that we take on ourselves.  Every day we should ask our heart “Is Jesus the foremost love in my thoughts today?  Am I giving Him foremost place in my time and schedule?  Is He what is most important to me today – does He have foremost position in my relationships, my work, and in what I look to for help and making the decisions before me?”

The commitment to daily evaluate our first love is in itself a major factor to succeeding in keeping Jesus as our first and foremost love.  The more you develop recognizing even the slightest area where you may have let your love slip, the less changes you will actually have to make.

“….repent and do the first works….”    Rev. 2.5   “Repent” in verse five is from a Greek word that means to “think differently, reconsider”  and it implies the idea to “perceive change”.   Chiefly, New Testament repentance is a change of mind or purpose and it involves both a turning from sin (or dropping away) and a turning to God. 

Once we’ve recognized where we are not keeping Jesus as our first love, all we must do is change our mind and purpose, turn from the way we have been doing things and turn to God, restoring Him to the position as our foremost love in all we think, say, and do.

After repentance, Rev. 2.5 says to “do the first works”.  The word “first” here is the same Greek word as in verse 4 – meaning  foremost (in time, place, order, importance).  “Works” in this verse simply means labor or effort.  So the implication is:  do the labor and effort that is foremost in importance, etc.  But the question is, which efforts or labors are foremost in importance? 

We were just told in Rev. 2.4 – holding to Jesus as our first love, keeping vital union with Him, is the most important labor or effort you and I can ever do.

The Lord once explained it this way to a man of God:   “Life in Jesus is gloriously easy.  It has one responsibility:  the responsibility of remaining in vital union.  If you stay in union with Me, I’ll take care of everything else.”

I believe that is absolutely the truth because the Word backs it up.  Jesus said in the fifteenth chapter of John that He is the Vine and we are the branches, and our place is to REMAIN in the VINE, staying in vital union with Him – “for without ME you can do NOTHING”.   (Jn. 15.5)

KEEP THE UNION

Deut. 10.20 says “you shall fear the Lord your God: you shall serve Him, and to Him you shall HOLD FAST.”

We were never intended to do things on our own.  Everything we are and everything we do is to be accomplished through God, in the strength and power that comes from our close union with Him.  In Gen. 2.24 we are told, “therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and CLEAVE to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”

This verse is speaking primarily about marriage in the natural realm yet this is precisely what we must do in our relationship with God.  We have to forsake the world, forsake the past, forsake what we have formerly depended on, and even forsake our own desire and way of doing things – so that we can CLEAVE wholly and completely to Jesus, and then “….the two shall become one flesh….”   - we will be ONE with Him and He with us.

I once heard it said that to fall in love with someone also means that you fall “out of love” with everything else -  In other words, the love you have for that person is a love that is above every other love and it is reserved only for them – it is exclusive and not to be duplicated toward anyone or anything else.  Well, that kind of love is the love I believe we are to have for Jesus. 

“We love Him because He first loved us.”    I Jn 4.19

There must be a reason why we love Him with this fervent, exclusive Love – and yes, it is this:   we love Him because He first loved us.  We are His first love – therefore He should always be our  first love.

Loving God is different than loving anyone else.  The love we have for others is always a love that is shared over two individuals – them and God.  You cannot love others with Agape (the God-kind of love) without loving God at the same time.   But the love we have for God is a love that is not shared with anyone else.  He is the only One that we can love with our whole being, because He alone is our Creator.  When you enter in to loving Him that completely and that fervently from the very depths of  your being, that is when you cross over into Worship.

Actually, true worship is the highest expression of Love.  A true lifestyle of worship is loving God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength – and yes, after you have loved God that completely, the outflow of that love is “loving  your neighbor as yourself”.  You cannot love God and hate your brother, (I Jn. 4.20-21)    But in order to truly love one another fervently from a pure heart, we have to first come to love God with every cell of our being.  (I Timothy 1.5/ I Peter 4.8)

“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and KNOWS God.” 

I John 4.7

It is through intimate knowledge, intimately knowing, intimate intercourse with the Spirit of God, with Love Himself, that we are able to love.   As we fervently love Him with our whole being, and do so every day of our life, our heart becomes so intermingled with His that we really become one with Him.   Zero distance, and no differentiation between us.

“And we have known and believed the love that God has for us.  God is Love,  and he who abides in Love abides in God, and God in Him.”    I Jn. 4.16

It is an awesome thing to be that close to God, where He is abiding in  you and you in Him.  To literally be “God-intoxicated”, so full of His love that everything else pales to it.   And contrary to how it may sound, in being caught up in loving God one will actually be more effective and  get more done, more proficiently in both the physical and spiritual realms.

When He is your foremost love, you are positioned in such a place of intimacy with Him that all wisdom, all knowledge, all ability, all power is flowing and coursing through you just like it is in Him and it is being released upon everything you touch.   That is why Psalm 1 says that the man whose delight is so in the law of the Lord, that he has it on his mind day and night – that EVERYTHING HE DOES PROSPERS.   It is the Law of Love he is thinking about.  All day and all night he is thinking on God, loving Him with all his being, dreaming how he can bless the Heart of God more deeply.  That is making God your first love.

He loves you far more than you will every know.  And  just like a young man who is desperately in love with his bride, our Lord is desperately in love with us and so desires to experience  complete and total intimacy in His love for us and our love for Him,  every moment of every day.

He is hungry for your heart –  Not in a selfish sense.  But He wants you to give Him your all….

Because that is the only way He can give you His all...

He desires to be your   FIRST LOVE.

Copyright  ©  November 2006

Sharah LaGail Wyatt   / First Love Ministries International

P O Box 163974  Ft Worth, TX 76161  /  www.ps27fr.org

All Rights Reserved.