182. Revelation 2:1-7 - The Letter To The Church In Ephesus

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the broadcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 182,

The Letter to Ephesus. Well, hello, everybody, and welcome back to the broadcast.

I'm so glad you're here, and I'm glad that we're finally back in the book of Revelation after what feels like a millennium.

Now, if you've been with us for any number of episodes, or any while, at least, you will know that we spent 15 episodes in Revelation chapter one, and we did that for a very important reason, because chapter one establishes, and it does so decisively, the theology of the book of Revelation.

That Revelation is not about future events that are gonna happen sometime in the mysterious future, but it's about a first -century destruction motif of the

Old Covenant city of Jerusalem. The Old Covenant world and everything that belonged to it was going to come under the judgment of God, and Revelation one sets that dramatic theme.

Jesus, as you know, came to his own, and his own did not receive him, and more than that, they took him up on a cross and murdered him, performing the ultimate covenant -betraying act before the face of God.

They spat on him, they mocked him, they maimed him, they mutilated him, and in so doing, they placed himself on a collision course with covenantal destiny, walking down a road that was paved long before in Deuteronomy chapter 28 and Leviticus chapter 26, which are the curses of the

Old Covenant now being poured out in real time in AD 70. Now, what we see in the book of Revelation so far is the moment when the covenant hens come home to roost, and these are the final tragic years of the

Jewish empire, the death rattle in the lungs of a patient just before its blistering end, and within a few short years of John's writing this book, the temple was gonna be destroyed forever.

The priesthood was gonna be abrogated decisively. The feast and the purification rituals were all gonna be eliminated permanently, and every remaining structure of the

Old Covenant world that depended upon a temple and an Aaronic priesthood would be placed on the museum shelf of history forever so that the better covenant of Jesus Christ could come into full view and bloom and then eventually take over the world.

That's the theme that is not speculation. It is established, it's grounded, it's defended, and it's all rooted in Revelation chapter one.

So if you haven't listened to those episodes yet, I would strongly encourage you to go back and to do so.

They set the theological trajectory for the entire book, and without them,

Revelation simply cannot be understood correctly. That's a bold claim, but I'm saying it.

Without those 15 episodes, you just won't understand what's going on. Now, before we move forward today,

I do wanna say a very brief but a very heartfelt thank you to everyone who watches this show, to everyone who subscribes and shares and gives, and especially to those people who have become members of this channel.

Thank you so much from the bottom of my heart. Thank you to all the Prod Squad members. Your name shows up at the beginning of every episode because I'm so thankful for you.

I'm genuinely grateful that you're supporting this work, all of you, because it would not exist without you.

And now, with that, thank you, and with that, let us turn to our first Revelation episode of the year where we're gonna be looking at the first of seven churches that are addressed in Revelation chapter two through three, and that is the church of Ephesus.

And we're gonna begin by going to the word of God in Revelation two, one through seven.

John, actually Jesus, says this. To the angel of the church in Ephesus write, the one who holds the seven stars in his right hand, the one who walks among the seven golden lampstands, says this,

I know your deeds and your toil and your perseverance and that you cannot tolerate evil men and you put to the test those who call themselves apostles and they are not, and you found them to be false, and you have perseverance and have endured for my name's sake and have not grown weary, but I have this against you, that you have left your first love.

Therefore, remember from where you have fallen and repent and do the deeds that you did at first or else

I am coming to you and will remove your lampstand out of its place unless you repent.

Yet this you do have, that you hate the deeds of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.

Therefore, he who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes,

I will grant to eat of the tree of life which is in the paradise of God.

And that brings us to part one, the city of Ephesus.

Now, before we can get to the text of Revelation 2, one through seven, we have to understand who the city of Ephesus was, because so much of the meaning of what

Jesus says is spoken directly into a first century world in the city of Ephesus, so we have to understand it.

And the first thing that we need to understand is Ephesus was not chosen by Jesus first on the list of seven by accident or coincidence.

When the risen Christ dictated his letters to the churches, Ephesus received the very first word, not because she was the most faithful or even because she was the most compromised or even because she was the most beloved, but because she was first in every practical sense that mattered.

She was the chief city of Asia Minor, so she was first in prominence, but she was also the nerve center of commerce and religion and imperial administration in the

East. Now, even more practically than that, Ephesus was the first city on a well -known postal route, so any message that was bound for the churches of Asia would have to go through Ephesus before it would reach the other churches like Smyrna, Pergamum, Philadelphia, Thyatira, or the other inner cities.

So if a postal worker was delivering a message, he would go to Ephesus first, and if Ephesus had heard it, then the entire region would hear it, and that made

Ephesus a city that was accustomed to being first. They got the news first. They got the details first.

They were sort of like New York in that sense in that everything happens first there and trickles out to the rest of culture.

Ephesus was that way to Asia Minor, and everyone knew it, not least the

Romans. From the imperial halls of the Roman world, Asia was watched through the lens of Ephesus.

It was important to the Romans. Merchants measured the world from her docks. Religious movements either passed through her or were strangled by her.

To address Ephesus first was to address a microcosm of the Roman world itself because as ships entered the harbor at dawn, they groaned against the stone hues.

Ropes were creaking under the burdens they were never meant to bear. Voices mingled in a dozen unbothered, broken languages,

Greek, Latin, and a mixture of Aramaic from Eastern traders beneath all sorts of different clipped consonants of Asiatic dialects were mixing in the salt air right there on the docks.

The smell arrived first. It would have hit you in the nostrils as you got off the boat. It would have been merciless.

It would have been a mixture of brine and rot and timber and fish. Human sweat compressed into way too small quarters.

Merchant vessels would have crowded the waterline. Hoes would have been sitting low with grain from Egypt and wine from this island or that.

Oil from this valley or that. Timber that would have been stocked high. Wool that would have been packed tight.

Animal hides that reeked even with the presence of copious amounts of salt.

Sealed jars of spices that were leaking their scents into everything else. The waterfront would have been a mixture of languages, peoples, cultures, smells.

The water itself would have even been quite surprising because you think of Port City, you think about this beautiful, pristine water.

Well, the water there would have been quite dark. Murky even with silt and refuse that was thrown into the harbor.

This harbor was not for lovers. It was for a working class people who are ready to make a lot of money.

This was a working harbor, like an open mouth. Always open, always feeding, always hungry.

In a city like Ephesus, sleep meant that you lose opportunities. Labor would have been almost 24 hours except for the fact that they didn't have light.

The harbor existed to receive process control and profit from all over the Roman world.

And if you were willing to take your place in the machine of the system and become a cog in the

Roman wheel, then life would have been really good for you in Ephesus. It would have been very accommodating.

Now, as you stepped out of the boats and onto the docks, you would see cranes swinging overhead, lifting one object from another with creaking noises, almost like sacred movements.

The men who would have operated those cranes had done so tens of thousands of times, and they would do it 10 ,000 more times before they joined their fathers in the dirt.

