Pastor Thanael Certa-Werner
Scripture | Revelation 2:1-7 (NIV)
“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 people, 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 the love you had at first. 5 Consider how far 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 Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To the one who is victorious, I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God.
This is the Word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Today is the day! We are beginning our last sermon series together – but it’s a good one. Over the course of the next seven weeks, we’re diving into the Book of Revelation. (Note: The book is called Revelation – not Revelations) The Book of Revelation is the final book of the Bible and it contains visions and understandings imparted to John when he was exiled on the island of Patmos. In the second and third chapters of the book, Jesus – through John – writes seven letters to seven churches of the ancient world. Each of these letters addresses some aspect of the faith that Jesus is calling those churches to. While, like all scripture, these letters were written for a specific time and people, their message rings true for us today. Over the course of these seven weeks, we’ll be exploring these letters and discovering the power they hold for the Church and how they can help us spark revival in our own hearts and lives.
To start, I want you to think of someone you really love. Picture them in your mind’s eye. Think about what it is that you love about them. Now, let me ask you, with them in mind, how do you maintain that love? What do you do to ensure that love continues on living and doesn’t die out? Do you regularly go out on dates or spend one on one time with them? Do you give them gifts? Do you do things for them? Do you tell them how much they mean to you? Whatever you do, something we can agree on is that love takes effort.
Without regular contributions, love begins to wither. And sometimes, if we don’t have built in checkpoints for our relationships, we can start to forget to feed that love like we have in the past. This is actually a theme for a holiday invented in the 1920’s called Sweetest Day. Have any of you heard of it? It’s a day that was created to celebrate the love of your wife, your husband, your neighbor, your friends – the love of everyone. This is what the original flyer said in introducing Sweetest Day to Cleveland, OH in 1923:
“Love is always the dominant motif in a successful life. Most of us have love in our hearts, but too often it remains there, never manifesting itself before those who inspire it. Perhaps the business of living in this day and age when every moment requires energy and exertion, precludes the constant exhibition of sentiment. … The Sweetest Day in the year came into being because the founders recognized the eternal tendency of men and women to become so engaged in the rush and whirl of life, and to forget the finer, more appealing things.”
What the people who put this flyer together realized is what we’re focusing on today: that humans often drift away towards second best. Without focus and checkpoints, we become complacent and take our loved one for granted. The same is true for our relationship with God. This is the primary reason that Jesus writes His letter to the first church: the church of Ephesus. Listen closely to His words:
“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. I know your deeds, your hard work and your perseverance. I know that you cannot tolerate wicked people, that you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them false. You have persevered and have endured hardships for My Name, and have not grown weary. Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken the love you had at first. Consider how far 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. But you have this in your favor: You hate the practices of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate. Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To the one who is victorious, I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God.”
In the first century, when the Book of Revelation was written, Pergamum was the capital of the province of Asia in the Roman Empire, but Ephesus was the major metropolis of the region. In fact, it held more political, financial, and cultural power than the actual capital of the region. It was consider the gateway to Asia, the Light of Asia. By the time the letter that we’re focusing on today, the city would have had a population of around 250,000. More importantly, Ephesus was home to the Roman Imperial Cult. See, the Roman emperors styled themselves as gods and as such they needed to have temples, priests, and followers. The Imperial Cult was that structure and it was entrusted to the city of Ephesus. The very people who most sought after the destruction and death of Christians – Claudius, Nero, and Domitian – were worshiped in this city as literal gods.
You might assume that Christianity struggled in this environment, but the opposite was true. The Church found the city of Ephesus fertile ground and grew quickly. They had a fantastic start, but they would soon see that the real goal of any church is not have a flare at the beginning but a sustained burn throughout time.
