Seven | Ephesus - Revelation 2:1-7 | August 16

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Now ignore me and be sad because this is not necessarily sad news.

Because I do, I feel like God has...

I've placed for a while now, these three chapters on my heart.

And as it tends to happen, what I'll do is I'll think about it.

And I'll be like, oh, that would be really good. And then over time,

God tends to confirm whether or not that's something we should hop into and

when we should hop into it.

We've come out of this summer, we've been talking about the names of God,

which has been valuable. And I've just been telling you, there's a lot of names

of God. So it is kind of an indefinite until when God leads us to the next thing.

And I feel like God has led us to this next series, this next word for us,

to the churches that are in Revelation, these seven churches that are in modern

day Turkey, which is purposefully written, not just to them.

John wrote these words from his revelation of Jesus to reveal this mystery to

these seven churches, but also to all people for all time.

It's the only book of the Bible that pronounces a blessing on those who read

it, who hear it, and who do the words that are written in it.

And so as a result, also, when he's writing this letter, the introduction is

in chapter one, he's writing the entirety of the book of Revelation to each

of these churches, and then to all who would read it.

And so it's understood that every single one of these churches,

while there's something specifically addressed to them, every one of them will

read these words out loud.

And so even though it's written to Ephesus and Pergamum and Thyatira and Smyrna

and all these churches, each one will read the other letters.

Just like Paul writes to Colossae, he writes, have this letter read in the church

at Laodicea. And the letter that I wrote to Laodicea, which we don't have,

unfortunately, make sure they bring it to you and you read it.

These words are not just for a particular church. They are for all churches for all time.

And we have a lot to learn from them. And so I'm looking forward to what God

has for us. Please stand with me as I read these kind of seven verses.

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 people, that you have tested those who

claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them to be 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 the love you had at first.

Consider how far you have fallen. Repent and do the things that you did at first.

And if you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place.

But you have this in your favor. You hate the practices of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.

Whoever has ears, let him hear that the Spirit says to the churches,

to the one who is victorious, I will give the right to eat from the tree of

life, which is in the paradise of God.

This is the word of God for the people of God.

And all the people said, amen.

Got a participatory crowd today.

As most of you are well aware, I am the person who sits there and goes,

I'm not going to say that.

I'm not going to do what you asked me to do.

This part of scripture is so important, And so much so that there are many people

who say that Revelation is the most important book of the Bible,

especially the New Testament.

Yes, Jesus' life, death and resurrection is important. But they look at this

and say it's important because it causes us to look at eternity and then view

all of history through it.

So even the sacrifice of Jesus is enhanced when we look through it through the

lens of eternity. So they'll say things like this is one of the most important,

if not the most important book of the Bible.

I don't know that I agree with that, but that thought is out there and it is such a valuable word.

Jesus starts out in revealing these words to John by saying,

again, we're going to follow this each week.

There is a formula to how these letters are written.

I'm not a particularly verse by verse guy.

I do enjoy listening to it, but we are going to kind of follow verse by verse

because there's a formula.

And I always start off with a word about the Messiah, a word about Jesus.

These are the words of him who holds the seven stars in his right hand and walks

among the seven golden lampstands.

And each of these descriptions of the Messiah are referenced back to chapter

one, where they're all read in one basic paragraph, but now they're split up

to these specific churches.

And I think it's important that we're starting with Ephesus.

It's important that Jesus's first words as a reminder, I hold the seven stars,

which there's debate on what those are.

I'm gonna tend to take the view that these are the leaders of the churches.

They say things like angels.

We could say, okay, well, there's an angel over each of the church,

supernatural being. However, angel also is the word messenger and it's used for people as well.

So we're gonna take the understanding at least together in this point of time,

that these stars that he's talking about are the leaders of these seven churches.

And Jesus says, I hold them in my hand. He says, I walk among these golden lampstands.

I think this is so important for us, especially in our time,

in our season, in our place, in this culture that we live in,

to remind ourselves that Jesus cares about individual churches,

that he doesn't just care about them, but he walks among them.

He evaluates them. He is integrated into them.

If at any point in time, these words have ever come out of your mouth.

I want this passage of scripture to challenge you, that you've ever thought,

well, okay, we're all part of the big C church.

So, you know, I can go and do this and I can do and do that.

We're all part of the big C church. That's true, but it's only half the story.

