Returning to Your First Love

TRANSCRIPT

If you will open with me to Revelation, chapter two. Revelation, chapter two and the book of Revelation is an incredible book of the Bible and it's a revelation. The first chapter tells us what it's a revelation of. It's a revelation chapter one, verse one of Jesus Christ. The book of Revelation is not the revelation of the Antichrist, it's not the revelation of the beast or the false prophet, it's not even the revelation of the last days or the end times. The book of Revelation is the unveiling, the revealing of Jesus Christ. This word revelation is. It comes from the Greek word, which means apocalypse. It is something that was hidden but that now has been revealed. And so this book is about Jesus and it's all about Jesus and it's about his victory and the victory that his people share in, as we share in Christ. And it was written to seven different churches and it was sent to these seven different churches and to each one of the different seven churches there is a specific message that was given specifically for them, and then the rest of the book of Revelation as well. So chapter one serves as an introduction. Chapters two and three are those specific messages to those seven churches, and then chapters four, through the end, give us that revelation of Jesus. And the verse that was pressed on my heart while we were praying was this first passage in Revelation, chapter two, verse one through seven, and it's the message written to the church at Ephesus.

The church at Ephesus and we read about this church at Ephesus it was a church that was very powerful. It was a church that the apostle Paul planted on his third missionary journey and he was there for about 18 months, or close to two years, actually planting this church. And in this city he established a ministry training center, a Bible school, if you will, that he taught at every single day and from Ephesus there went out missionaries throughout the whole region so that the whole area surrounding heard the gospel. It was an incredibly powerful and fruitful time of ministry there. Paul says writing from while he was there in Ephesus he says a wide open door of ministry is before me. We know that oftentimes where Paul went he didn't find a wide open door. He found a closed door, people rejecting him, rejecting his message, rejecting the gospel, him suffering even persecution. But in Ephesus there's a wide open door and in fact the gospel takes such root in that city that the idol makers start to go out of business. That's powerful.

In the city of Ephesus there was a great temple, the temple to the goddess Artemis or the goddess Diana she goes by both names and it was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, this massive temple. And they would sell these idols of the goddess Artemis, these silversmiths, to the point that the gospel was impacting the culture in the city that they couldn't sell their idols anymore. Can you imagine, can you imagine the gospel taking such root in a people, in a place, bringing such transformation? And what would that look like in our city? Can you imagine if the bars started to close? Can you imagine if the night clubs and the strip clubs and all of these places started to go out of business because the gospel was taking root in the city? Can you imagine if all of the web traffic to all of the pornographic websites stopped out of San Antonio? How amazing would that be.

And this is the kind of transformation that happened there, in the city of Ephesus, and now here, some decades later, as the apostle John now writes this message, he has this message to say from Jesus to the church at Ephesus. It says to the angel of the church at Ephesus right the words of him who holds the seven stars in his right hand, who walks among the seven golden lamps. In that is the words of Christ. Jesus says 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 found them to be false. I know you are enduring patiently and bearing up for my namesake and you have not grown weary Verse four but this I have against you that you have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember, therefore, from where you have fallen, repent and do the works you did at first 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 Nicolations, which I also hate. He who has an ear to hear, 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 thank you for your word, lord. I pray that you would use it to speak to our hearts tonight and, lord, that you would press into us these truths. Lord, that you would help me to deliver the message that you want us to hear tonight. In Jesus' name, we pray amen.

The city of Ephesus was an important city, a port city. It was there at a place of commerce and trade. It was there again that this incredible temple was, and people would travel from all over the world to come and see it with their eyes. In fact, it was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. It was a metropolis, if you will, a port city, a cultural melting pot. Think of places like London, miami, new York City, los Angeles. That was Ephesus. Ephesus had again a story past. Paul planted this church. It was there, it was powerful, but even very quickly, false teachers arose among them and began to deceive the people, and so Paul had to send Timothy there and Timothy had to go and clean house. We read about the work that Timothy had to do there in the book of 1 Timothy. He had to go and reestablish the eldership because they had become corrupted. He had to remove specific people from leadership because they had become false teachers and were teaching lies and deceit. And Timothy came in, he cleaned house and he put that church back on a good track, heading in the right direction, and some of that is mentioned here that Jesus mentions here at the beginning.

