first love

⁴But I have this against you: that you have relinquished your first charity. ⁵And so, call to mind the place from which you have fallen, and do penance, and do the first works. Otherwise, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent.

⁴But I have this against you: that you have relinquished your first charity.

¹⁹Therefore, let us love God, for God first loved us.

¹⁸Fear is not in love. Instead, perfect love casts out fear, for fear pertains to punishment. And whoever fears is not perfected in love.

¹⁶And we have known and believed the love that God has for us. God is love. And he who abides in love, abides in God, and God in him.

¹⁰In this is love: not as if we had loved God, but that he first loved us, and so he sent his Son as a propitiation for our sins.

¹³No one has a greater love than this: that he lay down his life for his friends.

⁸Whoever does not love, does not know God. For God is love.

¹If I were to speak in the language of men, or of Angels, yet not have charity, I would be like a clanging bell or a crashing cymbal. ²And if I have prophecy, and learn every mystery, and obtain all knowledge, and possess all faith, so that I could move mountains, yet not have charity, then I am nothing. ³And if I distribute all my goods in order to feed the poor, and if I hand over my body to be burned, yet not have charity, it offers me nothing. ⁴Charity is patient, is kind. Charity does not envy, does not act wrongly, is not inflated. ⁵Charity is not ambitious, does not seek for itself, is not provoked to anger, devises no evil. ⁶Charity does not rejoice over iniquity, but rejoices in truth.

¹⁶For God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, so that all who believe in him may not perish, but may have eternal life.

³⁷Jesus said to him: “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God from all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind.’