The other half is that Jesus cares very much about these individual congregations,

these individual churches.

And if we just validate our decisions for our family and for ourselves based

on what is good for the big C church, that's a good way to start.

And if you're going to get it wrong, you might as well get it wrong that way.

But you're only thinking half of the way Jesus thinks because he cares deeply

for individual churches and he thinks of them in that way.

Everyone is a member of his family. Everyone is a member of his kingdom.

Everyone is a part of his body, his bride, but also there are individual expressions

that he cares so much about.

And as we're going to look at as well, churches are a method of evangelism in this world.

Planting new churches, we all think about sometimes, why would you plant a new church there?

But if there are lost people, then planting a new church is always a good choice.

So Jesus walks among these churches and he holds these stars in his right hand. And.

These stars, again, are for the individual churches.

But if we think about Ephesus specifically, so Ephesus is probably the first

of these churches to get planted.

It's probably the largest of these churches. It's the largest city.

It's the only church that we have a letter written to.

It's not the only church that's mentioned in the rest of the New Testament,

although some of them are not mentioned again, except for in this chapter.

It is the place that Paul traveled with Priscilla and Aquila,

where they met Apollos, where they brought him along.

Priscilla and Aquila, probably with Apollos are the ones who actually planted the church.

And Paul went and left and did his missionary journey thing in the region.

And he came back and he established leaders for the church.

And they spent time there building the church as its leader.

So it has in its lineage, Paul, it has in its lineage Priscilla and Aquila,

it has in its lineage Apollos, it has in its lineage Timothy,

who Paul sent to be the pastor of this church for a period of time.

And so when Paul wrote Ephesus, the letter to the book of Ephesus,

which we call Ephesus or Ephesians, right?

This is 30 years or more before John writes these words.

Our tradition, our apostolic tradition tells us that John, the disciple of Jesus,

became the bishop in Ephesus later on.

So this is the lineage of leadership that is held in Ephesus.

It is the center of trade in this region. There was a big trade route to all of the churches.

It is by all expectation, a regional megachurch.

And we don't like to think about our perception of New Testament churches that

they're small and meet in homes.

But a lot of times what that looked like is that rich people built buildings,

on their property so these churches could meet at.

Because there wasn't a church here and a church there. There was all the believers gathering together.

In Ephesus, this is where Jenny and I got to travel there years and years ago.

And you can still stand in this amphitheater today. This is where Paul would

preach to thousands of people.

And so it's no wonder that these

people could have even gathered in that amphitheater from time to time.

And then in these larger rooms and houses, this was a big church.

And it's likely that it fed the church planting in these other churches.

And so Jesus addresses it first because it's one that others look to as this

is the place we came from.

This is the one that started it all. This is the big mama church of our area.

And so, Paul, Jesus gets John to write to the church in Ephesus first.

And he writes, I know your works.

I know your deeds, your hard work, your perseverance. I know that you cannot

tolerate wicked people and that you've 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 you have not grown weary.

So that after Jesus addresses a characteristic of himself as the Messiah,

then he moves into, like any good counselor mentor would, he moves into a time

of praise before he knocks them over the head with what they're doing wrong.

And then he ends with the time of praise after that.

So he's moving into this time of praise. I see you. I'm walking amongst the

lamp stands. I see your works. I see what you're doing.

Not only that, he says, I see that you are toiling.

My translation here says that you have endured hardships.

And your translation may be different, but this word toil has that idea of being beaten up.

You've been beaten up by what's going on around you. You've been beaten up by

the labor, but he says you haven't grown weary. You haven't grown tired.

You're not worn out by it.

There are people who are worn out in ministry and there are people who are worn out from ministry.

And the longer that you lead a church and the more people you know who lead

a church, you know how easy it is to be worn out from ministry.

But these Ephesians, they were laboring well.

They were tired, maybe. They were weary, maybe. But they would not give up.

And they were weary in the ministry and they were not weary from it.

They were weary in the work and they weren't weary from it.

So Jesus commends them that you haven't given up.

You're not so weary that you haven't pressed forward. Your church potentially is still growing.

People are still meeting Jesus. You're doing the work. You're out there for my name.

He says this about their discernment, that they hate those or that they cannot

tolerate these wicked people.

And they've tested those who have come among them as false prophets,

and they found them to be false.