In verse two, he says I know your works, your toil and your patient endurance, how you cannot bear with those who are evil, but have tested those who call themselves apostles and are not, and found them to be false.

These are good things. These are things that he commends them for. They're not just receiving the word of God from anyone, but in fact they test it. When people would come through and would say, look, we're apostles, look, we've got a message to bring, they wouldn't just say, oh okay, here, here's the pulpit, here you go for it, knock yourself out. But instead they would test them, they would see what it was that they were preaching, they would evaluate the message that they were bringing. And he says that they couldn't bear with those who would teach false things.

You can contrast this church with the church in Corinth that was more than happy to give the pulpit to all kinds of false prophets, all kinds of false apostles, but that wasn't the church in Ephesus. And so they are to be commended for this that they can't stand those who do evil. They can't bear with them, that they don't endure them. They will not listen to them. And this is something I will say that even the church in America today could take note of the church of Ephesus. Because the church in America today too often is willing to put up with all kinds of manner of nonsense, all kinds of manner of false teaching and false prophets and so-called ministers who do not preach and proclaim the word of God or the gospel of Christ. But this is not the church in Ephesus. They will not put up with those things.

And so Jesus says I commend you in this. I know your works and these things that you're doing for me, how you're working hard, how you're enduring even the persecution that was arising against the church in these days. In verse three he says I know you are enduring, patiently, bearing up. For my name's sake, that's enduring persecution. Think about that. I mean, we live in a country where we can gather, we can worship God. We're not worried about the government coming in and shutting us down. We're not worried about being on some kind of list where we're all gonna lose our jobs or we're all gonna be rounded up and thrown into jail. We're not worried about that. We have incredible freedom to worship God in this country. I have to wonder what would happen tomorrow if the government passed a law that said you cannot gather and worship Christ anymore. I have to wonder what it would look like next Sunday. Well, in fact I don't have to wonder, because they did that three years ago and we saw what happened. The churches were empty and in fact, many churches never were filled again.

But that's not the Ephesians. They continue to gather, they continue to meet, even under the threat of persecution, and they're doing it for the sake of Christ's name. And in all of that they haven't grown weary. You know, the apostle Paul writes that we should not grow weary in doing good, in our work for the Lord, because we know that whatever we do for the Lord is never in vain. And so they've done all of these things and they've done them well. He even goes on at the end of his correction for them, because he starts with a compliment if you will a commendation, then he brings a correction and then he ends again with commending them. And what he commends them again is that they do not, will not stand, and in fact they hate.

It says, the works of the Nicolations. What are the work of the Nicolations? Well, paul, not Paul, but John ties that to what Balaam was doing in the Old Testament. Balaam was a false prophet who was synthesizing, and he was a preacher for hire, if you will. He was hired to go in to proclaim a false message and he was happy to do it because he was getting paid for it. That was the work of the Nicolations.

So the Nicolations are false teachers that are in it for profit. They're willing to tickle people's ears so that they can enrich their own lives, so that they can line their own pockets. Now, if that sounds detestable to you, it should be, and Jesus commends them for that. And so the Ephesians would not put up with the guys who go on TV and say send me $50 and I promise you God's gonna cancel all your debts. Or send me a $100 seed offering and I'll send you my special anointing oil, and if you use my oil, then you're gonna be healed of cancer.

We see all of that today, don't we see that? Am I the only one that sees that? Am I the only one whose TV picks up this stuff? I don't know. This stuff is not uncommon today. There are many today who are profiting from this type of charlatan behavior, who are deceiving many.

