Revelation 2:1-7 Love the Sinner Hate the Sin

Good morning, welcome to Recast Church. I'm Don Felsick, I'm the lead pastor here. And I just wanna say thank you for coming out on this holiday weekend to worship

Christ together. That's the purpose and that's the reason we've gathered together here. A great place to meet here in a cafeteria where the school has allowed us the use of this facility.

So grateful that you've taken the time out of your busy week to come together as God's people. There's something that's great and glorious about the gathering of God's people.

I love it, it's energizing. And we've come together to hear from God's word this morning, to see him as he is, and to then live our lives according to the way that we encounter his word.

So I'm glad that you're here. If this is your first time with us and you're just checking us out, a special welcome to you.

Glad that you're here. And then if you'd please fill out that connection card that you received when you walked in.

If you're willing to fill that out, just be aware that we do send out a weekly email. So fill out that connection card you received when you walked in.

You can turn that in in the black box back there. We do send out a weekly email called the eCast and that's where you get all of your information.

And so there's links and all kinds of stuff to the Facebook, to the podcast, to the website, to our

Facebook page. Like I said, all that stuff is there. So even if you just get that email each week and flag it so that you know where the information is, you can go back to it throughout the week if you have questions about different activities.

What time does this start? What time is this happening? Where's the location of this event? That kind of stuff. So take advantage of that.

Also, if it's your first time with us, please take a free coffee mug out on the table on your way out. Just, that's our way of saying thanks.

We're glad that you're here. And then remember that we don't pass an offering plate here. Any offerings that you might choose to give, you can use the envelope that was provided for you.

And remember that if you choose to give to the expansion fund, which is a fund really escrowed or set aside for the purpose of eventually building a building, you can just mark expansion fund on the envelope or on the memo line of a check and then it gets put into a special fund for our goal of eventually building a building on our property that we already own on East McGillan.

So that's available there as well. If you're not gonna use that offering envelope this morning, there's a place to recycle that out there.

Just, we can reuse those again next week if there's nothing in them. And so you can use that there as well. One other, a couple of other announcements real quick.

We are, we have recently printed off a large number, like a thousand door hangers to be put out throughout our community.

And so what that entails is maybe just a family or a small group grabbing some of those and picking a neighborhood.

If you would be willing to do that sometime this week or over the next two weeks, those are available at the welcome table.

Haley has stacks of those to give out. The only thing that I request is that you have in mind where you're gonna put them and tell

Haley so that we're not doubling up on the same neighborhood because that could be really uncomfortable. Somebody gets something on their door, throws it away, and then you put another one back there, they're gonna get annoyed with us.

So at the same time, we want people to be aware that we're a church meeting in this community. And so that's a really good opportunity for us.

We're not looking to knock on doors. This is not a door -to -door evangelism kind of thing. It's to go and actually just hang this thing on their doorknob.

They can get and see and identify that, hey, there's a church meeting in the elementary school and maybe they don't have a church and they wanna come and check us out.

So that's available. Talk to Haley out there. She's got all of those available for you. And then let me remind you that we're in the process of voting on Steve Isham for the office of elder here at Recast Church.

Elders make up the leadership board of our church. And according to scripture, they are called to be spiritually qualified individuals.

That's very, very important to us that the people who are leading the church meet the qualifications that are lined out for us directly in scripture.

And so our ballot is a pretty extensive ballot. Some ballots are like a postcard that say yes or no to the person.

Ours is a three -page document that lines out on the left -hand side, the qualifications, puts them in writing on the left -hand side, and then leaves you room on the right -hand side to give feedback, to give positives.

Where has this person ministered to you in this area? Are you seeing good things? Or where have there been struggles? And particularly, we want you to be thoroughly and completely honest on this form.

I mean, if Steve's cheated you in business, you should write that on there. I mean, that's the kind of thing. Man, I hope not.

But I mean, we want it to be an honest feedback about your interaction with him.

And that's the kind of stuff that we're looking for in this. But I also wanna make sure that you understand this.

This is very important. This is in our bylaws. I'm not standing up and making this up on the fly. Those of you who might want to vote no, you need to recognize that your no will be counted when you give a reason for that.

And that's in our bylaws. So we don't accept just a no because you don't like his hair or you don't like his glasses or you don't like the way he walks or something like that.

We're asking for you to give an affirmation or a reason why he is not qualified.

So you're voting on his qualification for eldership. You're not just voting on, hey, I got this gut level feeling that I like the guy or I got a gut level feeling

I don't like the guy. And if you have a gut level feeling that you don't like the guy, come and talk with me about that before you cast a vote.

I mean, that's something. Or maybe even just come and meet him and talk with him. And I'm sure he would love to, he's nodding.

I mean, I'm sure he'd love to talk with you if you have questions about things going on in his life or whatever.

But it needs to have a rationale if you're gonna vote no, not just like, nope, nope, and that's it. So we also wanna encourage everybody that's coming here and attending here and you're like kind of at that point where you're like calling this your church, we'd like to encourage you towards membership.

Membership demonstrates that you're committing together in community with this local body. Now, I would trust that the majority of you are actually in with the universal body, that is you've accepted

Christ as your savior. And if you're in that position, then the next step would be for you to join in a more formal way with a local body, with a local church.

And membership just simply says this, I want accountability and I want to be clearly connected as a part of the body of Christ.

And so if you're here and you've been attending for a while and you haven't really thought much about membership, you can come and talk with me about that again.

Membership applications and ballots are both available out on the table out there. And remember that we need an 85 % of our membership that votes in order to bring

Steve on board on the elder board. So that's kind of where we're driving for that.

So you can ask Haley out at the welcome table if you need any of those documents or anything like that. At this time, I'm gonna ask

Steve Isham to come and share a brief testimony so that you can all put a face with a name and then we can give glory to God for what he's done in Steve's life.