Later on in the praise after his words, strong words to them,

he says that you have this in favor of you, that you hate the practices of the

Nicolaitans, that they were a people who understood the truth and carried the truth.

And as a result, that they were standing strong against those within the church who opposed.

It's interesting, whenever Paul talks about his ministry along the way,

he'll talk about how a fruitful ministry is amidst outside oppression, outside difficulty.

And so the church grows when there is external pressure.

And he writes very, we're going to read in Ephesians in a second.

He writes to these believers that they have rooted out those from within who

have brought false gospels.

Because when there's difficulty from within, when there is challenge from within,

that is what leads to hardship in the church. That's what leads to a lampstand

being removed from the church.

Outside pressure flourishes. There's a quote that talks about how God builds

his church. Jesus builds his church on the blood of the martyrs.

Where there is oppression, difficulty from outside, the church blows up.

It's from inside that's the difficult part. So he commends them that they have

been successful in evaluating those who consider themselves to be Christians,

but have brought a false gospel into

the fold, that they were imposters masquerading as members of the faith.

They could even be, and we know this to be true in our modern day,

people who genuinely consider themselves to be believers.

And it's not our place to evaluate necessarily whether they're saved,

but to measure the truth of their gospel that they're preaching.

So it could be that case as well. The Gnostics were all around at this time

who were preaching this other gospel, trying to infiltrate and attack the church.

There was persecution from within.

And Paul knew this. So 30 years before these words, Paul visited,

again, planted this church, helped plant this church.

In Acts 20, he writes these parting words as he heads off to Jerusalem,

with much tears, much hesitation on the part of the Ephesians.

He writes, keep watch over yourselves and all the flock of which the Holy Spirit

has made you overseers. Be shepherds of the church of God, which he bought with his own blood.

I know that after I leave, savage wolves will come in among you and will not spare the flock.

Even from your own number, men will arise and distort the truth in order to

draw away disciples after themselves.

So be on guard. Remember that for the three years, I never stopped warning each

of you night and day with tears.

And now I commit you to God and to the word of his grace, which can build you

up and give you inheritance among all those who are sanctified.

Paul knew that this was coming. And so he told them and they were prepared and

met it in the measure that the spirit had apportioned.

Even in his letter back to them in the book of Ephesians itself,

turn in the wrong direction.

Paul will talk about this again, encouraging them once more to stand strong,

as he equates this with this idea of a storm.

And Paul was familiar with storms. He was shipwrecked.

He had endured. He understood this metaphor. So he writes to them in Ephesians chapter four.

He writes, encouraging them to become mature, attaining to the whole measure

of the fullness of Christ.

And then verse 14, then we will no longer be infants who are tossed back and

forth by the waves, blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the

cunning and craftiness of people and their deceitful scheming.

Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect

the mature body of him who is the head.

So again, after his parting, this might've been,

this was probably after, after his parting words, he reminds them to continue

to mature, to continue to stand strong and commends them to speak that truth in love.

Rather than being those who are immature and are tossed back and forth by the wind.

So this is the legacy of the people that John is writing to.

This is the praise that Jesus brings right before he comes in with the warning,

which is a powerful warning.

It's probably other than the hot and cold Laodiceans, this is probably the one

people remember most about these letters.

There's letters to churches that we don't know about. We tend to forget what

Jesus says to them, but we remember Ephesians, we remember Laodicea.

And so he writes to them, yet this I hold against you.

And remember, all the churches are reading these words. So when we get to other

letters, he's going to say it again.

And after he's just praised them and commended them for doing the work and not

growing weary, they're feeling pretty good.

And he says, yet this I have against you. So deep gulp, you have forsaken the love you had at first.

You've forsaken the love you had at first. I don't know what translation you're looking at.

There's two ways that this is generally said.

You have forsaken your first love, or as I've just read, you've forsaken the love you had at first.

I am not going to choose between them purposefully. There is the popular interpretation,

which we're going to talk about.

And then there is an equally valid interpretation, which we're also going to

talk about. And I think they are inseparable for one another.

So I think the ambiguity in those translations is very appropriate and very personal for us.

I have this against you, that you have abandoned your first love.

We're going to start there.

That you have abandoned your first love. And so what people will see in this most readily is,

is that they are talking about their love for Christ.

That they're doing the work, they're enduring, they're defending the gospel.