It's the work of the Nicolations, those who are willing to enrich themselves by preaching false messages just to become rich in this life. And he says look, you hate their works and I hate them too. And so they have a lot to be commended for. They hate the right things, but in their hatred of what is evil, their hearts have grown cold. For their love for Jesus, they hated what it was evil. And I think that we, in the day and age in which we live, where we see so much evil, do we not? Are not our TVs filled with evil? This is what they're doing in California and this is what they're doing in Washington, and this is what they're doing in public schools and this is what they're doing to kids.

These days, we see all of this evil and if we hate it, find well and good. God hates it too. But if, in our hatred of evil, we go cold in our love for Jesus, we fall into the same trap of the Ephesians. They knew their Bibles, they were doctrinally sound, they could pick out a false teacher a mile away and they wouldn't pay one second of attention to them, and all of that is good. But if you have all of that and you've grown cold in your love for Jesus. You've stumbled, you've fallen. You need to, as Jesus says here, repent. He commends them for all of this, but then, in verse 4, he says but I have this against you that you have abandoned the love you had at first. And that is the great temptation for all of us.

As we live in these days, these evil days that we're living in, it's not difficult to be overwhelmed, it's not difficult to be inundated, it's not difficult to have our minds and our hearts saturated by all of this evil and to rise up in our spirits with anger, to rise up in our spirits with frustration, to rise up in our spirits with a hatred of what is evil. But listen, it has to be motivated in a love for Christ. If it's just an untethered hatred for these things and it's not tethered to the love of Christ, you know what it's going to become. We'll be no better than the Pharisees. We'll be no better than those who claim to love God but have no relationship with Him whatsoever. And so we have to be on guard in our day, in our day and age in which we live, that everything that we're seeing and everything that's going on, that it doesn't cause our hearts to grow cold, that the evil on the outside doesn't penetrate our hearts on the inside, that we keep our fire burning for the Lord and our love for the Lord it really needs.

If we're going to have any desire to pursue what is right and to pursue what is good and to oppose what is evil. It has to be rooted in a love for God, a love for righteousness, a love for Jesus, a passion for His glory. But they had abandoned their first love, they had forsaken their love for Jesus, they had grown cold. And that's really the danger. That's the danger of those who love even doctrine and those who love to spend time in the Word of God. We have to be careful that we don't become like the Pharisees who, when Jesus stood right in front of them, they couldn't even recognize Him. When the Word became flesh, the living Word, right among them, they nailed Him to a cross.

That our love for doctrine, our love for the Word of God, it has to be tethered to our love for God. Our love for God, our love for Jesus and our love for Jesus must be tethered to His love for us. We love Him why? Because he first loved us, and so we must constantly stir ourselves up on that truth, on the truth of His love for us expressed in the Gospel. God showed His love for us in what? In that, while we were still sinners, christ died for us.

What this stops us from doing, as we tether our hearts to the love of God expressed in the Gospel, is it reminds us that, yea, but for the grace of God, there go I. That the only thing that keeps me from plunging myself headlong into the deceptions that are sweeping across our world is not my intellect, is not my great revelation. It truly is the grace of God, and it is the Gospel that reminds us of that, in that, while we were yet sinners, christ died for us, the godly for the ungodly, the just for the unjust. You see, it's when I forget that hey, I was a sinner saved by grace, hey, I was in that boat, that I begin to look down upon those who are in sin. But it's when I remember the love of God expressed in the Gospel of Christ, it's when I remember the great truths that I contribute nothing to my salvation, that it's not grace plus works that saves me, but it's grace alone that saves me, that the only thing that I contribute to salvation is, as Jonathan Edwards says, the sin that made it necessary. That's all I bring to the table is my sin and my shame and my brokenness. Even my greatest deeds of righteousness are filthy rags. That's all I bring.