So thanks a lot, Steve. Good morning. I'm Steve Isham, for those of you who don't know me.

And as Don said, feel free to come up and interact with me at any time if you have any questions or just want to get to know me better.

But briefly, I've been attending Recast here for about five and a half years. And I've been married to my beautiful wife,

Jamie. I'm my college sweetheart for 14 years. And we have four kids. Charlie's 11,

Joey's nine, Abby is seven, and Ellie is down in the nursery is two. And I truly love being their dad.

I work as a design engineer at Stryker. And we live just a mile and a half down the road here in Mattawan.

So my testimony, I have been blessed to be raised in a

Christian home. And I like to say that my parents taught me that Jesus is Lord and the

Bible's absolute truth. When I was about six years old, my dad led me to Christ after church service one

Sunday morning. And as I grew, I felt God drawing me to himself.

But my faith became especially real when I was just a couple weeks short of my 16th birthday.

It was September 11th, 1994. And my older sister had just started college.

And we knew that she was planning to come home to attend church with us in Lansing.

But instead, we were met with a state police trooper that informed my dad that she had passed away on her drive home.

She had fallen asleep at the wheel and that she wasn't gonna be with us.

So my world was obviously shaken. But as I looked around,

I certainly saw many people who really could not cope with that concept of a beautiful, innocent 18 -year -old girl as everyone looked at it that way.

And there were lots of folks that just couldn't cope. But then I saw others that truly had joy and hope and real peace even in this tragic circumstance.

And I realized that all of those folks that I saw that had some form of hope and joy and peace truly believed that Jesus Christ was

Lord. And so it was really at that time that I made an even more conscious decision that no matter what happened in my life, that I was gonna follow

Jesus Christ. That tragic event obviously made a significant impact on my life, but I am living testimony that God uses all circumstances to bring glory and honor to himself.

And that's truly my goal. I obviously fall short many times. You can just ask my wife if you wanna hear more about that.

But my goal is to glorify God in all that I do. So that's a little bit about me, my testimony.

And obviously I stand before you now seeking to be an elder at Recast. And ultimately,

I just wanna do my part in leading our congregation as we shine the light of Jesus Christ to Matawan and beyond.

Thanks a lot, Steve, for sharing. And that's an illustration to me of how

God ultimately uses a variety of things to lead us to faith in him. And sometimes many of us,

I think, could testify of tragedy in our lives that have made us understand our faith a little bit more seriously.

And so thank you, Steve, for sharing that. I really appreciate that. Remember, you can pick up ballots out there.

Remember, it's not a popularity contest. It's not if he plucked your heart string or something like that, or if that really meant something to you.

Ultimately, it comes down to character and qualifications according to Scripture. So grab one of those ballots on the way out. This morning, we're gonna be continuing in our series called

The Lord of the Seven. And I'm excited about this series because in it, we get a chance to know the one who is revealed as the leader of his churches, okay?

How many of you think that to get to know Jesus Christ is a good thing? You think that's a good thing? Okay, good, lots of hands.

I appreciate that. Good to get the blood pumping this morning. Get your hand up over your head, that kind of stuff.

But yeah, it's good to get to know him. It's always better to know Jesus better. That's reality for us.

But we also get to know through these three chapters introducing and starting out the book of Revelation, we get to know

Jesus specifically in relationship to his church. And we start off this week with a specific letter to the first of the seven churches.

I want us all to consider what Jesus has to say to us as a corporate gathering, to recast this morning.

Our church has a history. Our church has a shape. Our church has strengths and weaknesses.

But at the end of the day, our church is a gathering of sinners saved by grace. A group of sinners saved by grace who are seeking to honor

Jesus Christ by repenting of sin and honoring him and worshiping him and doing community together and encouraging others and building each other up into him.

So Jesus is gonna tell us some things that we could be doing that look good, that look like doing well.

And he's also gonna highlight for us through the Church of Ephesus some things that we could improve on.

So let's open our Bibles, please, to Revelation chapter two, verses one through seven. Again, Revelation two.

If you don't have a Bible on your lap, do me a favor and just raise your hand. It's not to call you out. It's just to say we've got some

Bibles back there and we want everybody to have a copy of the word of God so that you can follow along.

I don't have an outline up on the PowerPoint. The outline is gonna be on your lap looking at God's word.

So Revelation two, one through seven, recast God's word to us.

Certainly talking about another church, talking about the church in Ephesus, but this is what God desires for us to hear in Matawan, Michigan in 2015 today.

So listen in. To the angel of the church in Ephesus write, the words of him who holds the seven stars in his right hand, who walks among the seven golden lampstands.

I know your works, your toil and your patient endurance, and how you cannot bear with those who are evil, but have tested those who call themselves apostles and are not, and found them to be false.

I know you are enduring patiently and bearing up for my namesake, and you have not grown weary, but I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first.

Remember therefore from where you have fallen, repent and do the works you did at first.

If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent. Yet thus you have, you hate the works of the

Nicolaitans, which I also hate. He who has an ear, let him hear what the

Spirit says to the churches. To the one who conquers, I will grant to eat of the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God.

Let's pray as the band comes to lead us in worship this morning. Father, I thank you so much for your grace and your mercy towards us.

We desire and need your presence here. Father, we need you to occupy the parts of our lives that there is darkness and there is sin.

We desire for you to push that out. Father, to be present with us in our gathering and in our community. Father, where there is strife, where there is quarreling, where there is dissent, where there is gossip, where there is a broken relationships,

Father, I pray that you would be present and moving in close to heal and to fix those things that are broken in our midst.

Father, we recognize that we're sinful and we've gone through our week with this battle of fighting against and warring against sin and repenting and turning from it day in and day out.