They're defending against these false teachers. They're rooting them out.

They're exposing the false gospels. They're sticking to the truth as Paul encouraged,

they're speaking the truth.

But something had happened along the way to their love for Jesus.

We've experienced this. We've seen this churches that are really good at their

programs, but along the way, they've lost the love behind it.

We might experience this our own lives. As we endure, we lose the excitement,

we lose the love, we lose the passion, but we continue to press forward.

We continue to do the work and do the ministry.

I don't want to suggest that they were any less followers of Jesus,

but I think they lost along the way the why of why they were doing it in the first place.

We see Jesus mentioned throughout scripture, the greatest commandment,

love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, strength, and soul.

So when we encounter those words, that's why we immediately think in our hearts,

you've lost your first love. First love, what's the first love?

To love God with all, with everything.

Christianity apart from love, ministry apart from love.

When we stop, when we get so caught up in the steps that we forget the drive behind it.

When we get so caught up in these ideas of, Oh, I have to be serving God out

of my gifting, which is fulfilling.

But when we get caught up in that, it becomes about our gifting.

It becomes, and this is the difficulty. This is why Paul writes so much about

boasting in his weakness.

When we serve God out of our gifting and things are going well,

it's so easy to forget God at all, or to forget God completely.

That works. Because we're doing it in our own strength.

This is why it's so important to just serve God out of love.

And if it's in our gifting, all the better.

Because we can go get so caught up in the doing that we forget about the one

behind it, about the one who gets the glory.

So we must serve the Lord in love. This is not a new idea in scripture.

Jeremiah chapter two, We get that phrase, that pronouncement,

that the people of Israel had abandoned the living water, the spring,

the well of God, and had instead turned to these broken cisterns.

So they were forsaking the fountain of living water, and they were trying to

dig their own muddy, dirty waters for themselves. They were doing it on their own strength.

They were doing it out of obligation. They were showing up and performing,

but their hearts weren't in it.

And God compares that to the difference of clean, fresh, cool,

running water to a muddy hole in the ground.

That they had lost their fountain.

This is what John is writing to this church emphasis. That you've lost your fountain.

You've lost your first love. You've lost the source.

But there's this other way of reading it. That you've lost the love you had at first.

Which doesn't sound very different, I'll admit. But there's an important nuance here.

They were, as commended, successful in all that they hadn't been trusted with.

As Paul had written, as John reminds them, instructs them, they were rooting

out these infiltrating wolves that were bringing in false gospels.

They were bringing in legalism. They were bringing in other teachings.

The Ephesians were great external auditors. They were great at looking and knowing

and spiritually discerning the motives of these people.

They could spot these fatal flaws.

But along the way, what we end up realizing is they became really terrible internal,

Because they were so focused as they should have been in defending the truth as being.

Possibly resulting in suspicion of people that grew over time.

We have some friends that are national leaders in the church in Uzbekistan.

And the story is not so dissimilar.

They would have people pretend to be believers and then expose and turn over

their gatherings to the police.

And while generally speaking, they're not day after day losing their lives as Christians.

They get beaten, they get fined, they get stuff confiscated.

It's very difficult, this external governmental pressure.

So what they started doing was discipling people for a year,

for two years, before they brought them into the larger gathering in a way to kind of test them.

There was a suspicion that had grown from that, and rightly so,

and they were treating it rightly. But it's easy to imagine that in the Ephesian

church, this suspicion of people grew over time.

As they were successfully rooting out these false gospels.

And the result was that they had lost their love for others.

They were speaking the truth as Paul writes, but as I have been reminded of

over time in my life, they were not doing it in love.

They had lost their love for people. Had they lost their love for Christ?

Maybe not, but they had become insular.

As a believer, if you've been around long enough, it's not difficult to imagine

what it's like to lose your initial love and passion that you had when you first got saved.

And if you grew up in the church, all the easier it is.

So it's not difficult to imagine. And I would say our word, the word that I'm

receiving from Jesus to the Ephesians this morning is this word for us,

that we have grown insular, not because we're suspicious, because collectively

we have gone through some hard stuff together,

and we've formed these relationships over times of difficulty,

which it's hard to understand if you're coming in from the outside.

And so we've grown insular. We've turned inward. We've lost our love for the lost.

It's a weird rhyming way to say it or I don't know.