And if there's anything good in my life, it's all from Him. If there's any good fruit from my life, it's all of Him. If there's any blessing in my life, it's all from Him. If there's any healing in my life, it's all of Him. If there's any love in my life, it's all from Him. If there's any fruit of the spirit in my life, it's only from Him. It's the Gospel that keeps us humble. The Gospel humbles us, the gospel flattens us, the gospel puts us on our face before God and it's the gospel that stirs us up again in our love and our affection for Christ.

And so, I don't know, maybe you're here today and you walked in and your love for Christ has grown cold. Stir yourself up on His love for you. That's where you need to start If you find in yourself that you are like the Ephesians and I think we all do from time to time. The cares of this life, the storms of this life, man, sometimes we're just beaten up day after day and we begin to become cold, we begin to become brittle, we can begin to become hard-hearted, but what softens our hearts is not when we focus on man. I don't love God enough. I don't love God the way that I should. I've grown cold in my heart. No, we don't focus on that. No, what we focus on is His love for us. If we will focus on His love for us, what we will find is our love for Him being stirred up all the more when we think about and when we reflect on and when we meditate on His love, that, even though he was rich for our sake, he became poor, that he left heaven, strone to take on human flesh and to be born in the likeness of men.

The most humble of births. I don't know if you could have a more humble birth than being born in a stable, being laid in a manger. I don't know of a more humble birth than that. The Creator of all things, the God who governs the universe, who upholds the universe by the word of His power, humble Himself to become human, to take on human flesh, to humble Himself to become so weak and to become so frail so that he could live a life without sin in our place. His perfect obedience on behalf of us and Every day he lived a day of perfect obedience was on our behalf, so that on his last day he could be nailed to that tree.

We celebrate his birth. That's what Christmas is all about. It's celebrating the birth of Christ, celebrating Christ's first day. But he came for that last day. That's why he came. He came to lay his life down as a ransom for many. He laid his life down. He says no one takes my life from me. I lay it down willingly. And he says I have the power to take it up again. God laid it all aside. Lay down the, the worship, the glory, the adoration. Think about how hard that would have been for any of us. None of us could have done it. Think about how much you like it when you just get one compliment on anything that's a nice shirt You're wearing. Oh, wow, you know. You just made my week.

Imagine being an exalted glory for all eternity with heaven, worshiping and bowing down before you 24-7 and forsaking all of that. Not to be born in a palace but to be born in a barn, to be attended to by shepherds. Jesus laid it all aside to live a life without sin, to redeem his not his friends, but his enemies. You see, we have made ourselves through sin. We had made ourselves enemies of God. But Jesus came to die to turn his enemies Into his friends, to turn his enemies into his sons and his daughters, to bring us back into the family of God. You see, without Christ we are without hope. There is no hope. Outside of Christ, there is no hope. He is our only hope. And so without Christ we are hopelessly lost. And God would have been perfectly just he would have been perfectly just to have condemned us all to an eternity of Damnation because of our sin, and he would not have violated his holiness, his righteousness or his justice In the slightest by doing just that. But God is not only a God of justice, he's also a God of love. And though he would not have violated his justice, he certainly would have violated his love. And so he has set his love upon us.

The Bible says, from the foundation of the world he loved us before the worlds even began. He loved us and he chose us and he called us and he said his affection upon us that we would be his sons and his daughters. Before the world even began, the plan was put into place to redeem humanity. Jesus is the lamb slain from the foundation of the world. Why am I telling you all of these things? Because, if your heart has grown cold, this is what you must focus on. This is what you must think on the plan of God, set forth from all eternity, that has intersected in time and space in your life. Think about the millions and the billions of people who have lived and died and never once heard the gospel. Think of the millions and billions of people who have lived and died and have never heard the gospel and have never believed the gospel. But God has chosen you and has called you and has blessed you and has entrusted you with the greatest message, with the greatest gift salvation, redemption, restoration. And it is this that we must think on, it is this that we must hold to. They had abandoned their love. Their hearts had grown cold. Jesus therefore says verse 5 remember, therefore, from where you have fallen. Remember, therefore, from where you have fallen.

