Worship Wednesday

He Is… OUR FIRST LOVE

“Yet I hold this against you, you have forsaken the love you had at first.” Revelation 2:4

Lord, what do you want to teach us today? We pause and ask You to teach us more about who You are. Amen.

I began preparing today’s post last week and had most of my thoughts already prepped, ready to go! (So proud of my planning ahead, of course.) But it was by about Thursday that God began to speak LOUD AND CLEAR. I have been in multiple conversations with friends recently about how we firmly believed that God is shifting things in our lives intentionally to draw us in to time with Him. We all had the same convictions from the Holy Spirit - God is shaking our norm on purpose. But how will we respond? On Saturday, a moment of brutally honest questions began to flood into my heart as I sat alone listening to “In The Balance” by Emmy Rose. 

Here they were…

What’s left when all this church stuff is stripped away?
Is my faith stripped away?

Have I idolized church, corporate worship, corporate faith?

Have I replace relationship with Jesus with these things?

Am I truly about what Jesus teaches or am I just as lost as the Pharisees and Sadducees, caught up in my own religious rituals?

Will I respond to this invitation to find my first love again? Or will I continue doing my routine that God is obviously trying to disrupt?

What IS He trying to disrupt in my religious routines?

And what is He trying to create ANEW?

The words “my first love” wouldn’t leave my head. It was like I was physically weighed down by this conviction that I couldn’t actually stand up from the couch. 

If you’re not familiar with that phrasing, it’s used in Revelation 2:4 when Jesus is confronting the church of Ephesus. They were one of the first groups of people to come to learn and love the Gospel of grace through Jesus Christ. They fell hard, head over heels for the Lord. They lived in an evil city, filled with a money-driven lifestyle of worship, which proved to be quite empty and unsatisfying. So when they found faith in Jesus, they clung tightly to it… until they didn’t. Over time they began to slip back into their old lifestyle. In Ephesians 4:17-31, Paul writes pleading with them to “live as children of light” and resist the cultural norms surrounding them. He tells them “Remember, He has identified you as His own…” Like the Israelites in the Old Testament, they veered away from God’s best over and over again. I recently read the books of Genesis and Exodus. And I don’t know about you, but when I read these stories I think to myself: “ARE. YOU. SERIOUS? Come on! He literally parted the Red Sea and you walked across it. He placed food on your doorstep every morning.” How could they possibly place their trust in anything other than God? But isn’t that what we do? We forget. When we place our trust in other things, we are forgetting OUR FIRST LOVE. 

Last Wednesday we talked about how when we remember what God has done in our lives, we are then able to recognize that He Is GOOD. Today as we remember that He Is OUR FIRST LOVE, I sit here pondering about what real love looks like in a relationship. I think about the love I have for my husband. When I chose to marry Caleb, my love for him meant that I would put him first, forsaking all others. It meant that I would serve him and give him ALL of me. I can’t give part of myself to him and then part of myself to someone else. This is the same in our relationship with Jesus, and it is how we demonstrate to Him that He Is OUR FIRST LOVE. Ephesians 5:21-33 describes the relationship between a husband and wife as an example of Christ’s (the bridegroom) love for us (the bride). This is yet another clear indicator that Jesus asks us to make Him OUR FIRST LOVE. Matt 22:37 says “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and soul.”

Think… is there a specific moment or memory you can recall from when you first fell in love the Lord? Hold that moment captive in your mind right now. Remember what it felt like to be ready to dive in? THAT is the invitation we receive from the Lord today. Here’s the thing though: unless we continue to remind ourselves of who our first love is, we can drift off like a loose buoy in Prince William Sound. 

Are there parts of your life you haven’t given over to your first love? Are they perhaps parts you once gave to Him when you first fell in love? Or maybe they’re parts you’ve never given over to Him that He’s still asking you to trust Him with? I am with you today asking myself these very questions. Will we be honest in our response? Will we make the decision to respond to God’s invitation to love Him with our full heart, our full being? Will we return to OUR FIRST LOVE?

I hope you enjoy this beautiful song by Emmy Rose called “In the Balance”. It has encouraged me greatly this week.

- Krista Harms