And we thank you for your immaculate, amazing, glorious grace that when a sinner repents, you give them strength and power.

So Father, I pray for a repentant heart and I thank you for the blood of Jesus that covers our sin.

May we worship him this morning in spirit and in truth, in Jesus name. Amen.

Well, thanks to Dave and Lee for leading us in worship this morning. Grateful for the time and energy that they put in this week for us.

I encourage you to get comfortable, keep your Bibles open to Revelation 2 1 -7. Again, that's gonna be the outline.

I know that in the shuffle you maybe lost your place and so turn back there so that you can reference that passage throughout the discussion this morning.

But I wanna ask you a question to start off. Have you ever been called to the principal's office? Handful of us, okay.

So maybe some of us have been called to the principal's office. A little bit of trouble there or there's gonna be a little bit of a review of our behavior or something to that effect.

Some of us have had an actual annual job performance review. Have any of you had that happen? So you had to go in and get reviewed and sit there and hear the good and the bad and all of that.

Or maybe you had an audit at your business and so you had to conform to certain standards and you had an audit in your entire corporation or your division was being audited or something to that effect.

Or maybe you've had just simply a good talking to by one of your parents. They sat you down and gave you a talking to.

You ever had one of those? So all of those have something in common and that is just this idea of auditing behavior.

The idea of us being reviewed and having somebody put their eyes on the way that we are living our lives or the behavior, the things that we're doing or the things that we're saying and then giving us some evaluation back.

And I'm guessing that all of us are covered under all of those things that I just mentioned, that we've had some of those things at least.

And Jesus is going to have a sit down, a sit down audit, if you will, of seven specific churches.

They were real churches during the life of John. They're not figurative. They're not figures of speech. They're real churches, gatherings of people in different cities on the

Western end of what is now modern day Turkey, that peninsula, also called Asia Minor. And it was actually the

Roman province of Asia during the time. And these seven churches are within walking distance of each other.

About to go around from city to city would be about 60 miles. So back in the day, break up the 60 into seven different legs and you're gonna get about roughly 10 miles at the max.

And so very doable to take this letter, which is the entire book of Revelation, take that entire letter around person by person.

Remember they didn't email it. They didn't text it. They didn't share it as a Google Doc so that everybody could access it at once.

And rather than any of that, they had to actually physically go and deliver this. And so it's interesting that all of these seven churches that are being audited by Christ himself are actually in that same vicinity.

And even though Jesus is not gonna be physically present, you know, they're not gonna see him. He's not gonna sit down across their desk and give them the good and the bad.

He is writing to all of them with a variety of commendations to each, corrections to each, and promised rewards for change.

And the interesting thing about this letter is that he wants all of them to read each other's mail. You're gonna see that in this text.

He says, I want you to read what the Spirit says to the churches, plural. So along each stop, they all got to kind of see the commendation of Jesus, the corrections of Jesus for each church along the way.

And now we are recipients of that same benefit that we get to look in and see Jesus' commendation to the churches, offer of reward to the churches, as well as corrections for the churches.

And it's with intention that he recorded that for us, that we might be beneficiaries of this information.

Not that we can look at Ephesus and go, man, you guys had some issues, you had some struggles, but that we might look at our church and say, where are we at in love?

Where are we at in truth? Where are we at in these things that we're gonna see specific? And so we see right up first the church, first church on the docket is the

Church of Ephesus. We're gonna see the next seven weeks are gonna be seven churches, one week each church, and we're gonna see these churches as they unfold what the really sit down audit of Jesus is for each one of them.

And our text this morning is completely comprised of the words of the Lord Jesus Christ himself. You'll see, aside from a couple of words at the beginning, if you have a red letter version of the

Bible, which I don't think is anywhere magical or mystical, but what they do is they try to take the actual quotes from Jesus and turn them into red letters.

And if you see that, then you'll notice that most of our text this morning is indeed red letter, if you have one of those.

It's the words of Jesus Christ quoting him here. And he is speaking the words that John is recording.

John's recording it, Jesus is speaking, and he commands John to write to this mystical phrase, write to the angel of the

Church of Ephesus. Now, I mentioned last week in one of the introductory messages that many see angel here as a metaphor for the human leader or the human director of each church, maybe even the pastor.

Some see it as a literal angel, like each church has a guardian angel or something to that effect, which seems a little bit kind of confusing, like why would he be writing a letter to an angel?

Last time I checked, I don't know if angels get mail. Where would you post a letter to an angel?

I don't know where you would send it. And so others believe that, by the way,

I didn't mention this last week, others believe that the angel could be a metaphor for this overall spirit or flavor of each individual church.

So each church has a kind of tendency towards it or a bent. And so some people see that.

I lean towards the angel being a specific human leader for each church, and that it's intentionally written with them in mind so that they can help guide and steer their church towards what is wholesome and healthy and what

Jesus is recommending for them. But it makes sense for John to be addressing concerns to them, these leaders.

And to be honest, it makes little difference who the angel is when you consider that these letters were read to each individual church at an assembly of the entire gathering.

So a reader, this letter would come into town, a reader would step up and read

Revelation 1 to 22 in a gathering to the church in Ephesus, and then they'd move on to the next church and onto the next church,

Smyrnothi, Tyre, all of these churches, and they'd move on, but it would be read in the gathering. So all of us would be privy to, like I just got up and read, all of us are privy to the information and have it available to us, the indictments and the commendations.

Each of these letters follows a pretty clear formula where Jesus identifies himself in a unique way. And some of you have kind of analytical minds, so you're like, well, what is the formula?

How does that work? Jesus identifies himself in each of these seven letters in a unique way.

He identifies something specific about his character in the introduction. He commends them usually, not every time, which is kind of interesting.