Essentially, remember your first love. Do you remember those early days of your salvation? Do you remember those early days when the gospel was preached to you and maybe you had heard it a hundred times before, but there was something. For some reason, in that moment, god opened your eyes and all of a sudden you saw and the Spirit gave sight to your eyes and, though you were dead in your trespasses and sin, god in that moment made you alive in Christ. Do you remember those early days and that passion and that love and that fervor and that desire? Do you remember that hunger you had to be in His presence, the joy that filled your heart, the joy that flooded your soul? Jesus calls us to remember those days. Remember from where you have fallen.

We need to remember what that was like. We need to remember the love that we experienced in those moments and go back to those places, maybe not physically but spiritually, to repent, to return, to go back to Christ and to do the works that you did at first. This is what we all need to do from time to time. If our love for Christ has grown cold, we need to remember. We need to set our hearts on the things that he has done and that he has accomplished for us, which is great. We need to remember the great lengths that he has gone to redeem us.

I don't know what the longest road trip you've ever been on has been. I've been on a few multi-day road trips which were great lengths, with a car, minivan, full of four kids. Whatever distance you've ever traveled, that doesn't even pale in comparison to the distance from heaven to earth. It doesn't even get close to the distance that Christ walked as he headed to Golgotha carrying that cursed tree, doesn't even begin to explain the distance that then was there that separated Him from the Father. This love that they experienced, this joy, this fellowship between the Father and the Son from all eternity, past in a moment, broken, so that Christ cries out my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Do you know what separated the Son from the Father in that moment? My sin, your sin. You think about the greatest moments in your life, the happiest moments, the moments filled with the most joy, the most love, and you think about that. There's nothing like that in the whole world. And the love between the Father and the Son, any love, any joy that we experience in this life, is like the most faintest, smallest shadow in comparison to the love that is expressed between the Father and the Son face to face, all eternity. And yet Christ left all of that and was separated from that. And what separated Him from that was our sin laid upon Him. And the reason he did that was so that we, you and I, could experience the love and the joy that he had experienced between Him and the Father for all eternity. That we could be wrapped up in that love, that we could be wrapped up in that joy. He says this in John 17,. If you wanna flip over there with me quickly, john, chapter 17. Jesus as he's heading to the cross.

John 17 is known as His high priestly prayer, where Jesus essentially goes into the holy of holies as our high priest making intercession for us. In John 17, in verse one, he prays. He says Father, the hour has come, glorify your Son, that the Son may glorify you, since you have given Him authority over all flesh to give eternal life to all whom you have given Him, that's you and I, my friends, and this is eternal life that they know you, the only true God in Jesus Christ whom you have sent. This is what it's all about being brought into fellowship with the triune God. To be brought into the fellowship, to be brought into the love, to be wrapped up in it and carried up into it that we would know the one and only true God and to know His Son, jesus Christ, and he says this.

In verse four. He says I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work you gave me to do, and now, father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world began. Jesus is talking about what he's doing and why he's coming and what he's going to accomplish. He's talking about how His desire is that we would experience this love that they have experienced from all eternity. And then he begins to pray for us specifically, that's you and I who are here tonight. He prayed for us in that moment.

That starts in verse 20. In verse 20, he says I do not ask for these, only speaking of His disciples who are there, but also for those who will believe in Me through their word, that is, us. We have believed upon Christ through the testimony of the apostles. He says His prayer is that we would be one. Just as you, father, are in Me and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world would believe that you have sent Me the glory that you have given Me. I have given to them that they may be one even as we are one. I am them and you in Me. That we may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent Me and love them even as you loved Me.