Their bodies would have been trained into instruments of repetition, and below them would have moved an army of slaves, hauling, stacking, cleaning, never fast enough for the merchants who demanded more and more efficiency so that they could maximize more and more profit.

Now, alongside the slaves on the dock would have been a class of free men. They would have been busy, but they would have been unhurried because they would have wanted to demonstrate that they weren't quite as frantic as the slaves.

This was a way that they could show that they weren't slaves. They were free men. And then standing apart from both of these slaves and free, you had the

Romans who were in white togas. They were the officials. They didn't lift, they didn't shout, they didn't bend a finger mostly, but they recorded with wax tablets filled with careful notation, seals pressed into soft wax, permits checked, taxes assessed, with all kinds of precision.

You'll know that an empire always is pretending to serve your needs at your own expense through taxes.

It's a bad deal then, it's a bad deal now. Governments don't actually serve the people well.

They just steal from you with taxes, but that's another talk. Now, from the harbor, the city leaped upward along a single architectural spine, a road that cut right through the center of the city that was wide and big and expansive.

And that road was famous and it was called the Arcadian Way. Now that road wasn't just a random little highway in the middle of a city, it was a statement.

It was carved in marble and it was imposed upon the land. And it declared how Ephesus understood power and visibility and importance, especially their own.

It was broad, it was straight, it was paved smooth by generations of foot traffic and wheels.

It stretched wide enough for emperor's entourages to come and circus spectacles and parades.

This was a metropolitan avenue for a city that loved the spotlight. And on that road, lined on both sides of it were colonnades that offered shade and shelter, but they also did more than that.

They ordered the life of the city. They framed the movement, the commerce and the conversation turning the streets of the

Arcadian Way into more than just a private highway, but they were sort of a marketplace that was lined up on both sides of this road so that they could buy things.

Shops would have been open on both sides of the road. Bread, you would smell it, it would still be warm.

Wine would be offered and passed around in samples, like when you go to Costco or Sam's and they give you the little sample.

It would have been like that. Perfumes and oils would have been dripping from doorways. Cloths would have been displayed in aggressive colors of purple representing wealth and reds representing power and blue representing royal refinement.

And all of it would have been priced accordingly. You can imagine going down a street in a famous town and seeing different designer stores left and right.

That's how it would have felt. Now, metal also rang constantly in the street of this particular road because artisans were busy at work shaping molten bronze and silver and gold into different tools and trinkets and into Ephesus' most famous export, which was idols.

They made idols like crazy. And Artemis was the chief god of the city.

So she appeared everywhere. Portable relics that the artisans had made, pocket -sized images that they had made, intricate little shrines that they had made.

You could, for a price, take this demon princess home with you, whether you were in foreign lands or you were going back to offer her metal coins that were made by the artisans in her own temple.

In fact, the entire city of Ephesus and their entire economic ecosystem was wrapped around the

Artemis cult, assuming that she was going to personally bless you depending on how much money that you spend.

That was a measure of your devotion. Now, Artemis was not merely worshiped in the city. She was marketed.

Oils and fragrances were lining the city colonnades in order to get yourself ready to meet her.

Cure -alls and sedatives and seducers were there as well. Scents clung to the skin and the clothing so that long after leaving the street, you'd smell nice when you got to the temple and everybody would know where you've been.

Then, from there, you would walk further up into the city, further uphill, where you would arrive at the bathhouses, which were opened up directly onto the

Arcadian Way. Now, the bathhouses are fascinating because they were public, they were social.

You didn't have shower curtains. You were naked, which is so strange to me to think of publicly bathing anywhere.

That just, it seems unheard of, unbelievable even, but that's what happened. And it's even stranger than that because in Ephesus, you didn't just go there and get clean.

That was where life happened. That was where business deals were actually struck. You would go there and you would participate in the societal structures that were there.

You would meet other entrepreneurs, if you were a business owner, and you would strike deals there in the nude.

So if you weren't participating in the bathhouses, you were missing out on business deals. Alliances were formed there under massages.

Modesty was suspended. Bodies were moving freely, unclothed, and just out in the open for all to see.

And the city itself learned something very powerful in these bathhouses, that their intimacy and their most intimate moments could be monetized for great financial gain.

Ephesus was all about it. Now, sexual commerce, as you can imagine, also became a powerful tool in the economic engine of the city.

Brothels stood near the temples. Prostitutes were procured through the bathhouses. Bodies were marketed beside the marketplaces and the food stalls.

Sex was like meat. It was a commodity, and Ephesus delivered it with the same efficiency that they did with a prime rib steak.

But that's only part of it, because we've hinted at the religion of Artemis, the cult of Artemis.

But if you don't understand this, you will not understand Jesus' letter to the city in Ephesus. And with that, now let's go to part two, the religion of Ephesus.

Now, as one moved inland from the harbor, something unmistakably intentional began to reveal itself about the city's design.

The streets did not wander aimlessly or sprawl from here to there. They actually had a purpose.

All of them kind of bent again and again towards the same destination. The roads converged, the foot traffic thickened, every path, whether by deliberate planning or ingrained habit, terminated at a single, unavoidable center in the city, which was the temple of Artemis of the

Ephesians. The closer one drew, the denser that the city became. The markets pressed inward along the approaches, eager to seize upon the opportunity of getting closer and closer and closer to the temple, because then it would be more convenient for people to buy your products.

Crowds would have been gathering much more tightly in this part of the city. Processions would have appeared with intensity and frequency.

The space itself would have felt heavier, as though the city's collective attention had narrowed, pulling everything forward to what now dominated the horizon, the temple of Artemis.

And the temple itself was not merely visible, but commanding. It was one of the wonders of the ancient world.

And long before you reached its steps, it announced itself. You saw it. It was looming over the landscape of the city, so that every shop, house, bathhouse, brothel, all of it was done under the shadow of the temple of Artemis.

And when you got there, row upon row of massive columns would have dwarfed every other structure in that part of the city.

Marble upon marble upon marble. Each surface was catching the sun, so that the temple gleamed with a kind of deliberate brilliance.

And this was not simply a place where religious ceremonies occurred. It was the city's heart, the organizing center around which everything else arranged itself.

The temple of Artemis and the precincts therein was never quiet. Pilgrims arrived without interruption.

Women carried their infants there to be blessed by Artemis. They were, men brought their offerings there because they were hoping that through paying money to Artemis that they would get some kind of benefit in their career.

Sailors were seeking favor before dangerous voyages. Merchants were calculating offerings as insurance against risky business ventures that could make or break them.

Devotion here was not reflective. It was practical, it was proportional, and it was strategic.

Priests moved through the crowds with an inherited kind of authority because they did. Their gestures were precise.

Their movements were practiced. Their presence was unquestioned because they inherited the priesthood from their fathers.

It was a professional devotion, stabilized by lineage and repetition. And then there were priestesses who were passing by with a different kind of gravitas, embodying the kind of sacred femininity through which the goddess herself was believed to channel fertility and power.

And their presence would have communicated a kind of mediation, access to forces that ordinary citizens like you and I could have never approached directly.