How many of you would like a commendation from Jesus? If he's issuing commendations, and he routinely does, how many of you know that that missing might be a downer, but some of these letters lack a commendation?

Like, he doesn't even say anything that they're doing right, that's pretty rough. He rebukes most all of them, gives them some kind of a correction, something that they need to change.

I say most of them, because how many of you like to be at one of those churches where he doesn't say anything that you're doing wrong? Like, that'd be kind of cool, right?

And I think the point being that we can kind of get a mix of this, and we'll see that there's some things that we're struggling with and some things that we're doing well, and I think you know that in your own heart, you know that there's a mix in each of us.

But he encourages them all, so he commends most of them, rebukes most of them. He then encourages them to take heed to his words.

He says, pay attention. If you have ears to hear, listen, heed this. Pay attention to the things that I'm saying.

And then lastly, he offers them a specific reward for conquering or overcoming. And conquering looks different for each church.

Conquering looks different for each one of these as he is indicting them and telling them what they need to change. And so, how does

Jesus reveal himself to the church in Ephesus? What's his MO? How does he approach them? And Jesus reveals himself in power to them.

Ephesus was a powerful city, and so it makes sense that Jesus reveals himself as powerful in the midst of this.

It was the fourth largest city in the entire Roman Empire. Fourth largest city in the

Roman Empire during this time. It was arguably the most influential city in the entire

Roman province of Asia. It was not the capital, but because of its art, its religion, its industry, it actually would be kind of like saying, what's our capital of our state?

What is it? You guys didn't know that right off the bat? Were you like, what? Lansing, but what's the largest city in our state?

Detroit. So you can kind of get a feel for that. Ephesus is the Detroit where Pergamum is the

Lansing. Pergamum is the capital of that Roman province, and it has the political clout, but when it really comes down to it,

Ephesus is the big city in Asia. It's the big one, okay? Even in this ancient time, it had over a quarter of a million residents.

250 ,000 people lived in Ephesus without running water, without electricity.

Any of you think that that might get a little cramped and crowded and smelly? Okay, it's,

I mean, and this is an ancient city. 250 ,000, that's three times, by the way, three times the population of Kalamazoo.

Three times the population of Kalamazoo, just to give you a perspective. It was a city that was steeped in Greek idolatry.

It was the seat of the worship of the Roman emperor in Asia, the imperial cult, as it was called, where they would actually pay homage and give offerings to the

Roman emperor as deity. They would worship him. It was also known for black magic.

Even when Paul, the apostle, went through the city of Ephesus, people repented of their voodoo style of religion, and they piled up their spell books and their amulets and their charms and all of these things that they thought brought them power, and they burned them when they became

Christians. A huge bonfire, and it was estimated that the worth of the magic books alone was over 50 ,000 pieces of silver.

A place steeped in black magic and Satanism and idolatry and all of this kind of stuff.

A place that understood and moved and breathed in the realms of power. Ephesus.

Ephesus. Further than this, Ephesus was the center of the worship of Artemis, who was the

Greek goddess of rednecks. Okay, some of you are like, where is he going with that?

She was the patron goddess of hunting, okay? So she never married, according to Greek mythology, and she was the huntress, and everybody who was into hunting would pay homage to her.

And so she was the queen of hunters, so to speak. And Ephesus had a large industrial park dedicated to the making of silver statues to Artemis.

If you had a silver statue to Artemis, it was made in Ephesus in the Roman Empire. These things were spread all throughout, all the way to the

Roman city itself, and they were known for making these silver statues, like a factory, an industry in Ephesus.

So Ephesus was a powerful city. It was filled with a good understanding of prestige. So Jesus, in verse one, identifies himself as the one who holds the leadership of the church.

I am the one who holds the stars in my right hand. And he walks among his churches.

He paints a picture of his sovereignty over those who are his, and he wants the

Ephesians to sit up and take note. Who's the one addressing us? Who's the one who has written this letter to us?

Who's the one that is offering us a review? The Lord Jesus Christ himself, the almighty one, the one who holds the stars in his hand.

He's the one. In verses two and three, Jesus jumps right into the commendation for this church that has been established in a pretty rough city.

How many of you think, just from the description that I gave you, that that would be a hard place to establish a church? Sounds pretty tough.

Sounds like a difficult place. Sounds kind of like, maybe like Detroit, right? Like a difficult place to have a church plan, or maybe

Dearborn or something. And there's a lot of struggles there in that community. And he commends them.

Jesus says, I know your works, Ephesians. Speaking to the church, I know your works. And the word for works here is not what we might think in our minds, specifically good works, right?

You're thinking, well, it's a commendation, right? So he's like, I know your good works. No, he's saying, I know the way that you roll.

I know the things that you do. It's a more general statement that all of us should take to heart.

And that's just simply the reality that Jesus knows the way that you and I roll. He knows the way that our church rolls.

He knows the things that we are doing. Jesus knows how we roll. He sees the things that we do individually, as well as understanding and knowing intimately the corporate flavor of our church, recast.

And it's a pretty cool thing to consider that Jesus knows what is going on in his churches. Anybody glad for that?

He understands and he knows. It's not meant to be a scary thing, like Jesus is watching you, he's gonna squish you, he's gonna get after you.

No, it's a peaceful thing. He says, I see your toil, I see your work.

It's something that we ought to consider. He sees the way that we're behaving. Jesus breaks down the work of the

Ephesians into three categories. Remember, all commendations. He says, I see your works, your works look like this, toil, patient endurance, and not putting up with evil.

Three things that he says I see in you, Ephesus. I see these things. Toil, patient endurance, and not putting up with evil.

These obviously are three things that are commendations from the Lord, so therefore worthy of commendation by God himself.

