First Love

I am trying to figure something out.
Maybe you can help me.

I started reading the book of Revelation again
and as always, I got stuck on the letter
to the church in Ephesus.

God commends them for rejecting evil,
for testing self-proclaimed apostles and finding some false ones,
for persevering and having patience,
for laboring for His name's sake and not becoming weary,
and for hating the deeds of the Nicolatians,
which were full of idolatry and immorality.

He goes on to say that He has something against them.
They have lost their first love
and He exhorts them to return to their first love
and do the things they did at first.

This always bothers me.

So, today, I looked back at Paul's letters
to the Ephesians. He wrote it around 60-61 AD
and John wrote Revelations around 70-95 AD,
a good 20-25 years later.

The first three chapters of Ephesians
is written about the believer's position in Christ.
The last three chapters are written about
the practices of a believer.
It appears that Jesus commended the Ephesians
for doing some of the very things that Paul had taught them.
But that doesn't do away with that awful rebuke.

And so, my question is this:
What did their first love look like
and how did it express itself?
He said to return to
it and do what they first did.

Having a first love
suggests the action of doing something.
What is it?

I don't know.

But I thought of another verse that
John had written sometime around 90 AD.
It uses the words 'first love' too.
"We love Him because He first loved us."
It goes on to say that if we love God
we must love our brother also.

I wonder if returning to our first love
has anything to do with returning
to the One who first loved us?

And I wonder,
if the church of Ephesus
in all of their legitimate labor and patience
of not bearing with those
who were evil and
testing for falseness,
if somehow, they lost their love for God
and the awareness of His love for them
in the process of being discerning about others.

It can easily happen.

We can be doing the right thing;
getting rid of the evil in our midst,
standing guard and working hard
without growing weary-
and lose our first love without even
realizing it.

Frightening,
isn't it?

John also said in his little book of letters
that '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.'

Maybe,
the 'doing'
that God refers to,
is 'abiding.'

Sometimes,
we get used to how things are done
when we abide in Him,
and we can stop abiding in Him
and keep on doing things that look spiritual
because we are maintaining the experience
of having aboded,
rather than really abiding in the person of Jesus Christ.

We hold on to the experience of our first love
instead of holding on to Him who first loved us.

I'm not sure.
But I am sure we don't want Him to remove His light from our midst.

It's time to return to our first love.

And who is our first love?
Jesus, who loved us first.

I think if we abide in the love
of Him who first loved us
we will have returned to our first love.