“I know your deeds, your hard work and your perseverance … Yet I have this against you. You have forsaken your first love”. Revelation 2:2-4
We may wonder how God could hold anything against such a hard working and faithful church. But God was displeased because they had lost their first love.
What is “first love”? It refers to the time we first came to an understanding of what God has done for us, “We love because He first loved us” (1 John 4:19). When we realise how much God loves us and the lengths He has gone to save us, we respond and love Him in return.
But sometimes, after we have been a Christian a while, our focus slowly drift away from what God has done and we begin to focus on what we are doing for God. We expect God to take notice of how much of the Bible we read, how long we pray and all the other good things we do for Him. We expect God to be pleased with all the effort we are putting in on His behalf. But we lose our first love with this attitude.
How do we return to our first love? Verse 5 tells us to “repent and do the things you did at first”. That is return to our original focus. God’s grace is not only available to save us but also available so we can live the Christian life. We need to focus, not on what we do, but on what God does.
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