They have apparently endured difficulty, and you can imagine, just from the culture that I explained to you, can you imagine some difficulties that they might have faced as a church with so much black magic and so much imperial cult worship?

I'm sure that Christians on a regular basis were asked to bow to statues routinely and regularly in that community and culture.

Lots of persecution, and they've endured that. In a culture that was so steeped in idolatry and black magic and various forms of paganism,

I'm sure that it cost something real to be a Christian in that culture. It cost you something to be a

Christian. And the Ephesian church worked hard in that context to remain pure according to the text, even testing those who claimed to be apostles, but were not.

They took this seriously, their purity as a church. Now, how many of you would agree with me that so far what you've heard in this commendation makes it sound like the church in Ephesus was a pretty conservative church?

Would you agree with me on that? Sounds fairly conservative in the way that it rolls, and I'm talking theologically.

It's just gonna take truth seriously. And they seek purity in practice and purity in their teaching.

They're not gonna put up with people acting out in evil or teaching that which is false. How many of you think that's a good quality in a church?

That's a pretty good quality in a church. The details, by the way, of how the Ephesian church tested their teachers isn't spelled out for us.

We don't have a roadmap for how best to test our teachers, but they were apparently pretty good at it.

The church in Ephesus was good at that practice, and they rooted out false teachers. Those that were false, according to Jesus himself, he says, those that are false, you're finding them.

You're actually identifying correctly the ones that are false and you're removing them. And I would suggest to you, maybe the wheels are already spinning in your mind, that this

Jesus already is starting to look a little different than the Jesus of our culture. The Jesus that you're gonna hear about in the media, the

Jesus that everybody's gonna use for their bumper sticker and their cause, and their Jesus is fill in the blank, right?

Jesus is revealed different than our routine cultural understanding.

He commends them for not bearing with those who are evil. Is that a popular message in our culture?

Are you gonna hear that declared about Jesus in the newspaper tomorrow? No. No, not at all, unless it's a derogatory article against Christians or something like that.

Well, here's what Christians believe, or here's what Don preached yesterday, or something like that. I'm not gonna be in the news. I hope not.

We'll see. But he, this is a Jesus who commends them for not bearing with those who are evil.

And you might even be thinking for just a second, wait a minute, Don. I thought Jesus hung out with sinners.

Didn't Jesus hang out with prostitutes and tax collectors? And here he's commending a church for not putting up with evil people.

What gives here? What's the, where's the balance in this? What's going on?

And it's extremely important that we get this right. So bear with me as we kind of take a little side note here into this realm of what is

Jesus doing here, commending them for not bearing up with evil people, and equally in his own life, if we're following his example, we're gonna be hanging out with sinful people, right?

And is there any such, what do you know that you don't really have options? Who you're hanging out with? Sinful people.

Agreed? Look around you, sinful people. Look up here, sinful person. I mean, we all have sin, right?

So what's the scoop here? It's important that we get this right, because our culture is eager to use

Jesus to support all their cries to love everybody regardless of sin.

Have any of you heard that maybe even just this week, that you are supposed to love everybody regardless of their sin? And it almost goes to the degree in our culture now where it's love the sinner and love their sin.

I've actually been indicted on Facebook by people who have said, you know, this love the sinner, hate the sin business,

I'm having none of that. And I say, what's the option? What's the other option? If it's not love the sinner and hate the sin, then it's love the sinner and the sin.

And we cannot, as the people of God, as the people who recognize Jesus Christ crucified for our sins to cover it, that we can love sin?

That is not possible as a follower of Jesus Christ. You cannot love sin.

You can hate sin for what it does to people. How many of you have ever seen sin ruin somebody? Some of us hear our testimonies to God's grace pulling us out where we were destroying ourselves with sin and God by his grace reached down and plucked us from the fire.

So I hate sin. Do you hate sin? We are supposed to hate it and we're gonna see that here.

We're gonna see that word applied here in just a moment. But Jesus never loves sin.

He doesn't turn a blind eye to sin, ever. So you ask, how could he respond so well to tax collectors?

How could he respond so well to the woman caught in adultery? And I would suggest to you that this one word is the key to understanding the tension between Jesus' response to sinners and his grace in our lives.

And actually how we can in turn say, turn somebody away. Repentance.

Repentance is the key. Think about Zacchaeus, the tiny little guy who was full of greed and extorted money from everybody in his life.

He stole money. He extorted from his own countrymen. He was known as a traitor. The tax collectors were traitors to his people and with good cause.

It wasn't just their religious snobbery that would have looked down on him. Looked down on him, see what

I did there? But it was actually his behavior. He had sinned against people. He had extorted money out of the poor and made them even poorer.

Zacchaeus has an encounter with the Lord Jesus Christ himself. And spit back out the other side of that story.

Zacchaeus meets Jesus and what does he do? He pays people back.

That is repentance. He pays them back. He's encountered the Lord and he recognizes holiness and he recognizes his own brokenness and his own sin and coming face to face with his own sin.

He said, I wanna make it right. And he repents and he turns from his sin and pays people back.

The woman caught in adultery. What was Jesus' declaration to her? Go and sin no more, which is another way of just saying, repent, you're heading towards sin, you're heading towards sin, stop it.

Stop heading towards it and go the other way. Repent. The rich young ruler asked

Jesus what he had to do to enter the kingdom of God and ultimately walked away rejected. Jesus wasn't there pleading, saying, please come back to me, please come back to me.

Because what did he notice? Unrepentance in the heart of the man. Jesus says, your greed is gonna destroy you.

I hate to see the greed in you. Go and sell what you have, give to the poor and then come and follow me. And the guy says, I'm having none of that.

He said, I want my sin. I want my greed and I'm gonna hold onto that and I'm not gonna come and follow you.

