The Seven Lost Churches of Revelation
10/10/2004 - Learning to Love Again
Someone has said that falling in love is a whole lot easier than staying in love. Those of you who have ever fallen in love might agree with that. You remember back to those days when you were knocked off your feet, head over heels in love! All you could think about was that special guy or that special girl. You couldn't concentrate on anything else. He or she just dominated your thoughts. You were worthless to everybody else. You were in love.
And all during the day you wondered where they were and what they were doing and when you were going to see them again. You couldn't wait until that happened and so you counted down the hours, because when you were in their presence that's when you felt fully alive.
Every time the phone rang your heart skipped a beat hoping it was them. When the mail came you ran out to see if there was a card or a letter from them with your name on it. And if you got one, you opened it up and read it real fast. And then you took it to your room and shut the door and went back over it again and again real slow memorizing every single word. You were hopelessly in love and everything was right with the world!
Then you got married and made a commitment that you would love each other in plenty and in want, in joy and in sorrow, in sickness and in health, as long as you both should live. But when you said those words at the altar you really didn't believe that there would be times of want or sorrow or sickness. Maybe those things happen to other people, but they weren't going to happen to you because you were in love.
Then life hit with all its responsibilities. There were bills to pay and there was money to make and deadlines to meet and children to raise and if you're not careful you find yourself slowly drifting away from your lover. You didn't set out to, you didn't mean to, you didn't want to, but you did. You stopped spending time together and talking together and listening to each other, and doing all the things you used to enjoy doing together. And as the communication slowly broke down, the conflicts and the hurts slowly piled up. Until one day you found yourself saying, "I'm not sure I love you anymore." Falling in love is a whole lot easier than staying in love.
Now, fortunately that doesn't happen to everybody. It doesn't have to. It doesn't happen to couples that choose to do the hard work necessary to keep their love alive. But it does happen. It happens a lot. And what can be true in our relationships with each other can also be true in our relationship with Jesus Christ. Our love for Christ that once burned so hot can dwindle down to a flicker if we're not careful. So how do we keep that love alive? And if we've lost it, how do we learn to love again?
This morning we continue our fall series called The Seven Lost Churches of Revelation. It's a series that takes us into the last book of the Bible and reveals lessons that we can learn from each one of the seven Asian churches addressed in this book. If you have a Bible turn to Revelation 2:1-7.
Imagine what it would be like to receive a direct message from God, not a mass mailing, but a personal letter addressed to Valley View Community Church from God himself. I think we'd all be anxious to hear what God had to say. We'd be on the edge of our seats wondering what God thought about us as a church. What would he say were our strengths? And what would he say were areas that we need to work on?
Well, these seven churches located in the modern day country of Turkey actually received a state of the church report form God. And over the next few weeks we're going to examine each one of these performance reports and find out what they have to say to us here at Valley View .
The first letter is written to the church at Ephesus. The apostle Paul started the church around 50 A.D. The book of Ephesians in our New Testament is the letter that Paul wrote to that church after he left there to start other churches.
Ephesus was a world-class city in the first century with a population of around 250,000 people. A few years ago I visited the city and all that's left now are some pretty impressive ruins. But in it's hay day it was a cross between New York City and Las Vegas. It was a happening place! Like New York, it was built on a natural harbor that was always bustling with commercial ships coming and going. It was a center for international trade. Ephesus was also a cultural center with one of the largest libraries in the world and boasted of an outdoor theater with a seating capacity of 25,000 people.
And like Las Vegas it was a city where what you did there stayed there. And people did a lot in Ephesus. Part of the city's mystique was the great Temple of Artemis, a huge marble structure four times larger than the Greek Parthenon in Athens that we saw so much on TV this summer during the Olympic Games. The Temple of Artemis was considered one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, longer than a football field including the end zones with columns that reached five stories high.
Inside the Temple was the statue of Artemis also called Diana, daughter of Zeus, the multi-breasted goddess of fertility. The worship of Artemis was really the worship of sex. Prostitutes and all kinds of sexual immorality were a big part of the religious rituals that were practiced there. And literally hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world came to Ephesus every year to "worship" at the temple. In fact, a whole lucrative industry grew up around the temple where souvenirs and little statues of Artemis were sold to the tourists who visited.
The apostle Paul came to Ephesus for a different reason. He came there to start a church. He saw Ephesus as a strategic city for the spread of the gospel throughout the entire Roman Empire. And so on his third missionary journey he settled there and for three years he taught publicly in a rented facility like the YMCA and privately from house to house. He spent more time in Ephesus than in any other city he visited, talking to anyone who would listen about Jesus, Jews and Gentiles alike, and eventually a church was born.
