Copyright © 2022 Michael A. Brown
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 men, that you have 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 have not grown
weary. Yet I hold this against you: You
have forsaken your first love. Remember
the height from which you have fallen! Repent
and do the things you did at first. If
you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its
place. But you have this in your favour:
You hate the deeds of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.
He who
has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who
overcomes, I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the
paradise of God.”
(Rev. 2:1-7)
Scandal – the intended bride of Christ in
Ephesus has lost her first love for her betrothed!
Much like a marriage relationship that has
become dry and cold. Gone are the
earlier days when the relationship was close, warm, intimate and passionate,
when the two partners were one in spirit and looked forward every day to being
with one another. When they were
together, time did not seem to exist; they could linger together for hours,
never wanting to be parted. The inward
fire of their love saw them through many challenges in life. However, the two partners slowly got used to
giving themselves to the humdrum demands of daily living, going to work,
working long hours, and fulfilling their tasks and responsibilities at
home. And then the children came along
as well, truly a great joy, but it simply added to the busyness and stress of
their lives.
They were a good couple in many ways but,
over time, this all slowly but surely took its toll on the intimacy of their
union, and it brought coldness and distance into their relationship. Intimacy was neglected, perhaps a little at
first but then increasingly. So now they
have become too busy and too tired to spend quality time with each other. They go to bed exhausted only to get up the
next day and go through the same demanding schedule again. They have become like the proverbial ships
that pass in the night. And so it
continues on...
Then one day they suddenly wake up to the
fact that what they used to have seems to be no more. There is little or no emotional warmth
between them, hardly any feelings, and everything seems to have gone cold. They are drifting apart. They now take each other for granted, even in
what they do for each other. They seem
to be spending more time apart than they do together. Living together has become nothing more than
a dull, lifeless and unending routine of daily demands.
Losing our passion for God through neglecting
intimacy with him
It
can be the same with God… We are told
that the first commandment, the one which we are to keep above all the others,
is to love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul and with all
our strength (Deut. 6:5). God’s design
and purpose has always been to bring people into a committed covenant love
relationship with himself. It is this
that he wants, and he yearns for it above all things.
These believers in Ephesus, the bride of
Christ, had much to commend them as a church.
They were working hard, and they had persevered in their faith through
many hardships (2:2-3).[1] However, it seems that they had become too
busy for God. They had neglected
intimacy with him, so they had lost this.
They were working hard, but it is true that spending too much time
working and toiling invariably takes its toll on relationships (2:2). They hadn’t noticed or admitted to themselves
that their love for Jesus had grown cold.
Furthermore, it seems that they were
becoming doctrinaire.[2] But being valiant for truth, necessary as
this is, does not in and of itself keep us close to God. We can be orthodox and correct in our
doctrine, and we can live rightly before others, but we may have little or no
love (1 Cor. 13:1-3). To use the example
of John Bunyan’s characters in Pilgrim’s Progress, we need to be both
Mr. Valiant-for-Truth and Mr. Great Heart.[3]
Through neglecting it, these believers had
lost their once warm, passionate relationship with God. It had become dry, distant and cold. They were no longer living out of
life-giving intimacy with God’s presence. They had lost what is the very heart of the
Christian life, the central, key focus without which our life can never become
what God intends it to be. However,
as I said above, God wants and desires relationship with us above all other
things. It is this that we were created
and redeemed for. We were redeemed to
live in union with God and to love him, not merely to serve him and work for
him. And it is living in his love that
meets our deepest needs. The root
of all backsliding is forsaking our first love. Either we learn the lesson of living with God
in heart-warming intimacy and walking with him closely, and reaping the
benefits of this by keeping our faith fresh and alive (and thereby keeping our
church alive too), or else we eventually lose what we have in him. It is spiritual freshness that brings life
and causes things to flower and bloom, but dryness kills off spiritual life...
The long-haul aspect of walking in
covenant relationship with Jesus can sometimes defeat believers. We can start well, but then develop problems
later on in our Christian life. Learning
to practise the self-disciplines of the spiritual life is crucial if we are to
walk consistently with the Lord throughout our whole life. We need to guard and cherish the closeness
and simplicity of our relationship with God above all other things, because it
is so easy to lose. If we miss
this, we miss everything.
Without him, we have nothing. To
have him is to have life, whereas not to have him is not to have life (1 John
5:12). When the bride in the Song of
Songs realised that her beloved was missing, she got up and went in search of
him until she found him (Song 3:1-4).
But on another occasion, when he was knocking at her door seeking to
come in, she was too tired and lazy to get up and open the door for him,
leaving him outside lonely and alone, so he turned and went away (Song
5:2-6). As believers we can sometimes neglect
the Lord we truly love, simply because we are too tired or lazy to seek him out
and spend time with him!
