Have You Left Your First Love?

There is nothing quite like the love of a newly married couple. In those early days, everything else quietly fades into the background. They think of each other constantly, count the hours until they are together again, and are perfectly content simply to be in the same room. No task feels like a burden when it is done for the beloved. Their whole world has reorganized itself around one person.

That is a picture of what Jesus calls our first love — and it is the very thing He gently, but seriously, names in the church at Ephesus.

Nevertheless I have this against you, that you have left your first love.

Revelation 2:4 (NKJV)

The Ephesians were neither lazy nor heretical. They worked hard, they endured, they tested false teachers and held to sound doctrine. By every outward measure they were a good church. And yet the Lord says the one thing that matters most had slipped: you have left the love you had at first. It is possible to be busy for Jesus, correct about Jesus, and still have a cooled heart toward Jesus.

Business as usual

Here is a quiet question worth sitting with. If Jesus were simply taken out of your life today — if His presence quietly withdrew — would your days actually change? Or would you go on much as before: eating and drinking, working and planning, business as usual?

And as it was in the days of Noah, so it will be also in the days of the Son of Man: They ate, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all.

Luke 17:26-27 (NKJV)

In the days of Noah, life looked completely normal right up to the end — eating, drinking, buying, selling, marrying — no one noticing that everything was about to change. It is possible to keep the whole routine of the Christian life running while the Presence that gave it meaning has quietly slipped to the edges. First love notices. First love would feel the absence at once.

Wanting to always be with Him

A bride does not count it a chore to be near her husband; it is her joy. First love simply wants to be together — always. It is focused. Its attention keeps returning to the one it loves. That is what the Lord is inviting us back to: not more activity, but more of Him — a heart that wants to always be with Jesus, and keeps Him at the center of its attention.

When love looks like something else

To those on the outside, this kind of focused devotion can look strange — even unloving. It has always been so. When Jesus was twelve, His parents traveled a day’s journey before realizing He was not with them; they finally found Him in the temple, and He answered:

Why did you seek Me? Did you not know that I must be about My Father’s business?

Luke 2:49 (NKJV)

Even to Mary and Joseph, His devotion to the Father looked, for a moment, like neglect. And Jesus was honest that following Him would order our loves in a way the world would not understand:

If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple.

Luke 14:26 (NKJV)

He is not commanding hatred of family. He is saying His place is first — so far above every other love that, by comparison, even our dearest earthly ties come second. To an onlooker, that can feel like hate. In truth it is love rightly ordered, with Christ on the throne where He belongs.

A love that is hidden

And yet true first love is not something we parade. A husband and wife do not announce the intimacy of their marriage to the world; the deepest things are kept private, sacred, between the two of them. So it is with Christ. Our closest communion with Him is an inward, hidden thing:

Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth. For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.

Colossians 3:2-3 (NKJV)

We are not called to perform our devotion for an audience, but to set our minds on Him and hide our lives in Him.

How do we come back?

If we recognize our own heart in the church at Ephesus, the Lord does not leave us without a way home. His counsel is tender and clear:

Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent and do the first works.

Revelation 2:5 (NKJV)

Three steps: remember the height you once knew, repent of the drifting, and do the first works — return to the simple things you did when your love was new. And seek Him. First love is recovered the way it was first found: by turning back to Jesus with the whole heart.

How do we keep it?

And how do we keep from drifting again? Jesus gave the answer the night before the cross:

Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me. I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing.

John 15:4-5 (NKJV)

As the Father loved Me, I also have loved you; abide in My love. If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love.

John 15:9-10 (NKJV)

First love is not merely a feeling to recapture once; it is a life to abide in. We remain by staying close — abiding in Him and keeping His commandments, not as cold duty, but as the natural nearness of love.

Sit with this today

• If Jesus quietly withdrew from your life, how long would it take you to notice?
• What “first works” — the simple, glad things you did when your love was new — have fallen away?
• Where is He asking you, today, to remember, to repent, and to return?

He has not stopped loving you. He is simply calling you back to Himself — to the love you had at first.