Sermon Cloud

Last week we introduced this series and we spent some time talking about the historical situation in which the churches in Asia found themselves at the end of the first century.  Then we spoke about the vision of Jesus that appeared to John to speak directly to their situation.  This picture of Jesus is very different than what many of us are used to and yet it is the way that Jesus revealed himself to the seven churches.  It is not the vision that John made up in his head, but it is the way Jesus revealed himself to John.  It is the way Jesus wanted to be seen.  So, before we begin to talk about the church in Ephesus, I want us to remember how Jesus revealed himself to John because it is in understanding who this Jesus is that church of Ephesus and every church since will find what they need to fight sin and live for his glory.  Remember this Jesus was clothed with a long robe, he had a golden sash around his chest, and his hair was white like white wool, like the snow.  His eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the roar of many waters.  In his right hand he held seven stars, from his mouth came a sharp, two-edged sword, and his face shone like the sun shining in full strength. 

What a massive Jesus this is.  How powerful his voice is, how glorious the vision of his face, how powerful the judgment that comes from his mouth.  This Jesus is huge.  He is infinitely more beautiful, more powerful, more glorious, and more satisfying than anything that the Roman Empire might put forward to worship.  The reason that we begin today discussing this portrait of Jesus is because this is the Jesus who told John to write to the seven churches.  In other words, this vision of Jesus was not just one of many pictures of Jesus, all of which we should be thinking about as we read the letters to the churches.  This picture of Jesus is the one who is writing to the churches.  This Jesus is the one who is speaking to you and me when we see the red words in chapters 2 and 3 of Revelation.  So, this is the Jesus that we must be thinking about as we read what he has to say to the church of Ephesus.

Notice how Jesus begins the letter.  He begins by picking an aspect of himself that he revealed to John and highlighting it.  Here he chooses to highlight the fact that he holds the seven stars and he walks among the seven golden lampstands.  In the previous verse we have been told that the seven lampstands are the seven churches.  What Jesus is trying to communicate to the church of Ephesus is that he is near.  He walks among them.  He knows and he sees everything.  He cannot be fooled, he is not distant.  The one whose face shines like the sun, whose voice roars like the mighty waters, whose hair glimmers like a fresh snow and whose mouth speaks judgment against his enemies, this one is walking among his churches.  I don’t want to pass over the seriousness of what is taking place.  Jesus walks among his churches.  Jesus sees and knows everyone who is present today.  He knows how we have spent our week and he knows what has been going through our hearts and our minds during worship.  He knows what you are thinking even now.  And not only is he near, not only does he know, he cares.  As a priest would walk among the lampstands in the temple, trimming their wicks, adding oil, and keeping watch on how each was burning, so Jesus walks among his church. 

I want to talk for a few minutes about the church of Ephesus.  We know a quite a bit about this church since Paul was there for about three years, and he wrote the letter to the Ephesians.  He wrote I and II Timothy to Timothy when he was living in Ephesus.  It is also likely that John himself had lived in Ephesus before he was exiled to Patmos.  You can imagine John on the Island of Patmos, seeing this incredible vision of Jesus, and then he is told to write a letter to his former church.

After telling them that he walks in their midst, Jesus begins to commend the church of Ephesus for the good things about her that he has seen.  He commends her for her doctrinal purity.  She has worked hard to test and fight off false doctrine.  She has not given in to the compromise of her culture.  Amidst a pagan culture which had attempted to infiltrate the church and lead her to compromise and heresy, the Ephesians have remained faithful.  They have tested their leaders and removed those who claimed to be apostles but were not.  They have fought false teachings and have remained faithful to the truth without growing weary and giving up. 

