Jesus' letter to the church in Ephesus, Revelation 2:1-7
Immanuel Sermon Audio
Seven - Ephesus
If you have your Bible this morning, open it to the last book in the Bible, the book of Revelation. We are going to spend a couple of weeks beginning this morning talking about Revelation chapter 2 and Revelation chapter 3. The series is called 7 and we're going to be looking at the seven letters that Jesus wrote to the seven churches in Asia Minor. So you can find your way to Revelation chapter 2, you can get your outline ready if you like to follow along there. I want to start off and I want you to think about shopping and I want you to think about how American it is to shop and how many opportunities and how many options we have as shoppers and as consumers in this country. Not everybody on planet earth shops like we shop. My wife and I recently, you know, have been shopping for a house and if you've ever done that, you know, it's not a whole lot of fun. You look at about three houses and then you forget what the first one was like and you're confused about the second one and was that in the first house? Did it have carpet? Did it have wood? You can't remember. And basically when you shop for a house, if you've done this, you know, you kind of come up with a list. If you're a type A personality, you put that list on paper like you're supposed to. If you're not a type A personality, you just kind of have thoughts rolling around in your head but you've got a list of some kind and you're thinking, okay, these are the things we want. These are the things we need and you go and you shop and you try to find something that you can afford that meets your criteria. You do the same thing when you go car shopping again, whether your list is on paper or in your head, you sort of know what you want and then you go out and you try to find a good deal but you're looking for something that fits your desires and your wishes and your needs. And we don't just do it with big purchases, we do it with all kinds of purchases. I went with my wife yesterday to the grocery store. You walk down the bread aisle at the grocery store and there's choices. You got this kind of bread and that kind of bread and whole wheat and organic and white and this, that and the other and all different prices and you shop and you find what you like the best. We do the same thing with clothing. You go to the mall or you go to your favorite store and the options are almost endless. And what we do as shoppers is we go out with an idea of what we want and we try to find something that fits our budget and our wishes and our desires. You know something about shopping as a church. You recently passed a group of people to go shopping for a pastor and some of you are wanting to know what the return policy is on that purchase. And the answer is there are no returns. I'm sorry. No returns. But you get a group of people together and what do they do? They sit down and they say, "Well, what do we want in a pastor?" Well, we want this, we want that, we want that and you go on and you try to find somebody that you think would be a good fit for your church. On the flip side of that, alright, one side is a church looking for a pastor but maybe the flip side would be a person or a family or an individual looking for a church. And some of you maybe have grown up in this church and you've just been a member of this church all your life, that's fantastic. Thank God that you have never had to church shop because it is not fun. It is not fun. I grew up in Amarillo, Texas from the nursery all the way to the newly married Sunday school class. I was in every Sunday school class in one church. Never had any question about where we were going to go, about which church family we were a part of. Brooke and I got married. We're still plugged into that church. Then we moved to Louisville, Kentucky and one of the things I never anticipated is that we would have to shop for a church. And let's be honest, it's miserable shopping for a church. Some of you might be doing it this morning. I'm sorry, just join us and end it right now, be over, be done with it. It's terrible. You go to a new place and you're trying to figure out exactly what you're looking for and is this more important or is that more important and you're interested in the preaching and the music and the kids programs and the missions and all these things and you go to another church the next week and you start comparing and you think, "Oh, I don't really want to compare. I should be more spiritual than that." I should just pray and God will tell me where to go, but you can't help but compare because we all do that. That's how we shop and it's horrible. You're in a place with a bunch of strangers and they all look like they're really nice people but they don't know you and you don't know them and so you try not to look too different and you just kind of try to fit in with everybody and everybody else knows what's going on. You have no clue what's going on and so you try to just act like you know what's going on and you nod and you're wondering where's that room at. I don't know where that room's at. There's this ministry. I don't know what that is. It's miserable but all of us have done that at some point in time whether it's shopping for a church, shopping