A teaching post for women who are doing all the right things and still feeling far away
“Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken the love you had at first.”
— Revelation 2:4 (NIV)
There is a church in the book of Revelation that gets a remarkable report card.
They are hardworking. They are persevering. They are doctrinally sound — they have tested false teachers and found them wanting. They are enduring hardship and not growing weary. By every outward measure, they are a faithful, functioning, impressive body of believers.
And Jesus looks at all of it and says: I have this against you.
Something is missing. And the thing that’s missing is not activity, or discipline, or even faithfulness. It’s intimacy.
You have forsaken the love you had at first.
They didn’t stop serving God. They just stopped being close to God. And according to Jesus, that is serious enough to name directly — even to a church that’s doing almost everything right.
I wonder how many of us are living in the same quiet gap: busy for God, but not close to God.
The Drift No One Talks About
Here’s the thing about spiritual drift — it is almost never dramatic. You don’t wake up one morning and decide to abandon your first love. You just get busy. And then busier. And then a season passes, and another, and at some point you realize that the intimacy you once had with Jesus has been quietly replaced by activity about Him.
You’re still in church. Still in ministry. Still saying the right things, serving on the right teams, attending the right events. But somewhere in the middle of all of that output, the input stopped. The receiving dried up. And you’ve been running on spiritual momentum rather than spiritual substance.
The Ephesian church hadn’t stopped showing up. They were still there every week, doing the work, enduring the hardship. What they had lost was the tender, first-love quality of their relationship with Jesus — the kind where you seek Him not for what He’ll do but for who He is, where you come to Him not out of obligation but out of longing.
Martha had the same drift, just in a single afternoon. Her love for Jesus was real. Her hospitality was genuine. But somewhere between opening the door and stirring the pot, her attention had moved away from the Person she was serving — to the service itself, to her sister’s participation in it, to the anxiety of getting it right.
Busyness doesn’t make us faithless. But it can make us distant. And distance, over time, makes everything we do for God feel hollow.
What First Love Actually Looks Like
When you first fall in love — with a person, with an idea, with Jesus — you pursue with abandon. You want to know everything. You rearrange your schedule. You think about them throughout the day. You bring them into your conversations because they’re filling up your thoughts. The relationship doesn’t feel like work yet. It feels like discovery.
That’s what first love looks like with Jesus, and most of us can remember seasons when we had it. Maybe it was when you were first saved, and everything about faith was new and alive. Maybe it was in a hard season when you were desperate for Him and you found that He showed up in ways you couldn’t have predicted. Maybe it was on a retreat or during a study where something cracked open and the Word came alive in a way you hadn’t felt in years.
First love has a quality to it. A freshness. A hunger. An orientation of the heart that says: I want to know You. Not just know about You — know You.
And then life happens. And the schedule fills. And the ministry grows. And the responsibilities accumulate. And one day you realize you haven’t felt that hunger in a while. You’ve been faithful — disciplined, even — but you’ve been going through the motions. The practices are still there. The closeness has quietly left.
Jesus’ word to the Ephesian church isn’t condemnation. It’s an alarm. Wake up. Something precious has slipped away. Return while you still can.
The Difference Between Service and Love
Here’s a distinction worth sitting with: you can serve someone faithfully without being in love with them.
Think about a job you’ve held for many years. At first, there was excitement. Engagement. Investment. And then it became familiar, and the familiarity became routine, and the routine became something you showed up for and performed without the heart that was there at the beginning.
That’s what happens when service replaces love in our relationship with Jesus. We show up and perform. We do the right things. We complete the spiritual tasks. But the love that once animated all of it — the first love that made service feel like worship and work feel like offering — has gone underground. And what we’re left with is religion without relationship.
Martha wasn’t unloving. She was actually trying to love Jesus well — through her cooking, through her hosting, through her gift of hospitality. But her service had become untethered from the presence of the One she was serving. She was in the kitchen while He was in the living room. She was doing for Him while Mary was being with Him.
And the One she was serving looked across the room and said: Come back. I’d rather have you than your cooking.
He says the same thing to every woman who has slowly traded nearness for busyness: Come back. Return to the love you had at first. I’m not impressed by your output if your heart has drifted from Me.
Why Busy Is the Enemy’s Favorite Weapon
I want to say something clearly: the enemy rarely needs us to commit obvious sin to neutralize our effectiveness. He just needs us to stay busy.
A woman who is genuinely close to Jesus is dangerous to the kingdom of darkness. She hears clearly, moves with discernment, serves from abundance, and carries something in her that can’t be manufactured or faked. She is anchored.
A woman who is busy about Jesus but not close to Jesus is much easier to manage. She runs on fumes. She mistakes activity for effectiveness. She serves from depletion and wonders why she’s exhausted. She hears less clearly because she’s spent less time listening. She is going through the motions and calling it faithfulness.
The enemy doesn’t need you to abandon your faith. He just needs to keep you too busy to tend it.
This is why Jesus’ alarm to the Ephesian church is so striking. They weren’t in obvious moral failure. They were working hard. They were enduring. And Jesus said: that is not enough. Without the love that animates it, the work is hollow. Return to where you started. Get back to the first thing.
The Road Back Is Shorter Than You Think
Here’s the most hopeful part of Revelation 2: Jesus tells them exactly what to do.
“Consider how far you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first.” (v.5)
Three steps. And they’re remarkably accessible:
Remember. Think about how it used to be. What did your relationship with Jesus look like at its best — when the hunger was real, when the Word was alive, when prayer felt like conversation? Don’t idealize it, but do remember it. Let the memory create a longing.
Repent. This is simply a change of direction. You don’t need to grovel. You just need to turn. Acknowledge that you’ve drifted, and make the decision to return. God already knows. He’s been waiting for you to acknowledge it.
Return. Do the things you did at first. What were they? Morning time with Him before the day took over? Worship that wasn’t a performance? Prayer that was honest and unhurried? Open Bible and open hands? Go back to those things. Not because the practices save you, but because they position you to encounter the Person.
The road back is shorter than the drift has made it feel. He hasn’t gone anywhere. First love is not lost — it is waiting to be reclaimed.
A Question Worth Asking
Before you close this post, I want you to sit with one honest question:
If you subtracted everything you do for God from your life right now — all the serving, the volunteering, the teaching, the showing up — what would be left of your relationship with Him?
That’s not a trick question. It’s the most clarifying question I know for diagnosing the state of our first love. Because a relationship built entirely on activity is not a relationship — it’s a job description. And God didn’t call us to a job. He called us to Himself.
Busy is not bad. Busy for God is not wrong. But busy instead of close is a problem that no amount of spiritual output can fix.
He’s calling your name. Not from a distance — from right there in the room.
Come back. I want you, not just your service. Return to your first love.
For Reflection
- On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate the closeness — not the faithfulness — of your current relationship with Jesus?
- When was the last time you came to Jesus with no agenda — not to ask for anything or complete a spiritual task, but simply to be with Him?
- What is one practice from your “first love” season with Jesus that you want to return to this week?
This post is part of the At His Feet, In His Service series — exploring what it means to live a life rooted in the presence of Jesus rather than the performance of religion. Learn more at https://awakewomensministry.com.