And in the lack of repentance, Jesus doesn't go begging and weeping and saying, please come, please come, stop, stop running away.

He lets him go because there's no repentance. There's no desire for change.

An unrepentant sinner remains in the anger and wrath of Jesus, which is real. But one who hungers for righteousness, one who desires change and is seeking to turn away from sin by the power of the spirit, that one has compassion, has freedom, has forgiveness and the eternal promises of God.

Despite how unpopular the phrase is becoming in our culture, I believe that Jesus in our text is quite clearly spelling out a roadmap for the church in Ephesus and the church in Matawan and recast for the church to love the sinner, but hate the sin.

It's a roadmap for that. How many of you have encountered that phrase in our culture and had somebody disparage it? Have you had it?

Have you found people speaking negatively about that phrase recently? Because I certainly have.

I had anybody? A few of us, okay. It's becoming increasingly a negative comment to people.

But I think that's exactly what Jesus is telling us. That's the title of my sermon. You see it on the front of the worship folder there. As you see, the

Ephesian church had the hate the sin concept down quite well and are being commended for it.

They're being commended for that aspect. They rejected false teaching. They toiled to remain pure and they wouldn't stand for evil members.

They were strong in accountability. And according to verse six, they even hated, look at verse six with me.

Verse six says, yet this you have. He's in the middle of rebuking them. And we're gonna get there in a second.

But then he returns to commendation, which is unique to this specific letter. And in verse six, he says, yet this you have.

Oh, by the way, don't forget, at least you've got this going for you. You hate the works of the

Nicolaitans, which I also hate, Jesus says.

Hopefully you look at that and you don't have me putting words into Jesus's mouth, but you see it for yourself there in the text.

There are behaviors, there are actions, there are works, there are deeds that according to this verse,

Jesus hates. Is that a strong phrase? To say Jesus hates something is a pretty big deal.

But he's saying, I hate their works. I hate the things that they do. And you do too. Good job.

Good job, he says. Bravo, you're getting something right at least. You hate sin.

Great. Whoa. You're going, wait, this is getting kind of warm in here.

Maybe there's gonna be something that softens it and there is here in a second. That Jesus hates some behaviors and he commends them for hating those same things.

And as much as I wanna give you a clear list of what those works of the Nicolaitans are, so that,

I mean, how many of you would like to have that list so that you could avoid those things? If Jesus says, I hate them, you'd like to have a list.

I mean, some of you are checklist people anyway, so you love a checklist. You love a good checklist. At the end of the day, you're like, did this, did this, read my

Bible, prayed, did this, did this, did this. And those of you married know that that doesn't work real well with a spouse.

It's just like it doesn't work real well with God because he wants your heart engaged in it. She wants your heart engaged in it. He wants your heart engaged in it.

So sometimes coming up with a checklist isn't so efficient in love, right? And some of us would love to have this list of things so that we could just avoid them and feel like we're okay as long as we know we're not doing whatever those

Nicolaitans did. I don't want to be doing that. We don't know what they were doing. The text in history doesn't give us a lot to go on, but generally scholars believe that the

Nicolaitans were a group who claimed to follow Christ and were involved in the Ephesian church, but attempted to assimilate too much of their pagan culture into their church life.

They were willing to kind of water things down so that the culture wasn't so hard on them.

How many of you might recognize some tendencies in your own heart leaning towards that in the culture we live in? Raise your hand if you just like people to like you.

Being honest, my hand is raised for me, okay? I like it when people like me. But how many of you know that there is growing in our society the reality that if people like me, then there's a good chance

I might have to compromise my message to maintain that like? Did you know, have you noticed that? You might have to actually begin to say that some things that are bad are good in order to be accepted by your coworkers, by the people that you work with, by your neighbors, by society in general.

It's increasingly growing that way in our culture. And I'm gonna take just a second to get back on my notes.

Oh, this was all about the list, all about what the list looks like and what is that list.

And scholars believe that they were assimilating too much of the culture into the church. And so they would allow

Christians to participate in emperor worship and even worship pagan, even involved in pagan celebrations and things in the temples around there for the cause of fitting in better with society.

And if these scholars are right, then these people were people in the church trying so hard to just fit in and get along with their culture that they slid right into wickedness and sinful acts.

And maybe Jesus doesn't list those acts and those behaviors and those works because he doesn't want us off the hook.

Because if you guys are anything like me, when I see a list of really bad sins, I immediately peruse the list and I'm often moved to self -justification.

Yup, just like I thought, I'm not as bad as everybody else. How many of you know that's a dangerous place for the

Christian to stand? And yet I confess that I can be moved to that at times.

I can look at lists of sins and go, well, I haven't done that, haven't done that, haven't done that, haven't done that. I guess Jesus loves me more. Ooh, dangerous ground.

But I think the reason Jesus specifically points out the Nicolaitans here without listing out their specific sins is to remind the church that there are some who want salvation but do not want to be distinct or stand out.

They want the salvation, but they don't want to stand out. It's a serious caution for us in 2015, where we live, in our culture, in our society.

Do we want the benefits of Christ without the toil of purity? Do we want to stand out on the day of salvation but kind of just blend in until then?

Jesus said, if you are embarrassed of me now, I will be embarrassed of you then.

Whoa, it's an intimidating thought, isn't it? But the Ephesian church was actually being commended here.

They're being commended. I'm taking their commendation and saying, it is a challenge for us to continue that vein.

They were doing a good job of it. Are we gonna continue doing a good job of it? Are we gonna continue to do a good job of remaining true and faithful in the midst of a culture that is gonna increasingly turn up the heat to conform to what is false?

It's already happening. And he's commending them. He's saying, you're doing a good job,

Ephesian church. In the midst of this city steeped in black magic and power and emperor worship and the worship of Artemis, they stood firm.

