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TEXT

 

Revelation 2:1-5 "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.  2 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.  3 I know you are enduring patiently and bearing up for my name's sake, and you have not grown weary.  4 But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first.  5 Remember therefore from 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.'"

 

Love or Die

 

What an amazing thing to have the unseen Christ who sees all things give a commentary on this or any church.  I often wonder how Jesus would describe Kaleo.  If I were the one receiving a message dictated by Jesus about the church at San Diego, called Kaleo, what would I read?  What would Jesus commend and what would Jesus rebuke? 

 

For the church in Ephesus, Jesus speaks a truth that would have been strange and troubling.  You see, Jesus begins by commending the church for its faithfulness and endurance.  Jesus says to them, "I know your works, your toil and your patient endurance."  Jesus sees all their hard work.  Jesus sees all their toil in difficult times.  Jesus sees their patient endurance, their willingness to wait upon the Lord.  He says, "I see you, I know you."  He's not unaware of all they're doing.  He has taken notice of the good of this church. 

 

Jesus also says that He knows how much they've fought against false doctrine through false apostles.  How they've engaged in battle and were willing to spend themselves to make sure God's truth wasn't distorted.  They are actively fighting against evil in their midst and exposing it when it is found. 

 

Jesus reassures this church that He knows that in all their patient work they haven't grown weary in their pursuit of Jesus' glory, His name sake, to be known among all people.  These are indeed words of great encouragement.  You can almost see the hearers, scarred from the battle, having lost friendships along the way, sigh in relief when the letter is read to them, looking at one another with a smile on their faces. 

But this smile quickly turns south.  Jesus' next words to this church are troubling.  They are shocking.  And His words to the church at Ephesus are some of the most frightening I can imagine were I to receive this letter from Jesus for Kaleo.

 

In verse 4 Jesus moves from recognition to rebuke.  Of all their labor, all their work, all their toil, all their patience, and all their energy focused on the face of Jesus, they have forgotten something of infinite importance.  Jesus says, "This I have against you, you have abandoned the love you had at first."

 

Jesus says to them, "Of all your righteous endurance, of all your patient and hard work for Me, you've forgotten what is most important.  You've forgotten the love you had at first.  If all your work is out of a duty to sound doctrine, a duty to endure hardships, and a duty to purge evil from your church but you've failed to love Me, then you've failed at everything.  I know you've worked hard, but what I want is for you to remember your first love."

 

Paul says as much in a famous passage in 1 Corinthians 13:

 

1 Corinthians 13:1-3: "If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.  2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.  3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing."

 

Do you hear what Paul is saying?  Paul understands what Jesus is telling the church at Ephesus.  Paul dares to say that if we have all of these gifts and all of this excitement, and all the knowledge and all the faith, but are missing love, we're nothing.  It's all meaningless.  If I have all the courage to be a martyr for Jesus but lack love, I gain nothing.  There is no reward for my sacrifice. 

 

After this rebuke Jesus demonstrates His love for this church by giving them instruction so that they would not have Christ turned against them.  He calls them to remember.  What do you think they have forgotten?  The gospel.  In the gospel we learn that we love God because God first loved us (1 John 4:19).  In the gospel we hear of the truly loving One who came for us.  We hear of the promise of God that tells us that all our hatred, all our despising of God and His goodness was swallowed up in Jesus' death and was victoriously defeated in Jesus' resurrection. 

 

They have forgotten the gospel of grace where God's love is shown most clearly.  Jesus is calling them to remember the love they had at first.  He isn't calling them to remember some fleeting feeling, but the very basis for that love, the content of that love, the very person of that love, Jesus.  He then calls them to repent and to do again the works that they once did.  In other words, their community life should turn from their coldness of heart and go back to their life of worshipping Jesus as they once did. 

 

If not, Jesus says He will come back and put out their lampstand.  Unless they repent, Jesus is basically telling them "Love or die."   

 

What strange words.  What a strange warning-love or die. 

 

No one ever demanded such a thing in antiquity.  The love of God was already a ridiculously difficult concept to understand in a world run by justice not love.  This was a world that at first couldn't fathom that God would love them.  At least, not in any intimate way.  Alexander Strauch in his book called Love or Die, says this:

 

No ancient or modern philosopher-Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Russell-ever taught such far-reaching ideas about love. No political figure, from Julius Caesar to Winston Churchill, has made such demands upon his followers to love. And no religious teacher, whether Buddha, Confucius, or Mohammed, ever commanded his followers to love one another as he loved them and gave his life for them. No other system of theology or philosophy says so much about the divine motivation of love (and holiness), or expresses love to the degree of Christ's death on the cross, or makes the demands of love like the teaching of Jesus Christ and his apostles.

 

This is unique to the Christian message.  This idea of love being the foundation of all things might be sentimentally held today, but the weight and beauty of it is owed solely to Christianity.  In the Far East, love is an illusion.  In the Middle East, love is not that important.  In the West, love is everything and nothing.  In the Near East of 1^st century Palestine a love that doesn't fit into either of those categories was shown off most clearly in the person of Jesus Christ who was given as a love gift from God to this world.  Jesus came to show that love is everything and something, more importantly, Someone.    