for a car, shopping for clothing, shopping for bread, whatever. We are shoppers in the United States of America and that impacts the way we think about church and in this sermon series as we look at Revelation chapter 2 and 3, I want us to just ask ourselves a couple of questions. What if we stopped asking ourselves what we want in a church and we started asking ourselves what does Jesus want from His church? It's a completely different question. The answers are completely different. What if we stopped asking what do we want and we started thinking about what does Jesus want? The Bible says in the book of Acts that Jesus died to purchase the church. It's His. It's not mine and it's not yours. It belongs to Jesus and the real question is not what do I want in a church but what does Jesus want from my church? Here's the good news. When you ask yourself that question, you don't have to guess about the answer. You don't have to wait for a dream or some kind of vision for God to reveal to you some sort of mysterious wish list. It's right here in the Bible. Jesus writes in Revelation chapter 2 and 3, He writes seven letters to real churches that really existed at the time that this was written down. He says to these churches, "You're doing some things good and I like that. I want you to keep doing that." He says to these churches, "You're doing some things that I am not happy with at all and those are things that you need to change and you need to address." In this series, we're going to ask this question, "What does Jesus want from a manual Baptist church?" We're going to try to answer it by looking at these seven letters in Revelation chapter 2 and 3. So our first letter, if you have your Bible open, is Revelation 2. It's going to be verse 1 to verse 7 and let me just sort of give you an overarching big idea for this passage before we jump in and read it. Here's a big thought to have in your mind before we read the letter to the Ephesians. Jesus warns the church in Ephesus about the danger of a diminishing love. He's warning the church in Ephesus about the danger of a diminishing love. Keep that in mind and I want you to follow along as I read. You can follow along on the screens or you can follow along in your Bible, but we're going to read the Word of God, Jesus speaking to this ancient church in Ephesus, this is what the Scriptures say in Revelation chapter 2 verse 1. To the angel of the church in Ephesus, write, "The words of Him who holds the seven stars in His right hand and who walks among the seven golden lampstands, I know your works, your toil and your patient endurance and how you cannot bear with those who are evil but have tested those who call themselves apostles and are not and have found them to be false. I know you are enduring patiently and bearing up for my namesake and you have not grown weary, but I have this against you that you have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember therefore where you have fallen, repent and do the works you did at first. If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place unless you repent. Yet, this you have, you hate the works of the Nicoleotans, which I also hate. He who has a near let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches, to the one who conquers, I will grant to eat of the tree of life which is in the paradise of God. Let's pray. Father, we believe that these are your words. We believe that they are true. We believe that they have authority for us as individuals and Father, we believe that they have authority over us as a church. Remind us this morning that this is your church, that you sent your son to die, to purchase a manual Baptist. And Father, help us to understand the answers to the question, what does Jesus want from His church? Give us eyes to see and ears to hear from you this morning. We ask it in Jesus' name, amen. As we start thinking about this warning to a church about diminishing love, I want to admit to you upfront that there is some debate about this passage. And the debate is really simple, but there are two clear sides. One is not a heretical view and one is a biblical view. Both are biblical views, both can be proven or can be argued from the text, but I want you to understand the debate. On the one side of the debate, there are a group of people who say when Jesus warns Ephesus about diminishing love, He's talking about their love for Jesus. When He says you have lost your first love, you have abandoned the love you had at first, He's talking about their love for God, their love for Jesus. That's one side of the debate. The other side of the debate says when He warns them about a diminishing love, He's talking about their love for one another, a love that they used to have in their fellowship, their first love, that for some reason over time because of circumstances has diminished or is in danger of completely going away. My opinion is that He's not talking about their love for Jesus and that He is saying your love for each other is in danger of diminishing. And I think I can prove it to you. I know that there's arguments both ways and I just want to tell you briefly why I think this warning about love is a warning about their love for each other. For the first thing, when you read through this letter, and we're