Revelation 2:1-7
“First Love”
In the late 1940s, there was an emerging evangelist who was preaching the Gospel to large crowds in major arenas, and many folks were coming to Christ at his crusades.
But he abandoned his faith, resigned from the ministry and became a writer and news commentator.
Journalist Lee Strobel interviewed him for his book, The Case for Faith.
The former evangelist was now 83 and beginning to suffer from Alzheimer’s disease.
Strobel asked him about Jesus and was surprised at his response.
“He was the greatest human being who has ever lived,” the former evangelist began.
“He was a moral genius. His ethical sense was unique.
He was the intrinsically wisest person I’ve ever encountered in my life or in my readings.
He’s the most important thing in my life.
I know it might sound strange, but I have to say I adore him!”
The man continued, “Everything good I know, everything decent I know, everything pure I know, I learned from Jesus.
He is the most important human being who has ever existed.
And if I may put it this way, I miss him.”
Strobel writes that the old former evangelist’s “eyes filled with tears and he wept freely.
[and then] He refused to say more.”
When I first gave my life to Jesus Christ, I remember feeling absolutely overwhelmed by love.
I was filled with love for God and for other people.
And I knew and experienced the reality that because of God’s love for me I could endure anything that came at me.
When I was walking in God’s love I was able to get “outside myself,” and was given a confidence and a “zest for life” that I had never even imagined existed.
I was in love.
I was in love with the One Who created me and the rest of humanity.
I was head over heels in love with other people because I could relate to their plight and I knew that God loved them with the same intensity that God loved me.
I was in love with God because God had rescued me from my misery, from my chains.
I was in love with God because God had first loved me.
I truly hadn’t even known what real love was until I experienced and yielded to the love of God.
It absolutely and completely changed my life.
But there have been many times over the past twenty-some-odd years since then, that I had forgotten that love.
Perhaps I had taken it for granted.
Maybe I had given in, little by little to the temptations of the world, and before I knew it I was like a ship which has drifted out to sea without an anchor…
…feeling lost, sad, and lonely.
It’s easy to drift away from God.
And there can be no doubt that the most unhappy person in the world is a Christian who is no longer walking with God.
And the reason is because this person has tasted how good it is to be with God.
This person has experienced that radical difference between being locked in the darkness and walking freely in the Light.
This person knows how it feels to love so deeply that it is beyond measure, and to know that they are loved much more unfathomably by God.
This person knows what it is like to feel such love for other persons that they would be willing to do just about anything in order to help enable another to experience the love of Christ.
Yes, the “fallen Christian” knows what it is to live with a peace which transcends all understanding.
The “fallen Christian” knows the truth that sets people free…
…but has found him or herself locked up once again in sin and misery.
There is nothing worse than to let go of our First Love.
Therefore, to make sure this doesn’t happen, we must make it our first priority to stay connected to Jesus.
A woman named Alice wrote in the Upper Room devotional, “Once a week or so, my husband and I go on a date.
Though we’ve been married over 30 years, we still find that a quiet meal or a walk along the river gives us the time we need to reconnect.
Something similar is true in my relationship with God.
If I don’t spend regular time with God, our relationship could grow cold.”
Do you spend regular time with God?
God called us into relationship with Him, and God is continually calling us back to our First Love, to God’s unfailing love.
And it is only by making time with God the focus of our every day that we stay connected and share God’s love with others.
Otherwise we will find ourselves focusing more and more inward…into ourselves until things become dark once again.
Apparently, the persons at the Church in Ephesus had lost the vital connection they once had with God.
In Revelation 2:4, Jesus says to the Church in Ephesus, “You have forsaken your first love.
Remember the height from which you have fallen!
Repent and do the things you did at first.”
Ephesus was a very well known city.
Colonists from Athens had founded it in about 1,000 B.C.
One of its temples for the goddess Artemis was thought to be one of the Seven Wonders of the World.
And the Apostle Paul was very intimately connected with the Christian Church in Ephesus.
Paul had been so successful in preaching at Ephesus that their business in making silver shrines of Artemis was in danger of becoming extinct.
