What Jesus Thinks of the Church

This morning, we're going to be looking at Revelation, and I noticed that Rob read from Revelation this morning as well. It's a book that we are probably familiar with but still scratch our heads over because it's a difficult one, often to understand. Very often, I hear people talking about church, particularly church members talking about what they think of the church. We're very happy to let others know what we think of the church. In particular, we also have lots of people in the media, in no uncertain terms, telling us what they think about the church.

Yeah. Whatever people's opinions may be of what the church is, who the church is, whether they are believers or unbelievers, there is in fact one thing or one opinion that we should never overlook. And that is what Jesus Christ thinks of the church. People may want the church to be bigger and better organised and have better preachers and better worship teams and be more visible in the community. But the real question that confronts the church is simply this: what does Jesus think of His church? What does Jesus Christ think of the global church?

But what does Jesus think even of our little church here? What does Jesus want the church to be today? What does Jesus want our church to be today? And this is precisely the issue that we find the book of Revelation talking about. I mean, we look at it for all the end time stuff and the symbolism and the metaphors and stuff, but we find at the very beginning in Revelation one and two that this is addressed to churches in the first century AD.

And so this morning, we're going to be looking at one of these churches in Revelation two, the church of Ephesus, and what Jesus Christ had to say to them. So let's turn to Revelation two, and we're going to read from verses one to seven. Revelation two, verse one: To the angel of the church in Ephesus, write: these are the words of Him who holds the seven stars in His right hand and walks among the seven golden lampstands. I know your deeds, your hard work, and your perseverance.

I know that you cannot tolerate wicked men, that you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not and have found them false. You have persevered and have endured hardships for My name and have not grown weary. Yet I hold this against you: you have forsaken your first love. Remember the height from which you have fallen.

Repent and do the things you did at first. If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place. But you have this in your favour: you hate the practice of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.

To him who overcomes, I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God. So far, our reading. Let's do a little bit of background to the book of Revelation, where it was written, and who it was written to. The apostle John is clearly identified as the one who wrote this account. John is at this moment on the island of Patmos, which today is a beautiful Mediterranean getaway with beautiful crystal clear water and nice balmy Mediterranean conditions.

It's off the coast of Turkey. But funnily enough, back in John's day, it was anything but a travel resort. It was a dumping ground for all the undesirables of society. It was like Tasmania. Sorry, John.

I will be in trouble. But like Tasmania was a penal colony, it was the same there. It was where you banished all the troublemakers. And at the end of this first century in which Revelation was written, it seems to have been one of the Roman Empire's convict settlements. And so John is on Patmos, and he writes to the church in Ephesus.

Ephesus, to try and again use modern day equivalents, is like Melbourne. It's a port city, had a river running through it. It was a commercial hub, and for its day had a really large population. It was a cosmopolitan world city. It had a population of about two hundred to two hundred fifty thousand people, had an impressive library, it had its own MCG at its own stadium for the Olympic games, and it had a theatre that could seat twenty-five thousand people.

Sport, culture, and commerce were the mainstays of the city of Ephesus, just like Melbourne today. But what made Ephesus stand out was that it was also a city of churches. It was a very religious city. A few weeks ago, you might remember where we looked at Acts 19 and Paul dealt with idolatry there. That was in Ephesus.

They had a temple to the goddess Artemis, one of the ancient wonders of the world. It was a huge monumental thing. And it was what identified Ephesus. It was where she found her identity. It was the largest building in the Greek world.

But more temples were always being built. And very importantly to the context of Revelation, there was a temple that had been built in around eighty AD, and we suspect Revelation was written in around ninety AD, so about ten years later. A temple built to the emperor Domitian, which had a huge colossal statue of this emperor, and people would come to worship and pay honour to the emperor. The message was clear: the emperor demanded to be worshipped as a god.

And why shouldn't he be? He had absolute power over the biggest empire the world had seen. We talk often in the Bible about these empires, Babylonian and Assyrian empires, but Rome had come to grow to be one of the eternal cities at the centre of the world. The entire Roman Empire had a population of between seventy to a hundred million people, taking into consideration that estimates are that the entire world population at that time was two hundred million.

So we're saying that the Roman Empire pretty much accumulated or had about half the world population, and the emperor had absolute power. So not only was emperor worship politically correct, it just seemed like the sensible thing to do. So you can see that by the end of the first century AD, when Revelation was written, the battle lines had been drawn. Who deserved to be worshipped? The king or Jesus Christ from this small little sect called Christianity, or the emperor of half the world.

