You've left your first love
Jesus's Oracle to Ephesus
Audio Version!
When I was eighteen years old, I went through a major spiritual crisis. I had professed Jesus as my Savior eight years previously when I was ten and for the next few years things were great (or at least as great as middle-school-hood could be). I was kind of a go-getter: I read my Bible, was (over) involved at church—choirs, youth group, summer camps, mission trips, weekly visitation, scripture memory, you name it. I loved church, I loved singing hymns, I loved my leaders, I loved the programs. And it was so very easy to love the stuff of church so much that I missed the key thing: the love of God.
In my eighteenth year—over about eight months including my first semester in college—the Lord was working to show me that what I had constructed as “faith” was really my own doing. That January of 1980, I had dropped out of college for a short period and attended a good old “revival” at Sherwood Baptist in my hometown Albany, Georgia. The revival preacher spoke at a lunch service on David’s general Joab and Saul’s general Abner in the book of 2 Samuel after David became king. Joab ended up murdering Abner to eliminate a rival—but David was livid and crushed because he knew of Abner’s affection.
The preacher made the point that “Abner loved David, but Joab only served him.”
Those words cut me to the heart.
I realized that I had replaced love for God and the service that flows from it with service itself.
Faithful service with no love becomes idolatrous and often self-serving.
I’ve had other spiritual crises in my life, but that moment remains vivid to this day—the Lord reset my life trajectory.
Even a cursory reading of Jesus’s oracle to the church at Ephesus in Revelation 2:1–7 will show why I told that story—and that replacing love and devotion with service is close to idolatry.
Let’s take a look.
1. Charge to John:
To the angel of the church in Ephesus write: (Revelation 2:1a).
Who is the “angel”?
Each angel appears to be a representative both of God to the church and representing the church itself—an intermediary between Christ, the holy exalted Messiah and the still-earth-bound, but redeemed church attempting to live out the gospel, but in fits of success and failure.
The angel is the representative spirit of each church in communication with God, but receiving the message personally (“you”), often a hard message, to the named church.
It is interesting to contemplate that each of our churches has such an angel who is there to speak the words of the Spirit to us.
Are we listening?
Regarding Ephesus itself, I encourage you to consult a Bible dictionary or commentary—the Wikipedia article is pretty good to.
At the time John wrote Revelation, Ephesus was one of the most important cities in the Roman Empire, and the church had already been around for at least twenty years.
2. Jesus introduces the oracle:
Thus says the One who firmly grasps the seven stars in his right hand and walks around in the middle of the seven gold lampstands (Revelation 2:1b).
Not only do these words connect to the Exalted Jesus in 1:20, but they tell us something about Jesus’s presence.
He is here.
He is walking among us.
He sees us.
He mourns for us.
He rejoices with us.
Jesus wants his churches to be everything he called them to be.
He will continue to speak the truth to us in his Word and call us to continually turn to Him.
3. The oracle proper begins with praise:
I know your works and your labor and perseverance and that you are unable to put up with evil people and you test those claiming themselves as apostles and are not and you found them liars and you have perseverance and you endure because of my name and you have not grown weary (Revelation 2:2–3).
This sentence is full of “and’s”!
Jesus listed action after action that was praiseworthy.
What jumps out to me first of all is the Jesus “knows.”
Nothing is hidden.
Jesus was and is aware of everything about his churches and about every person in those churches. He especially knows the things that set his people apart.
In this case, the church of Ephesus, one that we read about in Acts and 1 Timothy, was one with a history of confrontation with evil and with infiltrators, “ravenous wolves” as Paul called them in Acts 20.
And through it all this church and its leaders had been faithful—they labored for the gospel, they persevered through trouble and persecution, they spoke the truth and did not allow the wiles of Satan into their midst.
They did not grow weary laboring for the name of Jesus.
Would that Jesus could say that to all of our churches today!
Would that our churches stood for the truth of the gospel in a day when compromise for the sake of acceptance and tolerance is the flavor of the day.
But without in any way backing away from this praise—they should keep on with this!—Jesus went on to say something else.
(continued)
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4. A critique:
But I have against you that you left your first love (Revelation 2:4).
If Jesus praised the Ephesian church for holding to the truth, Jesus dropped a truth bomb of his own: you forsook your first love!
No matter how faithful, no matter how hard working, no matter how effective with the gospel in dispelling evil and speaking the truth …
Without the foundational love for Jesus that began it all, every labor becomes futile.
Our works for God become idolatrous when they are not flowing from the love of God—that intersection of God’s love for us in the cross of Christ and our grateful, repentant response to that love in thankfulness and joyous praise.
Works are grounded in worship
True worship is grounded in love for God.
All else is empty, vain, without worth.
5. Call to repent:
Therefore remember from where you have fallen and repent and do the first works. If not, I am coming to you and I will remove your lampstand from its place, if you do not repent (Revelation 2:5).
Jesus moved from his truth bomb to the remedy in three parts.
First, the church was to reflect on their fall.
Now they are called to remember when that condition of Jesus-love was a reality.
At one time Jesus was their first love.
Their words and deeds were grounded in worship.
They were acting out of love in everything they did.
Remembrance was necessary to bring back their desire for that glorious time (Psalm 42:1–4 comes to mind).
We all need to do the same.
Is my love for God as sincere and fervent as in the past?
Second, the church was called to repent (Greek metanoēson).