When these Ephesian believers lost their
first love for him – in fact, it even says that they had forsaken it (2:4) –
God took this so seriously that he warned them that if they continued on like
this, then he would close their church down by removing its lampstand
(2:5). This is how serious this issue is
for God: he says that if we do not want him in intimacy, then ultimately
we cannot really have him at all.
With God, it’s either intimacy or nothing. An empty, dry, stale marriage is as bad as an
empty shell of a church that has lost its fire, zeal and intimacy with
God. In this state, it is not fit for
its intended purpose. Couples whose
marriage has gone dry begin to drift apart and the end result is often
separation and divorce, the ending of the covenant commitment they promised to
one another in their vows at the very beginning.
A marriage can only survive and become
what it is intended by God to be, if true, intimate and meaningful love is
nurtured and survives. But for this to
happen, a couple has to commit themselves to doing what is necessary to regain
the love they have lost. They have
to return to doing what they did at first (2:5). And it is recovering intimacy which is the
key to this. Saying sorry, coming
together and dating again, making the time and space to spend quality time
alone together, making love once more, committing to putting into place a right
balance between work, home, family and marriage responsibilities, and so on.
It is no different with God. Our love for him and our desire to
spend quality time with him is far more important to him than our work for him
will ever be. We tend to get so
easily distracted by other things and by schedules which demand priority that
we simply become too busy (even in God’s work).
We lose our intimacy with God, because we do not value or
prioritize it.
Church
was never intended to be primarily about the program that we run every week or
the other activities that we do. In the
first place, it is about God himself. We
are the bride of Christ, so God wants real, genuine, close relationship with us
above all other things. He yearns
jealously to have us for himself, because we are one in spirit with him (Jas.
4:5, 1 Cor. 6:17, cf. Ex. 20:5-6). So
our first call as believers is to love him, to worship him and to live with him
in intimacy, and then to do his work and the rest of our daily activities. If the freshness of love for God is within
us, then we will be blessed in what we do for him.
Re-establishing our intimacy with God
The
theme of desire, passion and strongly expressed feelings runs throughout this
letter to the church at Ephesus.
Scholars tell us that the word ‘Ephesus’ may well derive from a root
word meaning ‘desirable.’ The letter
refers to such things as the passion of first love, a lack of tolerance of
wicked people and a hatred of free sexual relationships, and the promise of
paradise as the place of living eternally in close fellowship with God
(2:2,4,6-7).
Jesus presents himself to them as One
walking among the lampstands of the churches, seeking fellowship with those
whose heart will respond to him, with those who will devote themselves to be
close to him (2:1, 2 Chr. 16:9, Jer. 30:21).
We can perhaps detect the pain and disappointment of his heart when he
says plainly that in spite of all they are doing for him, yet he holds
something against these people whom he loves deeply (2:4). Open, plain, honest and direct speaking in
the uncovering of deep, inner feelings and desires is the language of marriage
and intimacy known only to those who have walked closely together in love. He can say it to them, because they should
know that, painful as it is to hear it, yet it is meant in love and expresses
the yearning cry of his heart for their good.
We are more likely to receive truthful rebuke and respond to it
constructively if we know that the one who says it loves us. He calls them back to what they had known
before:
‘I
remember the devotion of your youth, how as a bride you loved me and followed
me through the desert, through a land not sown.
Israel was holy to the LORD, the firstfruits of his harvest.’ (Jer. 2:2-3)
So
we need to re-establish our intimacy with God.
We have lost our spiritual freshness and vibrancy, and we may be jaded
and tired. We have lost our spirit of praise
and faith. In our heart, we feel cold
and far from God, even though we may be doing his work. Our devotional life is weak and
inconsistent. In church meetings it
seems like we are just going through the motions, everything has become dull
and lifeless. We may even have become so
self-deceived that we think that everything is actually okay, that if we are
doing his work with seeming success then he must necessarily be pleased with
the way things are, much as the husband who thinks everything is running
smoothly and is so surprised when his wife suddenly bursts out one day and is
distressed because intimacy between them has been drying up for a while, and he
didn’t even notice it happening.
So it’s about coming back to God and
drawing close to him, repenting and confessing our sin of coldness and the
things that have brought it about, resolving firmly to do away with things that
keep us too distracted or too busy, and committing ourselves to making the time
and space to be able to be with him regularly for quality time together and to
linger in his presence, in order to refresh the intimacy of our spiritual union
with him. Relaxing quietly with his word
and taking our time over it so that it once again speaks deeply into our
spirit, drinking deeply at the fountain of his presence, praising and
worshipping freely and openly in spirit and in truth, praying in the Spirit and
allowing the Spirit’s presence and peace to well up from within, so that our
heart is warmed and living water flows through us once again – renewing
our vows with God, and doing the things we did when we first became believers
and were living close to him (2:5).