We've lost our first love. We've lost the love we had at first.

We've lost our passion to see people meet Jesus. One of my prayers over these

last few years is that we would just see the harvest.

Because if we saw the harvest, then all the stuff that we tend to care more

about in times of growing and famine fades away when we see people,

their passions ignite for Jesus for the first time, where that love is first kindled.

So we had grown insular. So this is the word to us, not because we have been

defending against our culture or against infiltration.

And it's easy for churches, and this has been our experience,

I think, to have gospel-centered,

foundationally good teaching, to have solid doctrine, and to still feel like

something's, even to have the Spirit show up in tangible ways from time to time as we gather,

and still for them to be a sense that something is missing.

And of course, they were encountering this as a result of the environment that they were in.

So I'm not surprised by this pronouncement of Jesus. Depending on how self-aware,

they were, I wonder how surprised they were.

They were so good at defending that they had grown, their love for others had

grown cold. We see that in the New Testament, right?

It talks about how this is a word to the church.

In the last days, love for others will grow cold." This is a warning to believers,

this isn't to outsiders.

This is a warning to believers.

The reason I want us to think about these two together is because I believe

Jesus thinks about them together.

And I believe that the New Testament as a whole, the Bible as a whole thinks

about our love for Christ, our love for God.

As almost inseparable from our love for others.

It is a tension we are to hold and not solve. When you solve it saying,

oh, this is definitely about losing your love for Christ.

Then you go down the path that leads to inward focus, discipline,

which are disciplines are great. They lead to devotion, but it leads to, we need to pray more.

We need to spend time in the word more. We need to focus on recapturing our love for Christ more.

And it leads us away from people when that becomes the way we solve that tension.

Likewise, when we solve the tension the other way, when we focus on people,

then we drift away from the truth of what Christ calls us to.

So it's a tension we have to hold. The real solution in this chicken and egg

quandary is that, yes, the love of God comes first and everything flows out of it.

But it's so intimate that we see words from Jesus.

We see words from his brother, James, and we see words from John himself.

Previously writing in letters, how can you love God whom you don't see if you

don't love people whom you do see?

It's such an intimate relationship that we have to take both sides.

You've lost your first love.

You've lost the love you had at first. Jesus says the greatest commandment,

love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, strength, and soul.

He's quoting the Old Testament. It's all over the Old Testament.

It's in Deuteronomy. It's in Leviticus. It's in Samuel and Kings.

It's in Isaiah. It's all over the place. Love the Lord your God.

And whenever people turn from that, their love grows cold.

But he says it immediately after, the second is like it, right?

Love your neighbor as yourself.

So our prescription from John you,

is to remember, to repent, and then just for the sake of making them all ours, to repeat.

To remember, to repent, and to repeat. He tells us to remember from where we've come.

Remember how far we've fallen. Consider it. Remember the first spot.

It requires looking back and remembering what it was like before.

So for our first love, looking back to remember, remember what it was when we fell in love with Jesus.

Remember what it was like when we realized he saved us.

We sang that, you saved me, you saved me, I will never leave your love.

There's a reason we sang songs about love this morning.

Remember what it was like.

If it's you've lost the love you had at first, remember the passion you had

to see people meet Jesus.

Remember the love that you had for other people and how powerful that is.

So much so that we are called to make disciples.

Remember the love you had at first. Dredge up these memories.

It's not that God expects us to recapture some emotional high.

Emotions in the Bible are important. However, when the Bible talks about love,

it's not typically talking about a feeling.

It's talking about a conviction that leads to a commitment or a behavior.

It's talking about.

Making a choice in a way, not to completely remove the romance out of it,

but I'm not a romantic anyway. I'll take the risk.

It's about choosing Jesus. There's something deeper. Let me say it that way.

There's something deeper about biblical love than a feeling,

a feeling that is fleeting, a feeling that doesn't last when we're hungry or

when we're angry or when we're tired and we can't think about it.

It is a conviction that overflows into action that overflows into joy.

It's full of joy.

There's that passage in 1 Peter, though you have not seen Him,

you know Him. Though you do not now see Him, you love Him.

And then it says, which overflows in inexpressible joy.

This is the love that we lost, the love that they lost at first.

This love, this action, this commitment that overflows into inexpressible joy.

This is what Moses writes in Deuteronomy.

