Grace Thoughts

Voiceover: Hello friends, welcome to Grace Thoughts, the radio ministry of Grace Connection Church with Pastor Tim Kelley. Grace Thoughts has been dedicated to preaching a clear gospel of grace for over 20 years. Here is Pastor Kelley.

Tim Kelley: Revelation chapter 2. Revelation is quite a book. Some people, as you go through the Christian community and different people and writers and preachers, some people live in it. They love this book. I do not know why they like it so much. Maybe it gives them some literary license to make things up or to imagine some things that may or may not be even true or have just maybe a thread of truth in them.

But much of this book is easy to translate and some of it is not easy to translate. Some of it is John portraying this Revelation, this unveiling, that is what Revelation means. And he is describing what he saw 2,000 years ago. We are not sure exactly what he was actually looking at. But we can make educated guesses and we can make some pretty certain things that we know about. Jerome, one of the old church fathers, said Revelation has as many riddles as it does words.

I thought that was good. Martin Luther did not even want the Book of Revelation in the canon of scripture. He fought against that. And I believe James, he said, Luther's quote, Revelation finds a man insane or leaves him so. I thought that was good.

So, the seven churches. For the next couple of weeks we are going to get in, probably three weeks, I am guessing, maybe two, we will get into the seven churches. We are going to cover two of them today, the seven churches of Asia Minor. There are about 12 churches in that area. These are the ones that the Holy Spirit revealed to John. It is significant because some will feel that the seven churches reflect the seven phases of church history from the early church right to the modern day, with the modern day being the Laodicean church.

I probably do not, I can see that to a degree, but I probably do not fully embrace that because I think you can go to the New Testament time and see a Laodicean spirit and a persecuted church. You can see the same thing throughout through every period of church history. There are fervent Christians, there are persecuted Christians, and there were Laodicean Christians throughout history from the New Testament to the current time. I could be wrong. I was wrong once, it has been a long time now, but it has been 20 years. But I could be wrong, but I do not know, but many, many better men than me feel that that this all seven churches represent a reflection on periods of church history.

Now, what I do see, I think we can be confident with in the churches of Revelation, is a snapshot, at the very least, a snapshot of our churches today. We see deceived churches today like we see in Revelation. We see lazy churches today. I am talking about local churches as we saw in Revelation. We see worldly churches today as we saw in Revelation. And we see persecuted churches today.

I just, finally, I saw an article on Fox News this morning where they are saying Christian is persecuted, Christian persecution is increasing. The media has left that alone. But my friends, when you see a hundred Christians, as Dr. See shared with us, were killed in a church service in Pakistan, it made the news for one day. One day. But that stuff is happening literally all over the world.

So, the first church, because of time, is Ephesus. Let us start, where am I here? Verse 1. I am using the English Standard here. I have a couple of other translations in front of me here. To the angel, now the angel here is most likely the local church pastor. The word angel simply means messenger and oftentimes contextually it is going to refer to a heavenly angel coming down. But in this particular case, most will tell you this is referring to the local church pastor, the messenger, the preacher of that local church.

And this is to the preacher of the local church at Ephesus. To the angel of the church of Ephesus, write. These words hold of him who holds the seven star in his right hand, who walks among the seven golden lamp stands. I know your works and 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.

I know that you are enduring patiently and bearing up for my name's sake and you have not grown weary. So, he is building them up at this point. He is saying, look at, you guys are doing good. You guys are, and they were known. The Apostle John was one of the first bishops of this church. He was a pastor there and oversaw this church for many, many years. So, now he is writing about his former church here in the Book of Revelation. And from getting their Revelation from God, he is saying, you guys did really well.

When false doctrine would come in, you would cut it right off. Somebody would come in and distort the gospel, you would cut it right off. You did good. You kept the gospel pure. And John the apostle was known for two things: keeping the gospel pure and preaching the love of God and loving each other. He was known for those two things.

So, but I have this against you. You are doing good, but I have this one thing against you, that you have abandoned the love that you had at first. Remember, therefore, where you have fallen. Repent and do the works you did at first. If not, I will come and remove the lampstand from its place unless you repent. Yet you have yet this you have, you hate the works of Nicolaitans, which I also hate.

He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches, and to the one who conquers, I will grant to eat of the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God. We will refer to that in a few months when we get to Revelation 21 and 22. So, this letter goes to Ephesus. Ephesus was a great commercial city of tremendous importance of that day.

And if you can go on Google Maps and put in Ephesus, you can actually see the ruins today. You can see the theater and where Paul preached. You can see the the foundation of the Temple of Diana. You can see it right from the satellites even to this day. There was a wonderful, it was a hub of activity. There was a harbor, that is what I am looking for. A harbor would come in and it was one of the big trade centers of the day.

The Roman government saw it and gave it a level of independence. They would send judges there and they self-governed. Them and a few other cities were given that privilege. When you talked about Ephesus, you talked about a city that was wealthy, full of debauchery. It was a religious town. They had what we would call the Olympics of the day was played there every year or every, however many years it was.