They were the gateway into the presence of Artemis, who, by the way, was not a gentle or benevolent god.

She was a tyrant. Her images were swollen with symbols of sexuality, fertility, and domination.

Now, in that sense, she didn't invite people to her out of affection. She demanded your submission. Life was promised to you.

Vitality was promised to you. Blessings were promised to you, but only and always upon condition.

Beneath the language of blessing ran a constant threat that if you didn't do enough for Artemis to please her and to keep her happy, then you would be cursed with earthquakes and famines and plagues and infertility and defeat and war.

These things were not accident. They were verdicts that you've offended her by some totally arbitrary thing that you've done.

And in that sense, constant appeasement of Artemis was required and essential for you to actually do your daily life.

She didn't rule you by love, but by fear. Favor was a temporary blessing because you've tickled her fancies.

And the city learned to measure everything that it did, its prosperity and wealth, its safety, its success, its markets, its economy, and its compliance, all through the fear of Artemis, all through the fear of offending her and losing the blessing.

So in a sense, they were placating her constantly so they didn't lose their wealth and economic status in the cities of Asia.

Now, scripture does not permit us to look at these pagan people and say, oh, how silly.

They believed in Artemis. No, they were genuinely terrified. And this was not a harmless superstition.

They were under the rule and power of a demon. And they knew it, whether they would be able to categorize it with that language or not.

They knew that if you don't please this god, she will crush you.

Think about the slavery even in that. Now, we know that idols are nothing, but we also know that they're not neutral.

And worship does not evaporate into the empty air. It's received, it's answered, it's responded to by something.

So when they would go to the temple of Artemis, they weren't just talking to a metal statue. Of course, it was just a metal statue, but it also was animated by a kind of power that was unholy.

It was real, intelligent, and hostile, and demons. As Paul says, gladly would hide behind these carved stones and sacred statues in order to receive the praise and worship that you would give, ultimately in order to put a noose around your neck and govern your city through tyranny.

Artemis was not merely a symbol of fertility. She was a mask for futility and death.

And through her demonic authority, the people learned to bargain rather than to trust, to submit rather than to rest.

It didn't reconcile their consciences. It didn't transform their hearts. It managed their behavior.

It controlled their expectations and their outcomes. Anxiety was not relieved in the city. It was organized and religiosity -ized.

I know I made that up. The logic extended far beyond the temple steps as well.

The Artemis cult found its way into the walls, into the harbor, into the markets, into the fertility practices, into the way that they thought about the future.

Her favor explained success in every area of your life, and her displeasure explained your current catastrophe.

So whenever something bad happened, you knew it was because Artemis was mad at you. Nothing in the city was random.

Everything was purely deterministic. Everything was interpreted through the lens of her pleasure or displeasure.

Public life in that sense became intensely ritualized. Every aspect of it. Festivals functioned as a kind of obligation to pacify her mood.

Processions prescribed movements. Sacrifices were performed publicly. Children grew up absorbing all of this without any kind of explanation, knowing that everything they did was under the wrathful gaze of Artemis, and they had to appease her in order to get what they want.

And the temple mirrored this perfectly. It was vast. It was regulated.

It was administered by a professional priesthood. It functioned not only as the religious center of the city, but also as the economic engine because the people who went there were not mystics who were withdrawn from the society.

They were the managers of the city. They were the ones who oversaw the sacrifices. They were the ones who were putting large sums of money in the deposit boxes.

They were the administrators of big land holdings. They were the ones who cultivated alliances with other cities.

Holiness in that way was a gift to the powerful, and it was a gift out of predictable, hierarchical service to her.

So when you came to the temple, you were meeting with the movers and the shakers of the city. You were meeting with people, and this is the way that it went.

The more money you give to Artemis, the more blessed you are. So it invited rich people, wealthy people, and influential people there.

So if you were a business owner, it would have been like your local chamber of commerce. All of the important people were there so that if you were not there, you were missing out on opportunities.

Wealth was deposited within the temple's walls precisely because it was believed to be the safest there under the goddess's terrifying protection.

Kings entrusted their fortune to Artemis. Cities stored their reserves in Artemis. Merchants insured their risky ventures by placing their deposits in the sanctuary, confident that if they had given it to the goddess, that it would remain secure, even if everything else failed.

And because so much money was going into the temple, it caused a massive amount of partying and excess.

I mean, you can imagine all this money from all of these people, not just in Ephesus, but in all these surrounding regions, even

Rome coming into the city of Ephesus and dumping large deposits of cash. And then you have a priestly class who was incentivized into licentiousness and partying, and you get the drift.

The downtown area would have been like New Orleans during Mardi Gras or in Brazil during Carnival.

It would have been flooded with visitors. It would have been filled with inns. It would have been swelled with markets and brothels.

It would have been a place that the money moved very quickly and in large amounts, and it would have thrown the city into a kind of fever pitch of pleasure and excitement.

Now, these celebrations were not interruptions to the economy. They were all a part of the justification for it.

They were the rituals that they activated in order to please the God. Every sacrifice, every sex act, every required animal, incense, oil, bread, wine, all of it was purchased at approved prices and dedicated in Artemis's presence for her favor so that you would be blessed.

It was just what you did in order to get the blessing, and if you didn't, you hate your grandma, you hate your children, you hate your wife, you hate your family because you didn't do the thing.

Now everyone else is cursed. That's the way that they thought, and not only that. So not participate in the

Artemis cult would have not just been cursings upon your family. You would have also been looked at as someone who hated your city because you were threatening the foundations of this city's prosperity that they loved and cared for so much.

So if you didn't worship, you were a hater of your own people. And by worship, we don't just mean bowing down to this pagan

God. It means all of the processes, all of the different sacrifices that you would offer, the sexual acts that you would offer, all of it was a part of the worship of pleasing

Artemis, and if you didn't do it, you hated your family, you hated yourself, you hated your people. It was a massive amount of social pressure that was poured out on people to participate in this demonically animated religion.

And the effects were everywhere. They're into homes, into health, into relationships, into fertility, and into their own fate and destiny as a city.

Once a people are trained to bargain with unseen powers and demons, eventually it won't be long before they start participating in things like magic.

It won't be that surprising. It would actually be inevitable. And magic in the city of Ephesus actually was ordinary, along with the other various things that they were doing.

It was everywhere. It was the private application of the same kind of spiritual logic that the temple taught publicly.

They would wear amulets to praise Artemis and hopefully gain her favor. They would say different words and patterns of words openly as a kind of spell in order to kind of pacify and withdraw power from the unseen realm.

Spells were memorized, they were whispered, they were inscribed, they were folded, they were sealed, they were carried close to the body when you were getting ready to go on a journey.

People didn't ask whether these practices actually worked. They asked which one worked best.

Markets sold all kinds of different solutions for different problems, protections against curses, charms to help you procure promises, priced all at a affordable rate in the

Ephesian market. Magic, like everything else in Ephesus, was operated through currency.