going to talk more about this in a minute, but when you read through this letter, there's a lot of positive in here. There's a lot of things that Jesus says, you guys are doing this good, you're doing this good, you're doing this good. In fact, by my count there's eight things that Jesus says, you're doing this really, really well. And then He comes around and He does have one concern about love. I think that if Jesus was saying to this church, you don't love me anymore, I think His tone would be a lot more severe. I think He'd be a lot more to the point and we'll see in some of the other letters that we look at that Jesus is a lot more severe and that His tone is not as encouraging as it is to the Ephesians. And so that's one reason I don't think He's saying you have stopped loving me. I think what Jesus is saying is you've stopped loving each other. The other reason I think that is because the Apostle Paul wrote a letter to the church in Ephesus. And if you go back and look at that letter, I think there's some clues that indicate that maybe love in that church body was an issue. And so you can read about Paul in Acts 19, he goes to Ephesus, he starts this church, and he stayed there two years. He didn't stay that long everywhere he went. Sometimes he was forced to leave almost immediately, sometimes he stayed for a couple of weeks or a couple of months. He stayed in Ephesus two years. These were people he knew, these were people he had been in church with and he had rubbed shoulders with. And look at some of the things that Paul says to the Ephesians, Ephesians 1-15, writing back to this church, he says, "I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints. I have heard that you're enduring in your faith and that you're loving each other." And Paul is saying, "This is good. I'm proud of you. I'm giving you an out of boy, a pat on the back. Keep doing these things." But look what he says a little bit later in Ephesians 4, remember, he knows these people. He's not writing a letter to strangers and he says, "Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tender hearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you." It sounds to me like Paul knows these people and he knows that bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and all the way down the list, these things might be a problem. And so he's reminding them, "Look, I've heard of your faith. I've heard of your love for each other. This is good, but don't forget. Don't fall back into this stuff." Look what he says in the very next passage of Ephesians 5. He says, "Be imitators of God as beloved children and walk in love as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us. I've heard of your love. You're doing good, but don't forget. You can't let bitterness and all this other stuff creep back into your church family. You can't let it creep back into your life. Walk in love as Jesus loved you." I think for those two reasons, because of the tone in Revelation 2 and because of the clues from Ephesians that Jesus is saying to the church in Ephesus, "Your love for each other is in danger of diminishing." Now, let me say this. I preached this passage several years ago in King Fisher, Oklahoma. In the week after I preached it, I got a nice, anonymous letter in the mail. And it kind of looked like a serial killer wrote it. You know what I mean? The letter was kind of sketchy in the handwriting, just like somebody who was just shaking when they wrote it. In the gist of the letter said, I'll just summarize it for you, it was two pages front and back. Here's the gist. You're an idiot and a heretic. That was the letter. And I don't know if it was somebody who was a member of our church. I don't know if they had watched on the local TV station. I don't know if they had listened on the Internet. I have no idea, because it was anonymous, a.k.a. cowardly. But they wrote me this letter and what I'm saying to you is, don't write me an anonymous letter. If this morning you listen to me and you want to talk about something that I'm saying there's a debate and here's where I come down, come talk to me. Let's discuss it. Let's argue about it. I'm a big boy and you can tell me what you think and I can tell you what I think and we can hash it out. Whether you think that Jesus is talking about love for God or love for people in your church, the rest of what follows in this letter is the same either way. And so let's ask these questions. Why do churches stop loving people? Why do they stop loving? And the first answer is simple. They forget that Jesus is the sovereign king. They forget that Jesus is the sovereign king. That answer, that truth, that statement on the bottom has a lot to do with whether or not a church loves each other in the fellowship. Do you understand and do you apply to your life on a regular basis the truth that Jesus is the sovereign king? Look how he introduces himself to the Ephesians. It's different in every letter in Revelation, Ephesians or Revelation 2, 1. The words of him, Jesus, who holds the seven stars in his right hand and who walks among the seven golden lampstands. If you back up to chapter 1 in verse 20, the verse right up above it says that the seven stars are angels of the seven churches and the seven lampstands are the seven churches. So