How is it that we can think of Christ apart from emotion? Can we think of a lover apart from it? What is "first love" love? I like how John Piper put it: it is the love that is known between a wedded couple on their honeymoon, when they can't bare to be apart from each other for even a moment. If they're not wrapped up in arms, then they are lost in their eyes. Are we told in Scripture that we are supposed to lose this love for Christ? Then how can we think about Him without emotion? Is it because our considerations of Him are purely scholastic? Is it because we have given our love to another, and left little for Him? Is it becuase for one reason or another we have obstained from the full relationship that He wants to have with us? When Christ spoke with the woman at the well, He mentioned that He would give her "living water." Contrary to popular exegesis, "living" refers not to eternal life, but to vibrant, rushing waters. He compares the life He wishes to give to His own to the raging, bubbling, turning and tossing waters of a rushing river. But why is it that fundamental Baptists especially have traded this promised life for stagnant, bitter cisterns? Why have we left our first love? In order to leave one thing, one must go to something else. What have we sought in the place of Christ? To whom have we given our deepest love? I think, ourselves. This makes sense in context with this thought. Eternal life grants us not only length of life, but quality of life as well, which quality begins revealing itself in the mortal flesh. To love Christ, to abound in such a relationship with the one who calls His chosen the "dearly beloved of [His] soul," to be overwhelmed with His living water, is to enter into the quality aspect of eternal life. To love self is to retain the length of eternal life, but to deny the quality of it. Therefore, pride equals misery when one considers the life Christ gives. Not that we love Christ to gain abundant life, for to do that would be to miss the boat completely, living in the world of stagnant self-aggrandizement. To love Christ is to at the same time be "for Him" in every way shape and form, to show His splendor. To think otherwise is to lack love all together.