Our First Love

Text:  Revelation 2:1-7

¹ ‍Unto the angel of the church of Ephesus write; These things saith he that holdeth the seven stars in his right hand, who walketh in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks;‍ ² ‍I know thy works, and thy labour, and thy patience, and how thou canst not bear them which are evil: and thou hast tried them which say they are apostles, and are not, and hast found them liars:‍ ³ ‍And hast borne, and hast patience, and for my name’s sake hast laboured, and hast not fainted.‍ ⁴ ‍Nevertheless I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love.‍ ⁵ ‍Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent.‍ ⁶ ‍But this thou hast, that thou hatest the deeds of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.‍ ⁷ ‍He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God.‍ ^[1]

The Lord told the Ephesian church the good stuff first and  complemented them on the things He knew about them:

1:  Their works:  Some people cannot even get as far as the Ephesian saint:  They cannot testify of their works unto the Lord because they have not done any.  Some people are Christians by profession, but not by practice.  Happy is that man about whom the Lord can say, ‘I know thy works!”

2.  Their labor:   Having labour is going even further in being active in toil and travail for souls.  We all must go beyond the works stage and enter into the labor stage.  We don’t want the Lord to have to say to us, “I know thy loitering and laziness.”  That is not the mark of diligence that brings results!

3. Their patience:    Sometimes we labor very well, but when its only for a short while, and we cease to work and begin to faint, we will not see the kind of results that we all long for.  This speaks of laboring in the will of God for years in a consistent manner.

4. Their intolerance of evil:  The Ephesian church had a thorough hatred of evil doctrine, evil practice, and a corresponding intense love for pure truth and pure practice.  God honored this then, and He still honors this today.  I applaud Judge Roy Moore for standing by his convictions, even though they ruled for his removal, God will rule for his honor.  Righteousness will always win in the end.  The husks, the bran, and the chaff, are not things that we can feed upon. And when we listen to those who preach another gospel, a holy anger burns within us, for we love the truth as it is in Jesus; and nothing but that will satisfy us. “And hast borne, and hast patience, and for my name’s sake hast laboured, and hast not fainted.” They had borne persecutions, difficulties, hardships, embarrassments, and discouragements, yet had they never flagged, but always continued faithful. Who among us here present could lay claim to so much praise as this?

Then the Lord lovingly inserted the thing that he somewhat had against them:  they had left their first love!

May I say that it is possible to do all the right things, and still not have our personal devotion to Jesus Christ up to par?

Happy Christians are those who are not idle in their works for Him.  God was not taking away from these 4 good attributes of the Ephesian Church, otherwise He would not have praised them in these areas.  God’s desire for us is that we be well-rounded in our relationship.  The more we give ourselves to personal prayer, the higher the chances are that this will happen.

Paul Yonggi Cho, the pastor of one of the largest Pentecostal churches in the world, a small group church, mind you, said this:  “The most important thing in our lives is prayer.”

How often have we felt like fainting in the midst of the Master’s work?  So often we feel the longing to get from the work to the reward.

II Thess. 3:13 says, ¹³ ‍But ye, brethren, be‍^c‍ not weary in well doing.^[2]

Galatians 6:8-9 reads: ⁸ ‍For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting.‍ ⁹ ‍And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.‍^[3]

There is only one way we can uphold this:  a deep walk with Jesus Christ, and keeping Jesus Christ our First Love!  He must be chief, he must reign supreme in our lives!!!!!!!

If you are a child of God, the memories of what it was to have Jesus first in your life will not be hard to find because they will be the fondest memories in your life.  Think about the love we had for Him the first time He forgave us of our sins!  We can each remember that special time in our lives when we did not have all knowledge, but we certainly had a hot fire of love for Jesus Christ burning within us!

We can all easily return to that bright spot in our history.  The mind goes back easily because those were the best of times for all of us.  God wants to restore that in many of us!  Why do some get the idea that to grow up in God that you have to lose that original fire?  That is a deception from the enemy.

Think back to the time when you first realized that the cross was a personal thing, that Jesus Christ died for you, that the blood was for you, that the tomb was for you, and that the resurrection was for you.  That alone ought to be enough to rekindle the fire!