you get the symbolism. The stars are the angels, the lampstand is the church. And Jesus says, here's who's writing to you, the one who holds angels in his hand and the one who walks among the lampstands. That's who's writing. I am in complete control. I have total 100% sovereign authority over all spiritual and angelic beings. And I am the one who has complete authority over all of the churches. I hold them right here in the palm of my hand. Don't forget who I am. The reality is we do tend to forget who Jesus is and we are guilty of sentimentalizing him in the worst ways. And we do this for lots of different reasons. We go to the Christian bookstore and we see all kinds of Jesus memorabilia, some of which is God honoring, some of which is not. And it just sort of dumbs down Jesus. And even at Christmas when we celebrate the birth of Jesus, we send cards with baby Jesus on it. And if you send cards with that, there's nothing wrong with it. But sometimes we never get past baby Jesus and we have this image of Jesus as just this cute little infant in our minds. Sometimes we're guilty of sentimentalizing Jesus because we grow up in church and we see these not very well done pictures of Jesus and he just sort of looks kind of like a hippie walking around and we think, oh, he's just a cool laid back guy. And Jesus says, listen, you've forgotten who I am. You need to remember that I'm the one who holds the angels in the churches in my hand. I have sovereign control and power and authority, all of it. You need to remember who I am. In other words, Jesus is not saying, not saying, well, look, there's just some interesting personalities in your church. Let's just chalk it up to personality conflict. You're having trouble loving each other because you come from different walks of life. He doesn't say that. He doesn't say, well, it's communication problems. You need to learn how to communicate better with each other. He doesn't say that. He's saying you're in danger of giving up the love that you once had for each other and part of the problem is that you have forgotten who I am. So remember, I am the sovereign king over all things. Here's the second reason churches stop loving people. They forget that Jesus expects 100%. They think that Jesus just wants them to pray a prayer. They think that Jesus just wants them to attend a Sunday school class or a mid-week Bible study. They forget that what Jesus is calling for is their entire life. That's what we just sang about, right? Jesus paid it all, all to Him, I owe. We all just sang that together. You sound beautiful. Sometimes we forget that Jesus expects 100%, look what He says in verse 2, 3, 4, and then 6. He says, I know your works, your toil, your patient endurance and how you cannot bear with those who are evil, but you've tested those who call themselves apostles and are not. You found them to be false. I know that you're enduring patiently. You're bearing up for my namesake. You have not grown weary, but I have this against you. You've abandoned the love you had at first, and He tells them to repent in verse 5. And then in verse 6, He says, this you do have, here's one more positive, you hate the works of the nickelatins, which I also hate. Did you hear the first thing He said in verse 2, I know your works. If your phone went off in the middle of the week and you've got a text message from Jesus, he says, Jesus, and the content says, I know your works. You would feel anxious, guilty, relieved, nervous. He says to this church, I know your works, and there's good news and there's bad news. Here's the good news. They're toiling for the Lord, that's good. They're enduring patiently, that's a good thing. They cannot bear with those who are evil, another thing Jesus nods and approval at. They have rooted out false apostles. Again, He talks about enduring patiently. He says they've not grown weary. He says they hate what He hates, that is the work of the nickelatins. That's the good news. Here's the bad news. Where you have abandoned the love that you once had. Paul wrote you a letter and at one point he said, I've heard of your love for each other, but he knew that it was fragile and he tried to encourage you. He tried to remind you, let all of this nasty stuff be put away. Walk in love. Love each other just as Jesus loved us and now Jesus writes to them many, many decades later and he says, you're about to abandon. You have abandoned the love that you had for each other. Now I'm an accountant by education, so I like numbers. And I read through that list of good news and bad news and I say, okay, eight good things. One bad thing. By my counting, that's an 88. You got an 88. That's not bad. That's a pretty good score. We round up and maybe we even curve you to an A and we pat you on the back and we say, job well done for the most part, it's pretty good. And Jesus says, no, no, no, I'm not interested in B pluses. I'm not asking you for 95%. I'm not asking you for 99%. I'm asking you for everything that you are as an individual in your family and as a church. Jesus expects 100%. And he says, you have stopped loving each other. Number one, because you have forgotten who I am. Number two, because you have forgotten what I have asked for you. What does Jesus want him to do? Or in other words, what does