Sermon for CATM – December 28 – Churches of Revelation – Ephesus and Sardis – Revelation 2:1-7; 3:1-6
Today we begin a 5-part series on the Churches of Revelation. Yes, it is a bit odd that we’re beginning such a series on the last Sunday of the year and that we will be starting the new year with such a course.
But I’m excited about this short series because it’s about people, like us, who shaped the character, the feel, the ethos or vibe of some of the first Christian churches that ever existed.
And as we go along in this series I hope that you and I get a stronger sense of how it is that we as individuals shape the church that is called, “Church at the Mission”, and how we, by ourselves and corporately, influence the Kingdom of God in our community.
So today we look at two of the early churches that are described in the book of Revelation. Each church is described in chapter 1 as being a lampstand, and each church is described as having an angel.
We begin in chapter two, with Christ Jesus dictating, apparently, to John what He wants to say to the churches:
Rev 2:1 "To the angel of the church in Ephesus write: These are the words of him who holds the seven stars in his right hand and walks among the seven golden lampstands: 2 I know your deeds, your hard work and your perseverance. I know that you cannot tolerate wicked men, that you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them false. 3 You have persevered and have endured hardships for my name, and have not grown weary. 4 Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken your first love. 5 Remember the height from which you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first. If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place. 6 But you have this in your favor: You hate the practices of the Nicolaitans???, which I also hate. 7 He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes, I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God.
So with the church at Ephesus Jesus takes one certain approach. This is the church to whom the book of Ephesians is addressed, of course".
Jesus’ approach with this church is to start by identifying three of their strengths. First, Jesus says that He knows their deeds, their hard work. This is not a lazy church. This is not a church that has taken its calling lightly.
This is a church known for its hard workers and its hard work. This was not one of those congregations where 20% of the people do 80% of the ministry, as is often the case in this day and age.
This suggests that the people in the church at Ephesus took their call to BE the church very seriously. The lived out their faith. They acted on what they believed and it showed.
It’s said that you can tell what a person believes by how they LIVE far more than by what they SAY they believe. This church believed and embraced the gospel. This was no nominal church or glorified social club. And Jesus commends them for their work.
Secondly this is a church that is not muddy about what the gospel is. That’s evident by the fact that they show diligence in testing their teachers…they tested those who claimed to be apostles, or ones sent to build and strengthen the church by teaching and by personal encouragement.
They tested them because it mattered to them that their teachers were for real, and that their teachers taught the truth. That suggests that they knew the truth to begin with.
So with a strong knowledge of the gospel they tested the teachers, the self-proclaimed apostles, and they found certain ones to be false. Their life and their faith didn’t agree, or their testimony of Jesus was ultimately false.
Now this point was very important because in the early centuries of the history of the church there were a great number of attempts to alter the gospel, to water-down the importance of Jesus, to alter the facts of His life and death and resurrection.
The gospel and the church have been under assault, really…for as long as they have been around. That’s part of our heritage. So we don’t need to be surprised or discouraged in the least by the sometimes aggressive attempts you will hear about or read about that people make to discredit faith in Christ. In fact, we are wisest if we EXPECT those assaults on Christ, on the church and on the faith.
Whether it’s popular fiction like the Da Vinci Code or ‘scholars’ who make a career out of attempting to discredit the Bible (now there’s something called “The Jesus Project” where they are gathering a large number of scholars who don’t believe Jesus existed and they’re going to ask them: “So, did Jesus exist?”
WE shouldn’t be surprised at their answer. Or whether its new, false ‘gospels’ that are unearthed like the ‘gospel of Judas’ that tried to paint Judas as a really upstanding guy who just got a bad rap…all of this is par-for-the-course and has been since the beginning when they tried to discredit Jesus by saying He drove out demons by the prince of demons.
This is an important point and likely this year you’ll be hearing more along this line because I have seen, up close, Christians gradually being deceived by uncritically taking in all kinds of criticism of the church and of the Bible. I find THAT surprising, really.
And of course what always ends up happening is that their faith gets shipwrecked. They no longer believe the gospel, or they end up with such unnecessary doubts that they become for all intense and purpose agnostics with zero confidence in the Word of God.
And once people start down that road it is extremely difficult to find their way back to Christ, because they ALWAYS believe they are following a better way, but they have instead embraced a lie. And people who are on a slippery slope will always ferverntly deny that such a thing as a slippery slope even exists. Go figure.
So…please be careful, and please, please, be extremely wary when you hear stuff that attacks or seeks to discredit faith in Christ.
Understand that their motive is to kill faith. Understanding the motive will help you to discern between truth and error. If you read stuff or hear stuff that rocks your world, call me or email me…that’s one reason Ronda and Jan and I are here…
Now, the Ephesians WERE able to discern between truth and error, and so here they are commended by Jesus.