And so for this little church in Ephesus, Jesus introduces Himself with these words: These are the words of Him who holds the seven stars in His right hand. Now jumping just back a little bit in chapter one, we see this Jesus coming to John. And John describes Him as being absolutely awesome to behold. He is so majestic in fact that John falls down like a dead man, he says.

Jesus is described as having eyes of blazing fire. Eyes of blazing fire. His feet like bronze glowing in a furnace. His voice was like the sound of rushing waters. He is absolutely amazing to behold.

In other words, He is more than a match for the Roman Caesar. Now make no mistake about it. There's so much theology in this image, and it's a theology of power. It's a theology of power. He is absolute king.

So to the church of Ephesus, Jesus is introduced as the one who holds seven stars in His right hand and walks among the seven golden lampstands. Imagine that: holding seven stars in your right hand. At the end of chapter one, we are told that these stars are equated to be the angels of the seven churches. And this is where scholars struggle to understand exactly who this is referring to. The jury is still out.

Does it mean that each church has its own guardian angel, that this is a scriptural and angelic heavenly being, or are these angels, which can also mean messengers, are these angels elders or pastors of each church? We are not sure, but what we can be sure of is that Jesus Christ is the king and the guardian of these churches, whether it is angels protecting these individual churches or whether it's the leaders leading the flock. But He holds them in the palm of His hand. He is protector and guardian of these stars. But there's more. He also walks among the seven golden lampstands, and this is a bit easier for us to identify.

The lampstands are associated or attributed to each of the seven churches in the book of Revelation. In other words, when we see that Jesus walks among these lampstands as He's described doing, He is shown to be intimate. He's shown to be understanding. He is with them. Not only is He all powerful in that He holds the seven stars in His right hand, He is all knowing because He walks among the lampstands.

He inspects what's going on. He looks at each little candle as it's flickering. He knows, in other words, what is happening at Ephesus. And He knows what is happening in our church. And He knows not only what is happening on the surface, He is aware of our activities, and He knows our motivations behind these activities.

He can see what's going on in people's hearts and minds because He has those eyes of blazing fire through which He can see everything. This all powerful, all knowing majestic king has a message to tell the church of Ephesus, and this is what He says. He knows their deeds. The first thing we hear Jesus telling the church in Ephesus is that I know your deeds. Because Jesus walks among the seven lampstands, because He inspects them and sees them, He knows them.

He sees everything and He sees through everything. And to be aware of that for the church in Ephesus is deeply comforting, but it can also be deeply disturbing. My question is: who are you trying to impress? Who are we trying to impress? Even as Christians, so much of what we do is motivated by what other people will see.

How will this impress other Christians? What will this do for my image? How will this enhance my reputation? On the other hand, when no one sees what we're doing, do we feel that we failed? Do we feel that it's worthless?

I mean, if no one has seen what I've done, what's the point? And we might go to the trouble of tooting our own horn just to make sure that others know how good and virtuous we are. But these four words crush all of that and cuts through the nonsense: I know your deeds. I know your deeds.

Forget about your image and the kudos from other people because I know your deeds. Not just the public ones, but the private ones. Not just the deed itself, but also the motive that drove it. And people may not know the good that we do, but who cares? Even worse, people may construe and misunderstand the good that we do and see it as bad, may get upset with us, but they are not the final verdict on us.

They don't give the final verdict. Jesus does because Jesus knows. He understands our inside and outside. He knows us back to front like no one else. When you think about it, it's pretty pointless trying to impress anyone else.

And the question is: why do we then try so hard? I know your deeds, Jesus says. I walk among the lampstands, which is this church. There are two things that Jesus knows really well of the Ephesian church. The first thing He says is that I know the hard work that you do.

This church, this church was hardworking. This church was active. It was a beehive of activity. They were busy in the service of God and others. They entertained the lonely.

They nursed the sick. They taught the young. They were a vibrant, healthy church. You know, in the time of Paul, they were so busy. And again, in Acts eighteen nineteen, we see the amazing work that the gospel had done.

People burning their sorcery scrolls and all the things that they had collected and just a huge uproar in the city. People had come to faith dramatically in Ephesus. They were a busy church, hardworking. And Jesus says He also knows their perseverance. And that comes out in a very specific way.

He says: I know that you cannot tolerate wicked men, that you have tested those who claim to be apostles and are not, and you have found them to be false. And this seems to be an ongoing trouble in Ephesus. We know that they wrestled with being the commercial hub that they were. They were a meeting point of the East and the West. And so they had eastern mythologies.