And the church thrived, making such an impact on that city that eventually the temple and the industry around it went belly up. This church was making a difference in the world. It had a strong foundation of solid biblical teaching, first by the apostle Paul and then by others like Priscilla and Aquila, Apollos, Timothy, and later the apostle John himself who lived there towards the end of his life along with Jesus' mother, Mary. It had a list of believers at the core of this church that would make anybody's spiritual Who's Who list.
And now some forty years after the church was founded, God gives them their report card. And it's found in Revelation 2:1-7, "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 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 Those who have ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To those who overcome, I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God."
The report card begins with high marks in three areas. First of all Jesus says, "I know your deeds. You're an active church. There's a lot of good ministry going on around here. You're not just a church that shows up once a week for an hour and then disappears for six days. You're meeting together, you're serving together, you're giving your resources, you're caring for one another, you're praying for one another, you're opening your homes, you're reaching out to your friends and those are all good things. You get an A in deeds."
Second he says, "I know your hard work." The phrase literally means "intense labor to the point of exhaustion." This is a zealous bunch of believers. And Jesus says, "You've done some hard things for me. Living for me in Ephesus is not easy and I know that. You've had to confront false teachers who claim to be apostles, but they're really not. And at times that's been hard. You've gone toe to toe with that cult group called the Nicolaitans. And I'm glad you did. You hate their practices and so do I."
The Nicolaitans were a group of people named after their founder Nicolas who claimed that you could be a Christ follower and a follower of Artemis at the same time. In other words, you could be a Christian and go to orgies and commit immorality and practice idolatry at the temple. That's okay. No big deal. But Jesus says, "I hate it and you do too. You get an A in hard work."
Then he says, "I know your perseverance." These believers had paid a price for their faith. The apostle Paul was almost killed in Ephesus. The apostle John, who wrote this letter, was a member of this church and now he was in exile on the island of Patmos because he was a Christ follower. One scholar wrote, "In Ephesus, the grand boulevard that led to the sea changed from a thoroughfare for cargo into a highway for martyrs as thousands of Christians were led away in chains to ships bound for the Coliseum in Rome." Jesus says, "You get an A in perseverance."
This is an amazing body of believers, head and shoulders above most churches that I've ever heard of. They get an A in deeds, an A in hard work, an A in perseverance. You can't get much better than that. That's a 4.0. Straight A's until we read verse 4.
Yet, I hold this against you: You have forsaken your first love. To this church full of heroes who have faithfully and tenaciously served the Lord, Jesus says, "I have a bone to pick with you. You get a big, fat F when it comes to love! You don't love me anymore." That's a scary thought.
"You've left your first love," he says. Those are chilling words. The Greek word for "left" literally means to "release or let go of." It implies a gradual, almost imperceptible process, like erosion. The word "first" literally means "first in priority."
Jesus is saying, "You're doing a lot of good things. You're real busy, working hard, and even taking some shots for me, but you don't love me anymore. You do all this stuff for me, but it's not driven by love. It's driven by duty. It's all about should's and have to's and not about want to's anymore. And if your heart doesn't change, I'm going to have to blow out your candle, turn out your light, and shut down your church."
That's a wake up call for every single one of us who calls ourselves a Christ follower. It's so easy for us to be driven by duty in our service for Christ and not driven by love. Yet, Jesus said in Matthew 22 the first and greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. In Jesus' last encounter with the apostle Peter he asked him three times, "Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?"
I opened this teaching talking about marriage because one of Jesus' favorite illustrations of the church is the bride of Christ. It's a romantic image. We're the beautiful bride and Jesus is the handsome bridegroom and one day he's coming back to take us home to live with him and there's going to be a wedding ceremony and a lavish reception and a honeymoon that lasts forever in the best Sandal's Resort heaven has to offer.
This week I had to stop and ask myself, "Why do I do what I do in my service for Christ? Why do I study and teach and pray and give and meet with people and listen to problems and counsel and lead and do all the things that I do? What drives it all?"
And believe it or not, it's not all driven by love. I know that may surprise some of you! But I know that there are plenty of times when the deeds I do for Jesus are driven by a sense of obligation, I don't want to let somebody down, or a sense of expectation, what are they going to think of me if I do this or if I don't do that, or by guilt or by fear or by some other sick motive that is part of my flesh.
Yet, I also know there are times when my heart feels like it is going to explode with love for Christ. Often those times occur right here in worship when I get in touch with my brokenness and my desperate need for Jesus and his love. That's one reason I love our time around the Lord's Table so much, because it's often in those moments that I feel deeply loved by my Savior especially when I think of all that he did for me. Sometimes I feel that love when I'm all alone taking a walk in one of my favorite places or when God shows up in some dramatic way answering a prayer like he did recently when he provided the Sunnyside property. Things like that can just reduce me to tears. And on each occasion there's always this sense of unworthiness, even desperation, that I don't deserve this, God. You're love is amazing. I could sing of your love forever.