 

True love does exist.  And because it exists there is a God who has given it and is the basis and foundation for it, and is the one who defines it by His very nature and actions.

 

This gift was given to restore what we were originally built for. 

 

Defining Love

 

There are a number of poems, paintings and plays that are artistically created to show us something of love.  Each artist attempts to give a glimpse of what they think the meaning of love is-some works are born of heartbreak, some through a flood of praise, but all try to say something about love.

 

The one thing we learn about love from various artists and certainly in movies of our day, is that when you fall in love with someone you want to completely give yourself away.  You want to let all your defenses down and be vulnerable by giving your heart away (my son, give me your heart). 

 

In movies, we also see the heartbreak of love because when you love someone and give yourself to them, you're giving yourself to a human being who is flawed and therefore will let you down.  They will hurt you.  It is inevitable.

 

Love seems to be divine because it is grand, yet fickle because it doesn't seem lasting. 

 

Do you have a view of love that can account for the various kinds of love, the kind that C.S. Lewis speaks of?  Or are you one-dimensional in your view of love because it has been reduced to only one aspect of love? 

 

Can you account for and explain the various kinds of love?

 

Kinds of love

 

Love is Everything

 

This view believes that love is everything, love is all.  This is a view that believes that if you can just find love, everything will be alright.  Most of us start out this way.  We enter into relationships with a view that finding the right person to fall in love with will make us happy and fulfill us all our days. 

 

This is what makes brutish men write poetry, even if it's bad!  This kind of love feels cosmic and divine.  It makes us use words that are lofty, that have a kind of eternal quality to them.  Even the most logical or most masculine of men fall prey to this and can end up writing and singing love songs.

 

I always find it humorous when rappers try to write love songs.  Not because I dislike rap, quite the opposite, but because rappers are artists that are hyper-macho.  They are all about being tough, being rich, and being able to get the girl.  It's all chest-thumping at its extreme, so when they write a love song they sound like this from the beloved LL Cool J:

 

Romance sheer delight how sweet
I gotta find me a girl to make my life complete
You can scratch my back, we'll get cozy and huddle
I'll lay down my jacket so you can walk over a puddle
I'll give you a rose, pull out your chair before we eat
kiss you on the cheek and say ooh girl you're so sweet
It's deja vu whenever I'm with you
I could go on forever telling you what I do
But where you at you're neither here or there
I swear I can't find you anywhere
Damn sure you ain't in my closet, or under my rug
this love search is really making me bug
And if you know who you are why don't you make yourself seen
take the chance with my love and you'll find out what I mean
Fantasy's can run but they can't hide
and when I find you I'm gon' pour all my love inside
I need love

 

LL isn't the only one that's made sweet, sappy love songs.  For those of us that are older, we have our own sappy songs that epitomize bad love songs. 

 

       Longer than there've been fishes

         in the ocean

         Higher than any bird ever flew

         Longer than there've been stars

         up in the heavens

         I've been in love with you.

 

That was "Longer" by Dan Folgerberg and it is like syrup.  Of course it is, but it's the kind of thing you want to write when you fall in love.  Just because we all haven't taken Ivy League courses of poetry to learn about their construction and analysis, doesn't mean that we don't want to put our feelings to words when we fall in love.

 

What is more amazing is that even if we don't believe in God, we still speak with words that have a kind of salvation and eternal ring to them.  "You're my everything.  I want to be with you forever.  I can't imagine living without you.  I'd give my life for yours.  I'd go to hell and back for you."  These are all emotions we feel when in love, so it makes sense that we fall into a view that love is everything.  In some sense, from a human experience, it is.

 

Even the best of us that have done all we can to seize this feeling of love as the ultimate, can find ourselves empty.  Sophia Loren, a famous Italian actress for those of you too young to remember her, said this in an interview:

 

"My life is what I have dreamed of.  Films, marriage to Carlo, bearing his children-marvelous!  I lack only one thing; in the center of my life I find a void impossible to describe."

 

Do you hear what she's saying?  She's saying, "I've found everything that I've ever searched for or wanted, but I'm missing the most important thing."  She found her true love, but realizes she doesn't have true love!  That is a stunning statement.

 

You see the problem with love as a kind of salvation, or a love as everything model is that when you give yourself to love, you're giving it to a human being, and that person is going to let you down because they can't carry the freight of your life. 

 

The problem isn't that love isn't salvation, but what is the object of that love.  In other words, why base your sense of being, your sense of ultimate meaning on an object that will most definitely fail?  Humans aren't created to carry that weight to be an ultimate object of love.  They are created to be a secondary object of love once the primary person is loved.  In other words, we are to be reflections of a greater love and to the degree we are, to that same degree we can love each other the way we were intended.  When we take on the role of the primary love, we distort one another and make each other hideous. 

 

If a young woman of 19 has the most beautiful of features-healthy, perfect, shiny hair; perfect lips; eyes, ears, cheekbones, and skin-and each of these features all stop growing at 19 except one, what happens to that stunningly beautiful young woman?  Let's say, for instance, her nose doesn't stop growing.  What happens to her?  She becomes distorted because she is out of proportion. 