They had western Greek thoughts and philosophies. And it was just this melting pot of people talking and arguing and trying to get their point across. And so in this situation, we see that the church is not immune to false teachings, but these were people that were not easily hoodwinked. These were people that did the hard yards. They weren't gullible.

They knew their doctrine well. And if the teaching did not measure up to doctrine to scripture, they were prepared to say something which we don't often say: that is wrong. That is wrong. That's not true. And it's something that we have to hear sometimes as well.

Tea with her JWs, will we tell them that they're wrong? Or will we just say: well, we have our own opinions? You're wrong. You don't understand scripture. You don't understand the gospel.

And so this is what is good about Ephesus. They are hardworking. They persevere in searching the truth. But then it comes to this next part in verse four. But for all their toil and all their endurance, for all their hard work and their orthodoxy, Jesus holds this against them, and it's absolutely devastating.

You have forsaken your first love. Now try to imagine hearing that for the first time if you were them and just how you would have been gutted by that. What if your wife said to you: I really don't think you love me as much as you did when we were engaged or when we were on our honeymoon. Ouch. Or what if you are a young mother of a toddler and your husband says to you: I don't think you love little Johnny as much as you did when he was a baby.

If I was a husband who said that, I'd make sure that she wasn't changing a dirty diaper at that time. You have left. You have forsaken. You have turned away from your first love. That's a harsh criticism.

At Ephesus, they were doing so much right. They were doing so much right. There was so much to commend, but the one whose eyes are like flames of fire sees into the heart. And for all their orthodoxy and for all their discernment, for all their hard work and discipline and perseverance, they have left their first love. Here was a church that we would be, that I would be impressed by.

It had the activities. It had the worship rosters. It had the working bees. It was a busy church. It was a church that had the standards of excellent doctrine and teaching, but it had lost its first love.

And it was not a loveless church. It wasn't that it had completely become dead, but it had less love now than it used to have. It was not a cold church, but it was a cooler church. And as a scholar Leon Morris says about this, he says: they had completely forsaken their first fine flush of enthusiastic love. They had yielded to the temptation ever present with Christians to put all their emphasis on sound teaching.

But in the process, they had lost love, without which all else is nothing. But now we get to the bold question: how is it with us? How is it with us? Could Jesus say the same thing about our church? You have left.

You have forsaken your first love. Or let me make it even sharper. What about you? Have you perhaps forsaken that first fine flush of enthusiastic love? Do you have as much love now of Jesus, of the church, as when you had it when you first became a Christian?

Some of our golden oldies here. Do you remember when you first started meeting here as a church or in the high school as a church? Do you remember how enthusiastically you began? As ministry leaders and volunteers, are we just grinding our teeth in serving this church? For others, are we holding back on serving this church, loving this church because there are other more important things happening in our lives? A few years ago, there was a report that was written to our national meeting, which we call the Synod.

And in this report, there was a section called evidence of a backslidden condition. Evidences of a backslidden condition. And they had sixteen criteria to test our hearts and the hearts of people in church or the church in terms of backsliding. Listen to this and see how you measure up. Evidence of backslidden condition.

Firstly, prayer ceases to be a vital part of your life. Secondly, the quest for biblical truth ceases. You are content in your current knowledge. Biblical knowledge is no longer applied inwardly. Pointed spiritual discussions are embarrassing.

Sport, recreation, or entertainment are a large and necessary part of your life. Aspirations for holiness cease to dominate your life. Acquisition of money and goods becomes dominant in your thinking. You can mouth religious songs and words, but do it without heart. You can hear God abused and not be moved.

Breaches of the peace in the congregation are of no concern to you. It's none of your business. The slightest excuse is sufficient to keep you from spiritual duty or opportunity. You are content with your lack of spiritual power. You pardon your own sin.

Injustice and human misery exist, and you don't care. The word is no longer preached and you are content. And lastly, number sixteen, you cannot detect spiritual decline in your life. Some of those things touch me pretty hard. So how would we stack up on those criteria, church?

And what if you discover that this does describe you, at least some of it? What if you conclude that: okay, there's some areas in our life that we have backslidden? What then? Well, Jesus thankfully tells us what to do. He doesn't simply accuse the Ephesian church.

He brings it back in verse five, and He mentions three R's. Three R's. Nice to remember. Nice to keep in the memory. The first thing is to remember.