And like everything else in the city, it had its price. Now with that, the religion of Artemis and magic were not opposites.

They were complements to one another. They both promised access to power that was beyond human reach.

Both required a correct technique and authorized specialists in order to mediate for you.

One was public, one was civic. Magic was done in your home and in private. The worship of Artemis was done publicly and civically, but they shared the same logic by trying to extract power from the unseen realm.

And it was dark and it was evil. All of it was seen as participating in the good health blessing of the city so that Artemis doesn't get angry and curse you.

So in that sense, the city was a fever pitch of religious ideas smorgasbord together into a kind of cacophony of darkness.

Rome added another level on top of this by adding the imperial images. Because if Artemis is gonna be worshiped, so is

Caesar. So you would have imperial images that were filled. And that's one of the things that we have to understand about these

Greek gods. They didn't care if you worshiped one or a hundred. You just couldn't worship

God, the real God. So fine, worship Caesar. Worship the God of this river.

Worship everything else. Worship me, Artemis. All of it was a part of this demonic religion that was taking the focus off of the one true

God and putting it onto everything else. And participation in all of this was not only assumed, it was required.

Refusal was noticed by everyone. If you refuse to do this kind of dog and pony show with the demonic powers, you were noticed, you were marked, and you were avoided because you're the kind of person that wants to bring down curses on everyone.

And this is precisely where the pressure began mounting for Christians in the city because their confession that there's only one

God and his name is Jesus Christ, one God, three persons, God the Father, God the

Son, God the Holy Spirit, looked like, it looked like atheism to the people of Ephesus because they could not confess all of these other gods.

They could not participate in all of these other practices. Their allegiance could not be diversified in the panoply of different religious experiments.

What made the Ephesian religion so workable for everyone else made it impossible for Christians who could not bow down to another

God. And that foundation is so important to understand because it's into that context that Jesus gives his message.

But before we get to that, we have to now look at part three, the temptation in Ephesus.

Now, as I said before, this is precisely where the pressure for the church in Ephesus began to mount because of her confession to Christ.

It wasn't like she was hard to get along with her. She was seeking to be persnickety or to get on people's nerves or anything like that.

The church was minding its own business, worshiping Christ exclusively, and that was a problem in this demon -governed city.

Again, the church was planted there, but Christianity was disruptive there.

And it did not arrive in Ephesus as one more God seeking shelf space among the pantheon of gods.

Christianity did not deny the reality of the unseen realm and the powers that permeate there, but it did name them.

And it didn't offer techniques on how to leverage those powers. It demanded repentance and fleeing from those powers.

It didn't promise you how to manage your anxiety through a pagan religion. It promised real, lasting peace.

You see, the gospel did not dispute that Ephesus was a religious place. It just was disputing with that it espoused the wrong kind of religion.

To confess Jesus as Lord in Ephesus was not merely to adopt a different set of beliefs.

It was to step outside of the entire logic by which the city functioned.

It was to refuse the marketplace of gods, the diversification of spiritual investments.

It was to say that power could not be appeased and favor could not be purchased and that fear could not be managed because fear itself was judged and dethroned and defanged on the cross.

That made Christianity deeply disruptive because Christians did not bring any offerings to Artemis.

They didn't wear amulets or memorize spells and they didn't hedge their bets with layered devotions to the demons.

They worshiped one God through one mediator through one sacrifice and that was

Jesus. So their allegiance was utterly exclusive and their confidence was anchored in the promise of God, not in technique and not in religion.

And it was this refusal that made them stink to the Ephesians and it had public consequences because a people who rejected the temple of Artemis was undermining the economy and undermining the blessings and undermining the social status of the city and inviting curses upon you.

See, a people who abandoned the magic and the temple and all of that were threatening the spiritual marketplace, this very tense environment where we don't wanna ruffle

Artemis's feathers. See, in that sense, a people who refuse

Artemis and the magic and the incense offerings to Caesars were destabilizing the civic unity because they hated the city or they hated you.

They were disruptors of the peace. They were people who had malevolent, malicious intention. They were open to persecution because they were persecuting you.

See, in a city like Ephesus, adaptation was far more important than exclusivity.

You see, in a city like Ephesus, syncretism, adaptation, pluralism, and all of that was far more important to the people than your exclusivity.

And this is where the Nicolaitans actually enter the story. Now, the Nicolaitans were not a pagan outsider group that was attacking the church.

They didn't actually believe in Artemis at all. They were an internal Christian group that was focused on accommodation, focused on getting along, focused on not ruffling any feathers.

They were trying to be a theological bridge that would make Christianity more palatable to the city of Ephesus and more survivable in a hostile climate.

And their error was not that they denied Jesus, but that they misrepresented

Him through Ephesian trappings. See, they offered a version of the faith that could coexist with the city's religious economy and social expectations and moral assumptions, not by rejecting

Jesus, but by hollowing Him out. They didn't tell Christians to return openly to Artemis.

They told them that Artemis didn't really matter, that Artemis had no power. Artemis didn't really command any kind of actual worship.

So they neutralized the Artemis cult, and then they said, it doesn't matter. You're not forbidden from actually participating in the temple life because the temple life doesn't matter.

Jesus died for us. He saved us. And if you go to the temple, so what? It's not a real thing.

It's not a real God. You can do that. You can do that because it's better to get along.

You can do that because it's better not to ruffle any feathers, and you can be a Christian in peace and quiet.

Just get along with the people. You do a little incense here, you do a little ritual there, and you can have your faith and eat it too.

Now, they did not forbid participation in the temple life. They simply reclassified it as inconsequential.

It matters. Adiaphora is a word you could use for that. What they were actually saying was far more concrete than their language suggested.

They were saying you can buy the incense. You can go to the guild bank, which was where all the workers would come together and offer sacrifices to the gods.

And if you were a worker in the city, it was really important that you went there. It would almost be like joining a union today.

If you're not in the union, maybe you don't get a job. Or if you're not in the guild workers, maybe you don't get the job. But it was infused with idolatry.

The Nicolaitans said, go, get your job. Why would you do that to yourself? Don't you know that you're supposed to provide for your family?

Don't you know that you're supposed to make sure that you make a living here? Like, do you think Jesus would want your family to starve because of your convictions?

That's the kind of stuff they were saying. And along with that, they were saying you could walk in the temple precinct and not be polluted.

You could pass beneath the columns. You could burn the incense that Rome told you to burn with a clean conscience.

You could sleep well at night saying that the city required it. I did it because I wanted to keep the peace.

And it didn't really bother them. Some even went as far as to say, yeah, you can go to the bathhouses without any shame.

Yeah, you can even participate in the sexual rituals that followed because you don't want people to think that you're one of those people.

If the sexual ritual gets them off your back, well then it's a sacrifice we all have to make.

You can lie with the cult prostitute. You could perform the expected acts. You could play the part.

You could walk back out into public life, unmarked, unstained, unnoticed.

And then you could tell yourself very comfortably that none of it really mattered because Jesus died for your sins.