The third thing that Jesus focuses on and really celebrates is the perseverance of the Ephesians. They have stuck to their guns…they’ve not been discouraged by the trials of faith or by false teachers; they haven’t LET IN to the church or IN TO their hearts anything that would damage their faith.
They have endured hardships as well for their faith in Christ. Now hardships are only ever a drag when you are going through them. No one in their right mind looks to suffer, no one wants hardships. But hardships, when they are endured, actually build strength. Hardships come in many different shape and sizes.
The first couple of years after my conversion I faced a family who were really quite hostile to faith. They were either like my brother and dad who were avowed atheists and who thought I had gone crazy by coming to believe in God; or they were like my mom, an agnostic, who couldn’t imagine one of her sons having any actual beliefs or convictions about God.
Or they were like one of my sisters who were sort of ok with having a spiritual outlook on life, but alarmed and surprised that I’d actually chosen to follow Christ.
In the environment there were a lot of tense conversations. I was challenged regularly and so I had to really think about what I believed, and I had to consider the cost.
I had to really ask myself, “Is knowing Jesus and following Him, is this love relationship with God through Christ really worth all the hassle I was getting?” That was hard. But it was the pressure cooker in which my faith was formed.
Likewise the first year after my conversion I was learning a ton about the gospel and the Bible and I was in a state of constant amazement as I slowly took in the incredibly good news of God loving me enough to send Jesus to die for my sins.
At the same time I was in regular contact with a fellow who was studying for the priesthood on the one hand, but who also denied nearly every point I was learning in church. He called it all ‘myth’.
It became clear to me that there were at least two things that called themselves ‘the Christian Faith’…one that embraced the teaching of the Bible and encouraged a deep, intimate relationship with Christ, and one that considered the gospel to be a myth, a fiction, and yet who held to the forms of the church while sometimes encouraging social activism.
That was hard. But we all face hardship. It’s been said, and I agree— that trials, obstacles, difficulties, and sometimes defeats, are the very food of faith.
So Jesus says to the church at Ephesus “3 You have persevered and have endured hardships for my name, and have not grown weary”.
So these are three really, really good qualities of that church. Hard-working, concentrated on the truth of the gospel, discerning and persevering. These are all admirable qualities….things that I think most of us here would aspire to. But despite this, there is a problem.
A very serious problem with the Ephesian church. Some of those in the church may have been aware of this problem. While they were busy working for the Kingdom, while they were sharing faith and living out the gospel, while they were discerning truth from error, while they were sticking to their guns and holding fast to the faith they professed…what was going on?
Who remembers Jesus’ main issue with the Ephesians? What had they somehow managed to leave behind? What were they forgetting? What had they forsaken?
Jesus says to them: “I hold this against you: You have forsaken your first love”. What? That’s harsh!!
“Now what is "first love" in God’s eyes? It is the love that first brought you to God. It is the love that you experienced when you saw the cross as it really was. It was when you realized that the blood of Jesus Christ was shed for your sin & you were overwhelmed with His amazing love”. [Melvin Newland]
What is that first love that the Ephesians have forsaken? Jesus! But how could that be?
Read the book of Ephesians and you’ll hear Paul speak of their love for Christ 20 times! “You are rooted and grounded in love” he said…but years later in today’s passage in Rev. 2 John relays Jesus’ words, “you have left your first love.”
How could that be? They worked so hard! They stood for truth over error! They kept going despite all the odds! Isn’t that proof that they had NOT forsaken their first love?
One story. The first number of years I worked at the mission, Rick Tobias, our President and CEO, would ask me two questions about once every six months. He would ask: “How are things going?” I would tell him what was good and what was hard about the ministries I was involved in.
Usually I was pretty upbeat…I’ve always loved and believed in the ministry of Yonge Street Mission. Then Rick would ask the second question: “Do you still know Jesus?” [Pause]
Now at first I was kind of surprised, kind of offended at the question. “Of course I still know Jesus!”, I would say to myself. And I would tell Rick that, yes, I still know and I still love Jesus”. After about the third or fourth year, Rick would still ask every six months or so, and I would still answer: “Yes!”
But then I would walk away and really consider the question…and you know, it struck me very hard and painfully that despite being immersed in Christian ministry, despite getting up daily and going to prayerfully serve in many different ways at the mission, there were times when I lost touch with Jesus.
So my honest answer would have been…“You know, I love Jesus…but, when it comes right down to it, I don’t really know Him today like I should know Him. Somehow my experience of a relationship with Jesus was more history that present reality. I was doing my best to serve the best way I could, but I was losing track of my first love”.
How many people here are married? So…what’s the deal? You find someone you really love, get married and then live happily-ever-after….effortlessly? Am I Right? Of course not, eh?