Second thing is to repent, and lastly, to resume. Verse five: remember the height from which we have fallen. Repent and do the things you did at first. Maybe in your Christian life, there are some good old days to which you need to return. Nostalgia isn't all that bad.

If we have backslidden, we are to remember our earlier spiritual state. We are to think long and hard about it. Why did I feel that way? Why did I do those things? What moved me about that time?

We are to remember and have it inspire and reinvigorate us, but then we are to do something about it. You see, some of us may simply indulge in those memories, and we get fat on those spiritual good times. We get sentimental about the years that have gone by and feel that those things can sustain our Christian walk now. But that's where the second part comes in. If you remember how it was back then, if you remember what moved you, if you realise you are different today than you were back then, the second thing is to repent and to turn around, to turn back from that.

Usually, we think of repentance as having to do with activities: not to do this anymore, to do this more. But here Christ is telling us to repent not so much of sinful activities as a sinful state of the heart. Turn away from the lovelessness that we hold towards our church, towards our brothers and sisters, and importantly to Jesus Himself. And then how do we do that? To turn away.

How do we do that? The third thing is to resume. It's to resume. You do the things you did at first. Rekindle that first love because deep down, you know, you know that the insecurity and the bitterness and the apathy and the frustration and the depression and the anger, it all stems from that distance that we feel.

And when we worship and we say: Lord, I need you, we just are so reminded: Lord, yes, this is true. I need you. And how on earth do I keep forgetting that? Remember how fulfilled you were when you walked closely with Jesus. How nothing else really mattered when you knew that you were in that relationship with Jesus and it was strong, and everything was beautiful because of it. All sorts of negative things creep in when we lose those basics of spending time with Christ, of spending time with our brothers and sisters.

You can go to as many counsellors and psychologists as you want, but the truth is so simple. Study the scriptures again. Hear His word and His promises to you. Get up early to pray again. Start witnessing again to your friends because it's in that witnessing that you hear the gospel yourself.

Seek out fellowship with other Christians to be encouraged by what God is doing in their lives. Do those things that made you love being a Christian in the first place. And let's not just do it as individuals. Let's agree to do this as a church because this is really what Jesus is talking about. He's talking to us as a church.

He's talking to the Ephesians as a church. Let's seriously pray for greater love amongst us, deeper love for the Lord, a growing love for the lost so that they may enter into what we have. And if we don't do it, the second part of this verse is very stern. It's a stern warning. Listen to it.

If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place. Now why is this so urgent? Why is this so severe? Unless they repent, the church will cease to exist, Jesus says. Why?

Well, remember what they have to repent of. It's a loss of love. A church may have the greatest facilities out there. It may look beautiful. It may be clean, and they may have working days every single week, and it looks pristine.

It may have the greatest technology, but if no love is found, it will cease to exist. It will cease to be useful. A church may have the most gifted membership, the most talented people you could hope for serving it. But if it has no love for others and for Jesus, it will cease to exist. The church may have all the right doctrine, friends, and watch all its theological p's and q's, but if it has no love, it will cease to exist.

The lampstand will be taken. There was some research done into all the reformed churches in Australia a while ago, and why they have closed: some of these churches have closed down over the years. And in this research, the conclusion was sobering. They all had one thing in common: unresolved conflict.

Unresolved conflict. It may have been very immediate and intense, or it may have been conflict that had been dragged on for many, many years. But in the end, all these churches paid the same price. They closed down. If you do not repent, if you do not turn away from your lovelessness, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place.

If your love has cooled down and you realise that this morning, change your heart. Follow these three R's that Jesus gives us. Remember how you used to be. Repent from the attitude you now have and resume those good things once again. And so we hear some of the glorious promises after this of what awaits us.

And we hear a commendation again from Jesus. So He does a sandwich. He says: you are great in these things. And He gives them the bad news, and then He commends them again. So after He's just been criticised for their lack of love.

And then Jesus says this, and it sounds funny to us for the first time, but you have this in your favour in verse six. You have this in your favour. You hate the practices of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate. Now this is funny because having been criticised for their lack of love, now they are being commended for their hatred. In some ways, this is really strange.

You have cooled in your love, but at least you have one thing for you: you hate really well. Now the question is: how can Jesus say this? How can Jesus say this? Wasn't He the teacher and the preacher of love? Wasn't His whole life defined by love?

Wasn't His greatest expression of His love for us what He did on the cross? Absolutely. And we answer with a resounding yes. So for a group to draw out Jesus' hatred, well, it must be something pretty nasty. What these were doing must have been pretty terrible.