he want from an unloving church? The answer is simple. It's very clear in this letter, Jesus wants repentance. Nothing more, nothing less. He wants repentance. Verse five says this, remember therefore from where you have fallen, repent and do the works you did at first, if not, if you don't, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place. And again, he uses the R word unless you repent. Jesus wants repentance. And he says to them, if you don't, I will remove your lampstand. Lampstand, chapter one, verse 20 is the church. If you don't repent, I'll get rid of your church. You're not loving each other. I'm calling you to repent and if you don't, I'll shut you down. You can call it a promise. You can call it a thread. I don't really care what you call it. But Jesus says, if you don't do this, I will shut your doors. Now how do you think that played in Ephesus? Remember this is a letter. So they got the letter and somebody stood up in the front and said, okay, we got some mail from Jesus. Listen up. Start reading through. He said, yeah, he knows we're enduring. He knows we got rid of those false apostles. He knows that this is great, but I have this against you. You're abandoning the love that you had at first. And if you don't repent, I'm going to shut you down. I hope they repented. My guess is there were at least a few folks in the church who got huffy. You think? Ephesus was a wicked place. You can read about it in Acts 19. It was a spiritually wicked place. You can read about it from accounts outside the Bible, historical accounts. It was an evil, dark, wicked place. And my hunch is that when they heard this read in their church that somebody sat back and said, are you kidding me? It's not like there's 1st Presbyterian, 1st Baptist, 1st Methodist, right down the road in Ephesus. This is the church. That's it. And some of them probably sat back and folded their arms and said, seriously? You've got one beacon of light in this cesspool of a town and you're going to shut us down. Eight positives, one negative, and you're going to close the doors over that. Are you kidding me? And Jesus says, look. I'm acknowledging the good things you're doing, but there's a problem. You've abandoned your love for each other, and if you don't fix it, I'm going to shut you down. They may have thought Jesus needed them in that cesspool of a town, but do you remember what Jesus said in John chapter 13 verse 34 and 35? He said, a new commandment I give to you that you love one another. Just as I loved you, you're also to love one another. By this, underline those two words, by this, all people will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another. Look, Ephesus, you're doing a lot of great stuff, and I would like you to be a beacon of light in this cesspool of a town. The problem is nobody is going to know that you're truly my disciples if you don't love one another. So 88% is not going to cut it. 55% is not enough. I'm calling you to be completely 100% sold out to me, and if that's going to happen, you've got to repent of the fact that you no longer love each other. What is Jesus' promise? A loving church. That's the flip side. We've talked about the warning. What's the promise? Jesus promises access to the tree of life. He promises access to the tree of life. Verse 7 says, "He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches, to the one who conquers, or maybe your version says to the one who overcomes, I will grant to eat of the tree of life which is in the paradise of God." Takes you all the way back to the very first book in the Bible when God created Adam and Eve, and he put them in the garden, and Adam and Eve listened to Satan rather than to God, separated themselves by their sin, not only from God, but also from the tree of life. You remember the story. After they rebelled against God, they were kicked out of the garden, and Scripture says God didn't want them to eat of the tree of life and live perpetually in a state of sin forever with no hope of redemption. So he kicks them out of the garden. He removes access to the tree of life, and he begins the promises, and he begins the process of sending a Savior to fix everything. He kicks them out of the garden so they can't eat the tree, and he says to them, "I'm going to send somebody, the offspring of the woman, who's going to crush the service of the serpent's head." His heel will be struck, but the serpent's head will be crushed, and the promise is given to Abraham, and the promise is given to Judah, and the promise is given to David, and the promise is given through Isaiah and his ministry, and eventually Jesus comes, and the Bible says he came to destroy the works of the devil. He came to crush the serpent's head, and through Jesus Christ we now have access back into a relationship with God, and Jesus says here, once again, access to the tree of life. And you can flip all the way to the end of the book of Revelation, chapter 22. You can look at it later this afternoon. When everything is said and done, when Jesus comes back, his enemies are defeated, Satan is judged, unbelievers are judged, and God's people are reigning with him. It talks about you and I having access to the tree of life, where we live with God and where we live with God forever. Jesus promises the