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A successful marriage is the result of years of constant energy being put into the relationship. Staying close to your spouse…close enough to follow them through their changes, close enough to hear their heartbeat, to know what they care about.
A successful marriage is a dynamic thing that is freshly re-visioned every few years. Where each person refreshes themselves in their commitment to their partner. Where love is expressed verbally and through actions…intentionally…where the problems that develop are faced squarely and dealt with as each one comes up.
The love that binds a successful marriage leads both partners to examine themselves and their weaknesses…am I basically an unaffectionate person? I better find ways of expressing my affection that can be received by my spouse!
Are my interests really quite different than my spouses? I better find ways to develop an interest in what the other person cares about? Do I have personal behaviours that are really at odds somehow with being in a healthy relationship? I better find ways to address those behaviours before they damage my marriage. I need to set up an accountability partner before those behaviours get the better of me!
So Jesus says to those in Ephesus…to those hard-working, truth-loving persevere-ors: “You have forsaken your first love”.
Now, you gotta figure…that had to have really stung. And it would’ve taken them time to understand what He meant. So it’s about more??? Than cleaving to true things about God? It’s about more??? Than working hard, than sticking to your guns?
God wants more from me? Yes…He wants your faith, He wants your trust in Him, He wants you to grasp the importance of the gospel. He wants you to be committed and to work for the Kingdom. But there’s something more that He wants.
He wants you…all of you…heart, soul, mind strength…He wants to love you and to have that loved returned…not dutifully, no out of obligation. Rather, He wants you like a lover wants His beloved. He wants every part of you…your life entwined in His life, your heart enfolded into His heart, your body as a temple, holy and pure and wholly His as a dwelling place for the Holy Spirit of God.
Oswald Chambers whose devotional works are some of the best ever written, said that "The only way to keep true to God is by a steady persistent refusal to be interested in Christian work and to be interested alone in Jesus Christ."
So if this is the problem for the Ephesians…what does that mean? Are they toast? They’re no longer in the same healthy relationship with God, they’re forsaken their first love, and that’s…it? Of course not. Immediately Jesus begins to restore the church at Ephesus, and this is how He does it. Here’s what He says:
“5 Remember the height from which you have fallen!” Think back to the best days of your relationship with God. Think of the joy, the surrender, the hope, the power you felt upon realizing how much God loves you. You felt like you could do anything and nothing could stop you because God IS WITH YOU.
He says: “Repent and do the things you did at first”. Come to God with a humble heart. Cry out in repentance for your sin. Face the ugliness of sin head on – don’t sugar-coat it, don’t relativize it, don’t look for excuses, don’t listen to those who don’t understand how evil and dark sin is and how holy and perfect God is.
Find the courage to face your sinfulness head on…so you can experience afresh God’s amazing grace, His matchless love…in forgiving you and setting you free from sin. Go back, in your heart, to the start if you need to, in order to regain your perspective, in order to remember how glorious and great a Saviour you have who adopted you as his son, his daughter, who brought you out of the miry clay and placed your feet upon a rock!
What’s the upside of genuine repentance? A healed relationship with God, a fresh start, a new beginning. Living life knowing that you have the holy wind of God under your wings, living life as God intends you to live it…absolutely free.
What’s the downside to not repenting? The relationship suffers, and can suffer greatly.
Jesus says: “If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place”. That’s not a threat, as I read it, as much as a statement of logical consequences.
And remember, this is Jesus speaking to the church as a whole as well as to the individuals who make up the church. We are here, not for ourselves, but we are here, as blessed and happy as we are to be here, for others to whom God is not yet known in Christ Jesus.
We here to be a lampstand to light the way to Jesus. The fuel for that lampstand is not good works. It’s not hard work. It’s not ‘right doctrine’, it’s not perseverance. The ‘fuel’ is love for Jesus…passion for our first love. We love because He first loved us.
And the refrain of Jesus is this: “7 He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes, I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God”.
Now, the second church that Jesus speaks to is the church at Sardis. And the focus is similar but different, so I’ll just touch on the message of Jesus to the church that met at Sardis. Jesus says: “I know your deeds; you have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead”.
Have you ever gotten credit that you know you didn’t deserve? Have you ever been on the receiving end of praise for a job well-done when all you could think of is: “Boy, if you really knew how little work I put into that or that I actually blew it here, you would not be saying such nice things”.
The church at Sardis had an awesome reputation, but the truth was far from awesome. And that ‘reputation’ was likely doing more bad than good. There’s a nasty human tendency to work hard until we achieve some level of success, and then to coast on our laurels.
Then that ‘success’ becomes based on your history and your reputation simply no longer accurately reflect who you are.
Barb and I once left one church we were at to go to another church that had a great reputation for being involved in the community.
