Revelation 2:1-7
seated. Please turn in your copy
of the scriptures to the book of Revelation to the second chapter. We’ll be taking a brief break
from the book of Philippians. Today’s passage gives us an insight
into what Jesus thinks of his church. And so the subject of
our sermon is the state of the church. It’s been assembly week
and so oftentimes when I come back from General Assembly or
General Synod I have done a lot of thinking about the church.
I have lots of things swirling around in my mind and this passage
came to my heart early in the week and so I think we’ll find
great benefit from it. As you’re making your way to
chapter 2 of Revelation, I have a friend who listens to a lot
of sermons on his podcast and he says, have you ever listened
to a sermon in fast forward? says you can make Sinclair Ferguson
and Derek Thomas and all these guys talk really fast. I realize
our day has been full and we still have the Lord’s Supper
and so maybe you’ll catch me in a little fast-forward mode
here. I don’t think some of you will complain. But let’s hear
from God’s Word, the second chapter of Revelation verses 1 through
7. This is Jesus saying to John
the Apostle, to the angel of the church in Ephesus write,
The words of him who holds the seven stars in his right hand,
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 you have tested those who call themselves
apostles. and are not, and you have found
them to be false. I know that you are enduring
patiently and bearing up for my name’s sake, and you have
not grown weary. But I have this against you,
that you have abandoned the love that you had at first. Remember,
therefore, from where you have fallen, repent and do the works
that you did at first. If not, I will come to you and
remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent. Yet
this you do have. You hate the works of the Nicolaitans,
which I also hate. He who has an ear, let him hear
what the Spirit says to the churches. To the one who conquers, I will
grant to eat the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God. Amen. Pray with me. Our Lord
and God, please bless now your holy word. May it convince and
convert sinners and comfort and build up your saints. By your
Holy Spirit, we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen. For some 17 or 18
years now, if I have, as I have ridden down interstate 85 towards
Charlotte, I’ve noticed as I’ve headed South on the left, this
little building that looks like, it looks like a bunker. In fact,
it looks like something of maybe a captain or chaplain Bates,
uh, uh, barracks type, uh, uh, building that he had over in
Afghanistan, but it’s, it’s, It’s over on the side of Interstate
85. It’s a metal low building. It looks like some sort of bunker
or a building that you might pull a tractor into. And always
over the years, I just saw it last week, it has had this, maybe
a little boys erector set type cross on top, maybe that was
put together by pieces of metal and somehow wired up to the top. It’s a little church building.
And as I’ve ridden by that building over the years, I’ve noticed
it and thought about it and wondered what in the world is going on
in that place. I’ve thought about what type
of church it is, what type of gospel is proclaimed in it, what
type of doctrine is taught, what type of people go there, if anyone
at all. Now, I’m pretty sure there are
signs of life in that church because over the years it’s been
a little Baptist church and I think it’s been a little something
else. It’s changed names and changed hands. So something is
taking place in there. Or it’s a front for something.
It could be that also. But you know, we judge churches
by appearance. We judge churches by appearance
and did you know that you could drive by on a main street in
any town and see a grand old building that had been standing
there for years with tall Roman columns, a steeple and spire
reaching into the sky with a pipe organ that swells and can shake
the ground that even a bystander outside its doors. might feel. It can have an orator and the
pulpit who speaks with such command of the English language that
people love to listen. And did you know that the little
church I see on Interstate 85 could be more full of abundant
life than a grand church on Main Street? You see, we judge churches
by the cover. We judge them by the outside.
We judge them by their grandeur. We judge them by their slick
advertisements and the things that our eyes see. But we must
remember that Jesus judges the church much like he judged the
brothers of little shepherd boy David when God was looking for
a king. God judges the heart. He judges
the reality of what is taking place in our lives in big steeples
and large columns and shiny pews and loud organs or little metal
buildings on the side of the interstate overgrown with kudzu.
God sees into the reality and into the hearts of churches.
And Revelations chapter 2 and chapter 3 are what we call the
seven letters to the seven churches where Jesus speaks into the church. Now, Revelation is full of all
kinds of imagery and apocalypse and prophecy and all kinds of
things that many of us don’t understand. But let me say this
to you basically. Jesus in this passage is ministering
to his churches in the last days. We are in the last days. Jesus
has risen. He is ascended into heaven. He
is ruling and reigning his church from on high. And when John the
apostle, who would have been the third church, or third pastor
at the church of Ephesus, it would have been Paul the planter,
Timothy the second pastor, and now John the old apostle. When
John is on the Isle of Patmos, basically a prison isle for the
sake of the gospel, being persecuted, Jesus wants to encourage John,
and what he writes is meant to encourage us, the church, You
know, sometimes we say we’re living in 2017, things are miserable,
things are dark. How could the church survive
and thrive? Well, revelation is written to
encourage us in such dark times. And so in chapter two, verses
one through seven, we have Jesus saying to the church at Ephesus,
he’s saying to us, I know the realities that you’re facing.