This is a commendable thing.  Ephesus was a city of about 250,000.  It was the largest of Rome’s cities in Asia.  It was a major port city.  It had a temple built to Artemis, the god of fertility that was located just outside the city.  This was one of the largest buildings in the ancient world and it had literally thousands of priests and priestesses working at it, many of them prostitutes.  It was one of the seven ancient wonders of the world.  The imperial cult, which was the worship of the emperor, was thriving in Ephesus and it was actually named the keeper of the imperial cult and a temple was built to the emperor Domitian.  Certainly the temptations to compromise in Ephesus were intense.  Not only was there intense pressure outside the church, but many false teachers also arose from within the church in Ephesus.  Paul warns the Ephesian elders about these false teachers and later commands Timothy to rebuke another group of false teachers.  Look at Acts 20:29, and also notice how I Timothy begins I Timothy 1:3-4.  The Ephesian church had been tested.  They had elders who rose up like wolves and tried to destroy the flock.  Yet, they had survived.  They had kept their doctrinal purity in the face of tremendous opposition.  After reading this, the next section must come as a shock to many.

In this next section, we learn that all is not well in Ephesus.  Jesus begins this next section with a BUT.  But I have this against you.  This is scary.  This is meant to be scary.  Just think about that line.  Jesus, the one whose face shines like the sun, whose voice roars like many waters, and whose mouth holds a two edged sword, this Jesus has something against them.  This is no mere man who has something against them.  This is not the story of a disgruntled member, this is not one of the major donors that has something against them, this is not one of the pastors who has something against them; this is Jesus.  What he has against them is that they have abandoned the love they had at first.  They have ceased to love him as they once did. 

Last week we talked about the audience that Revelation was written to and we emphasized two different groups of people.  One group was living as a faithful witness to Jesus and was suffering persecution.  The other group was compromising with the Roman Empire in many of their pagan practices.  Then we have the church of Ephesus.  She has not compromised doctrinally, she has taken a stand for doctrinal purity.  She has refused to succumb to the false teachers.  She has fought against every heresy that has tried to creep into the church.  Yet, God is not pleased with her.  He is not pleased with her because, though she has remained doctrinally pure, she has ceased to be a faithful witness to him.  I want you to take a moment and let that sink in.  Even though she has remained doctrinally pure, she has ceased to be a faithful witness for Jesus.

She has ceased to be a faithful witness to him because she has lost her first love.  Her lack of love for Jesus has destroyed her witness even though she may say all the right things about him.  It seems that Jesus is arguing that you cannot rightly testify to his beauty, majesty and value when you are no longer absolutely smitten with him.  Do you see how the two have to go together?  Do you see how it is impossible to authentically proclaim true things about Jesus without being overwhelmed by his majesty and humbled by his grace?  It can’t be done.  It’s like a husband telling his wife how beautiful she is and how great her stories are at a restaurant while at the same time cringing as he watches the opposing team score a touchdown on the big screen TV behind her.  It’s like someone telling you that they love your cooking while at the same time gagging and spitting it in a napkin.  It doesn’t work.  Merely saying the right things is not enough. 

We must see from Ephesus how pathetic it is to arrogantly talk about God’s grace.  Do you see how they don’t go together?  Do you see how true grace can only humble us, it can only break us, it can only make us stand in utter awe at the one who has been so gracious?  Not only has God lavished his grace upon us, but this grace that he gave us cost him the very life of his only son, the firstborn from the dead.  The ruler of the kings of the earth became a baby, grew up and died upon a cross to wash away our sins and shed his grace on us.  When you say that in an arrogant way, when you get in a debate about grace and arrogance drips from your lips as you declare that salvation is by grace alone and has nothing to do with human merit, do you see how unfaithful such a witness is?  Do you see how pathetic it can be to say all the right things and come across as if we think we are better than other people?  At some point it does not matter whether what you are saying is true or not, if it is being said without love it no longer represents an accurate description of the God who is.  That is why John says in I John 4:8 “Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.”  You can say all the right things about him but you don’t know him if you don’t love him.  If you are not overwhelmed with the majesty and beauty of your savior, it is because you have not seen him.  Or, if you have, you have forgotten what he looked like.  You see the God who is, is so beautiful, magnificent and irresistible, that to speak about him in a way that is not smitten by him is to prove that you do not know him. 

