"Loving God First" -2

"Therefore hath the LORD recompensed me according to my righteousness, according to the cleanness of my hands in His eyesight." (Psalms 18:24) Just in case you quickly skipped over the point of yesterday's blog, we get to reinforce a main point that I was trying to make; a point about making sure that there is nothing between you and God, and that He is your first love. In relation to where God is to be in the order of what we love and care about, He is to be first and foremost above everything else. What that means in our relationships with everything else, including even our families, is that our love for God must trump all others; taking second place to nothing or anyone else. When we read the 'Letter to the Church of Ephesus', which is in Revelation 2:1-7, we see Jesus listing all the good things that this church has done and has stood for; for they laboured with patience, which is an action associated with love; they could not except those that were evil, and those that tried to pretend they were follower's of Christ; they took up burdens with patience, which was an act of sacrifice; and they even laboured for Christ's name sake, and fainted not, which was a show of great dedication to the cross of Christ. Jesus also had something else good to say about them after His rebuke, which was that they hated the deeds of the Nicolations, which also He hated, for they were those that casted a stumbling block before the church. Nevertheless, in the midst of all these things that they had going for them, they had left their first love! What does Jesus mean by "first love"? Up until just recently, I had for all these years considered that to mean the love that I experienced the day I accepted Jesus Christ into my heart, and then, I just left it at that. But it means more than that, because it must take into account the position of our love for God. In other words, our love experienced on that day was so overwhelming to us, because of the great love that we experienced in Him, and nothing else mattered to us, nor compared to the love we felt with God. Again, I would like to go back to something said at the beginning of this Psalm, where we discovered one of the differences between this song and the song from 2 Samuel 22, which is that this song starts with the verse, "I will love Thee, O LORD, my strength". As with all those good things listed towards them in the Church of Ephesus, having left their first love makes nothing they do matter all that much; although Jesus acknowledge their efforts, and even complimented them on sharing His passion, they were not experiencing the love of God in their lives, and they were missing out on the life available in Christ... "He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith into the churches; To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God." (Revelation 2:7)