See, here's what it's all about. Christ was despised and forsaken so that we would experience the love that he experienced in all eternity the love from the Father to the Son, our sin laid upon Christ and His perfect righteousness laid upon us so that we could be the recipients of that same love. He says that we would experience the love that he has loved us even as he loved Christ. That's incredible, my friends. That that's mind-bending. That God loves you as much as he loves His own Son, jesus. I can't even begin to try to wrap my mind around that, simply because of how unworthy I am. But I'm not. I don't stand before God in my own merits. I have been made worthy by the work of Christ so that I can experience this love. You loved them even as you loved me, father. I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world. Oh, righteous Father, even though the world does not know you, I know you and these know that you have sent me. I may know to them your name and I will continue to make it known that the love with which you have loved me may be in them and I in them.

How do we return to our first love? By basking in and meditating in the love that he has for us. We love him because he first loved us. Look, it's good to care about doctrine and sound doctrine. I care about that a lot. It's great to be able to spot a false teacher like that and turn it off and not listen to it. It's great to hate the false teaching of the Nicolations that Jesus also hates. But if in all of that we lose our love for Christ, we need to repent. We need to confess that sin of letting our hearts grow cold.

When Paul writes to Timothy at the end of his life Timothy who went and was the pastor of this church in Ephesus, he tells Timothy to fan into flame the gift of God that was in him. You see, oftentimes, as we go through life, our passion for the Lord, our fire for the Lord, can grow small and can grow dim, the circumstances of life, the things that we go through, the trials, the temptations, the tests, all of it. But as Paul encourages Timothy, fan into flame. You might come in here tonight and wonder I think my fire may have gone out. You would be surprised. If you just pour a little bit of oil on that fire, you just get, you just begin to worship God, you just begin to extol God, you just begin to lift him up, you begin to reflect on his love for you. Well, every time we do that, that's fanning that fire a little bit more, that's throwing another log on the flame and before you know it, what was just a smoldering ember can become a raging fire.

But guess what? That's on us. We're the ones that have to tend to our own fire. I can't do it for you. I wish that I could. Actually, I don't. It's enough work keeping my own fire going. It's our job.

We all have to do that personally. We all have to remember what Christ has done for us. Personally, I can't do that for you. I can only present the truths to you, but you are the one who has to embrace them. You are the one who has to believe them in faith. You are the ones who have to carry them with you as you leave here and go back out there to whatever is there facing you. But as you do that and as you meditate on that, and as you begin to praise and to worship God because of who he is and what he's done for you, you will find that your heart will begin to not be cold but to grow warm and to grow hot for the Lord again.

I wanna encourage you today, if you're here and you feel like your heart has grown cold, simply meditate on the work of Christ, simply meditate on his love and watch how your heart will be warmed and how your fire for the Lord will begin to burn again. Amen, let's pray, father, we do. Thank you for your word, lord. I pray for any and all of us who may be here tonight, who may be our weary, who may be have grown tired and grown cold. Lord, I pray that, even as the truths of the gospel were presented here tonight, god, that that would have been just a little bit of fuel to their fire tonight.

Lord, I pray that you would help us all to continue to remember, to continue to meditate on, to continue to live moment by moment, day by day, clinging to you and your work for us, lord, not only hating evil, but also loving you, loving you, loving you simply because you have loved us.

Father, I thank you for the opportunity we have to shine as lights in the world, as we are in you and you are in us, and your work of redemption is working through us, lord. That the glory we share with you, lord, that it would be seen on our face, that we would carry your presence with us, lord, that we would not let the circumstances of life flood our soul, but that our soul would be saturated with your spirit so that, everywhere we go, we would be ambassadors for you, sharing the love that you've poured into our hearts by your spirit. I pray your blessing to be on us as your people as we go out from this place, lord. We go out to be salt, to be light, to be ambassadors for your kingdom. Lord, we do pray over our homes, over our families, over our places of work, over our community, over our city. Lord, we do pray your kingdom come and your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. In Christ's name, we pray, amen.