Have You Lost Your First Love? – by Des Ford

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Sep 17, 2015 2364

Revelation 2:4 says, “I have this against you, you have abandoned the love you had at first.” Could anything worse be said than that? There should never be a time in a Christian’s life when he can’t say, “I love Christ more today than I have at any previous time in my experience. The church at Ephesus that received the first letter was not licentious, it was not heterodox, that is, it was not heretical, it was not idle and it was not cowardly. It had lots of virtues.

But virtues apart from love are no virtues at all. It has all the machinery going but I’d warn you that a fair apple can have a worm at the very core. When love dies, orthodoxy dies, and doctrine ultimately just becomes a corpse. Truth will sour into bigotry and this attitude crucifies the Christ afresh. For a bride to fail in love is to fail in everything.

Christ is he who lifted us from the pit to his bosom, from the dunghill to the right hand of the throne. My friends, he wants to remind us of the time when we lived for him, and with him and in him. He asks us to remember, to repent, to return.

Have you lost your first love? I would tell you today that to love
Jesus is another name for paradise. He loves us from the gutter-most to the uttermost.

See him there, stripped, stark naked on that cross because we have no thread of righteousness; see him thirsty because we thirsted after things of the world; see him with a crown of thorns because our mind has entertained thoughts of pride and vanity, impurity and hatred and fear. See the blood flow, my friends, because without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sin.

Do you love him? Look at how he loved you!

You know, in Luke 14 Jesus said a hard thing, he said, “Unless a man loves me more than father, mother, son or daughter, or houses and lands, or his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” What a hard saying!

You remember the next chapter tells about his love for us. We can never love Jesus until convinced that he loved us. That is why he told those stories in Luke 15, and the Pharisee said, “This man receiveth sinners and eats with them,” Jesus said, “Guilty, guilty, guilty!”

Jesus described himself as the good shepherd who goes out into the darkness, through the storm, across the vale, up the mountain, through the woods looking for the one lost sheep; the woman who sweeps until she finds the last coin; the wonderful father who every day walked to the top of the hill looking for his prodigal son, his heart aching toward him, who when he found him would not let him get his confession out but threw his own robe over the naked shoulders, called for shoes for his feet, put a ring on his finger, killed the fatted calf and called upon all to rejoice: “Rejoice with me for I have found my son which was lost.”

My friends, there you see the heart of God. Have you lost your first love? Look at his love for you, and see its depth, its height, its length, its breadth.

It goes down into hell and it will raise you to heaven. It encompasses east and west and its length is eternity. “I have loved thee with an everlasting love, therefore, with loving kindness have I drawn thee.”

–­ Des Ford. Rom 8:27–32. Adapted from “The Visions of Patmos ­– Part 4.”