Remembering Your First Love

Speaker Notes

Revelation 2:1-7

To the Church in Ephesus

2 “To the angel of the church in Ephesus write:

These are the words of him who holds the seven stars in his right hand and walks among the seven golden lampstands. 2 I know your deeds, your hard work and your perseverance. I know that you cannot tolerate wicked people, that you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them false. 3 You have persevered and have endured hardships for my name, and have not grown weary.

4 Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken the love you had at first.5 Consider how far you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first. If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place. 6 But you have this in your favor: You hate the practices of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.

7 Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To the one who is victorious, I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God.

Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood is a poem by William Wordsworth, completed in 1804 selections:

THERE was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
    The earth, and every common sight, 
            To me did seem 
    Apparell'd in celestial light, 
The glory and the freshness of a dream.         5
It is not now as it hath been of yore;— 
        Turn wheresoe'er I may, 
            By night or day, 
The things which I have seen I now can see no more. 

 
        The rainbow comes and goes,  10
        And lovely is the rose; 
        The moon doth with delight 
    Look round her when the heavens are bare; 
        Waters on a starry night 
        Are beautiful and fair;  15
    The sunshine is a glorious birth; 
    But yet I know, where'er I go, 
That there hath pass'd away a glory from the earth.

--------------------------------

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: 
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,  60
        Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
          And cometh from afar: 
        Not in entire forgetfulness, 
        And not in utter nakedness, 
But trailing clouds of glory do we come  65
        From God, who is our home: 
Heaven lies about us in our infancy! 
Shades of the prison-house begin to close 
        Upon the growing Boy, 
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,  70
        He sees it in his joy; 
The Youth, who daily farther from the east 
Must travel, still is Nature's priest, 
     And by the vision splendid 
      Is on his way attended;  75
At length the Man perceives it die away, 
And fade into the light of common day.

David is a Theologian and Ethicist.

---