And the Temple of Diana was 425 feet long. That is big. 220 foot across and 60 foot high. It was a sensuous cult that promoted prostitution for spirituality. However, the city was also on the decline. Stuff had come into the harbor, shipping was harder to get in. It was making it a little bit harder to trade.

So, here we have, the apostle says I have this one thing against you, you have lost your first love. If you were to go back to, I believe it is Acts chapter 20, you would find that this church was commended for their love, about 30 to 35 years before this was written. So, the Apostle Paul, when leaving Ephesus, he commends them because the way they loved each other and they loved the world. Loved the world in the sense of wanting to win the world, not worldliness.

But 30 years, that is not that long. 30 years later, less than a biblical generation later, they have lost their first love. Yet, they remained doctrinally on game. They knew what they believed. They knew the clear gospel. They knew what they stood for. They could detect error a mile away. They were dogmatic in their convictions.

When they saw something that was wrong, they said, that is wrong. They knew it. And God commended them for that. He says, but I have this one thing. You have forgotten love. You have forgotten loving one another. You have forgotten forgotten loving the rest of the church. You have forgotten loving, showing that love to the world so they can see who I am.

That is the one thing that I have with you. And for that, you have to, if I can, he can say this, repent. John's words, not mine. So, he says he holds, verses 1 through 3, I just want to pick out a few nuggets from here. He, the words of him who holds the seven stars, that is representing the seven churches.

And the word holds, an interesting word, it is, and I would not bring it up if it was not, it is in a genitive accusative, which is very unusual here. In other words, he is saying Jesus Christ holds the entire universal church within his hands and under his control. This is a corporate local church, the universal church is Christians across the across the the globe. In other words, he is in absolute control and understands everything precisely happening universally in the world and corporately and locally in every local church. He is aware of it.

Then it says work. I know your work, your toil, some labor. Your toil means to drain one's strength. Your patience, the ability to withstand under pressure. It is a great compliment. But I have this one thing. They lost their first love.

If you go to Ephesians today, Ephesus today is no longer a city there. It is a city that they will equate with it, I call it, if I can say it right, Ayasuluk, is the city. And it comes from two Greek words, Hagios Theologos, which is Holy Theology or Saint Theologian. And it is referring to the Apostle John.

The church in Ephesus has long been forgotten, but the the man that brought the spirit of God there is still remembered to this day. He is the last remnant really of that day when the church in Acts chapter 20 and the subsequent years after where they loved right and they were a testimony to a world in a very, very, very dark world.

Now, how do you lose your first love? That is the main point. I want to get it. How does that happen? That is probably more messages than just the seven or eight minutes we are going to spend on it here today. But I have a few things here. I have six things. We lose our first love when we replace a kingdom mindset with religious tradition and personal preference, sort of what happened here in Ephesus.

They did not ever saw the real kingdom of God anymore as a scope. They saw their own piece of the kingdom and they protected their own piece of the kingdom. Their desires became bigger than kingdom desires. So, when you replace a kingdom mindset with my traditions or my preferences, I can lose my first love. In other words, God may be calling me and leading me over here and guiding me over here. But I am saying, no, God, no, this is what I want and this is what I like. This is my preference over here.

And God said, I know that is, but I am I am asking you, I am trying to lead you over here because this is where you will be my greatest witness and this is where you will be the the greatest effectiveness in the kingdom. And Jesus hit this throughout the throughout the the New Testament, especially in Matthew chapter 23, when he went after the Pharisees and he said, look at, your tradition has strangled men.

The doctrinally, theologically correct, morally perfect Pharisees. Jesus called them dead men's bones and white sepulchers because they missed the Messiah, the one they defended, the one they are going to crucify, the actual Messiah in the name of the Messiah. We are going to crucify you in the name of the Messiah. I am the Messiah.

But the Messiah did not pick their package, it did not fit their their description. He was not what they were expecting. He rattled their cage. He changed the rules. He exposed the hypocrisy of their hearts. So, the very reason why they served them in the first place seemed to disappear. We can lose our first love when we lose our passion in pursuit for God's presence.

We talked about it this Sunday morning. When when when my faith has become mechanical more than personal. When I do not clamor after God and the presence of God. For me in my own life, I know when I get up early in the mornings and sometimes I will read I read the scriptures every day and I pray every day, but I find myself maybe at one or two or three days later and I really have not sensed the presence of God like I would like to.

I will get on my knees and I will not get off it and I will sing Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs and I will praise them and I will thank them for things until I can really sense his presence because I do not want to go away without his presence. If I lose his presence in the course of my day, my day gets arduous and hard. So, we know when we lose our first love, when we lose our passion for the pursuit and the presence of God. We do not even think really, when I talk about the presence of God, it is a foreign concept. It is nothing that I even have ever tasted or partook of.

We lose our first love when we become self-focused and not mission-focused. I love missions because missions is the most selfless thing you could have.