In one of my early posts I explored the idea of repentance as a change of mind (meta, change, noēson, thinking)—a change of thinking is absolutely necessary to a substantive change of action.
But here, Jesus specified the action: do the first works!
He was not referring to the commendable works of verses 2 and 3, but to the work of believing or trusting in Jesus.
In John 6:28–29, the Jews of Capernaum asked Jesus, “What should we do so that we are working the works of God?” Jesus responded, “This is the work of God: that you believe in the one he has sent.”
Jesus was telling the Ephesian church to return to that foundational task of trusting Jesus—their first love.
Third, not repenting had a consequence: the removal of their lampstand.
The church may have continued to function, but the works they would do, even in the name of Jesus, would be out of the blessing of God.
Good works are not necessarily God-blessed works.
And sooner or later the church that has left love of Jesus behind will cease bearing fruit for God.
What Jesus was not saying was that the individuals in the church would forfeit their salvation: God knows those who are his—and further, I would suggest that the Ephesian church did repent.
A few years after Revelation was written, Ignatius, the bishop of Antioch, wrote in a letter to that very church in Ephesus:
So you are all participants together in a shared worship, God-bearers and temple-bearers, Christ-bearers, bearers of holy things, adorned in every respect with the commandments of Jesus Christ. I too celebrate with you, since I have been judged worthy to speak with you through this letter, and to rejoice with you because you love nothing in human life, only God (Ignatius, Letter to the Ephesians, 9:2).
Jesus’s truth-bomb apparently had its intended effect.
6. A final praise:
But this you do have: namely, you hate the works of the Nicolaitans, which I hate (Revelation 2:6).
In several of his oracles, Jesus followed up his call to repent with a further word of affirmation.
In this case, Jesus commended the Ephesian church for “hating” the works of the Nicolaitans.
Hate is a strong word, but notice Jesus did not say he hated the Nicolaitans themselves, but their “works.”
The saying, “hate the sin, not the sinner” may not be in the Bible, but this is as close as it gets.
A good reminder for all of us.
Who were these people that drew such a strong word from Jesus?
Unfortunately, we have no idea. Some have suggested they were followers of Nicolaus, one of the seven deacons in Acts 6, but there is no proof of that. Jesus refers to the Nicolaitans again in his oracle to Pergamum—there he refers to their teaching, which was not in line with the gospel (I will take up the Nicolaitans again there).
In any case, Jesus commended the Ephesian church for upholding the truth in the face of those who would water down or reject the gospel.
(cont.)
7. Call to listen:
The one who has an ear, let him listen to what the Spirit says to the churches (Revelation 2:7a).
Jesus said this to every church, so I will take this sentence apart over three posts.
“The one who has ears (to hear), let him hear” is a phrase that Jesus used in his ministry, usually at the end of parables (Matthew 11:15; 13:9, 43; Mark 4:9, 23; Luke 8:8; 14:35).
This phrase was kind of a riddle.
I know I have ears, and I literally hear what is being spoken, so what is he talking about?
Jesus spoke of spiritual hearing—something like “Do you have the capacity (ears) to understand what I am saying about God’s kingdom?
Here in Revelation, the word from Jesus to the church was to put on a spiritual ear (not ears!) so they could hear Jesus’s encouragement and his admonishment in the right way—not as offensive—to allow his words to change them, not to harden them.
O Lord, change me!
8. The reward:
To the one who conquers I will permit him to eat from the Tree of Life which is in the Garden of God (Revelation 2:7b).
This is an amazing statement!
The one who conquers is singular, like the address to the church (via the angel).
Yet it is not second person—“you”—but third person (like “the one who has ears”).
In both these phrases was Jesus speaking to the church as a whole or to individual believers?
Likely both, but focused on each person as part of the whole.
The verb for “conquer” (Greek nikaō) was one that Jesus used in John 16:33 (“in the world you have tribulation, but take heart, I have overcome the world”).
John himself used conquer six times in 1 John, and the word appears in Revelation 17 times—24 of its 27 uses in the NT are in books by John.
In other words, “conquer” is an important term especially for Revelation, but is consistent with the other uses in John and 1 John.
Later in Revelation we read that Jesus has conquered death and Satan and all the powers of the world and that the saints conquer through Jesus’s blood.
This last use was what Jesus called the Ephesian saints to do: conquer through Jesus, the slain Lamb.
This may be military imagery, but the conquering is not violent at all.
The only violence was that Jesus took the violence of the world and Satan onto himself in order to conquer them through his death and resurrection!
For me or you or the Church, to conquer means allowing Jesus’s victory on the cross to do the work.
To those there is a reward: the privilege to eat from the Tree of Life—that tree which was shut off to Adam and Eve but now is restored to those whose sin has been removed by Jesus.
Some see this reward as entirely future and in heaven.
But the Garden of Eden was on earth as was the Tree.
God’s kingdom plan is to restore the earth and its habitants to what he intended from the beginning.
Revelation 21 and 22 show this intention: God and the Lamb ruling over the new heavens and the new earth with the Tree of Life right there in the midst of the city.
This Spring, as I walk around my yard exploding with new foliage and apple, peach, citrus, blueberry and grape blossoms (and weeds), I can only imagine what that Garden will be like.
Will there be weeds?
If so we will gladly pull them as we continue to worship our Creator.
Thanks for reading. See you later.
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