I know your deeds and your toil and perseverance, and that you cannot tolerate evil men, and you put to the test those who call themselves apostles, and they are not, and you found them to be false; and you have perseverance and have endured for My name’s sake, and have not grown weary. But this I have against you, that you have left your first love.

—Revelation 2:2-4

One of my favorite verses in the Bible is the verse in Isaiah that talks about us hearing a voice in the wilderness saying, “Go this way,” or “Go that way.” I haven’t studied the passage in depth (I’m still somewhat intimidated by the major prophets), but it reminds me how God so often leads us with that gentle voice that comes out of nowhere.

I had one of those moments this weekend while I was at a women’s event with my mama. The situation wasn’t exceptionally conducive to processing deep spiritual insights. I was having blood sugar problems that required monitoring, and a sweet baby girl was sitting primly atop my bladder. At one point, Baby Girl bounced a little too hard and sent me running for the bathroom.

Overall, I was not on top of my game as a strong student of Scripture while the speaker delivered her message. Too much was going on, and my focus was hopelessly splintered.

But even so, God’s gentle voice made it through. I don’t mean to say that I heard an audible voice. When God leads me, it tends to feel a lot more like a finger pointing in the direction I need to look or a spiritual spotlight shining on something He wants to draw my attention to. And that’s what happened in the midst of all the distractions on Saturday.

I was picking up my phone to check the app connected to my blood sugar monitor when I heard the speaker reading today’s passage. The spiritual spotlight flashed, and my attention shifted back to what the speaker was saying.

What struck me about the passage initially was that it started, at least to my ear, sounding like a great progress report for the church at Ephesus. They seemed to be doing all the right things. They hated evil men, had perseverance, and were not fooled by false teachers, but were loyal to the truth. All that sounds pretty good.

But they weren’t guiltless. And the charge laid against them was striking to me. I’ve always cared deeply about truth and doing things well. But that wasn’t enough for the church at Ephesus, and I was convicted that it should never become enough for me either. Because something was missing–the “first love.”

As a native English speaker, I initially took it to mean something similar to the strong feelings we experience when first falling in love, but when I looked into the original language, that’s not what I found.

Instead, the word translated first refers to something first, not in time, but in importance. It’s actually the superlative form of a word meaning to be before or above something else in importance. It designates something as the foremost of all important things.

I found even more when I looked into the word translated love. It was a form of the word agape, which was the highest form of love in the Greek language. It’s a type of love normally associated with self-sacrifice in service of someone else’s good. But I found a new layer to agape as I read the lexicon entry for it. It also refers to a love-feast.

Members of the early church would have a love-feast for the purpose of encouraging fellowship. So agape doesn’t just refer to choosing someone else’s good above our own. It also carries a connotation of fellowship.

That means if we ever let ourselves become like the church at Ephesus, we might be doing and saying all the right things to seem quite pious, but in reality, we would have abandoned the most important fellowship of our lives—deep fellowship with Christ.

Before finding out what those words meant, I found it tempting to say that the passage would never describe me. Of course, I will never abandon my love for Jesus. But getting that reminder that nothing compares to true fellowship with Christ makes me feel the need to reconsider.

When life gets busy, or I don’t know how we’re going to overcome the challenges coming our way, I do often forget to foster fellowship with Jesus. It can be so easy to let the chief priority fall to the back of my mind. So this week, I’m going to try to actively foster fellowship with Jesus. To make time to spend focusing on Him instead of other things. Not just reading my Bible, but making time for prayer, time for meditation, time for resting in Him. And I hope you’ll join me!