Because as long as Jesus is Lord, grace covers everything. And in saying that, what they were really undermining is the theology of physicality.

The body and what you do with it doesn't really matter. It's what you believe. It's your theology that matters. See, the city could be navigated pragmatically to the

Nicolaitans. Allegiance could be performed externally as a show. Holiness could be postponed until you got home in safer settings.

If avoiding persecution, protecting your family and your livelihood and keeping the church out of Rome's radar and off the city of Ephesus's naughty list, well then that's the sacrifice you had to make.

And I think Christ would understand. That's what they were saying. It was Ephesian religion wearing

Christian garments. The Nicolaitans were preserving the city's logic while baptizing it in sort of Christianese conclusions.

They were still adopting fear. The entire city was operating on fear. If I don't do this for Artemis, I won't be blessed.

My job will get lost. It will have an earthquake. Everything was appease, appease, appease, appease this angry

God. The Nicolaitans were saying embrace that fear. Embrace it because why?

If you don't do it, they're gonna harm you. It's just a Christian form of the fear.

Well, not even Christian. It was a fear wrapped in Christian sounding words but it was not

Christian. They were still governed by fear. They were still afraid of being out and afraid of economic loss, afraid of becoming a target.

And while you can understand why they would have been afraid in a city like Ephesus, you can also understand why

Jesus was so hard on them and why he hated them because they were not persecutors of the faith.

They were translators of it, retranslating it into the cultural practices of Ephesus.

They didn't attack the church's confession. They hollowed it out. They taught believers how to move through the city of Ephesus without really leaving

Ephesus and how to keep Christ verbally on your lips while you're surrendering your obedience practically and publicly.

They allowed Christians to walk the Arcadian way, to attend the banquets, enter the baths, share the beds, participate in the city's moral ecosystem all while assuming, assuring themselves that nothing of consequence was actually at stake.

But Christ saw exactly what was at stake because once Christianity absorbs the city's logic, once fear and desire and convenience are allowed to set the terms of your faith and your life, then the gospel is no longer the gospel.

It's denied. It's domesticated. And a domesticated gospel is no gospel at all.

It doesn't save, it merely soothes. Now, to the Ephesian church's credit, they had resisted the

Temple Artemis and they had endured the pressure from the Nicolaitans. And Jesus acknowledges that.

He acknowledges that they've endured, that they've not compromised on these things, but it's to this church that doesn't actually bow down to the heresy, but in resisting becomes cold, that Jesus is going to come and say that they have lost their first love.

And to understand why he said that, we need to go to part four. Now, faithfulness in Ephesus rarely ended with believers being dragged before the magistrates.

They were not usually paraded through the streets or publicly executed. More often, they were simply marked.

And once marked, life became incrementally harder in ways that were easy for outsiders to miss, but impossible for those who were living within the city to ignore.

See, the first cost was economic. Refusing to participate in the workers' guild, which again,

I said earlier, was infused with idolatry. It meant refusing the social glue that held the professional culture of the city together.

Contracts would quietly dry up for Christians. Apprenticeships were steered elsewhere.

Customers learned to favor artisans who were easier, more agreeable, and more reliable in the eyes of the city.

No accusations were necessary. No social sanctions were actually required. The market itself did the disciplining, and it did it good and hard.

Faithfulness became expensive in the city of Ephesus precisely because it was unspectacular.

Over time, this marginalization reshaped the daily life for the Christian. Believers would cluster together out of necessity rather than perseverance.

They would have to rely on one another for work and for trade and for mutual aid, and the church became a kind of parallel economy, not only a place of worship, but a place of survival and a network, a place that was in response to the dominant culture at large who had cut them out of daily life.

Now, that solidarity was beautiful and it was necessary, and all of the Christians took all of their various skills and they worked together to basically survive, and it was beautiful.

It was exactly what they should have done, but it was also constricting. Now, as opportunities narrowed in the city, so did contact with city people.

They were having less and less interactions with people from the outside, so Christians began to withdraw, and they began to withdraw intentionally because everyone was cutting them out of the civil life, but because the ordinary points of engagement between the church and the world had basically evaporated, because of fewer contacts and fewer casual relationships and fewer social settings, all of that, because it shrank quietly without announcement, then suspicion began to follow the economic loss.

Patterns began to be noticed. Oh, those Christians, they're always by themselves. They hate our gods. They hate our city.

They don't talk to us. They don't participate with us, and people started to suspect something was awry.

Questions began being asked. Why do these Christians refuse the perfectly normal religious practices that every other human being does?

What were they hiding? Were they loyal to the city? Were they dangerous?

In a place where religious participation was bound up with public safety, refusal could actually be reframed quite easily.

If Artemis protected the city, what happened when a growing number of people started to refuse to honor her?

Legal pressure began arriving unevenly and without warning. Some officials ignored the Christians entirely, but others enforced existing laws with sudden and paralyzing vigor, and that uncertainty became its own kind of oppression for the early church.

Their words began to be really measured because they were afraid of offending someone. The audiences that they would put themselves in front of began to be thought through rather carefully.

Casual remarks were reconsidered in public places. Safety was provisional, but public visibility also carried quite a risk, and the thing that was so confusing to the church in Ephesus was that pressure didn't come in constant barrages.

It actually came in waves. Periods of relative calm were interrupted by sudden hostility, a new official, a new public crisis, a rumor circulating at the wrong moment.

The community could never really fully relax because experience taught them that ease was temporary, but vigilance was permanent.

This kind of endurance, having to look over your shoulder constantly and having to discern whether someone was plotting against you, that kind of life would lead to really tough realities, mentally, emotionally, spiritually.

Yeah, they learned discernment. They grew skilled at recognizing false teachers, and they were quick to test claims of authority, and they were good at that, and Jesus commends them for that.

They remembered the apostles' warning. They had seen that accommodation to the Nicolaitans and to others could happen in real time, and they watched how it could cause people to gradually drift into all kinds of rank and horrible sins until the line between Christian and confession was utterly gone.

So the way that they navigated all of this is they held the line. They endured. They said no again and again and again, even when yes would have made their life easier, even when yes would have given them more creaturely comforts, even when yes might have actually saved their life.

But this kind of endurance over time forms habits, trains the instincts.

It reshapes what feels normal, what feels dangerous, and what feels worth the risk.

Vigilance then becomes habitual. Caution becomes instinctive. Discernment hardens into suspicion, and before long, the posture that required you to survive in Ephesus made you watchful, constantly at the ready, careful, and at a distance from others.

The church learned in the midst of how to stand and how to resist and how to endure, but they found that they had no rest.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the center of gravity for the church in Ephesus shifted.

The question that dominated communal life was no longer how can we love well, but how can we remain faithful?

And those questions aren't enemies from one another, but they're not quite identical either. One can be answered while the other quietly goes unattended.

See, the habits that protect truth do not automatically nourish love and affection.

Discernment will keep the errors at bay, but it doesn't kindle joy. Boundary keeping will preserve your identity, but it doesn't sustain your delight.

