Loving God with a First Love Kind of Love

 Revelation 2:4- "But I have this against you, that you have left your first love."

Have you ever made a priority list? Having priorities is important for me. I use to-do lists because I am prone to distraction. As important as priorities are, though, I want to say something that may sound contradictory to what is normally taught. Avoid prioritizing God! You read it right. 

Why do I say that? Revelation 2 tells the story of a church that worked hard for the faith. They persevered during persecution. They even cleaned house when they discovered false teachers in their midst. But somehow they had lost their way. Detrimentally, they abandoned their first love. 

We teach in the church that losing our first love means we have put other things above God. Maybe we prioritized some sin in our life or we put all of our energy into our careers. While prioritizing other things over God may have implicated Ephesus (Revelation 2:5), the wider context of scripture speaks to a deeper meaning of first love that could explain God's reaction to this church. 

To understand the implications of first love you have to understand first who God is. God declared, "I am the Lord, and there is no other; apart from me there is no God" (Isaiah 45:5). God does not share space with other things we place beside Him. He is wholly other. He resides in a different category. He is incomparable. He is incompatible with anything that rivals His place in our lives. To place Him even at the top of a list of priorities minimizes His divine nature through our earthly concerns.   

Here are the implications of our exclusive, first love for God. As wrong as it sounds, you need to take God off your priority list. God is not your first love of many. He represents your only love. Most of us either live according to an implicit or explicit rule that God should be first in our lives. To live with that "should" hanging over our heads means that our love for God is likely motivated by our obligation to love God. Living from a place of obligation to love God means that you are likely seeking to love God from a law-based motivation as opposed from a place of grace. Loving God exclusively is only possible when we live from a place of God loving us and not the other way around. 

First love means you live from a place of being loved by God. The idea of a first love may sound a bit law-based for someone who lives influenced by grace. I guess it is if we strive to make God our first love out of obligation or obedience. God as our first love represents a fruit of grace and not a product of our good efforts. Let me explain. 

When Jesus was asked one time about the greatest commandment in the law (Matthew 22:34-40), He explained that love represents the core essence of the two greatest commandments. And not just any love, but the only love that originates from God's kind of love: agape love. Agape love is love that Helps Word Studies says "is always defined by God-a discriminating affection which involves choice and selection." To love God exclusively is only possible by God's very nature of love (1 John 4:16) indwelling that person. Loving God with a first love kind of love represents the fruit of God's selective, gracious love for you. 

So how do we live there? We live life from a place of being loved by God making it possible to love God with the exclusivity of a first love kind of love. Being loved by God makes all the difference, then, for everyone around us. They receive the overflow of God's love for us to be loved with a love that can only originate from God.