How many of you think that's an awesome thing? I wanna meet some Ephesians in heaven. I wanna sit down and talk with them and hear their stories because there's gonna be amazing stories in heaven about what the

Ephesians endured, physical things that they endured, loss of family, loss of jobs, loss of income, starvation, all kinds of horrendous things that happen because of their faith.

And they'll be there. They'll be there to share and tell us the stories because they were faithful and they were in with Christ.

So the Ephesian church is being commended. Jesus says in verse six, ultimately, hey, at least you've got this going for you.

You hate the same things I hate. Some churches will feel pretty smug at this point because yeah, they're nailing the hating part.

What? They're nailing the hating part. How many of you know that that might not be the ultimate thing to be proud of?

Because when it comes down to it, we're gonna see that they're missing a huge part of what it means to be a church. But it's not over yet.

Further in verse three, Jesus again commends their endurance. He's still talking positively about them.

They've got endurance. They stand up under pressure for his name. They have a tireless tenacity about them.

Words like work, just listen for just a second. Words like work, toil, patient endurance, bearing up, it makes me tired reading them.

Okay? How many of you got tired just listening to me read those words, work, toil, patient endurance, bearing up, but the

Ephesian church kept at it? Ephesus is defined then in a positive way by what

I would say the commendation is simply this, you have a tenacious faith. You're sticking to it.

You're faithful, faithful, faithful. But that's not all Jesus has to say to them.

He has something to say against them. And I wonder if in the public reading of this letter in the church in Ephesus, if there wasn't an audible stir at the word but, and then

I have something against you. How many of you, if Jesus is writing to you when he says I've got something against you, your ears might perk up a bit and you might just kind of go, you got me,

I'm listening. Anybody dozing off all of a sudden is awake, right? It's like in the reading of this. Yeah, I knew we were nailing this, man.

We were totally awesome. We were getting it, getting after it, man. We've been so faithful and totally awesome.

You stand strong on the truth, yeah, preach it, whoever the reader is and then, but I have this against you.

You have abandoned the love you had at first. Ephesus had not always been a loveless generation, but they are now, they are now.

They weren't as of the beginning, but they've fallen away. They had love for one another, but I would suggest to you that somewhere in the course of defending the faith and rooting out false teachers and evil practices, they lost their kindhearted compassion and service for each other.

I believe that Ephesus stands as a reminder to us, recast, that often zeal for the truth leads to suspicion and a lack of love when it isn't balanced with compassion.

So in other words, if we're the kind of church that's constantly looking for and constantly wary of false teachers, what is gonna be a common temptation for us?

To lack love. To be jaded, to become cynical, to see somebody as a false teacher under every rock and every bush, and it's gonna be, ah, we're constantly on edge, right?

Truth and love must both be always present in the church. And Ephesus, according to this text, lost its love.

But Jesus graciously offers a corrective, a corrective action to help this church get back on the right track.

He said, here's what you need to do. And he spells out very clearly, here's the roadmap to health on this.

It's in verse five. And we can apply this as a church, but I would suggest to you, if you're taking notes, remember, you can apply this as an individual as well.

You find yourself off track spiritually, apply this. You find yourself caught up in behaviors or addiction or struggles, this is a roadmap of sorts to get moving in the right direction towards God.

The first thing is to remember. The second is to repent. And the third is to revive.

He says, remember the way that things were when you first came to faith. Second, repent, which just simply means a turn of direction.

And the last, revive the works that you did at first. When the passion was new and the excitement and enthusiasm for the kingdom of God was fresh in your life, revive those things that you did in those days.

He says, ultimately, remember when your love was still new. Remember the way that things were when you first came to faith.

And remembering precedes repentance. Think that through with me. Remembering precedes a change of behavior.

We must remember at least what God desires of us in order to recognize how far we have fallen from his plan for us, his standard.

So the standard is that we love each other. That's the standard. And without remembering that standard, it's hard to tell where you're at, right?

But when you suddenly have that place to measure and say, love, kindness, acts of service towards each other, now you can, now you have some method of measurement.

God desires his church to be defined by our love for each other. Second, Jesus tells them to repent.

They're told to stop heading in the direction of cold -hearted apathy toward each other and turn the other way.

Repentance is a directional word. You're heading in this way. Hey, stop heading in this way. Go over here.

And that's where the last thing is. What should they be going for? Okay, turn away from apathy. Turn away from lovelessness.

But where should we set our target? They must get back to the works of love that they used to do but have let fall away.

Love is never in the Bible, by the way. This is key. Love in the Bible is never a mushy feeling inside somebody's chest.

It isn't a raised pulse. It isn't synonymous with a rush of excitement. Is that the way our culture defines love?

It's always some, you know, pitter -patter in your chest or something like that or some gut -level feeling.

But love in Scripture is actions of kindness towards one another, works of love. And if you think about the five love languages, how many of you ever read the book,

Five Love Languages? Either you have or you should. Two types of people in the room. All of us would probably benefit from that.

Is it Smalley? Does anybody know the author? Is it Gary Smalley that's the author of that? But it's a great book. I've got a copy of it if you wanna borrow it.

I love recommending and loaning out books if you can find it useful. But he identifies five ways, five primary ways that people receive love or even then in turn probably give love.

And the first is physical touch, the second acts of service, words of affirmation, quality time, and gifts.

So my question is if you think about that list, which one best defines biblical love?

And you can kind of like go, well, wait a minute. You can probably dismiss most of these off the list. Physical touch could just really ultimately revolve around lust.

Words of affirmation could kind of revolve around pride. Gifts could revolve around greed. So you can kind of see some backside failures on some of these things.

