Introduction
Don’t you hate it when people twist your words? When I was a child we used to have what we called a joke. It went like this. If your friend was eating lunch, and he said, “I love the soup.” Somebody would immediately reply, “Why don’t you marry it.”
We use the word love in some really strange ways. We call an adulterous relationship a “love affair.” We love to do certain things, go certain places, and eat certain foods. In the Greek NT there are four different words that can be translated love. There is a chapter in the New Testament that is called the love chapter.
This passage as much as anything forces us to think about love.
It especially forces us to think about our first love.
And, maybe it is not really even our first love. It is the first love of a generation that has now gone.
Describing the Biblical Text
Jesus is speaking to seven churches to illustrate how they are either succeeding or failing in their calling and in their ministries.
The first of these 7 churches is the church at Ephesus.
Ephesus is an interesting congregation because in the NT it is probably the most covered of all the churches.
It is mentioned in Acts, it has its own letter, the letter to Timothy was to help him in leading the Ephesian church, and here we see it mentions as one of the 7 churches that were chosen to receive the Apocalypse.
Narrate the Contextual application
Jesus has a message to the church that is both comforting and yet it is a warning.
It is dire warning that if the church does not find what it lost, the church will disappear.
It is the kind of warning that we as a church must take very seriously if it comes our way.
It is the kind of warning that can serve to educate us in how we need to think.
Can we afford to lose or not to reclaim our first love?
Can we afford not to know what that first love is?
Life Application (thesis)
It is that first love that drove our church in the beginning.
It was that first love that caused us to unify behind purpose and to trust each other to each be the part of the body that Christ has called us to be.
We must reclaim the first love which drove our ministry in the beginning.
SO WHAT!! (Outline)
As we look at this text, there are three keys that we will need to use to unlock the door back to our first love.
We have to recognize those things which are confused for the first love.
We can see by this passage what the Ephesians did was to confuse the good for the best.
Let’s look at it again.
Jesus tells them, “I know your deeds and your toil and your perseverance and your intolerance for evil men.”
All these things are good aren’t they?
Chocolate cake is good; peach cobbler is good, apple crisp is good, Crème broulet is good but you certainly cannot live all your life nourished by that.
It is best to have a balanced diet.
Dessert is good, but nutrition is best.
It is possible for everything to look really good on the outside and for things to simply be not right.
I bet we can all think of times when we had a rotten Sunday Morning at home and came to church and nobody knew it because we were the happy smiling family that everybody expected us to be.
God sees through that.
God sees and knows our motivators and he knows our attitudes.
God knows when we get into a rut.
Think about the Ephesians.
They were a hard working church.
They did a lot of stuff.
When Jesus said that he knew their deeds and their toil, he was saying your works and your labor towards those works.
Jesus also tells them that they have a good handle on their teaching and doctrine as they are able to root out the heretics who would come in try to spoil the church through false teaching.
There aren’t 8 of 10 churches in America that could do that today.
These were all things that the Ephesians could be proud of.
Yet there was something wrong.
Jesus said, “This I have against you”
That is really an interesting statement.
The word against is a preposition and there is the implication of location there.
There other night, Valerie and I rearranged our home office and I cannot imagine how difficult that would have been if someone was leaning on the furniture the whole time.
Jesus is saying this leaving of the first love is against you.
It is like a weight that is pressing on you and keeping you from being able to move.
It is like the encumbrance of sin that slows us down as Paul described in Hebrews 12.
Something else we need to note here is the fact that they have left their first love.
Literally they threw it away.
How in the world could that happen to a church that was founded by Paul, pastored by Timothy, and probably John.
How could this happen?
When a church starts majoring on the minors and minoring on the majors, it is not that unthinkable.
But you know what; they were warned about this very thing.
Look with me for just a minute to Ephesians 4.
Therefore I, the prisoner of the Lord, implore you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called, 2with all humility and gentleness, with patience, showing tolerance for one another in love, 3being diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. 4There is one body and one Spirit, just as also you were called in one hope of your calling; 5one Lord, one faith, one baptism, 6one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all.