The energy that was required for the Ephesian church to remain vigilant under pressure must come from somewhere.

And over time, as they borrowed from love for long enough and hard enough and diligently enough, before long, suspicions began to feel safer than trust.

Caution felt more responsible and more urgent than tenderness. And none of this happened because the church despised love.

It happened because love felt inefficient in a hostile world. Love made you vulnerable in a city like this, and vigilance made you safe.

And so the irony settles in. The very virtue that once flowed naturally from love, which is endurance and faithfulness and discernment, now learned how to survive without love.

What was once animated by affection for Christ became sustained by discipline.

Discernment. What was once fueled by delight became driven by duty.

And because discipline and duty are good things, especially under pressure, the loss of love was hard to see.

It was very easy to miss. Believers in Ephesus do not wake up one morning having abandoned their first love.

It was so slow and so imperceptible, they didn't notice. See, what happened to the

Ephesians is they endured faithfully until they forgot love. Little by little, they endured their way out of love, which is why

Jesus calls them to repent, which now brings us part five, letter to the church in Ephesus.

Now, with that foundation firmly established, I want us to listen again to the words of Christ. And we'll see that these words are not merely abstract concepts, but they're judgments spoken into a real city under real pressure in a real context going through real cost.

And for us, having seen now what it was like there and where the text is actually landing inside of a city and a religious culture and all of that,

I think that the text is going to land. And as we hear it again, there's a phrase at the end of Jesus's message that quietly gathers everything in the message together and moves it forward.

And it shows us the point. It's small and it's decisive. And it tells us that the suffering of this church is not open -ended and that the endurance has a horizon and that the affliction that the people are going through is a part of their faithfulness as long as they repent for their sin.

So as we see all that, I'm gonna read several passages out of the text that we read today. And I wanna talk about it just briefly because it's so important now that we've got the context.

First, Jesus says, I know your deeds and your toil and your perseverance. When he says that, he's not speaking to sheltered believers who are living very quiet and uncomplicated and uncomfortable lives.

He's addressing Christians who are laboring inside of a city that's turned against them, that never rest, a city that's engineered to extract value and loyalty and religious participation at every level.

He knows that the harbor never sleeps. He knows that the markets never stop selling. He knows that the temples never stop demanding your loyalty and your allegiance.

And he's saying their toil is not generic obedience. It is survival under constant civil, economic and religious pressures.

Christ is naming their exhaustion and he's not shaming it because he knows where their exhaustion comes from.

It's coming from obedience. It's coming from a place of wanting to do right. And when he commends them for not tolerating evil men and for testing those who claimed apostolic authority, but absolutely were not, he's not praising needless harshness or religious dutyism or legalism or any of that.

He's praising a church that learned discernment the hard way in a city drowning in spiritual entrepreneurs, priests, magicians, mystics, cult leaders, prostitutes, self -authorized mediators, a city where clarity was not optional.

It was a means to protect yourself. Again, to be careless with truth in Ephesus was not

Christian, it was not charitable. It was spiritual suicide. Their intolerance of false apostles was not cruelty.

It was godliness. It was wisdom that was forged under real trials and pressures.

So when Jesus says to them, you have perseverance and you've endured for my name's sake and you have not grown weary, he's validating.

What no one else at that time could see that their suffering was not just dramatics. It didn't always end in prison or execution, but it was a relentless kind of attack upon them that was wearying them and wearing them out.

Again, their work contracts were lost. Their relationships were strained. Opportunities in the city were withdrawn.

Suspicion was simmering under every breath and under every crevice. Legal pressures was arriving in unpredictable ways.

Long obedience without applause was wearying them. And Christ does not look at them and ask, hey, why are you so tired?

He looks at them and he says, I know why. You've obeyed and you've endured.

And he praises them for that. But it's also precisely here after all of that that his rebuke lands with full weight because he says, but I have this against you.

That you left your first love. Jesus is not accusing them of apostasy.

He's not accusing them of a moral failure. He's not even accusing them of compromising with idols or surrendering over to false teachers.

He's accusing them of attrition. The city didn't conquer the church by pleasure or by heresy.

It wore them down by pressure. Faithfulness became exhausting.

Discernment became defensive. Endurance became their identity. And love didn't vanish in the rebellion.

It actually thinned out over time under the constant strain of pressure. See, up to this point, we've seen a church that's been pressed on every side by a city engineered for profit, by religion animated by demons and fear, by an economy that punished noncompliance and by the long grinding cost of faithfulness that slowly thinned out love.

And yet, and maybe you can relate with that.

You've been faithful to God for a long time. You've grinded out a really bad situation that you've been stuck in for years.

And you've been faithful before God. Maybe if Jesus were to write you a letter, he would say, I'm gonna praise you in these things.

You've been faithful, you've endured, you've persevered. But what we often forget and what the

Ephesian church forgot is that if all you do is endure and if all you do is persevere and if all you do is fight the battle for truth, you'll eventually have no love.

You actually have to cultivate love in the midst of protecting yourself, enduring hardships and facing the different errors that were trying to creep into the church.

You actually have to constantly be at battle with your heart because if all you do is battle truth and protect yourself from errors, eventually your heart will calcify and it will become hard and you'll lose your first love.

That's what Jesus is telling them. You fought well on one front, but you forgot to fight for your affections.

You forgot to fight for your heart. You forgot to fight for tenderness. And because of that, you lost your first love.

You're doing all the right things, but you don't even remember why you're doing them anymore. You're following me, but your heart's not filled with love.

Your affections have been dampened. You've been worn thin. And Jesus doesn't say, I understand, it's okay,

I get it. For that, he tells them to repent. For that, he says that if they don't, he'll remove their lampstand.

For that, he says that they must repent. You see, it's not enough for you to do the right thing, but to have a bad heart.

It's not enough for you to go on and on and on with perfunctory obedience, but to have not love.

Paul says in 1 Corinthians that if you do all these things, speak in the tongues of angels, but you have not love, you have nothing, you're a noisy gong.

Jesus is saying, you've done so many important things, Ephesian church. The most important thing, the world's gonna know you by the love of God in you.

Isn't that what Jesus says when he's on earth with his disciples? He says, they will know you by your love.

That's the thing you forgot. That's the thing that's hollowed you out. It's not the persecution.

Persecution stings the body, but it doesn't wear out the soul. Jesus is saying, you did all the right things, but you forgot the best thing.

Similar to Martha and Mary. You know, Mary's sitting at the foot of Jesus. Martha's running around doing all these good things.

Good things. I wanna serve Jesus. I wanna care for him. I wanna make him a meal.

I wanna make sure that all the pots and pans are clean. I don't want him to feel like that this place is untidy and messy.

I want him to feel like he's at home. And yet Jesus says that you gave up the better thing sitting at my feet, spending time with me.

You gave up the better thing for good things. That's what the Ephesian church did. Jesus is telling them to repent.

If that's where you're at today, Jesus tells you to repent. Now make excuses. Now point to your affliction.

