I should be glad if I could describe
to you just what that first love was in your heart. I can not do this,
neither can you; but you know how it felt, and how joyful was your soul.
Oh, blessed happy day, when your sins were washed away, and love sang
its sweetest lay within your soul!
Now, if you do not have the same ardor; the same warmth; the same sweet
relish for prayer, for the word of God, for a meeting; the same
thrilling sense of sweetness in your soul; that same precious drawing
toward God and toward the brethren; that same delight in laboring for
Jesus; that same joy and happiness in making sacrifices for him and for
your fellow man: if you do not feel those symptoms of love as deeply and
as delightfully, and if they are not in you as actively as they were at
the first,--you are like the church at Ephesus--you have left your first
love. In Wilson's excellent translation this text reads, "Thou hast
relaxed thy first love." They had lost the intensity of their first
love. It had relaxed, or lost tension, and had become languid. It does
not matter to what you testify, or who you are, if you have not the same
ardor and deep intensity of love that you had at the first, you have
relaxed love.
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