Revelation - All Things New, Sermon Four; Orthodusty - Revelation 2:1-7
Ephesus - the First of Seven Love Letters from Christ to his Bride, the Church
Annual Reviews and Checkups - don’t we love that??!!!
A 360 review in reverse: the one in the center is assessing those in the circle, and they are entire congregations. Seven of them, representing the whole Church in the whole world for the full range of time from Jesus’ ascension to Jesus’ return.
“What the Spirit is saying…” - the word of Jesus that John writes is the voice of the Spirit speaking in and to the Church. When we gather and we hear the Scriptures, we are LITERALLY hearing the voice of the Spirit. Are we listening?
Ephesus - Its power, prestige, and preeminence: Ephesus began as an Ionian Greek settlement on the coast of Asia Minor, built where the Cayster River met the Aegean, and it grew into one of the great cities of the ancient Mediterranean on the strength of that harbor. As Rome absorbed Asia Minor in the second century BC, Ephesus was made capital of the province of Asia, and by the first century AD it ranked among the empire's largest cities — estimates run into the hundreds of thousands of residents, rivaled in the East mainly by Alexandria. Its wealth came from trade flowing through its port, from banking, and from the enormous religious economy built around the Temple of Artemis (the Roman Diana), one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world and, at roughly four times the size of the Parthenon, a pilgrimage destination that drew worshippers from across the Mediterranean. The temple functioned as much more than a shrine — it served as bank, marketplace, and civic anchor all at once, and the silversmiths who made shrines and images of Artemis (Acts 19) were a real economic guild with real political muscle.
Ephesus was also a showcase of the Roman imperial cult: the city was honored as "neokoros" (temple-warden) of the emperors, and around AD 89–90 it dedicated the Temple of the Sebastoi to the Flavian dynasty under Domitian — the same emperor most scholars associate with the persecution pressing on John's own exile to Patmos. Standing at the intersection of enormous commercial wealth, a globally famous pagan cult, and state-sponsored emperor worship, the young church at Ephesus had to hold its ground against extraordinary gravitational pull toward compromise.
Ephesus - its importance in the NT: Acts, Ephesians, 1 Timothy, 1-3 John. Mary’s home. John’s home, after Timothy was killed by the Roman authorities.
The problem isn’t persecution or false teaching or false leaders, but something quieter, more subtle, but as spiritually deadly as any plague precisely because it is so easily masked. This hidden killer is an indifferent heart.
The Revelation of Jesus - 2:1
The signature at the start of the letter - chapter one is not a stage in the book we jettison but the foundation for everything that follows. Each minio-epistle finds Jesus “signing in” with a dimension of who he’s shown us to be in chapter one’s revelation. “I’m the Head of the Church and the Ruler of all and all things.
The Rule of Jesus - 2:2-6
A. Jesus Commends - 2:2-3,6
Orthodoxy in Doctrine
We should never settle for less than faithful Christian doctrine and teaching
Keen Discernment
Paul’s warning: Acts 20:30: Paul's own prediction that "fierce wolves" and men "speaking twisted things" would rise from among them — and against 1 Timothy 1:3–4, Timothy's standing charge to silence exactly this kind of teaching. This church did its homework. If Paul or Timothy could read verse 2 in isolation, they would call it a success report.
BUT!!!
B. Jesus Critiques - 2:4: Laid down your first love. What does this mean?
Let me remind you of an important text in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians - “Speaking the truth in love…” Or consider these words to Timothy who was leading the church in Ephesus after Paul started the work - “The goal of our instruction is love from a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith.” - 1 Timothy 1
It appears that the orthodoxy of the Ephesian church was becoming a brittle, theological system that possessed all of the correct propositional truths but was devoid of affection and committed compassion. In short, it was becoming Pharisaical - right in so many ways, but finding a way to be wrong about being so right. Truth without love is not “truthing” at all.
Three Loves
1. Love for Jesus - Jeremiah 2:2 - “I remember the devotion of your youth, how as a bride you loved me…”; Song of Solomon 6:3; John 21:17 - “Peter, do you love me?”
A GREAT danger - 2 Corinthians 11:2-3
“I’m not the one who moved.”
2. Love for One Another
Ephesians - the church is meant to be "rooted and grounded in love" (3:17) and grows precisely by "speaking the truth in love" (4:15) into a body that "builds itself up in love" (4:16) — love isn't the emotional weather around the doctrine, it's the mechanism by which the doctrine does its maturing work. So when Christ says they've abandoned love, he's not describing a lapsed feeling alongside intact belief. He's saying the body has stopped doing the one thing truth-telling in this community was ever for.
