Ephesus: A Church Without Love—Jeremiah 29: 1-14; Revelation 2: 1-7
In ten years here, I have miraculously avoided delving into Revelation. It’s one of the most mysterious and misunderstood books in the Bible. People ask questions about all the wild and fantastic imagery of the book, and for the most part, preachers pretend to have answers. It is complex, difficult, prophetic, and personal to the author and his anger at Rome. But one part which is clear is God’s message to the seven churches. Each one of them receives a word of encouragement, critique, or reprimand. And, I believe, that message to the churches still holds true in a very prophetic way to our churches today.
In this first part of God’s message, the Book of Revelation addresses the church at Ephesus. While there are many positives for this church, there is one very strong and overwhelming rebuke: they have forgotten their first love, God. The book gets right to the point saying in verse four, “But I have this complaint against you. You don’t love me or each other as you did at first.” God calls to them to “turn back to [God] and do the works [they] did at first.” It’s a call for the church at Ephesus to return to their first love, and that love is God.
Now, as I was preparing this sermon, I tried hard to think of hymns, songs, and praise music which might fit with the sermon. Though I think the hymns fit well with theme, there’s one song which kept coming back into my mind, and it’s not exactly a hymn. The chorus says this, “I was looking for love in all the wrong places, lookin’ for love in too many faces…lookin’ for love.” And while this may fit well with the theme, I don’t think God would approve of me fully including a 1980s country song about a single man philandering around till he finds his true love in a church service.
This was the problem of the church at Ephesus. They had right doctrine. They did not tolerate evil. They stayed true to the apostles’ teachings. They had suffered for the sake of righteousness, and truly one could think this was a solid institution of faith. But the writer of Revelation points out their shortcoming. They were, if you’ll pardon the reference, looking for love in all the wrong places, and God says they must back to their first love—God. Love is a very powerful force in faith and the life of the church.
Look at what Revelation says. Though they have done almost everything right, the fact that they have misplaced their love of God and one another has them fully in danger of God’s full wrath, for their lampstand will be removed from its place among the churches. But we know the importance of love. For Jesus told us that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord, Our God, with all our heart, soul, and mind, and the second greatest commandment is to love our neighbors as ourselves. I Corinthians 13 puts it even more clearly: “If I could speak all the languages of earth and angels, but did not love others, I would only be a noisy gong or clanging cymbal.” And the final verse of that chapter says, “Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.”
Yet the church at Ephesus had lost their love. They loved neither God nor one another as they first did. A church and the people of God can have everything right and perfect as much as they want—doctrinally, educationally, programmatically—everything can be right and perfect, but if a church or God’s people fail at love, they fail completely. You cannot make substitutes for God’s holy love. But I read my Bible, we say, and know every book in fact! But I go to church every Sunday! But I’ve studied and figured out what church is supposed to be about! “Too bad!” God says. The church at Ephesus did these things too.
Still nothing can substitute for this love which God sent to us to learn and know in Christ’s life, death, and resurrection for us. Ephesus did everything technically correct, but they still failed completely in their faith. God warned them that they would be finished if they did not turn back to loving God and one another as they first did when the church began.
In many ways, our modern churches are like the church of Ephesus. We bring people in, plug them into a program, a youth group, a small group, a Sunday School, a hundred different programs. We see churches that have everything a person could want right down to a petting zoo, but there’s something wrong, something amiss. Too many of our churches are looking for love in all the wrong places. Too many have forgotten their first love. Today, just like in Revelation, God is calling to the church to return to her first love—the God who saves, loves, and redeems.
The church has gone off looking for love in the strangest of places. First and foremost, these days, the church has lost herself in political battles. Of all the places God’s holy church should not be is in the sinful waste of politics. The church is so consumed by arguing over the next political topic on the news that it has forgotten to feed the hungry, heal the sick, care for the broken and hurting, preach good news in a weary world. These things are rapidly losing ground to the theology of political commentary, and the church has lost its mission and its witness as a result. That lampstand is teetering on thin ice, just like in Ephesus.
For the people of God, the two questions by which we should weigh our decisions go right back to what Jesus said are the two most powerful commandments: does it show our love of God, and does it show our love to our neighbor, whom we should love like ourselves? No matter how right we are about something (or wrong, perhaps), if what we say and do, how we act and live, does not show love then all we can offer is the noise of a gong or clanging cymbal.
God is saying to Ephesus, and in a prophetic way to us as the modern church, that we must go back to what is our first and primary calling, to the mission which Christ gave us: preach the good news, care for the least of these our brothers and sisters, love God with our whole heart, and love our neighbors as ourselves. There’s an old story of a tiger and a donkey having an argument over the color of the grass. They donkey insists that it’s blue, while the tiger says green. They go to the lion as the king to sort it out. The donkey blurts out that he believes the grass to be blue then asks the lion to punish the tiger because the donkey was right. The lion tells the donkey if he believes it, it must be true, then punishes the tiger with three days of silence.
The dumbfounded tiger asks why the lion told the donkey what was wrong, and then punished him. The lion says, “This is not about the color of the grass. You are punished because it is degrading for a brave, intelligent, powerful creature like you to argue with a donkey. If you allow yourself to be led on a fool’s errand, you will wind up yourself a fool.”
Do not be led astray. Do not go looking for love in all the wrong places. Do not try to substitute what is second best for the perfect, grace-filled love of God that has the power to transform all of humankind through faith in a risen Savior who showed us exactly what it means to show God’s love. As the hymn says, “My Jesus, I love Thee; I know Thou art mine,” and may we never, ever forget it.
Worship Video: https://www.facebook.com/fccmacon/videos/592217715265376