This week is Valentine’s week in the US and a lot of couples find it to be  an encouragement to express their affection for their beloveds.  Romance is a gift from God and we thank Him for it. Biblically speaking, behind the relationship there is a summons from God to be a servant and to build up the other person. There is also a pattern. In Ephesians 5, husbands are told to love their wives as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself for it. If husbands could ever love as unselfishly as Jesus did, our wives would be overwhelmed.  There is another principle to weave into our hearts from the Bible this week also. Jesus told the church in Ephesus , “You have left your first love!” (Revelation 2:4). This is what the believer must guard against more than anything. One of the greatest goals a child of God can have is to “stick close to my first love, Jesus” every day of my life. To do this, we must remember His love for us which was demonstrated on the cross (Romans 5:8). We must hear what God says concerning his love for all who have fled to him for forgiveness: “I have loved you with an everlasting love” (Jeremiah 31:3). To hear the words of God ringing in our ears and echoing in our hearts is the way to nourish our affection for the Redeemer.  When we turn to God in repentance and faith, based on what Jesus did on the cross for the guilty, we can claim as our own the precious expressions of gratitude that God’s people have used through out the ages. We can say like Hezekiah, “You have delivered my soul from the pit of destruction, for you have cast all my sins behind your back” (Isaiah 38:17). We can say like Isaiah, “In His love and in His pity He redeemed them and He bore them and carried them all the days of old” (Isaiah 63:9). As our capacity deepens for this communion with God in hearing his delight in us an in our expression of our affection to Him, we will be able to say like David, “Because Your lovingkindness is better than life, my lips shall praise you” (Psalm 63:3). This is the way to stay in our first love to Jesus. Is He your first love? Have we strayed from Him? Let us return today! Then our hearts will not only be the objects of God’s mercy and love, but they will be channels of his love for “He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water” (John 7:38). I have found that when I hold fast to Jesus as my first love, I am able to love my wife as I truly should! Let us stick to our first love this Valentine’s season and all of our lives!