Once more, It would be profitable to recollect the best parts of our lives, and compare them with what we now are. Think, backsliding Christian, what an effect those sacred truths have had upon your heart, which since, it may be, you have held with a loose hand, and have been almost inclined to abandon: think what delight you have taken in those ways which you have since neglected; what abhorrence you have felt against those sins in which you have since thought there was no great harm, and so have yielded to them: how you have been grieved when you have seen other Christians degenerate into carnality, sloth, pride, or worldly-mindedness: think—ah! where shall I stop? Do not forget to ask your soul at the close of every thought, Is it better with me now than then? We are not only counselled to “remember from whence we are fallen,” but also called on to “repent.”

Repentance is a godly sorrow for sin; and if ever there be any true revival of religion, it must originate in this. When Judah returned to the Lord, after their captivity, it was with bitter weeping: “Going and weeping, they sought the Lord their God.” There can be no well-grounded peace or joy restored to our mind while the idols of our hearts remain unlamented. God insists upon these being given up; and that, not in a way of secret reluctance, but with holy abhorrence. Nor are we called upon to lament merely on account of positive acts of sin, but even for our sins of omission—because we have “forsaken our first love.”

Some professing Christians seem to have no notion of any obligation that they are under to love Christ and Divine things. It is the work of God, say they, to affect our hearts, and enable us to love Christ; we cannot command the influence of the Spirit, nor keep our own souls alive. This is very true, but not in the sense in which they plead it. The hearts of men, even of the best of men, are so very bad that unless a kind of perpetual miracle be wrought in them their love will be sure to expire. To preserve alive a spark in the midst of an ocean would not be so great a wonder as preserving the love of Christ in our hearts. But if nothing be obligatory on us but what we can do of ourselves, or, in other words, what we, in this our corrupted state, can find in our own hearts to do, it must follow that we are not obliged to do any good thing whatever; for “without Christ we can do nothing;” and so it must follow that we have no cause for self-reflection for the contrary, but have a good right to make ourselves easy, and to be contented with that degree of love and holiness which we have, seeing it is such a measure as God pleases to bestow upon us. But, in this case, there could be no propriety in the church at Ephesus being rebuked for having left their first love, or called upon to repent for it. Repentance, if genuine, will lead us to the other part of Christ’s advice; namely, “Do the first works.” The first works are the works of the best ages of the church, and the best times in our life. If there be any considerable revival in the church, or in the souls of individuals, it will be when the diligence, disinterestedness, tenderness of conscience, generosity, and faithfulness of those times are imitated.

Fuller, A. G. (1988). “On Spiritual Declension and the Means of Revival.” The Complete Works of Andrew Fuller: Expositions—Miscellaneous (J. Belcher, Ed.; Vol. 3, pp. 631–632). Sprinkle Publications.