revelation revelation

so i was talking about revelation with the BF tonight. reading things here and there, trying to figure things out. trying to understand what is meant by a lot of these letters to churches i have a hard time pronouncing. laodicea anyone?

chapter two verse four: yet i hold this against you: you have forgotten your first love. remember the height from which you have fallen! repent and do the things you did at first.

i read this and thought that if that letter were written to me, i would cry. how sad would it be to hear that the Lord has recognized you falling out of love with him? out of his pure, never changing, unconditional, divine love.

then i thought, this letter is still up for deciphering by us. no matter who says it, the Bible is relevant for us today. us as a nation. us as individuals. us as a spiritual body.

i think that it's so easy to fall from the heights of God's love. to forget how awesome it is to hold on to the hope of him. to hold on to the hand of a savior. we get used to it. we get used to being forgiven for our sins, and grow accustomed to his mercy.

i know i forget the importance of my redemption regularly. it's easy, when like i said, it's so... like Jesus to lavish upon us his grace, daily.

so when we think about it - what did we do at first? when we were first redeemed and refined by the living God? we had a focus. our focus was pure. our focus was Him. our attitude was one of thanks, and yearning. thankful for his blood. yearning for the ways we can please him. searching for ways to show our devotion, our faith. for ways to put our trust in him. we were so excited.

and over time - it dies. our passion grows faint, and we have fallen from the greatest height that ever existed - Christ's love.

but oh! it doesn't have to die. and the hardest thing to recognize is - it's our choice. our continual dropping from that high place is all our own doing.

it's like we're on a rope. we're so strong at the top, because we can feel God, we can hear him. then as gravity - the gravity of the world - the music we listen to, the people we hang around, the food we eat, the movies we watch - begins to pull on us, to consume us... our hands become moist with the weight of our sin. and we begin to slide. further and further down, until we're in a place of complete forgetfulness.

forgetting how Jesus feels, what his voice sounds like.

and when i read things like this - urging me to repent, and fall in love with my first - the one and only... i want to dry my hands and climb back to the top, and rest.

rest in that same mercy he gave me when i was at the bottom.