I know the context in which your church exists and in the ministry
you are trying to do, I walk among the lampstands. The lampstands
being the faithful, light-bearing churches in the world. Now, you’ll
notice that one of the things Jesus will do is he’ll threaten
to remove the lampstand. If you’re not a faithful church,
I’ll have you stop bearing light. And so sometimes we wonder why
churches peter out or why churches even carry on even though they
are no longer bearing light. Well, God knows, and he knows
how to sustain his truth. churches, and that’s what he’s
encouraging them to do in this passage today. I want you to
leave here today understanding this. We need to love and adore
Jesus. Jesus is our first love, and
this passage reminds us that if we have lost our first love,
and our first love ought to be Jesus, then we need to rekindle
that flame. Now I want you to understand
chapter 2 verses 1 through 7 in light of chapters two and three.
Chapters two and three are Jesus’ letters to the seven churches,
and it is like a royal proclamation. We understand that in the Old
Testament, God proclaimed his will to his churches through
prophets, and they proclaimed their message often through royal
proclamation. I come and I speak on behalf
of the king, and that king is God himself. Here it is, King
Jesus. And so this is a royal proclamation,
and it requires that we listen, that we heed the warning, that
we take the encouragement, and that we decide, because of the
work of the Spirit in us, to obey Almighty God. I want us
to notice a couple things that Jesus does for the church at
Ephesus. The first thing is that he affirms
them. I was always taught as a young pastor that you need
to lather a man before you shave him. You know, sometimes you
get out of seminary and maybe Chaplain Bate can relate to this. We like to shave people and we
don’t like to lather them first. We just like to give them the
straight up gospel, the straight up reform faith. You need to
get right or get left. That’s how we want to put it.
Maybe that’s your prison ministry approach. Who knows? But we should
lather a man before we shave him. And that is exactly what
God does here. He affirms before he accuses. You see, the second point we’ll
look at is that he accuses the people of God at Ephesus. But
first, he affirms. Look at verses two and three.
He says many wonderful things. 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, and you found them to be false.
I know that you’re enduring patiently and bearing up for my namesake,
and that you have not grown weary. He sang to this little church
at Ephesus in the midst of a Roman and pagan world. I know that
you’re a hard working congregation. You’re teaching Sunday school.
You’re proclaiming Jesus. You’re being a witness in your
neighborhoods. You’re making it possible for
the gospel to be preached, for Jesus to be praised on Sundays. You’re playing the piano. You’re
playing the organ. You’re supporting missionaries. You’re writing
them letters. On and on it could go, I know that you are working
hard, but you’ve lost your spark. You’ve lost that twinkle in your
eye. Men, you’ve heard this in your
home sometimes. Your wife says to you, honey, when we were first
married, you used to unload the dishwasher, but you’re not unloading
the dishes anymore. And she says to you, I want to
go back to a day when you used to love me by unloading the dishes. That’s in a little sense of what
Jesus is saying to the church. You used to love me. You used
to have a twinkle in your eye, a spark in your life that served
me. So he’s affirming, but notice
also in verse four, he is accusing. He says in verse four, I have
this against you. You’ve abandoned the love that
you had at first. He’s direct. He’s clear. You know, we quote that little
verse, Paul to Timothy, all scripture is breathed out by God. And it
is useful for teaching and rebuking and for correcting and training
and righteousness so that the man of God may be thoroughly
equipped or fully furnished to do the work of God. And we love that verse. It helps
us say to our other friends in the world who don’t believe in
the word of God, my Bible is true. We love to say that. But
let me ask you this. Do you like it when the Bible
steps on your toes? What do we say the preacher’s
done when he’s gone from preaching? He’s gone from preaching to meddling. And that’s exactly what Jesus
is doing in his seven letters to the seven churches. And it’s
what he’s doing here in verse four of chapter two, the first
to the church at Ephesus. He’s gone to meddling, he’s accusing
them. He’s accusing them of having
forgotten what they used to hold dear. Oh, you’re doing good work. Oh yes, you’re teaching Sunday
school and giving your tithes and offerings. There’s a lot
of things they’re doing really well. But here’s what we need
to understand, you brothers and sisters, it is possible to play
church. It is possible to do church.
And I’m speaking both as members and as your pastor. It is quite
possible for me to play church, for me to put on this robe, for
me to write out a little sermon, for me to open my Bible, for
me to lead worship, just as it is for you to serve in your capacities.
It is possible to play church and to have forgotten that Jesus
is our first love. And you know, sometimes we say,
It’s not very nice when somebody tells us we’re doing something
wrong. Oh, it’s not very nice for someone to accuse us. Oh,
it’s not nice to be. Reproved. I have a little side
note in my Bible beside verse four and verse five, and it’s
the word grace. And I tell my children this very
often, I don’t know if they believe it yet. It’s taken me till this
age to believe it. It is a grace, dear brothers
and sisters. It is a grace when someone, especially
in our passage when it is Jesus, comes to us and says, stop what
you’re doing. Think about it for a moment and
let’s do the right thing. What a grace and mercy it is
for someone to love us enough. What do we say? What does the
Bible say? It’s better to have a wound from a faithful friend. Wouldn’t that be better than
just having a faithful friend who’s really not so faithful?