Once we got there we found that while that may have been true in the past, the present reality was that this church that was new to us had huge internal problems that were consuming all their energies. Years later that’s still the case for that church. Very sad.
Three pastors and the worship leader…the core leadership of the church…left at the same time, leaving the church leaderless. It was a real mess, far from what its reputation was.
The church at Sardis was far from awesome. So Jesus exposes the lie. That’s what light does, eh? Jesus says: “You’ve got a reputation for one thing, but the truth is this other thing…people think you’re alive, but actually…yer dead”. That’s quite a pronouncement.
He doesn’t dwell on their true current condition though, if you notice. Instead He goes right to encouraging them. He says: “2 Wake up! Strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have not found your deeds complete in the sight of my God. 3 Remember, therefore, what you have received and heard; obey it, and repent”.
So Jesus doesn’t mess around. He says: “Wake up!”
Now when someone is in a very serious accident or has hypothermia from prolonged exposure to the cold, often those around them will do everything they can to keep the person from falling asleep and lapsing into a coma. That’s because there’s a good chance they may never come out of the coma.
Jesus has that urgency in his voice here as He exhorts the church to, again: Remember the full message of the gospel they received, obey that message…don’t make the mistake of thinking that the gospel is one theory among many about life…realize that the gospel IS life, the gospel is THE way of life, the gospel is a gathering Way that enfolds people into its life.
Obey the gospel. Do what it says. Live the life it describes (the Christian life can only be lived as God intends IN community with others).
And Jesus says that He has found their deeds incomplete. There’s a disjoint between what they say they believe and how they actually behave.
They haven’t enacted their faith to the degree possible and instead they had chosen to rest on their laurels…become inert actually, when much was left to be accomplished for the Kingdom of our God and His Christ. And…repent.
Now that’s familiar, eh? Why does Jesus keep saying that? What’s the value of repenting? Why does Jesus call us to repentence? [I’m askin’!] Again, so that all things can be restored.
So that our relationship with God, if it’s gone off the rails, can once again be on track, can once again move forward as God wants it to.
So…two churches. Two gathered communities of faith grounded in Jesus. And after this message from Jesus they both had an opportunity to respond. The church at Ephesus had forsaken its first love…in its busyness and in its theological fervency it had become a stranger to the One for whom it was busy and fervent.
Ironic, isn’t it. And such a statement about the human condition…that we sacrifice love on the alter of activity; that in our striving for theological orthodoxy that contents and satisfies the mind, we can leave behind, forsake, our first love.
The church at Sardis…sabotaged by its reputation; desperately in need of a wake-up call so it can live out its faith and stop resting on what once was.
And Jesus word to them is “stop going the direction you’re going….turn around! Admit that you’ve made a wrong turn, get back on the right road”. That is what He means by His call to repent.
But…what about us, church? Is there something in the condition of the church at Ephesus or at Sardis that we recognize in ourselves? How are we doing? How are you doing?
Do you still love Jesus? Do you still know…really KNOW Jesus, or is your love now an ember when once it was a roaring fire? Or do you have a feeling in your gut that, “Yeah…I’ve been resting on my laurels. I’ve been pretty much inert, not really living out my faith the way I know Jesus wants me to”.
I know I still respond to those questions. I find them very probing really, because I see now that Jesus is calling me higher. He’s calling me to live more purely. He’s calling me to greater passion…unbridled passion for Him and His Kingdom.
He’s calling me to embrace Him, to cleave to Him like I never have before. He’s calling me to forget the former things and to press on to the high calling of living my life immersed in Jesus, in love with Jesus.
St. Augustine was this guy in the fourth century who, despite having a godly family, through his upbringing to the wind and lived for years for himself, indulging every vice, using people, ignoring God.
After his conversion and after years of reflection, he wrote this:
“Slow was I, Lord, too slow in loving you. To you, earliest and latest beauty, I was slow in love. You were waiting within me while I went outside me, looking for you there, misshaping myself as I flung myself upon the shapely things you made. You were with me all the while I was not with you, kept from you by things that could not be except by being in you. You were calling to me, shouting, drumming on deaf ears. You thundered and lightninged, piercing my blindness”.
Let’s pray. Holy God we bless You and thank You for Your Word. We thank You that You call out to us through Your word and by Your Spirit you break past our blindness. We thank you that you have walked with us this year, that You have spoken to us and You’ve spoken and loved through us.
Thank you for the example, for good and ill, of other churches at other times in history; for the challenges they faced, for the way You faithfully journeyed with them. But we pray God for this church. We pray that You would find us faithful, that You would strengthen us to live out our faith, and that You would lead us as we choose You over all other loves, that we might never forsake the One who loved us first and Who laid down His life for us, that we might truly live.
In His stunning and healing and matchless name we pray. Amen
