Nevertheless I have [this] against you, that you have left your first love. Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent and do the first works, or else I will come to you quickly and remove your lampstand from its place—unless you repent. Revelation 2:4-5 (NKJV)
Love never leaves us; we are always the ones who turn our backs on love and leave.
The Lord Himself is our first love. He’s also our last. He loved us first; He loved us from the first. He will always love us to the last, that is forever.
You have left your first love doesn’t mean our love for the Lord. It doesn’t mean that devotion we had when we had just known the Lord and were riding high in that intense excitement of that initial acquaintance with the Lord.
Our first means when we first got to know the Lord, believed in Him, loyally followed Him, joyfully served Him what drove us was exclusively the wonder of His unconditional love for us. This is because we were correctly taught to come to Jesus as you’re. That God accepts and receives us unconditionally.
But after a while in church they taught us conditional love. They told us that now that we are no longer new baby believers the honey moon is over, it’s time to grow and be serious. Now we have to first do this big list of things in order for God to love us, accept and approve of us. They told us that when we were still baby believers God did and gave us everything freely. But now that we have grown we have to earn whatever we need from God. So we start relating and walking with God with a mindset of indebtedness. We then serve God with a slave mentality.
All this results into dead works.
These are right things we do but with a wrong attitude, and motive.
Reading your Bible, praying, attending church, doing any task in the church, giving, acting good to others in order for God to accept, love, bless, and help you is dead works.
It’s what being fallen from Grace means. Galatians 5:4. Your own human efforts to please and be accepted by God is the opposite of Grace.
So when Jesus tells the church at Ephesus and consequently all the rest of us to remember from where we have fallen, repent and do the first works, He is telling us to go back to how we received Jesus Christ in the first place – not by our own efforts but freely by Faith. He’s telling us to go back to how we related and walked with God in the beginning – not by our own works but unconditionally by Grace.
Therefore read your bible, pray, attend church, do any task in the church, give, act good to others not in order for God to accept, love, bless, and help you but out of gratefulness and gladness because He has already out of His unconditional love for you done and continues to do so.