And then committing ourselves to keeping to this pattern on a regular
basis, realising that it really is the most important thing we can ever
do, as only then can our faith be kept fresh and alive and our work for
God remain effective and fruitful over the longer term.
We need to guard our spiritual life and to
put in place whatever measures are necessary to keep our union with Jesus alive
and fresh. Not wanting to lose her
beloved, the bride got up and went in search of him. And when she found him, she would not let him
go (cf. Song 1:7-8, 3:1-5, 5:2-8). It really
is all about being centred on our relationship with Jesus, as a fiancée is with
her fiancé. They seek, they want,
and they desire to be together. Our
Christian life was never intended to be about merely going to church. It’s about enjoying our inner fellowship with
Jesus and delighting our souls on the richest of fare which is found only in
him (Isa. 55:1-2). When we truly love
him, we truly live! It is in
learning to live with Jesus, walking together consistently and intimately with
him, that God’s best and most fruitful purposes for our life can be fulfilled.
Overcoming
in this way brings us into renewed fellowship with God and into the promise of
eating from the tree of life in the paradise of God, much as the first couple
walked with God among the trees in the garden (2:7, Gen. 3:8, cf. Song
6:2-3). It is a picture of the secret,
inner life of sharing together which intimacy in relationship brings.
However, not being willing to keep
regularly to this pattern simply means that we potentially condemn ourselves to
losing this intimacy again and ending up where we were before. And so the heart of our relationship with God
will remain unstable... Unstable
relationships do not know a life of inner, secret sharing together and they
tend to remain superficial. Much as a
married couple that recognise their problem and become intimate again for a
while, but then allow themselves through the pressures of life to become too
busy yet again for each other, and so the same downward spiral in their
relationship begins all over again.
To
be effective as God’s people on earth, we need to be living in the fire, love
and passion of a close, fresh, intimate relationship with God. It is fire, passion and presence that bring
fruit and blessing. All our
effectiveness and fruitfulness for God flow out of our intimacy with him. To be effective for him, we need to be with
him consistently. Furthermore, we will
only truly love our neighbour, if we love God first. We cannot minister to others in the fire and
love of God, if we are not on fire and in love with God ourselves. Our relationship with God and our work for
him have to find their right balance.
Continuing to serve tables is no good if it means that we cannot give
ourselves firstly to prayer and the ministry of the word (cf. Acts 6:2-4). First things must come first and, with God,
first things really do have to be kept as the first things.
To survive over the long-term and down
through generations, and to consistently be what God wants us to be as church,
then, above everything else, we must learn this one, basic, fundamental and
all-important truth: that we can only truly live
through keeping alive our intimate, spiritual union with Jesus. Without him there is no life in us, and
neither is there any future for us.
Ultimately it is this and this alone which is the secret of the life and
future of both our own personal spiritual life and that of the church.
If we carry on as a church in our dry
spiritual state and our busyness, disregarding the call of the Spirit to repent
and come back to a place of intimacy with God, then the Lord himself eventually
leaves. The church’s future
depends on our love for him. A
marriage cannot continue on and on in a dry state without separation occurring
sooner or later. So we will find
ourselves without the presence and blessing of God in the life of our church,
and its spiritual life will wither and die away.
Although a believer as an individual can
always repent and return to intimacy with God, yet the call of this letter is
made to the church as a local body. An
outward form, an empty shell may remain even for many years, but ultimately the
church will close down. Its lampstand –
the light and life of God’s presence within it – was removed. The removal of the lampstand is the
ultimate end of a distanced relationship. Jesus himself left and vacated the place, and
our house was left unto us desolate (cf. Matt. 23:38). He left because we did not want him. He forsook us, because we first grieved him
by forsaking him in our heart and we did not then return to him when he
called. We did not learn to value
intimacy with him (replacing it with any number of other things), so ultimately
we lost him altogether.
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THE
HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011
by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
[1] Writing in the
early second century AD, Ignatius says that these believers in Ephesus enjoyed
a reputation of being wholly devoted to God, suggesting therefore that they had
responded positively to this letter to them.
See Ignatius, Chapter VIII, Epistle to the Ephesians, Ante-Nicene
Fathers.
[2] ibid.,
Chapter IX. Ignatius tells us that this
community of believers in Ephesus had developed a reputation of being very
well-taught, that no false doctrine or immoral lifestyle could take root among
them (2:2,6; cf. Acts 20:28-31).
[3] Wilcock, M. The
Message of Revelation, Leicester: IVP, 1989, p.44.
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