And so you could easily start to whittle them down. Well, maybe it's just acts of service. Maybe it's just quality time. What is the core action of love?

And I would suggest to you all of them, all of them. The problem is that often we read the book to define the one thing we're gonna do for our spouse for the rest of our lives.

And that's not the way it should be. Or the way that we're gonna, well, this is just the way I'm gonna love and this is the way that it is and I'm just gonna do this thing.

My wife really likes acts of service. She loves it when I unload the dishwasher. That's like, that's speaking love to her.

But that doesn't mean that there's not times in our lives and in our relationship where what she really needs is just a hug, right?

Guys, you gotta get this in your mind. If her love language is acts of service, she still needs other things from you, okay?

And so you get all these things. There's times when she likes me to go out of my way to get her a thoughtful gift.

That's not her primary love language, but she still likes that. She's still grateful for that. And maybe using a spouse as an illustration muddies the water a bit because we're talking about in the church.

And within the church, we need all kinds of sensitive, compassionate responses to each other, kindness towards one another, gentleness towards each other, a listening ear, quality time.

Sometimes, look at the way that Jesus loved. Sometimes he just put his hand on somebody's back and that conveyed a world of love to an individual who was never touched.

Like the lepers, for example. Sometimes just a hug is what a person needs.

I'm learning that personally. That's not something that comes natural to me. So I'm learning that. Sometimes what's needed is just an embrace or a hand on the back or just to say,

I'm here with you. All kinds of movements and acts of compassion and kindness and love towards one another.

And if we see the church as fundamentally, and here's the problem in America, a lot of us see the church fundamentally as a show or a program or a civic institution or a community event.

If that's the way we view the church, then we're missing the point. We're missing something. It's more like a family that reflects the community, reflects to the community the love of Jesus in us and through us to them.

And as we consider this correction towards the Ephesian church, I think we might find Jesus a bit harsh here in what he has to say to them at the end of verse five.

He says, I'm gonna downgrade your status. I'm gonna remove your lamp stand if you don't repent. If you don't turn back to love and deeds of love,

I'm gonna give you the status, no longer a church if you don't turn it around.

He's gonna remove their lamp stand, which being a lamp stand is the definition of a church. In one sense, the punishment, however, fits the crime.

Jesus says here, he's not being completely harsh. He's being just kind of logical in his discipline. He says,

I'm gonna keep you from being able to shine out if you refuse to shine out both truth and love.

If you refuse to shine out accurately about me, then I'm gonna eventually remove you as a church.

And as we consider this correction, we've got to consider where is truth and love in our church.

It may surprise some of us that the truth isn't all you need. It might surprise us even more that love isn't all you need.

Just like the song, the song was wrong. Love isn't all you need. You need truth too. Both are necessary components of a healthy church.

And Ephesus got the truth down like a room full of scholars, but they stopped loving, probably because they had been burned enough by people who thought that they were on the same team.

They thought were on the same team. But Jesus says, I know you've been burned. I know that it hasn't always gone smooth.

It's been toil and work. You've stood strong in the truth all the way through, but don't give up now.

Don't grow cynical and jaded now. Keep on loving, keep on serving one another.

Repentance and conquering for the church of Ephesus looks like works of love.

What is it gonna be to turn this church around? Remember, repent and revive those works of love.

And if they take to heart the warning to listen up in verse seven, if they conquer their own inhibited and apathetic hearts,

Jesus says, the fruit of the tree of life will be yours to eat in paradise. Does that sound good?

Does that sound refreshing? Especially in a hot room right now? To eat of the fruit of the tree of life.

It's awesome and glorious that that tree is brought back into the equation now, because that tree is an ancient tree that was there in the garden of Eden.

There was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil there that we were told not to eat, and then there was the tree of life. And Adam and Eve ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil against God's explicit commands.

So God gave them the boot from the garden, and part of the reason that he gave them the boot from the garden is actually declared for us in the text of Genesis.

It says, lest they take and eat from the tree of life and live forever.

There was a threat, there was a real threat that if Adam and Eve ate from the tree of life, that they would live eternally in a state of sin.

So in one sense, God's giving them the boot out of the garden was grace to us as a race, that we might have hope and not live eternally in a state of sin.

And God promises that for those who are restored in the love of Christ, God promises to grant them that bite of the life -giving fruit of paradise, a restoration to that which was taken away at sin will be brought back in its completion when

Jesus brings his kingdom. Now, I wanna clearly communicate that this passage tackles head -on the reality that love and judgment are not incompatible.

Our culture is telling us that love and judgment can never really meet. Our culture tells us that you cannot both love someone and declare that their deeds are wrong.

That's the way our culture is moving, right? Am I right? If you say that you love somebody, then you have to agree with everything they do, right?

Right? Wrong. Wrong, we don't, we don't have to, we can love somebody and disagree with them, right?

Is that possible? Our culture is saying no. It's like this, it's completely inconsistent and strange and bizarre that this is the way our culture is going.

It's not logical, but hey, that's where, that's what we're gonna have to deal with moving down, moving forward.

But this text openly declares that you must do both. You must love each other and you must hate the works of evil.

The call on us as a church from this text is equally a call to all of us as individuals.

Consider your own relationship to the truth and your relationship to love. We are not being called to water down the truth and water down love to make some kind of impowerful, impotent mix of the two.

We are to stand strong on the truth in the things that we teach and in the way that we live. And we are to take holiness seriously.

We are to root out those who would be like wolves among the flock. But we are to love each other with acts of kindness, with acts of service that shows compassion even for sinners like us.

My hope is that as we come to communion this morning, you can reflect on the love and justice of God at the cross.

We take communion to remember the sacrifice of Jesus Christ for us each week. We want to start the next week with a reminder that we're sinners saved by the grace of Jesus Christ.