Our faith was always meant to be a love driven faith. Love is the strongest, most effective change agent in the world. You can motivate people for a while with fear or with rewards, but nothing over the long haul has the motivating power of love. The apostle John wrote in one of his letters (1 John 3:1), How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God!
It's possible to get so busy working for God that we neglect our relationship with him. We don't set out to, we don't mean to, we don't want to, but we do. We stop spending time together and talking together and listening to each other and reading his love letters, and doing all the things we used to enjoy doing together. And just like in a marriage, when the communication stops the love is sure to follow. So how do we keep our love alive? And if we've lost it, how do we learn to love again?
Jesus tells us how in three words found in verse 5, Remember the height from which you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first.
The first is remember. Memories have power. Often when Jennifer and I are talking with couples that say they've lost their love for each other we'll encourage them to remember back to the early days of their relationship. Remember the time when they first fell in love and all the things that once attracted them to each other. Remember the feelings they had and the things that they did together. Memories have a way of reigniting lost feelings.
Jesus says, Remember the height from which you have fallen. In other words, "Remember how bad your life once was and what God has done for you." I love talking to new believers and hearing their excitement after they first come to Christ. Often they have an insatiable appetite for the Bible. They just can't get enough of God's Word. They read it in the morning and during the day and stay up late at night reading it some more. They love to worship. In fact, I've had some of them tell me that they wish Valley View met every single day of the week just so they could worship God some more. They love being here. They love to tell others about what God has done in their lives. And often offend a bunch of people doing it. But their hearts are so full of love and gratitude that they feel like they're going to explode if they don't express it.
Jesus says, "When your love starts to fade and your walk with me seems more like a duty than a desire remember those times when you felt so close to God. Remember when you were so in touch with your brokenness and how messed up your life was and the burden of feeling like you had to earn God's forgiveness that you were just amazed at God's marvelous love and grace."
Some of us who came to Christ at a young age, can't always remember those times. But we remember other times when we felt desperate and in need of help and God came through. Do you want to learn to love again? Go back to the times in your life when your love was most alive. Remember what Jesus has done for you.
Second Jesus says, repent. Don't let that word scare you. It simply means, "change your mind." Turn around, go back to where you once were. Change the way you think. Change the way you live and do it now. Don't let the candle burn out completely.
And third, repeat. Do the things you did at first. It's never too late to learn to love again in a relationship with another person or in our relationship with God. I know what that means for me. For me that means slowing down, taking time to enjoy God and not just work for him, letting him serve me and not just serving him. Worship renews my love for him, both corporately and privately, times of solitude and quiet rekindle my love for him, enjoying rich community with friends who also love God keeps my love fresh. But when I stop doing those things the love in my heart starts to shrivel up. I can feel it and over the years I've learned to identify those times in the course of a year when that is most apt to happen.
Henri Nouwen once wrote an article that I've never recovered from. It was called "Moving from Solitude to Community to Ministry." And in it he writes these words. "The word discipleship and the word discipline are the same word - that has always fascinated me. Once you have made the choice to say, 'Yes, I want to follow Jesus,' the question is, 'What disciplines will help me remain faithful to that choice?' If we want to be disciples of Jesus, we have to live a disciplined life."
"In the spiritual life, the word discipline means 'the effort to create some space in which God can act.' Discipline means to prevent everything in your life from being filled up. Discipline means that somewhere you're not occupied, and certainly not preoccupied. In the spiritual life, discipline means to create that space in which something can happen that you hadn't planned or counted on."
"Solitude is being with God and God alone. Is there any space for that in your life? Why is it so important that you are with God and God alone on the mountain top? It's important because it's the place in which you can listen to the voice of the One who calls you the beloved. To pray is to listen to the One who calls you 'my beloved daughter,' 'my beloved son,' 'my beloved child.' To pray is to let that voice speak to the center of your being, to your guts, and let that voice resound in your whole being."
One way we keep our love alive is by allowing God to love us and often that means getting alone with him and giving him the time and the space to remind us how much we're loved.
C. S. Lewis once said, "Every Christian would agree that our spiritual health is exactly proportional to our love for God." God is looking for lovers. He wants our love more than anything else. He wants to be number one in our life. He wants to be our first priority. But it's easy to get so busy working for God that we neglect our relationship with God. We don't set out to, we don't mean to, we don't want to, but we do. We stop spending time together and talking together and listening to each other and reading his love letters, and doing all the things we used to enjoy doing together. And just like in a marriage, when the communication stops the love is sure to follow.
But it doesn't have to be that way. It's never too late to learn to love again. Remember. Repent. And repeat. History tells us that the church in Ephesus never did recapture their first love and so their lampstand was removed. I wonder what will happen to our lampstand? Will it be removed or will it burn brightly until Jesus comes?