church that repents, that loves each other, that holds fast to the gospel access to the tree of life. This morning I hope that you have that hope. I hope that out there in your future you're saying, someday I want to have access to the tree of life. I want to be brought back into a relationship with God. I don't want to be separated from him now, or especially for all eternity. I want to live with him forever in paradise. I want to experience this promise that Jesus is talking about. If you've never made that hope, your hope, we're going to invite you to do that in just a little bit. We're going to give you the opportunity to come talk to Cory or talk to myself and to make the decision to repent of your sin, to believe the truth about Jesus Christ, that he came to destroy the works of the devil, and that he offers you this great hope. Before we do that, before we sing together, I want to give you a few suggestions. We've talked about the issue here is love for our church members, love for the people sitting next to you in the pew. How do you do that? Five quick suggestions, and then we'll wrap up. Number one, be present. I'm not saying you have to be here every minute that the doors of this building are unlocked, but I am saying that you cannot love the people of a manual Baptist if you're not present. So be present. Number two, serve. If you're a follower of Jesus Christ, you have gifts and talents and abilities that God gave to you, not so that you keep them to yourself, but that you use them for His glory and for the good of some church. And if you're a member of this church, God wants you to use your gifts and talents in serving for the good of the people here. So be present. Serve. Number three, pray. Pray for the people in your small group, pray for the people that sit close to you in church, pray for our staff, pray for your church. Number three, or number four, control your tongue. That's one of the ways you love a manual Baptist church is control your tongue. I don't have on the list love everything about this church. Be enamored with every person here and everything that's going on. I'm not saying that. I am saying part of loving your church family is controlling your tongue. And lastly, forgive others. Paul talked about that to the Ephesians when he said, "Let all this bitterness, let all this clamor, let all this wrath be put away and forgive one another as God in Christ has forgiven you." So those are some suggestions for you to think about this morning. Here's what we're going to do. I'm going to ask you to bow and spend just a moment in reflection, a moment in prayer. Our band is going to come up and we're going to worship together, but I want you to think about what we've seen in Revelation 2 and Revelation 3 about what does Jesus want from his church? We see the things that he commended Ephesus for and we see the things that he rebuked him for. We've seen the promises of life, we've seen the warnings of the lampstand of this church being removed. Father, we come to you humbly and Father, we are grateful for the privilege of being a part of the church that Jesus shed his blood to purchase. It's his church and we want the most important burning question on our hearts this morning to be, "What does Jesus want from us?" And as we read in on the mail that the Ephesians received many, many, many years ago, Father, we pray that you would open our eyes. We pray that you would give us ears to hear what the Spirit is saying to your people. Father, we pray that if we need to repent that we would do it this morning, if there are people that we need to extend forgiveness to or people that we need to ask forgiveness of, we pray that we would do it before we leave, that we would do it today. Father, we as a church, as families, as individuals, do not want to be guilty of losing love for each other. We want all people to know that we are your disciples by the love that we have for each other. And so Father, whatever that looks like in our lives as individuals and as a church family, we pray that you would drive these truths home to our hearts, that you would bring conviction into our lives where we need to be convicted, and Father, that you would give us the will to respond in a way that would honor Jesus Christ. We pray all of this in Jesus' name, amen. Stand up and we're going to sing together. As we sing, if you have a commitment or decision you want to share publicly, come down front, Corey will be up here, I'll be on the other side, we'd love to visit with you or pray with you, if you'd like to pray at the front, you're more than welcome to do that. Maybe your response this morning needs to take place right where you're at in worship. Maybe you need to go visit with somebody like I prayed about just a second ago. Tyler, you guys lead us and we'll take a moment to worship. [ Silence ] [ Silence ] [ Silence ] [ Silence ] [ Silence ] [ Silence ] [ Silence ] [ Silence ] [ Silence ] [ Silence ] [ Silence ] [ Silence ] [ Silence ] [ Silence ] [ Silence ] [ Silence ] [ Silence ] [ Silence ] [ Silence ] [ Silence ] [ Silence ] [ Silence ] [ Silence ] [ Silence ] [ Silence ] [ Silence ] [ Silence ] [ Silence ] [ Silence ] [ Silence ] [ Silence ] [ Silence ] [ Silence ] You [BLANK_AUDIO]
Sermons from Immanuel Baptist Church in Odessa, Texas