If we break the letter down, it seems to clearly present a faithful church. It seems clear that even though they lived in the center of pagan faith and the religion of the Caesar, they were willing to seek after and be a part of the Kingdom of God where Jesus is King of Kings, and Lord of Lords. Jesus specifically lifts up their hard work at staying true to the Words of His teaching, for learning them and not allowing for false prophets to take root. In other words, they have everything down when it comes to the form and understanding of the faith. They know the faith and they live it out with proper actions. But what Jesus takes issue with is what’s at the center of it all: their love.
He says, “Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken the love you had at first.” It seems that the Christians of Ephesus had forsaken the very core of what had made them a community that was so able to grow in the first place. They had lost their love for Christ – the love they felt when they first loved Him and first felt His hand upon their hearts. Our first experiences with the things and people we love leave lasting marks on us – they engrave their mark upon our lives.
Remember the first time you felt the love of another. Remember the first time you experienced the love of a game or a movie. But the first time we experience the love of Christ does more than any of that, it not only engraves our lives, but our very souls. Yet, just like with all kinds of love, we can drift away from that experience and can forget the feeling we felt. We start to live differently and more father away from that love, which pulls us away faster. This is what the church at Ephesus must have been going through. They had stopped being filled with the love of Christ which had first filled them. They had stopped being focused on the people outside of them and started focusing solely on themselves and what it meant for them to continue the faith. The acts of faith and worship were starting to be something that served them, which was for their benefit and use – and stopped being for God as a means of His love to be shared with all the people of Ephesus.
What is the solution to this problem then? How do we recapture our love? Jesus tells the Ephesians, “Repent and do the things you did at first.” Jesus is calling those whose love is burning low to remember their first interaction. To look back upon the engraving on their souls and remember what it was like to love Christ first. More than that, Jesus is calling to return to the way we used to be and to do what we used to do. Beyond loving Christ as we did at first, it means working to maintain that love and not letting it go.
What this really means is allowing Christ to be first and foremost in our lives. It means reprioritizing our lives to dwell in the love of God for the sake of our love. The reality of life is that we want to love. We want to love other people, love our jobs, love our lives. And in the course of loving those things, it can almost be too much. It can become more and more difficult to figure out how to love all the different things that in our lives that we are supposed to love. How do we effectively love our jobs, our wives, our husbands, our mothers, our fathers, our children, our friends, our aunts and uncles – and to top it all off, love God?
The sad truth is that we often allow our love of Christ to drop off in order that we can love these other things more fully. But when we do this, we are separating ourselves from the source of love itself. We take the already overworked and low-burning flame of our love and snuff out its fuel.
What Christ warning the Ephesians of is what happens when you try to love under your own power. He warns that if you take away the source of your flame, your light will go out. The love you have for the Word of God, the love you have for the church, for its people, for the works of faith – all of it will burn out if you love without fuel. And when that happens, when your light goes out and your flame is gone, Jesus says, “I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place.”
So how do we go to the source? How do we depend solely on Christ for our love? How do we maintain our love for Christ? The reality is that we do it the same way we love others well. We establish checkpoints and commit ourselves to doing the work of love. This is best done through the work of Spiritual Disciplines. There are thousands of these which have been honed by the church over the millennia. But, the most common are through regular prayer, regular scripture reading, regular worship, and regular giving.
Jesus Himself engaged in these disciplines. Throughout the scriptures, He goes off by Himself to pray. He reads and meditates on the scriptures. He spends time with His followers, worshiping God. Most of all, He showed us what it means to love God and love others. A church where love ceases can no longer function properly as a local expression of Christ’s body. But a church which is overflowing with love is exactly what the body of Christ is meant to be.
Christ ends his letter to the Ephesians with a promise. He looks to the garden of Eden in which the tree of life resides. He promises the church that anyone who hears this message and allows it to change their lives will experience eternal life. This is because love is the source of eternal life. If we want to experience personal revival and revival in the church, if we want to know the sweet fruit of the garden of Eden, let us begin by remembering Christ’s own words in Matthew 22:37-39: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”
May it be so. Amen!
