first love.

Last week at Hillside one of the elders gave the message since PT was on vacation- he told the congregation he was interested in preaching about something he is currently struggling with-- thus losing his first love. It was one of those moments where you blink hard and say to God- Wow, that's perfect timing on your part. Touché.

Apparently the only place the phrase 'first love' shows up in the NT is in Revelation. Interesting. Any way, the passage (2:1-7) is written to the church in Ephesus and can kind of be broken down in to two parts: 1- Good stuff they do, and 2- stuff they are forgeting. The parts are separated by the conjunction 'but.' The speaker made the point that when you give someone a compliment and then say 'but ...' they often just focus on the part after the but.

So forgeting your first love. Chances are this has probably happened to any Christian at least once in a small degree. It's happened to me in a small scale this summer. Every since project I've been very apathetic towards growing in my walk, reading my Bible, etc. Oops. And this coming from someone who just went on a 6 week missions trip overseas. I basically let myself slack off and think I went 6 weeks with steady, solid growth- what's two or three weeks? I deserve time off. Time off? I seem to have made a silly excuse that because I am not provided specific times for prayer and time with the Lord and evangelism, it's ok to not do any of that so I can have some 'me' time. Wow.