This is crazy isn’t it?  We don’t like to hear things like this because in our pragmatic culture we all want to reduce everything to forms.  We want to be able to say, as long as you believe this or that, as long as you affirm this creed or that statement of faith, as long as you profess these doctrinal truths, you will go to heaven and God will be pleased with you.  But the Ephesian church stands as an example that this is not enough.  To speak truths about God without being overwhelmed by him is the heart of foolishness. 

If you had the choice between talking to someone who had all the stats about the Grand Canyon and someone who had been there, who had gazed over its rim and walked its trails, who would you talk to?  Give me the one who has hiked it.  Can’t you see the difference?  The one who knows all the stats thinks he is all that because he can tell you everything about the canyon.  But the one who has gazed over its edge feels small because he has seen it.  He doesn’t know much, but he knows it’s big enough to remind him of how small he is, while the other guy knows exactly how big the canyon is and yet somehow its size has done nothing to him.   All of us must heed this call to be people who gaze at the beauty of our Savior and let it transform us instead of people who try and learn all the facts about him to spout out to others.     

The church of Ephesus began with this sort of passionate love for their savior, but somewhere along the way they lost sight of him.  It’s not hard to see how it could have happened.  Again and again they found themselves fighting off heresies, fighting off salvage wolves who came to tear the church apart.  Somewhere along the line they became jaded.   They were constantly making distinctions between their position, the true position, and what these false apostles where teaching that they became keenly aware of this vast difference between the two of them.  They knew that there was a huge difference between them and the false teachers, and between them and the compromisers, and they spent a lot of time talking about the differences.  And at some point, they forgot where the difference came from.  At some point they forgot why they were so different.  At some point they forgot that at one time they were just like their opponents.  They felt so different from them that they completely forgot that at one time they were them.  When they forgot that, they became jaded.  When they forgot, they ceased loving.  Satan is so clever, that he loves to take virtues and corrupt them.  He loves it because we are not looking for it.  Here he has taken the doctrinal purity of a church, which is a beautiful thing, and he has used it to get them to take their eyes off of Jesus.  He has used it to make them feel like they are better than the false apostles and the compromisers.

It is at that moment, when they began to feel superior to others, that they forgot one of the core components of the Gospel.  The moment they began to genuinely feel like they were better than their opponents they forgot grace. They had spent so much time on distinguishing their true doctrine from others that they felt superior to those who did not believe what they believed or live like they lived, and this superiority caused them to lose their ability to genuinely love both God and others.  The moment they forgot grace they became angry and frustrated with others because they rightly understood just how pathetic and wrong they were, but without grace they could only be frustrated by others’ failures.   Having forgotten grace, they forgot what makes God so beautiful and what enables us to genuinely love him.

Jesus calls them to remember from where they have fallen, repent and do the works they did at first.  What does he mean when he says remember?  The reason he calls them to remember goes back to why they loved Jesus so much at the beginning of their Christian life.  What do you think is the main difference between where they were now, years after their conversion, and where they were when they first heard the Gospel?  What is it that they need to remember?  I believe that the biggest difference is when they first came to Jesus they were far more keenly aware of their own sin.  When they first came to Jesus they were far more aware of how evil they were and how much they needed to be forgiven.  Let me show you some passages that speak of this. 

Look at Ephesians 2:11-16.  Twice it talks about remembering.  Look at how chapter 2 begins.  “You were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked…” Look at 2:4.  That is what Jesus is calling them to remember.  He is saying, “Remember that you were once just like the false apostles, remember the depths of your own sin.”  Remember how much I have saved you from.  Remember the price I paid to bring you near who were once so far off. 

