By Pastor Dr. Aggrey Soyekwo
Revelation 2:3-5 "You have persevered and have endured hardships for my name, and have not grown weary. Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken the love you had at first. Consider how far you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first. If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place."
The church at Ephesus had endured alot for the Lord and not grown weary. They didn’t give up the faith. While persevering in hardships, working hard, resisting false apostles, they lost their first love for God. For forsaking their first love for God, they had fallen, although within the faith. They no longer did what they did at first out of love for the Lord. They were now in a form of religious routine out of duty, but without intimate relationship with God.
How true this is for many a professing believer in God! First love is marked by genuine, pure trust, commitment and unreserved loyalty to God. Lose of it makes service and commitment to God a routine burden out of duty with no joy of salvation. Your body is present, does what you do, but the heart isn’t in it any more. Soon people strive, fight, compete, compromise and lose track.
Jesus took this fall seriously and challenged them to consider how far they had fallen, to repent and do what they did at first. God appreciates what we do for Him, but wants it done out of first love. How is your devotion to God now as compared to the past? Would He challenge you as He did the Ephesus church? Repent and get back to it. This was the very reason God rebuked Israel.
Isaiah 29:13 "The Lord says: “These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship of me is based on merely human rules they have been taught."
Shalom children of God.