And they never encourage us or press us or push us or pursue
us. So Jesus here is accusing and
he says three things that they need to do. You need to remember
from where you have fallen. You need to repent of your sins
and go the other way. And then you need to recover
or repeat the things you used to do. Remember, this is a. challenge to ongoing remembrance. Sometimes we tie a little string
around our finger. Sometimes we put sticky notes
on the bathroom mirror or beside our keys or wallet as we’re gonna
grab things and leave home and not want to forget an important
errand. We need to have a lifestyle of
remembering. That’s why Lord’s Day after Lord’s
Day, we come to God’s house and hear from God’s word and are
with God’s people so that we might be encouraged to remember
the things that are important. How often do you make it to about
Tuesday or Wednesday? And you can’t really remember
what happened in church. And maybe by the next Sunday
comes around, you say, I wonder what the sermon was on last week.
I wonder what it’s going to be on this week. Or I wonder what
God’s taught me in Sunday school. Sometimes we just forget. And
God says, remember. That’s why we have the Lord’s
Supper today. What does it say on the front
of our table? If that cloth were not there, etched in that table,
do this in remembrance of me. What does God know about us?
We forget. We forget. Remember. repent, turn, stop,
quit going the wrong way, go the right way, and then recover
or do again the things that we used to do once again. Maybe if it’s true for some of
you men, you don’t love your wives as much as you used to
when you were first married, or maybe you have a car that
you bought, and when it was new, it was shiny, and you washed
it every other day. When the birds messed on it, you got out
there and hosed it off, and you loved that car, kept good care
of it with a baby diaper, but when it’s about 12 years old,
you know, the love and wonders lost. But there are things in
our lives that are deserving of our love and wonder and care
every day, and that is especially true of Jesus. There’s a third
thing he does. He affirms, he accuses, but he
admonishes. We find that in verse 7. He says
in verse 7, He who has an ear, 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. Jesus is saying to us as the
king of the church, through this royal proclamation that is his
holy word, that is the book of Revelation, that is his seven
letters to the seven churches, that is a special proclamation
in a sense to the church at Ephesus, but these are universal letters.
These are meant to be heard. by all churches throughout all
generations, the seven churches, the sevens being a completion,
a whole picture. He admonishes us. He says, listen
up and listen. Good. Listen up and listen. Well,
we need all ears. There’s urgency. Repeat. Remember, repent and recover.
Repeat the things that you used to do. You see what is happening. is the Christian saints under
persecution, the Christian saints under the normal hard labor of
life in the church. You know, we get busy keeping
nursery and putting out schedules and coming over and rolling out
the trash cans. We get busy writing sermons and playing organs and
pianos and producing bulletins. We get busy in the life of the
church, doing the things of the church. And don’t you know, we
can just sometimes simply forget that it’s all about loving Jesus,
that it’s all about adoring the Savior. We’ve had a treat today
with this new song that our choir has been singing and now we were
able to sing. Aren’t those wonderful words?
They speak of all the wonderful things that Jesus has done for
us to make us his own children. And so these types of songs help
us to remember our first love, to help us with our spiritual
needs, You see, Jesus is speaking to his church because he wants
them to not only not just simply do church. He wants them to love
Jesus and worship him, but he wants them overall big picture
to endure, to live through 2017, to live through all the attacks
on marriage and identity, to live through the cultural wars
that we’re facing. He wants us to live through all
the battles that face Christians and persecution. He wants our
brother in Turkey to make it through his imprisonment there.
And he wants us to make it faithfully so that we will land safely on
heaven’s shore. If you’ll notice at the end of
each of these letters to the seven churches, he says, if you
listen and obey, there’s a promised blessing. And here in verse seven,
it is this, if you listen, If you obey, if you conquer or overcome,
I will grant you to eat of the tree of life, which is in the
paradise of almighty God. And so brothers and sisters,
what is our challenge? Our challenge is not to be careless, but to
love Jesus. And if we’ve lost our first love,
if that twinkle is not in our eyes and that spark is not in
our heart for Christ, if we’ve forgotten Jesus, our love for
the gospel has waned. If we’re living on our own, and
not loving Jesus with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength,
then we need to hear this wake up call. And what is he promising? He’s promising that we, if we
overcome by faith in Jesus and perseverance to the end, that
we will reenter that garden. Do you remember when Adam and
Eve sinned? God put them out of the garden. I used to think
that was the most horrible thing. Remember, he put the flaming
swords there. You’re not going to go back in. And why was it
that they could not go back into the garden? It’s so that they
would not eat of the tree of life and live forever in their
sin. But now look at this promise.
If you have laid hold of Jesus by faith and you are no longer
living in death, but in life, God wants you to live forever
in glory with him. And so the great promise The
great promise is no longer banishment, but it’s to be with Jesus in
the presence of almighty God. And it’s in his garden of paradise
with the tree. Let us pray together. Our Lord
and God, we thank you for this, your word. We thank you for coming
into our midst week after week. And by your word and spirit,
you affirm us, you accuse us, but you also admonish us. And
help us today through these three things to be admonished to love
Jesus more and to worship him with all our hearts, minds, soul,
and strength. And we pray it in his name, amen.