Not even point to your obedience. Repent. Repent and get your love back.

That's what Jesus is saying. Now, there's a final thing that we need to cover here in this text because Jesus is speaking to a church that's pressured on every side for sure by the

Roman Gentile culture. But there's also another enemy that's attacking them and afflicting them and causing them a tremendous amount of damage.

In fact, it was in a lot of ways worse than what was going on in the Ephesian city because they were being killed by another group.

They were being targeted by another group. And it was the Jews. And that leads us to part six,

Jewish pressures in Ephesus. Now the passage in Revelation 2, one through seven says, for those who endure, for those who overcome, that's what it says.

Well, the only reason you would have to overcome is because you're being persecuted. And the

Ephesian church was being pressed by more than just the Gentiles, by more than just the Romans, by more than just the

Ephesians, by more than just all of that, the Artemis cult. Yeah, pagan worship saturated the city's imagination.

Roman authority enforced the public order, but there was threaded through this another force, older than Rome, more established than Artemis, more skilled at operating inside of the city's legal and social machinery.

You see, Ephesus housed one of the most entrenched Jewish communities in all of Asia Minor.

This community was very ancient. It was organized. It was institutionally protected because Roman law granted the

Jews that their synagogues had privileges that were unavailable to nearly every other religious group on earth because they were old and Rome liked old things.

They looked at it and they said, that's old, that's ancient, that's stable. We'll give that an exception.

So the Jews had the right to gather publicly and worship Yahweh. They had the right to regulate their internal affairs.

And most crucially, they had the right to abstain from participation in the imperial cult and the

Artemis cult without consequence, which was invaluable. In a city where refusal to honor the gods could be interpreted as disloyalty and hatred against the

Commonwealth, this exemption functioned as a legal protection and a shield for the

Jews. You could not persecute them for this. It was simply a part of the policy. And it was into that climate that the gospel entered the city of Ephesus and it carried unavoidable implications.

It announced in the synagogue, no less, that Israel's Messiah had come, that the covenant promises had reached their fulfillment and that those who rejected him, especially their leaders, stood under the judgment of God.

But this message was disruptive. This message didn't merely challenge their Jewish interpretations of the

Old Testament. It threatened their legal status. It threatened their standing in the city, their authority, because the

Christians were preaching this message loud and proud. They were upsetting the civil order. And the city was looking at the

Jews and saying, do you believe that? The Christians were threatening everything.

Acts tells us that when Paul reasoned in the synagogue, that resistance hardened quickly.

Opposition didn't remain internal. The leaders began speaking publicly against the Christians before the crowds, because you'll have to remember that at this point,

Christians were considered a denomination of Judaism, because according to the world, they worshiped the same

God, Yahweh. They just had a different view on this Galilean guy.

But the Jews were very quick to distance themselves from the Christians. Their goal was not to debate policy or dogma or religious views.

They didn't care at all about that, because what they cared about was their status. They cared about the perception that they had.

You see, Christianity was coming in as this rambunctious, disruptive religion.

It was socially dangerous. It was a threat to the civil order of the city of Ephesus. And in Ephesus, perception carried consequences, and those consequences would lead to dire sorts of situations.

So the Jews, so again, the Jews, weren't interested in debating with Paul on the merits of the theology.

They were trying to distance themselves politically and socially, culturally from the

Christians who were saying, they're not Jews. They're not a denomination of us. They're different. They're this and that.

They were hanging them out to dry. And that sort of explains why Paul has a very unusually long ministry in Ephesus, nearly three years, which he almost didn't have anywhere else.

And it wasn't because he had ease or he had success. He endured constant resistance.

Eventually, pressure forced a separation. Teaching moved out of the synagogue, and a

Christian community formed beyond the veil of the Jewish institutional cover.

And because of that, because the Christians now were viewed as outsiders, they weren't under the legal protections of the

Jews. Now, exposure followed. The city convulsed. The city learned to hate the

Christians because the Jews were distancing themselves from them. They're saying, they don't belong to us. Economic interest then lit the fuse, and then the powder keg moment happened because Christ was converting people through the church.

The church was preaching the gospel, and people were coming to know Jesus, and the demons were leaving them.

The magic was no longer working. The gods had no power. And here you have this moment where a man named

Demetrius, who's a silversmith, a silversmith. He's not making horseshoes.

He's not making hand grenades. He's making idols. And he saw the implications of Jesus in Ephesus very clearly.

Shrines to Artemis were losing their value, which was threatening his business. It was threatening his prophet.

Devotion to the God was thinning because Jesus was winning the populace, and the prophets were threatened.

And this guy named Demetrius gathered the craftsmen together, and he named the issue plainly to them.

And he told them that this man named Paul, his teaching was undermining the city's religious economy. Artemis' prestige and Ephesus' identity was standing at risk.

And then because of this message, he whipped the city up into a riot that broke the city's carefully maintained and managed order.

Crowds began to surge into the theater. Voices were overlapping. Confusion was multiplying.

Ephesus, which was so deliberate in its planning and proud of its hierarchy and proud of its order, collapsed into cacophony.

A citywide riot broke out because the Christians were gaining success in a city that said, if you don't accept everything, you accept nothing.

And the tradesmen were rebelling against the Christians and stirring up a revolt.

Then the Jews pulled the final card of separating themselves from the

Christians. They put forward a man named Alexander, who was a Jewish person, but of Greek heritage.

He was one of the Diaspora Jews. He was a Hellenistic Jew. He was a hometown boy from the city of Ephesus, a

Jewish man who had some influence and maybe he was political in the city. He knew how to navigate the social contracts.

He knew how to keep the Jews off the radar with their legal protections. And the Jews put him forward in order to distance themselves from the

Christians and in order to set the trap that the city would eventually pounce on the believers and murder them.

That was at least the Jews' intent. And as soon as Alexander stood up, the crowd recognized him immediately.

He possessed a kind of clout and standing and credibility and influence in the city's life. He was chosen for a single purpose to make sure that the synagogue completely disavowed any relationship whatsoever to the

Christians. And to quell all of this as soon as possible because riots attack

Roman attention and Roman attention takes away your legal status. Disorders threaten your privilege.

Jewish protection depended upon the city appearing peaceful, for them appearing ancient and loyal and non -disruptive.

Christianity, which was already denounced by the city and already unprotected by the Jewish legal status had become dangerous to be associated with and Alexander's presence was meant to draw a bright line.

This movement's not ours. It's a way that they could save their own skin and save their own face by giving up the church to death.

But the plan backfired tremendously. When the crowds recognized

Alexander as Jewish, the theater erupted again. And for two hours straight,

Luke tells us in the book of Acts that the city thundered with this chant, great is

Artemis of the Ephesians. Can you imagine? Thousands, tens of thousands of people chanting, great is

Artemis of the Ephesians, great is Artemis of the Ephesians over and over and over in a kind of mantric repetition.

The Jews, by attempting to control the situation only intensified it.

The city responded exactly as if it had been trained to respond to this kind of threat.