And I think it's so fitting. The Bible, y'all, is a work of a master.

And we shouldn't be surprised because we call that master God.

In Deuteronomy chapter 28, this is the charge against the Israelites.

Deuteronomy 28 · chapter mention

That Moses tells them, this is what's gonna happen if you turn away.

This is what's gonna happen if you forget your first love.

All these curses will come on you. They will pursue you and overtake you until

you are destroyed because you did not obey the Lord your God and observe His

commands and the creases He gave you.

They will be a sign and a wonder to you and your descendants forever because.

You did not serve the Lord your God joyfully and gladly.

Not just that you didn't obey him. It says that verse.

But even when you do obey him, you don't do it with joy. And you don't do it with gladness of heart.

This is what John's writing. You've lost your passion.

You've lost the love that you have at first. This is why in 1 Corinthians chapter

1 Corinthians 13 · chapter mention

13, we have that wonderful list of what godly love looks like.

And at the end, we have those very strange statements about these remain faith,

hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love.

All of the gifts that they were arguing about in Corinth, all that goes away in heaven.

We don't need any of that anymore. Faith and hope, they all go away in heaven.

We don't have to hope for something if we've received it already.

We don't have to have faith for something if we see it.

Love is the only thing that remains. Love is the only thing that is eternal of all of those things.

God himself calls, gives himself the moniker of love. God is love.

Love doesn't fade. So we remember, we repent.

That word repent, metanoia, real quick, because we have our ideas of what repentance

looks like. And they're correct. I'm not saying you're wrong.

To turn around, right? That's our definition. The word repent literally means

to think better, to think different, to think transcendently,

to think God's thoughts. God says, my thoughts are not your thoughts.

To repent is to choose what God says above what our thoughts say.

And then the important part about it is, as I shared last week,

if we think about discipleship, this is the way I think about discipleship.

The order of discipleship is think, believe, do. Every sin we've ever done started as a thought.

Every step of faithfulness towards Jesus begins as a thought that we remind

ourselves over and over again, as we repent, as we think better,

as we think transcendently,

that thought over time becomes belief, strong belief that it overflows into action.

And if there is no action as a result of the repenting, as a result of the thinking,

as the result of the believing, then it is not complete. Repentance is not complete.

If we just think differently, it must overflow into action.

So we remember, we repent, and we repeat. I think that was the other R I gave you.

We do the works that you did at first. That's John's prescription.

That's Jesus' prescription. His prescription is not you wait around until the feelings return.

This is all counseling stuff. I'm just going to keep calling you out,

Katie, because this is all counseling stuff, right? This is marriage counseling.

You don't just go, ah, I'll love them again. That doesn't work.

I'm going to wait until I'm overcome with attraction again.

We've known people who the wife has gotten pregnant to save their marriage. That doesn't work.

You have to communicate and you have to commit to one another.

You have to do the work you did at first. You can't just try and feel the way

you felt at first. You have to do the things you did at first.

You have to prioritize one another. You have to talk to one another.

You have to communicate to one another. This is what prayer is.

I want to redefine prayer a little bit for you.

What if, if everything in this life is a response to things that God has already done.

That's what salvation is. That's what love is. We respond to what God has done at first.

Why is prayer different than that? We respond in prayer to communication that

God's already initiated.

He spoke first. We respond. We let God have the first word. We let God have the last word.

We communicate. It's what prayer is about. We commit.

I want to remind you all every week through this, in each of these letters.

Each of you is necessary to the kingdom of God.

We lose that idea over time. We're often content in churches to let the guy

in front be the necessary one. Y'all are necessary.

Here's a harder one to understand. The person sitting next to you,

they are necessary to the kingdom of God. They are necessary to this church.

You are necessary. They are necessary.

In the midst of conflict, in the midst of difficulty, in the midst of offense,

it's hard to remember that.

Just turn and look at the person next to you. Now turn and look at the person who's not your spouse.

Some of y'all, that was easier for others. They are necessary to this church and the kingdom of God.

So we're over time. I'm going to wrap it up here. But Jesus says.

To do these things, remember, repent, do the works you had at first,

repeat, or else I'm going to come and remove your lampstand.

And I've heard that that means I'm going to end the church, the gathering of this people.

I don't think that's necessarily the case. It could be because this church had

lost their first love and yet they were still doing the work.