In Luke 7:46, Jesus tells us that those who are forgiven much love much.  Do you remember that story with Simon the Pharisee and the prostitute who came in and washed Jesus’ feet?  I want to briefly remind you of that story.  Jesus is having dinner with a Pharisee named Simon.  They were reclining at a table and talking, and, as was the custom of the day, a crowd had gathered around the table to watch.  Then, in the midst of their conversation a sinful woman, probably a prostitute, came off of the streets.  You can only imagine the commotion as people moved to get out of her way, not wanting to touch her lest they be made unclean by her disgusting sin.  As soon as she passed, they gathered around even tighter to see what Jesus would do.  She comes to him, kneels at his feet, wets them with her tears, lets her hair down in public to wipe his feet off, and then empties a flask of ointment on his feet.  Imagine the scene.  It’s crazy.  Simon is thinking, “If Jesus was really a prophet then he would know what type of woman is touching him, that she is a sinner.”

It is at this point that Jesus decides to teach us all something about the Gospel and about forgiveness and love.  Jesus tells a story about two guys who owed a man different sums of money.  One owed him a lot of money, and the other owed him a little bit of money.  The man forgave both of them their debts and then Jesus asked, which man would love the one who forgave his debt more?  Simon answered “the one for whom he cancelled the biggest debt.”  Jesus declared he was right and then applied that to our lives by saying, “Those who are forgiven much, love much.”  In this case, the comparison was between this woman who knew she was a sinner and who had been forgiven and responded to her forgiveness with lavish acts of love—a love that was absolutely single minded, that didn’t care about anything else in the world except him and how beautiful he was and how much she had been forgiven—and Simon, who thought he and Jesus were peers.  He didn’t wash Jesus’ feet when he came, didn’t kiss him, didn’t anoint him with oil; he saw Jesus as a peer, so did not believe he owed Jesus the lavish love that this woman knew she owed him. 

In this story we have the paradigm for the church of Ephesus and for all of us today.  We all, like this woman, are sinners and that is what we are called to remember.  But not just that we are sinners, but that God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love for which he has loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.  That is what the Ephesians are called to remember.  Jesus calls them to remember the depths of their sin and how much they have been forgiven.  At one point, some of them knew that.  At one point they had been like the woman at Jesus’ feet, but now, now they had become like Simon.  Like Simon, they were now consumed with the distinction between themselves and others.  Like Simon, when they think of gross sinners they think of others and not themselves.  And, like Simon, because they do not believe they are very bad, they have failed to love Jesus rightly.  Remember that Simon treated Jesus as a peer.  Simon didn’t love Jesus because he didn’t think he needed him very much.  We too will love Jesus to the extent that we understand how much we need him.  We will love him to the extent that we believe he has forgiven us.  His blood is only precious to those who know that without it they have no hope.

Paul has already given the Ephesians an example of what it looks like to remember how much you have been forgiven.  Look at I Timothy 1:15-17.  Here we see the key to Paul’s lifelong passion for Jesus.  Paul remembers the depths of his own sin and how amazing Jesus’ forgiveness is.  He knows himself as the chief of sinners and yet he does not succumb to despair because he knows his savior as the one who died to save sinners.  Paul preached often against false teachers, but he never forgot that at one time he too was a blasphemer who persecuted the very savior who died for him.  Jesus calls the Ephesians to remember.  Remember how much you have been forgiven.  Remember the depths of your own sin.  Remember and repent.  When we forget that we have been forgiven of our past sins we lose the ability to repent because we are afraid.  When we forget how we have been forgiven, when we forget grace, we begin to believe that we must earn God’s favor and this belief keeps us from being able to acknowledge just how sinful we are.  We are too afraid.  That is why we must remember what sinners we were and are, and just how big and beautiful the forgiveness of our savior is.  When we do that, we are able to repent.  When we repent and believe that Jesus forgives us, we will find ourselves overwhelmed with love for him.  That is what it means to repent and do the works you did at first. 