*How is it that somebody becomes cold in their walk?

It happens different ways for different people:  each must take personal assessment of their personal lives and commitment.

For some, it is over-commitment in the area of personal success that keeps them from selling out totally to the Lord.  An example of this might be somebody who owns a business, it does well after some years of struggle, and then the buy another, and another, and another.  Soon, that person is no longer struggling financially, but now they are very wealthy as a result of their many businesses.  The problem is this person tends to lose their sense of understanding of their need for the Lord, and they just become so caught up in their success that they can easily lose their sense of need for the Lord anymore, so they just drift from God.

The lust for excess riches is often one of the worst temptations that a child of God faces because it is the sin that they dread the least.

Consider the ancient traveler who takes a stick with him on his journey, the stick should be a help to him through the rugged terrain.  Suppose if he is covetous and he says, “I will have a hundred of these sticks,” they will not be a help to him, but now he just has a load to carry!  This stops his progress instead of assisting it.

How many Christians lived near to God when they had next to nothing, and they would have been happy to give it all up if God asked for it, but when God increases their substance, they became  cold in their soul?

Too much of the world is a bad thing for any man!

Sometimes a man ought to stop at an extra business opportunity and say this:  “Here is an opportunity of making more money, but it is clearly going to have a negative effect on my prayer time, and my time with my family, therefore, I will not engage in this opportunity, I am going to turn it down, because  I have enough and I will let it go.  I would rather do business with Heaven than with earth!

Some people also go astray when they spent too much of their time with people who are not living for the Lord.  We are not talking about soul winning here, but we are talking about those whom we have chosen to be our closest friends.  Was it not true that when we were new in the Lord that our closest friends were those in the faith?

The person who has fallen away once surrounded themselves with those who feared the Lord, but now they dwell in the tents of a false freedom that only supplies misery and disappointment.

Proverbs 6:²⁷ ‍Can a man take fire in his bosom, and his clothes not be burned?‍ ²⁸ ‍Can one go upon hot coals, and his feet not be burned?‍ ²⁹ ‍So he that goeth in to his neighbor’s wife; whosoever toucheth her shall not be innocent.^[4]

We should all seek to have godly friends so that we can maintain our first love!

**To anyone  who has lost their first love, the only thing you can do is to seek to get your first love restored.

Though you may still be a child of God, without Jesus being first in your life, there will be sure trouble at hand.

“Whom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth,” and he is sure to chasten us when we sin. It is calm with you to night, is it? Oh! but dread that calm, there is a tempest lowering.

Sin is the open gate to tempest:  just read the history of David.  Even though all of us face storms since we are all in a fallen world, the more we allow ourselves to sin, the more we are welcoming raging tempests to come into our lives.

All David’s life, in all his troubles, even in the rocks of the wild goats, and in the caves of Engedi, he was the happiest of men till he lost his first love; and from the day when his lustful eye was fixed upon Bathsheba, even to the last, he went with broken bones sorrowing to his grave. It was one long string of afflictions:

You may say, well, I will not sin as David did.  Hold on right there:  when we are away from God, we cannot tell just what we might do.  Stay on fire all the time, that that has a built in protection from engaging in that which we would later regret!  If you lost your first love, what should hinder you that you would lose your first purity?

Love and purity go together.  The more we truly love, the more pure we become.  When we love little, we find our purity decrease, until it becomes marred and polluted.

The sooner we get back to our first love, the sooner we will begin experiencing the harvest, but as long as people keep playing games with God, the church will remain stagnant.  Is that what you want?  It is time to get real with God and sell out like we have never before!

That means giving ourselves to prayer.  Saints who don’t pray are carnal and bad examples of what it means to be apostolic.  The early church were given to prayer.  Some people are always looking for the latest gimmick, but churches don’t have revival because they used the latest gimmick, but revival still comes through a commitment to prayer!   That is where the anointing still flows from!!

Altar call:  it is time for some of us here tonight to get our first love back.  Some of us have lost it, and I am throwing this out to all because some of us have slipped in our love and don’t even realize it, so I am throwing this out for all to take to heart.  You never go wrong by often visiting the cross.  That is the first step to take tonight, and that is where we will find renewed power in the blood of Calvary.