It's not that removing the lampstand is going to end that necessarily.

People who are committed to doing the work are still going to do the work,

but they're definitely going to lose their influence, their light,

which shines in the darkness.

This is the only time Jesus gives this warning that he would remove the lampstand of the church.

This is why he starts with that, how he does about himself as the one who walks

amongst the lampstands.

He's gonna give pretty harsh warnings to other churches. I'm not saying this is the worst.

He says against one that he's going to come and fight against them.

I think that might be worse.

This is the only one he says that you're gonna, I'm gonna remove your lampstand.

I'm gonna remove your influence. I'm gonna remove your light.

Maybe I'm going to end this church. I'm going to end this gathering.

Paul writes to Corinthians, your meetings do more harm than good.

Time and trouble and disappointment have a way of wearing us down.

He ends this letter as he lends all the letters to the one who overcomes.

It is possible to walk in victory.

It is possible for you to recapture the love you had at first,

to recapture your first love.

And I, this is, I usually, so like tomorrow, I usually try and not think about

what I'm going to say next Sunday, but sometimes God just surprises you.

And before I had really dove into this letter more, I'm familiar with these.

I've read the Bible lots of times. It's easy to forget.

The word why popped into my head before I'd even done any work.

And I think that's what Jesus' message to us and to our time is and where I

want us to end up here, that we would never forget the why.

Simon Sinek, business development guy, he wrote a book about it.

I haven't read it, but it's used to turn businesses around.

Find your why. Why do you do this? What differentiates you?

Whatever it is, whether it was the love for Christ, the love for people,

I think we can sum up the book, the letter to the Ephesians with that question,

or that statement that's followed by a question that they had lost their why,

which the question inherent in that is, what is your why?

There are 31,000 some people in Watauga County.

There are 15,000 students at App State. Is that right? Somebody know.

We're going to pretend that light's correct.

Added to that number, 46,000 people, 47, 50,000 people, little less.

Conservative estimates say

that 55% of a population are actually believers or actually Christians.

70, 80% might say that they are Christians. But when we really evaluate,

do you go to church? Do you read the Bible? Do you do these things that control your life?

Does God factor into the way you live your life?

Conservative estimate, 55%.

There are 30,000 people in our community that don't know Jesus.

And you ask me, does Boone need a church plant? Yes. He needs 20 church plants.

It needs 30 church plants, the size of Alliance to finish the work that people would know Jesus.

That's our why.

We love God because he first loved us. We love people, yes, because he tells

us to, but because they're so intimately connected.

We can't love God unless we love people. He says that literally.

You can't love me unless you love your brother.

Our why, as I've said this before in the past, this is what we end on.

The gospel ultimately came to you because it was headed to somebody else.

You are infinitely valuable. In Isaiah, I just found comfort in these words

yesterday that you are precious.

You are honored. And I love you. That's God's words.

Also loves the people around you equally. He doesn't love in percentages.

So the gospel came to you. His

love came to you. He chose you because he's also choosing other people.

That's our why. That's why whether it's this church or another church, whether that church,

preaches that you need to make disciples or not, whether they model it or not,

whether you're in a church that's insular or not, that is your why,

regardless of what anybody else says,

regardless of where you are,

that the whole world might know Jesus.

To love God, serve the Lord. Don't merely serve God in your gifting,

serve him with everything you have.

Love people, care for his flock.

When God, when Jesus restored Peter after the resurrection from his denial,

his question was, do you love me, Peter?

And Peter gets frustrated after the third time, right? Of course I love you.

You know that I love you. You know all things.

Jesus' response, it's slightly different each time, which people pour a lot

of meaning into, but it's basically the same thing.

Shepherd my flock, care for my flock, love my people.

If you love me, love my people. We love God. We love people.

We remember, we repent, we do the works that we did at first.

Like any good counselor will tell you.

What did you do when you felt that way previously? What did you do that worked

in the past that got you out of that addiction, out of that train of thought, out of that depression?

Do the works that you did at first.

Love people, love God. And ultimately the question is.

Up to you. What's your why? What is going to be your why? What is going to be our why collectively?

I've submitted to you what I believe it is. Go and wrestle with that. See if you agree.

You don't have to agree with me. I'm not going to be offended.

I'm usually right. Doesn't mean I'm always right.

Fine. Figure out what your why is.