When calm finally returned, the outcomes diverged pretty sharply when the dust settled.

The synagogue remained intact. Its legal protections did hold temporarily. Its institutional life continued, but its perception among the

Romans was eroding. We're in the 60s at this point, 60s

AD. These protections had been in place for a long time. But the

Jews all over the empire were starting issues with the Christians. They were starting riots. They were starting all these things.

And what's truly ironic is that they feared the

Christians upsetting the social order. And by attacking the Christians, they upset the social order.

They caused the city to go into a panic. And while Rome did not pounce on them that day, the message was becoming clear.

This legal protection that the Jews have would not last forever. The status of being favored in the empire would not last forever.

And very soon, the very thing that they wanted more than anything, which was to keep the Romans off their back, would be utterly reversed as the

Romans would come in and crack and crush their back. It was into this culture and this context that Jesus was giving his people a very encouraging message to end

Revelation 2, one through seven. He's saying, I hear, I see. I see that you've been persecuted by the

Ephesians. I see that you've been persecuted by the Artemis cult. I see that you've been persecuted by the Romans.

I see that you are even being persecuted by the Jews. And that's the point.

And that leads us to our... The church in Ephesus didn't fail because it loved error.

It faltered because it learned how to survive without joy. They endured pressure that would have crushed many.

They resisted false teaching when compromise would have been way easier. They remained faithful in a city that was engineered to reward participation and punish refusal.

They bore the cost of obedience quietly and steadily and without applause. And Christ saw all of it.

The danger was not that they abandoned truth, but that truth was allowed to function in their heart without love.

Faithfulness became procedural. Endurance became a habit. Obedience continued. But the delight that once animated their heart was thinned out under strain and every pressure.

That danger was ever present for the Ephesian church.

And Jesus tells them to remain, to overcome. He who overcomes, Jesus says.

And just a few short years from when this command was given for them to repent of their lack of love, to return to their first love, to do the things that they once did before and to remain in that love, just a few years after this message by Jesus was given, the primary persecutor of the

Christian faith was dead. The Jews had lost their legal status. The Jews had lost their temple.

They had lost their priesthood. They had lost their old covenant status, which was way more important than their status in Rome. And the church was now the only place on earth that could know

God. This is why Jesus is so hard and severe, even graciously so, on their lack of love, because he knew just a few short years, there's no place on earth where people will get to know

God except the church. And they're gonna know you by your love. They're gonna look at you and say,

I don't understand what they believe. I don't understand why they believe it. I don't understand how in a city like Ephesus they could do what they're doing, but my goodness, do they have love?

That's what Jesus is calling them to repent of, is losing their love.

And again, like we said before, if that's happening to you, I would call you to do the same thing today.

Because the danger that existed for the Ephesian church never goes away. There are seasons when the church must brace itself and when vigilance is necessary and when the discernment needs to be sharp, when compromise must be resisted at every level and often with real costs.

Scripture never tells us not to do that. But scripture tells us never to let our vigilance replace our affection or our endurance displace our joy.

A church can learn how to stand firm and still forget why it's standing. Christ doesn't rebuke the

Ephesian believers to shame them. He rebukes them because he loves them.

He addresses them, not as a distant judge, but as the Lord who walks among his churches and clips the lampstands and the wicks so that they'll burn brighter.

He knows their labor. He knows and remembers their love, even when they're struggling to remember it themselves.

The call to repentance is not a demand for emotional intensity. It's an invitation to return to your first love, return to your bridegroom, return to the love that once made obedience light and joyful, even in the midst of the hardest circumstances.

Return to the joy that once made sacrifice feel like it was worth it. Return to the communion that once made trials and persecutions feel sweet.

Return to the thing that sustained your endurance rather than being consumed by it. The promise attached to the call is quite staggering.

To him who overcomes with love, I will grant to eat of the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God, which points forward to Revelation 22, where the city of God, where the new

Jerusalem has come down from heaven because the old Jerusalem has been destroyed. And John says that new

Jerusalem city is the church. He says, behold, the new Jerusalem, the bride.

The bride is the church. So there you go. Jesus is saying in that city, where the tree of life is, where you're going to be handing out the tree of life and its fruit to the nations.

The nations are gonna come in Revelation 22 and they're gonna eat, they're gonna feast and they're gonna come in for renewal, for healing.

They're gonna come in with their tribute and their spoils and they're gonna give it at the feet of Jesus. If you're gonna be there in the city, ready to receive the nations as they come in, ready to give them the gospel, you better have love.

That's what Jesus is saying. Obedience that's no longer strained by vigilance.

Love that's no longer crowded out by survival. The kind of love that fuels everything that you do.

See, the story of Ephesus doesn't end in warning and rebuke, it ends in hope. Christ's rebuke is not the final word, his promise is.

The same Lord who exposes their loss of love also promises its renewal. He doesn't abandon his church to wither under the pressure.

He calls them back to something that'll give them life. And the same

Christ who called Ephesus is the same

Christ who calls us and walks among his lampstands still today. He sees faithfulness that no one else notices.

He knows the endurance that you've went through. He knows the things that you've done that felt thankless and unseen and unnoticed.

He names losses that the world dismisses. And when he calls his church to remember and to repent and return to him, he doesn't do so in order to burden her, but to bless her, to make her luminous again, to bring the light back again, not merely so that she will survive, but so she will thrive, so that she will burn with white -hot intensity for her savior.

Jesus, the same Christ in our culture where compromise is literally everywhere.

We've got quite literally the pagans who are telling us to adopt the disgusting sexual perversion of our time.

It's no different than Ephesians. You'll lose jobs, you'll lose friends, you'll lose relationships by holding fast to Christ.

And we also live in a time when the larger religious landscape of Christianity is broken, where you've got people who are now occupying pulpits of once faithful pastors who now adopt the

LGBTQ movement and abortion and every other demonic doctrine.

We kind of live in a time like Ephesus. And the same thing that Jesus said to them, he would say to us, yeah, it's okay to be angry about all of the things you see being compromised.

It's okay to be angry at the lesbitarians. It's okay to be angry at all of the different ways that Christ is being maligned.

Absolutely. Endure that, persevere that, call that what it is, it's false.

Do what Ephesus did. Do not forget Paul, because if you forget that, he will remove our lampstand, because it's the love of Christ that wins the world.

It's this King who conquers the nations through love, and not just through discernment and endurance and perseverance.

The way you endure, the way you discern, the way you persevere is through love.

The way you do everything for Christ is through love. So if you've forgotten your first love today, go back to him.

He will welcome you, and he will brighten every aspect of you. And with that, thank you so much for tuning in to another episode of the broadcast.

I'm truly grateful that this show exists. I'm truly grateful for you, for your comments, for the way that you have interacted with this subject matter.

And until next time, next week when we go into the second church of Revelation 2 -3, until then,

God richly bless you. Don't forget your first love. Return and repent, repent, return, and do the things you've once done.

And until next time, God richly bless you. We'll see you next time on the broadcast. Now get out of here.