It’s been written that Ephesus was a place where “the wise and the foolish, the good and the bad, the old and the new, lived together.”
And it was the job of the Church to shed the light of Christ in this very pluralistic or integrated ancient city.
In a lot of ways, Ephesus was very similar to any modern town in the USA.
There are people of different faiths and backgrounds.
There are the wise and the foolish, the good and the bad, the old and the new all living together.
And there is the Church.
Is our lampstand shining as bright as it can?
Remember, as the Body of Christ, we are only as effective as the sum of our parts.
Are we all pitching in equally?
Are we doing what God has called us to do?
Apparently, the Church in Ephesus, although they had once burned very bright with the love of Jesus…
…somehow they had become complacent…
…and had fallen from great heights.
It seems that their light was dangerously close to going completely out as Jesus says in verse 5, “If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place.”
And all the while we are told that they had many “deeds and hard work…” even “perseverance.”
Soren Kierkegaard once said, “There are, in the end, only two ways open to us: to honestly and honorably make an admission of how far we are from the Christianity of the New Testament, or to perform skillful tricks to conceal the true situation.”
Are we honest with God and ourselves or do we think we can trick God by acting Christian without having a personal relationship with Christ?
A pastor writes, “Some time ago some wonderful people in our church gave my wife and I a gift card to a nice restaurant for $100.00.
We thought, ‘Wow, a hundred bucks. Let’s go for it.’
We found a free evening.
We dressed up.
I took a bath, used deodorant and cologne—the whole thing.
I even washed and waxed my car, because we wanted to make it through the valet, and I didn’t want my ten year old Ford Focus to look bad.”
He goes on to write that when the night came he and his wife ordered the most expensive things on the menu.
But, “When the bill arrived, I said, ‘Honey could you give me the gift card?’
She said, ‘I don’t have it. I thought you brought it.’”
And the pastor writes, “I thought to myself, ‘We look rich, we act rich, we even smell rich.
But if we don’t have that gift card, it invalidates everything.’”
And there are times in our lives when we can look like Christians, act a bit like Christians and maybe even smell like Christians.
But without a relationship with Jesus, we’ve forgotten the most important thing.
Because it’s our relationship with Christ that validates everything else.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing to a Church which had failed to stand against the atrocities of Hitler, but instead bent to the demands of and even promoted the propaganda of The Third Reich wrote: “Discipleship means adherence to Christ…
…Discipleship without Jesus Christ is a way of our own choosing…
…it is devoid of all promise.”
Are we following Jesus Christ?
Or were we once on fire for Jesus, but now we think very little about Him?
What is our prayer life like?
How often do we read the Bible?
Are we in love with God?
Are we in love with all persons because of our relationship with God?
There is a word from physics which means that everything that is left to itself has a tendency to deteriorate.
In a similar fashion, a Christian who becomes apathetic or complacent or settles for the path of least resistance soon finds that dreams die and hope fades.
And then a really terrible thing happens: the Church begins to think it can live with mediocrity.
And that seems to have happened at the Church in Ephesus.
But that doesn’t have to be the end.
For Jesus’ call continues, “Change your hearts and lives and do the things you did at first.”
Are you settling for mediocrity in your relationship with God?
The message to the Church in Ephesus is the first of seven letters to seven churches.
These letters culminate with Jesus’ message to the Church in Laodicea.
To that Church Jesus says, “You are neither cold nor hot.
I wish that you were either cold or hot.
So because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I’m about to spit you out of my mouth.”
But this is not what Christ desires…for He goes on to plead with them, “Look! I’m standing at the door and knocking.
If any hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to be with them…
…I will allow them to sit with me on my throne, just as I…sat down with my Father on his throne.”
How sad to look back on a life missed, and say between sobs…
… “I miss Jesus”….
…but then refuse to say anything more.
Refuse to allow yourself the grace of Christ coming in, of rekindling what you once left and have regretted leaving ever since…
…With many things people often say, “There are no second chances.”
But with Christ there is another chance.
We are on a journey.
And it’s a journey where God is continually calling us back to our first love, God’s unfailing love.
If you have fallen, won’t you “repent” and open the door again?
There is nothing more important in the whole of life.
Amen.