Do you hear what that is?
It is a call to love each other and in that love, we become united in Christ.
We become like Christ who is one Lord and His Father who is One God and Father.
Now, this is what John 17:21 says that Jesus prays for us.
That they may all be one; even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us.
Throwing away the first love is throwing away the unity of the body of Christ in our church.
But that unity is sacred.
That unity is what paints us like Jesus.
It shows the world that we take seriously the command of God to love Him and to love our neighbors as ourselves.
We can never let our deeds take the place of our love
We can never let our perseverance take the place of our love.
Just to remind us that perseverance can come in many forms from enduring persecution and standing fast in it to doggedly holding on to empty traditions that do not in and of themselves communicate the gospel of Christ.
So let’s be clear.
We cannot let anything take the place of that first love.
We cannot throw it away.
This morning, I am going to do something a little different.
I am combining the second and third points of this message.
Here is key # 2
We have to remember from where we have fallen
In doing that we are able then to use the third key.
We have to repent and do the deeds we did at first.
Why combine these two keys?
Well, frankly, they both refer to the past.
From where have we fallen?
I don’t know.
I wasn’t even born in 1929 when the church was started.
I was only 3 years old when the church hit its peak in 1964.
But there was meteoric growth from 1929 to 1964.
We were standing tall.
We need to think about something when we think about recovering the past.
It is not about form and it is not about style.
It is easy to confuse the ideas but they are not synonymous.
The Ephesians had works
Verse 2 tells us that they had deeds toil and steadfastness
Then why is the church told to do works in verse 5.
The NASB says that it is the work you did at first.
But, it is more than that.
It is the first works.
That to me is very compelling.
The word first does not mean the beginning or the original but it means the primary.
Now the fact that they are a church here leads me to believe that they have not lost their love for Christ but they have left their love for the first deeds and replaced it with a love for the new deeds.
What were those first deeds that they loved so much that made them a vital church?
I think that if we were to look at the NT carefully, we would find three things that we could view at the first works or primary deeds.
The start of the church at Ephesus was a little unusual to say the least.
This was the church where the demon stripped and scared the seven sons of Sceva.
This was t he church that saw the miraculous healing at the drop of a hanky or a shadow of an apostle.
It was the church where Demetrius the silversmith stirred the people against the church claiming that they were slamming the idol god Artemus because the gospel was cutting into their financial livelihood.
Yet this was a special church as we pointed out before.
Paul came back to Ephesus and taught the elders to protect the church from false teachers so that he church would thrive.
But, the first deeds that we see in verse 5 are probably none of these things but it is alluded to by Demetrius.
The church was winning people to Christ.
It was sharing that clear message because there was excitement and enthusiasm to do it.
It is very difficult for a church that loses it motivation to find it again.
The question that Jesus asked about salt gaining its savor is important for us.
How do we get our savor back?
There was an architect who designed the new fellowship hall of our first church. When we were estimating the cost, he explained something to us. He said it would take us about 8-12 years to pay for the facility. The only exception is new churches. Somehow, they could almost always come up with the money at the start. He said that there was just something about new churches.
Like the Ephesians, new churches know how to get excited about the things of God.
They know how to prioritize because they have to.
Unnecessary deeds consume resources and talents that are needed to win the world to Jesus.
But, they were not a new church. They were the church that Paul had started some 40 or 50 years before.
Now they had to start thinking like a new church.
Is it time for us to do the same thing?
Have we ever thought about simply replanting ourselves?
What do we have to lose?
We once had that first love, a love for serving Christ and winning souls.
Starting over is the way to find that again.
We all started over once before when we trusted Christ.
Just like disciples have a process that eventually takes them back to the beginning, it is possible that churches do also.
I am willing to find out if we can do it.
It will be hard work, but looking to the future glory of this church will be much more rewarding than resting on our past.
Let’s remember our past, from where we have fallen and keep our lampstand in the hand of Jesus.
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