FIRST LOVE

Amos 1:1-3:15; Revelation 2:1-17; Psalm 129:1-8; Proverbs 29:19-20

“Can two people walk together without agreeing on the direction? Does a lion ever roar in a thicket without first finding a victim? Does a young lion growl in its den without first catching its prey? Does a bird ever get caught in a trap that has no bait? Does a trap spring shut when there’s nothing to catch? When the ram’s horn blows a warning, shouldn’t the people be alarmed? Does disaster come to a city unless the Lord has planned it? Indeed, the Sovereign Lord never does anything until he reveals his plans to his servants the prophets. The lion has roared—so who isn’t frightened? The Sovereign Lord has spoken—so who can refuse to proclaim his message?”

“I know all the things you do. I have seen your hard work and your patient endurance. I know you don’t tolerate evil people. You have examined the claims of those who say they are apostles but are not. You have discovered they are liars. You have patiently suffered for me without quitting. But I have this complaint against you. You don’t love me or each other as you did at first! Look how far you have fallen! Turn back to me and do the works you did at first. If you don’t repent, I will come and remove your lampstand from its place among the churches.”

“My back is covered with cuts, as if a farmer had plowed long furrows. But the Lord is good; he has cut me free from the ropes of the ungodly.”

“There is more hope for a fool than for someone who speaks without thinking.”

Most love is inexplicable on some level. First love is almost always inexplicable on every level. It usually occurs long before we even know love’s true meaning. Having nothing else to judge it by, we are all too willing to accept the light-headedness and giddy sense of disorientation as the real thing. This is no problem at age 10 to sixteen. When we persist in defining love by the way we feel when we are in it, though, we are destined to make some member of the opposite sex quite miserable in later life. Love is much more than an emotional attachment. Love is first and foremost an intellectual commitment. It is a relationship that withstands the stresses and tests of time, regardless of whether we want to be where we find ourselves or not. Love endures because it sees no other option than staying the course. Love never forgets, and love never bails out. The Lord’s concern that the Church in Ephesus had forgotten its first love is not what it may look like to some. The Lord had no interest in the puppy love infatuations some think of as spiritual highs. In context, His concern stemmed from whether or not the Church’s members had simply been playing mind games with each other from the start. He wanted them to look honestly at their current motivations, not those of the emotional moment when they first met Christ. They were doing a lot of “good” things. But they were getting to the place where form was becoming more important than substance. Indeed, it could be argued that all the positive things they were doing actually took the place of the love they should have been sharing. They were certainly keeping busy being “religious.” They had no problem with hard work or suffering or even with discerning and condemning false prophets. Still, reading between the lines, their actions masked rapidly cooling hearts and had precious little to do with any consuming passion for the Lord.

Mark it down: when people become more concerned with clinging to the outward appearances of Christianity than maintaining and building on their original enthusiasm for their Savior, trouble’s brewing. No wonder. Anytime we allow hard work and martyrdom to become ends in and of themselves, spiritually speaking, we are destined for disappointment. Without love, none of our actions, however well intended, will get us one step further down the Road to Glory. Actions that matter are primarily those born out of loving commitment. Actions without love necessarily represent an abandonment of the Father’s primary purpose for our lives. The Creator would have us be motivated by love, or not at all.

There is a time when peer pressure can be a very good thing. There’s no arguing it can lead us away from danger and into the safety of numbers. However, peer pressure can also lead us into danger. When our association with any group is more about appearances and doing the right thing than it is about our true feelings, we’re getting pretty far afield. Peer pressure can not only lead us away from the Father but also away from our own sense of self and purpose.

Amos’ point was that there is always a reason. The people would soon wonder at the devastation to be heaped upon them. They would complain about the seeming injustice of it all. They would simply refuse to accept the results of lives lived out of self-gratification and ego. Nevertheless, their loss of focus on love was soon going to cost them their lives. They’d been seduced. The things they’d been seduced by had nothing to do with love. So, they had made themselves the lion’s prey.

Anytime we act without love, we run the risk of being consumed by any number of things. We can lose ourselves in our work. We can turn self-sacrifice into pointless and bitter martyrdom at the drop of a hat. In desperation, we can even attempt to rewrite the Word of God so it better accommodates the people we’ve become. None of this, however, will ever lift our souls out of the holes we have dug for them by not living in love. Love is the only thing that helps us rise above ourselves and our situations. Indeed, the only thing that will get our minds off ourselves is love. God knew us and loved us while we were still in the womb. We do well to stay true to the One who has loved us from the first.