But the problem is, again, we're not quite sure of what these Nicolaitans were doing. We know that in part, they followed a syncretistic understanding of Jesus, of Christianity, but they included other bits of worship to it as well. In particular, the most popular theory is that these Nicolaitans synchronised their faith with emperor worship. So this great big theology or spirituality that was in Ephesus in that time with the great colossal worship of Domitian, the emperor of that time, was being mingled with Christianity. So in other words, they may have said: does the emperor want to be worshipped?

Okay. Well, that's fine. Maybe we can work something out. But by most accounts, it seems that the Nicolatian sect endangered the distinctiveness, the uniqueness of Christianity, and trying to blend it with some other spirituality that was out there. And it was this compromise, it seems, that was obnoxious to the Ephesian church, and they refused to participate in that.

But more so, it was obnoxious to Jesus. He hated the idea, and so did they. And so what we find here is that there are such things as Christian hatred: hating what God hates. But then this message is thrown out to not simply the Ephesian churches, but to the churches of all times and places. And this is why I feel comfortable saying that this is simply not just for the church in Ephesus.

This is for us today. It is a reminder. It is a warning for us today. Verse seven says this: He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. This was not a message simply for Ephesus.

It was at least to the other six churches in the book of Revelation. But because of the Spirit, it's also saying here, what Jesus is saying is what the Spirit is saying. What the Spirit is saying is what Jesus is saying. They are speaking to all the churches, and I believe because the Spirit continues to work, it is to the church of all times and all places as well. If we do then claim to desire to repent and resume our love for Jesus, we receive this closing promise.

To him who overcomes, to him who overcomes, to him who overcomes the loss of love, I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God. The tree of life, you'll remember, is that tree that was in the Garden of Eden at the beginning of the Bible. It was what symbolised the nearness of God, the eternal full life that God wanted us to have. And Jesus says: if you overcome this lovelessness, you will be able to receive that again. And here we see this amazing thing that the tree at the beginning of the Bible reappears at the end of the Bible.

What we were, however, we also know barred us from being welcomed to that tree. We were barred from that, but now we are welcomed to that tree. And how come? Why are we welcome to eat of that tree again? Are we lost in paradise in Eden?

Because of another tree. Another tree. The cross of Calvary. The tree of death. And so what we see here is in a nutshell the message of the Bible.

At the beginning of the Bible, we have the tree of life. At the end of the Bible, we have the promise that if we love Christ, if we seek Him, we can take and participate in this fullness of life that God wanted for us. But it was only possible because of what happened in the middle of the Bible: the tree of death. In closing, let me say this: remember who you are.

Think of who you are. What brought you into this existence? Remember His suffering and His death. And let's remember these things in particular. Let's be like the church at Ephesus that work hard and persevere and desire to do all the right things.

But let's do it with the right motivations. Let's dare to stand against what is wrong. But let's not be like the Ephesians and let our love grow cold. Let's not be like that because if that does happen, we will close down and the lampstand will be taken from us. And there will be no point to being at church.

Hard work, warm love, and a clear stand. Hard work, warm love, and a clear stand. May that be the way that the Lord sees us both now and that day when He comes back for us. In the meantime, let's listen carefully to what the Spirit says to the churches of all times and all places. Let's pray.

Hard work, Lord, is what we do. We work hard, Lord. This church works hard. As many ministers here, not just one, as many servants here, Lord, servant leaders. But, Father, we also can sense that burnout and triviality and egos, Lord, these things creep in.

And the reason they creep in is because we lose track of why we're doing it in the first place. It's not about us. It's not about what others will think. It's not about what others will say. Lord, it is because we love You and we love other people.

And Lord, we know and we desire that intimacy and that fullness and the fulfilment that we have, that we've experienced in the past, where we've just been in that amazing place of peace and joy and surrender and serenity. And, Father, we desire that. We need that. That's why we sing: we need You. We know that without You, that is impossible.

We know that without You, anything else is simply fabrications. Father, I pray that if there are some of us that need to work on some of these disciplines and just needs to meet with You again regularly. Father, I pray that we will do that, that we will be moved by that, that we will discipline our heart and our minds for that. Father, let our church be a church that is known for its love for You first and foremostly and our love for others because of Your love. Lord, in this next week, we pray that You will work through us and in us.

In these areas, we will test ourselves, that we will know ourselves. And, Father, that we may come to that sweet spot. And we may come to that amazing place of worship, of awe, of glory and praise. We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.