 

When we make each other our ultimate meaning for love, we distort one another out of proportion and when we do this, we eventually make each other ugly because we're not set in the right place.  This is the more conservative model of love that we find in our movies of 50 years ago. 

 

Now, there is another kind of love that claims that love is nothing.

 

Love is nothing

 

This model of love is more current.  This is a view that true love is a kind of illusion. 

 

Wanda Urbanska, author of The Singular Generation, describing her peers in their twenties says this:

 

"We . . . do not have affairs, we have ‘sexual friendships.' We do not fall in love, we build relationships. We do not date, we ‘see' each other. A student quoted in a recent article in the Vassar Quarterly adopts the same cool attitude. She doesn't care for the term boyfriend or lover; she speaks instead of ‘my special friend with whom I spent lots of quality physical time.'"

 

These are people who have realized that the "Love is everything" model has failed.  Why?  Because they have been hurt, heartbroken and are disillusioned with the whole idea of love towards another person.  So we withdraw ourselves and think only of ourselves, which is the first step and basis for hatred. 

 

So, we have to watch ourselves, protect ourselves and look out for number 1, me!  We start off with the cosmic and divine sense of love and end up with a kind of numb and dull view of love.

 

C.S. Lewis warns against this kind of protection of our hearts when he says:

 

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket-safe, dark, motionless, airless-t will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.

 

We all know how hard this is to do.  To give yourself to someone and love them is by nature to open up to them and allow them in.  So we do, we get hurt and then we become cold-cold towards one another, to ourselves, and to God.  It is the horrifying effects of sin.

 

And the truth is, if there is no God, there is no such thing as love.  Why should there be?  Why would there be?  Love is reduced to nothing more than a biological reaction to various kinds of chemical stimuli.  That's it.  Nothing more. 

 

So, we're told we're to spend ourselves on no one but ourselves.  Our primary concern becomes us because we've been so mistreated; this seems like the logical choice.  We learn to be a people of protection and self-preservation. 

 

But do you see the problem in this?  Instead of realizing the cause of our hurt, we simply run to a solution without thinking about the repercussions. 

 

Let me explain it this way; it isn't that you've been hurt, it's why you've been hurt.  You've been hurt because you gave yourself to someone with an open heart.  But that really isn't the problem.  We're commended to open our hearts to one another. 

 

However, by opening our hearts to only one another, and not to God, we've become marred and broken, cracked and flawed.  Our love now is tainted with self-interest.  This kind of self-serving love then causes us to hurt one another.  You could say that selfishness becomes a kind of root of all sin towards one another.

 

Why do we hurt one another?  Because we think only of ourselves.  We do what Lewis warns against and our culture promotes: we lock our hearts up tight to keep them safe and look out only for ourselves.  In doing so, we then become the perpetrators of the same kind of pain and agony that caused us to withdraw in the first place. 

 

Since we're not thinking of why, but that we were hurt, we only turn and hurt each other by continuing the cycle of self-centered, self-love gone bad. 

 

In the Garden, what happened when self-interest replaced God-interest, when we became self-centered instead of God-centered?  Sin exploded into this world and has wreaked havoc on us for thousands upon thousands of years.  We have been repeating the cycle of pain and withdrawal ever since.

 

So, why have your lovers let you down and hurt you?  Because they've been broken by the effects of sin as well.  Do you know why the people that hurt them did what they did?  The same answer.  We trace this all the way back to our first parents.  We live in a lineage of selfishness and self-interest, we don't need more of it.  Infusing this world with what caused the problem hasn't worked.  We are more hurt, more broken inside, and more lost in despair because of this advice. 

 

And it isn't that women and men are all alike.  It isn't because they are men or women, but because they are human that they let you down.  They were never intended to be your savior in the first place.  They were never supposed to be your center.  They were never supposed to be your ultimate foundation for living. 

 

Sin is building your life on anything other than God. 

 

1 John 2:5: " but whoever keeps his word, in him truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may be sure that we are in him."

 

1 John 2:15:  "Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him."

 

1 John 3:1:  "See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him."

 

1 John 3:10:  "By this it is evident who are the children of God, and who are the children of the devil: whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is the one who does not love his brother."

 

1 John 3:11:  "For this is the message that you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another."

 

1 John 3:14:  "We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers. Whoever does not love abides in death."

 

1 John 3:16:  "By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers."

 

1 John 3:17:  "But if anyone has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him?"

 

1 John 3:18:  "Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth."

 

1 John 3:23:  "And this is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us."

 

1 John 4:7:  "Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God."

 

1 John 4:8:  "Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love."

 

1 John 4:9:  "In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him."

 

1 John 4:10:  "In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins."

 

1 John 4:11:  "Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another."

 

1 John 4:12:  "No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us."

 

1 John 4:16:  "So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him."

 

1 John 4:17:  "By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world."

 

1 John 4:18:  "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love."

 

1 John 4:19:  "We love because he first loved us."

 

1 John 4:20:  "If anyone says, ‘I love God,' and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen."

 

1 John 4:21:  "And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother."

 

1 John 5:2:  "By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments."

 

1 John 5:3:  "For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome."