The life of the Christian has its ups and downs. We start on our walk with Jesus and the Holy Spirit, with great enthusiasm, we love the new closeness we have with God! It is awesome! We may have met Jesus at a revival meeting, or perhaps it was a "chance" encounter with someone on the street, perhaps it was some relative or friend who introduced us. But we were excited, and we were going to tell the world about it!
The natural way of things, is that life starts to encroach on this relationship. Busy-ness is one of these things. Early in life we have less responsibilities, and more time to maintain the freshness of this relationship. As time goes on, though, more things crowd in to devour our time, meaning there is less time to feed our relationship with Jesus. Gradually, Jesus can be allowed to drift to the periphery of our life, while other more urgent things take center stage.
The church in Ephesus had this happen to them. They started with a bang, people had to decide rapidly on which side they stood, when a riot threatened to kill off the initial attempts to start a church (Acts 19). They persevered though, and Paul was able to write one of his most profound letters to this church - the epistle to the Ephesians. As time goes on, we can become weary in well-doing (2 Thes 3:13), but this was not the case in Ephesus. They maintained their spiritual walk, and are commended for this (Rev 2:1-3)
But Jesus also, besides the commendation, has something to say to this church. "Yet I hold this against you. You have forsaken your first love." He says, "Repent, and do the things you did at first". This church was obedient and resistant to false teaching, they persevered. But they had lost the freshness of their first love, that first contact with Jesus! Relationship may have become religion to them. Jesus urges them to recapture that initial zeal, and get back to the urgency of their early days as God's children.
Proverbs tells us: "for though a righteous man falls seven times, he rises again". We can regain that closeness with Jesus. He says to do the first works, what worked before will work again! We devoured the Bible, our prayer time was precious to us. Yes, we may have lost our habit of doing these things, but we can get up again! Restarting certain disciplines may feel uncomfortable for a while, but as we regain that lost fervor, we will once again feel the hunger for a closer walk with the Lord!
"Lord, we surrender ourselves to you, and ask you to lead us into a closer relationship with you. We long for your touch! In Jesus' name, amen"
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