1,2,3 John references to walking in love: Read against 1 John, the charge has real theological teeth: "whoever says he is in the light and hates his brother is still in darkness" (1 John 2:9); "if anyone says, 'I love God,' and hates his brother, he is a liar" (4:20). John doesn't allow "orthodox but unloving" as a stable category — for him it collapses into self-deceit. “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).
3. Love for the Lost (Lampstand - light in the world!)
Do we engage in prayer for the lost, for mission? Do we share the gospel with others? Do we give to the work of the gospel?
Jack and Rosemarie Miller in Uganda - picking up the trash to preach the gospel.
The Response to Jesus - Rev 2:5,7
“I will come to you…Hear what the Spirit is saying!” - Have we? Do we?
Lovelessness is a great plague and danger. About the days in which Revelation was written - and surely they can be applied to our day too - Jesus said, “Because lawlessness is increased, the love of many will grow cold” (Matthew 24).
I’ll tell you who hasn’t lost their first love - God revealed in the face of Jesus Christ.
Why do we love at all?
We love, John wrote, because God FIRST loved us!
He loved first! And he hasn’t laid down his first love. On the contrary, the only thing he laid down was his life precisely because of that first love.
Our love is a thimbleful of water in comparison with the ocean of his. But it is that ocean of love that gives us the love we have.
And that love is shown to us at the cross, poured out in our hearts by the Spirit, and sealed eternally in his powerful embrace of unconquered grace. We love because he first loved us, and he loves us even when our love is weak and cold, and our hearts have grown indifferent.
He gently breathes on dimly burning wicks, fanning the flicker that remains into bright flame. He is love, and he does love.
Perhaps as you’re listening today, you sense within you a heart that has cooled in ardent devotion to Jesus, judgmental and closed to brothers and sisters who bother you, and indifferent to the eternal state of your neighbors and the world. Perhaps, like Jonah, you’d rather God judge those who hate you rather than save them.
What can be done for our hearts in such a place?
Remember
Repent
Grieve it; Confess it; Forsake it; Cry for Help
Return
Come as you are, O Prodigals! There are many prodigals in the church, not just in the pigpens!
The Reward of Jesus - 2:7
“To the one who overcomes” - The tree of life in the paradise of God: All things made new!
Paradeisos was originally a Persian loanword for a walled royal park or pleasure-garden, and it's the same word the Septuagint uses for Eden and the word John uses in Revelation 2:7. The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus was surrounded by exactly this kind of paradeisos - a sacred grove of cultivated trees, watered by a nearby river, that also functioned as a legally recognized place of asylum (criminals and fugitives could claim sanctuary there). Scholars have even noted that Xenophon, when he built his own private paradeisos elsewhere in Asia Minor, explicitly modeled it on the Ephesian precinct — river, grove, and all. So when Christ promises the Ephesians access to "the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God," his first hearers wouldn't have heard only an echo of Genesis. They'd have heard a direct counter-claim against the most famous paradeisos in their own city, the one they walked past every day, the one their whole local economy served. Christ is essentially saying: the real garden-sanctuary, the real tree of life, isn't the one you can see from the harbor road. It's mine to give, and it's better than the one you already think you have.
According to Jerome, the great ancient translator of the Bible, when he was very old, John was carried into the worship service and set before the congregation. So weary, he could speak but a few words: “Little children, love one another.”
Did the Ephesians respond to Christ’s appeal? They did! The Ephesians heard what the Spirit was saying to them. They remembered. They repented. They returned.
In the generation after the writing of Revelation, Ignatius, the chief minister of the church in Antioch, wrote a letter to the church in Ephesus that is full of praise for what he calls that “deservedly happy church” which is known everywhere, he said, for its good deeds, its brotherly love and unity, under that “man of inexpressible love” their bishop Onesimus. That Onesimus, according to an ancient tradition, was none other than the runaway slave and then Christian convert whom Paul sent back to his Christian master, Philemon, as we read in the New Testament letter that bears his name. Ignatius also praises the Ephesian Christians because, he says, “no false teaching could gain a hearing among them.” [Ign. Ephesians, 19]
O friends, we are the Bride of Christ and his banner over us is love. We are destined for the Tree of Life in the paradise of God, in full communion with him through Jesus Christ.
Do you know his love for you? Do you love him? Do you love one another? Do you love the lost he came to save?
No wonder Ephesians closes with this benediction - “Grace to all who love our Lord Jesus Christ with an undying love.”