These works are simply the fruit of repentance.  They are simply what flow from a life overwhelmed by love for our savior.  Jesus talks about the works that God requires of us in John 6:28-29.  In this passage the people ask him, “What must we do, to be doing the works of God?”  Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.”  The call to the Ephesian church is to remember the grace of God, repent, experience once more the joy of forgiveness, and to love God much because they know that he has forgiven them much.  How powerful the Gospel is, that having fallen away, having left their first love, there is still hope.  They are not immediately condemned, but if they will only repent, they will find that they can love him even more than they did at first.  This is what is so beautiful about the Gospel.  As long as we have breath, it is not too late.  It is not too late to remember and repent and love once more as you did at first.

Yet, as simple and as beautiful and as this is, there are many who will refuse to remember.  For those who refuse, there is a stern warning.  If you refuse to repent, if you maintain that you are better than others and that God should be pleased with you because of the way you have fought against the culture to obey him and believe the right things, those who refuse to repent will be removed.  Jesus is serious about his church.  He is serious about getting glory.  There is no glory for God in a bunch of punks who go around spouting off true statements about him, living outwardly moral lives, but all the while making a joke of God because they arrogantly speak of his majesty.  There is no glory for God in the Simons of this world.  For churches made up of Simons, the warning of Revelation comes again today and says, “Your God walks among the churches, he sees everything, he knows your hearts, and he will not tolerate for long the abuse of his name by churches that do love him with all their hearts.”  He is the savior of the church of sinners and in their midst he will be loved, glorified, worshipped, and proclaimed worthy.  In the church full of good people who believe that they have earned his pleasure, he will only be patronized and disregarded, until he comes with the sword in his mouth and snuffs them out.

I hope you can see already just how amazingly applicable this letter is to us today. For some of us the letter is directly applicable.  Some of us are like the prodigal son and have been saved from a life of sin.  When we were first saved we were blown away by God’s grace.  We couldn’t believe that God would save a wretch like us.  We loved him so much.  Our hearts were full of his grace and we saw him as supremely worthy of all worship and all praise.  Then we began to hang out with other Christians, we began to learn how to act the right way, say the right things, and we began to realize that we were no longer the worst people we knew.  All of a sudden we found ourselves looking at others and wondering what their problem was, wondering why they couldn’t just repent and get their lives straightened out.  Now, we are the ones who have it all together.  Now we have a nice family, or a good job, and we have the church thing down, we know what to say and do and we feel pretty good about ourselves.  We certainly don’t need God like we once did and if we are honest, we kind of prefer it that way.  Of course we know we don’t love Jesus like we used to.  But then again we used to be kind of crazy and we have learned a lot since then.  We are no longer as desperate as we once were.  In fact, we have gone from joy at how God saved us from such a terrible life to a little bit of shame that we ever did those stupid things and now when we see others struggling with the same things we did, we wish they would just man up and stop it.  We don’t get how they can keep falling back into the same stupid sins, and we find them frustrating us.  If we were to honestly answer the question “Do we feel like we are better than them?” we would say yes.  Not out loud and not to anyone else but in our hearts and certainly in the way we act.  Please don’t go down that road.  If you feel yourself going down it, listen to Jesus and remember how great your God is, what it was like to fling yourself upon his grace, and know that if he did not rescue you, you had no chance.  Remember that.  Remember the freedom from resting in his righteousness.  Remember it and repent of your forgetfulness, of your self-reliance, of your lost love, and once again fling yourself upon him.  Go back to the days of desperation.  Go back, don’t believe the lie that you have to look like you have it all together.  Your savior has it all together and he has you in his hands.  That is all that matters.  Rejoice to be in his hands.  Rejoice at his righteousness, rejoice at his blood.  Please, please remember, repent, and trust in him. Worship him like Paul did when he remembered his conversion.  Don’t move on from there.  Don’t outgrow your first love.  Don’t let knowledge of God puff you up and change you; let it only make you stand in more and more awe that such an amazing God would save a sinner such as you.

Then there are many like me, people who grew up in the church.  These people have always struggled to see themselves as bad when compared to everyone else, have always had friends and family members who they saw as way worse than them, who have always been held up as an example for others.  These are often second or more generation Christians.  Some have rebelled and others who have not.  Some of us have had siblings who have rebelled and that has only served to strengthen the distinction between ourselves and others.  There is no doubt some in Ephesus were like this as well.  The danger for some of us is that we may have never had a sinful woman experience.  We may not have ever felt desperate, out of control, absolutely empty, and needy.  For those of you like that, there is a great temptation to believe that we have got the Christian thing down.  There is a great temptation to believe that we are better than others, that God is lucky to have us in his church, to think highly of ourselves and our service to God, to be Simon.  Please don’t.  Let’s repent and acknowledge that though other people may never see, we know what’s inside.  Let’s stop lying, let’s stop faking it.  Let’s acknowledge just how arrogant we are and lets wake up to see arrogance as disgustingly wicked as our God sees it.  He is the one who opposes the proud.  Pride is so ugly because while it appears to know God and have all the facts about him down, it proves that it has not seen Jesus.  Pride is incompatible with the Jesus whose face shines like the sun.  It is incompatible with the one whose voice roars like the mighty waters.  Our arrogance is incompatible with the true Jesus.  Let’s be like John.  Let’s fall down as if dead before our majestic savior and beg him for mercy.  I want you to remember the parable of the prodigal son and I want you to think for a moment of the older brother.  How dangerous it is for the older brother in that parable, to be the one who always did what his father asked him to do and yet he missed the party.  He always did what his father asked and yet he missed the joy of his father.  He missed it because he refused to receive the father’s grace.  Let’s not be the older brother.  Don’t miss the party, don’t stand by and watch prodigals overflow with love for your savior while you smugly think that your love has been shown by your legalistic obedience.  Let’s remember that our savior walks among the lampstands, he sees it all, he knows every sin, every drop of pride, every ounce of self reliance, every thought of superiority.  He sees them all, and he will forgive us if we will stop trying to be perfect and simply fall at his feet and beg him for mercy.  We may look like fools to others, but not to our savior.  The sinful woman who wept at his feet was not afraid of what others thought because she knew that her savior loved her, that she was forgiven, that what he thought was where she was placing her only hope.  Kaleo, lets join that woman.  All of us, the prodigals who have yet to repent, the prodigals who have forgotten the depths of their forgiveness, and the older brothers who are tired of acting like we have it all together, let’s all join the sinful woman at the feet of our savior. 

Before we take communion, I want all of us to take a few moments and to remember how desperately we need our savior, to remember the depths of our past and present sins, to remember that we were once dead in our sins and our trespasses, alienated from the promises, separate from Christ, and without hope in this world, until our savior came from heaven to make us alive.  I want us to picture the person we feel most different from, the one who frustrates us the most, the one who fails us over and over again, and I want us to realize that our sin before God is far greater than their sin.  Wrestle with that thought for a few moments, then give up.  Give up like the sinful woman and run to your savior.  Run to the one who, though his face shown like the sun, willingly took on flesh to die on the cross in our place.  He went to the cross and shed his precious blood to forgive us, to wash away our sins.  He died so that today, right now we can be forgiven.  Remember both the depths of our sin and yet the sufficiency of Jesus’ blood to forgive us.  I want you to come to communion overwhelmed with love for your savior.  Come like the woman who wept at Jesus’ feet.  Come to him, take the bread which represents his body that was broken for you, dip it in the cup that represents his blood which he shed for the forgiveness of sins.  After a few moments of remembering and repenting I want all of you who believe that you have been radically forgiven of a dept you could not pay to come forward full of love to the one who paid your debt.