Copyright © 2019 by Michael A. Brown
Keeping our Passion for Jesus Fresh
To the angel of the church in Ephesus write:
“These are the words of him who holds the seven stars
in his right hand and walks among the seven golden lampstands: I know your
deeds, your hard work and your perseverance. I know that you cannot tolerate wicked men,
that you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found
them false. You have persevered and have
endured hardships for my name, and have not grown weary. Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken
your first love. Remember the height
from which you have fallen! Repent and do
the things you did at first. If you do
not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place. But you have this in your favour: You hate the
deeds of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.
He who has
an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who
overcomes, I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the
paradise of God.” (Rev.
2:1-7)
SCANDAL – the intended bride of Christ in Ephesus has lost her
first love for her betrothed!
Much like a marriage relationship
that has become dry and cold. Gone are the earlier days when the relationship
was close, warm, intimate and passionate, when the two partners were one in
spirit and looked forward every day to being with one another. When they were together, time did not seem to
exist; they could linger together for hours, never wanting to be parted. The inward fire of their love saw them through
many difficulties. However, the two
partners slowly got used to giving themselves to the humdrum demands of daily
living, going to work, working long hours, and fulfilling their tasks and
responsibilities at home. And then the
children came along as well, truly a great joy, but it simply added to the
busyness and stress of their lives...
They were a
good couple in many ways but, over time, this all slowly but surely took its
toll on the intimacy of their union, and it brought coldness and distance into
their relationship. Intimacy was
neglected, perhaps a little at first but then increasingly. So now they have become too busy and too tired
to spend quality time with each other. They go to bed exhausted only to get up the
next day and go through the same demanding schedule again. They have become like the proverbial ships
that pass in the night. And so it
continues on...
Then
one day they suddenly wake up to the fact that what they used to have seems to
be no more. There is little or no
emotional warmth between them, hardly any feelings, and everything seems to
have gone cold. They are drifting
apart. They now take each other for
granted, even in what they do for each other. They seem to be spending more time apart than
they do together. Living together has
become nothing more than a dull, lifeless and unending routine of daily
demands.
Losing our passion for God through neglecting intimacy with him
It can be
the same with God… We are told that the
first commandment, the one which we are to keep above all the others, is to
love the LORD our God with all our heart, with all our soul and with all our
strength (Deut. 6:5). God’s design and
purpose has always been to bring people into a committed covenant love
relationship with himself. It is this
that he wants, and he yearns for it above all things.
These
believers in Ephesus, the bride of Christ, had much to commend them as a
church. Indeed they enjoyed a widespread
reputation as being wholly devoted to God.[1] Their love for God had seen them through many
hardships (2:3). However, they had
become too busy for God… They had
neglected intimacy with him, so they had lost this. They were working hard (2:2), but it is true
that spending too much time working and toiling invariably takes its toll on
relationships. They hadn’t noticed or
admitted to themselves that their love for Christ had grown cold.
Furthermore,
it seems they were becoming become doctrinaire. Ignatius tells us that this community of believers
in Ephesus had a reputation of being very well-taught, that no false doctrine
or immoral lifestyle could take root among them (2:2,6; cf. Acts 20:28-31).[2]
But being valiant for truth, necessary
as this is, does not in and of itself keep us close to God. We can be orthodox and correct in our doctrine
and we can live rightly before others, but we may have little or no love (1
Cor. 13:1-3). To use the example of
Bunyan’s characters in Pilgrim’s Progress, we need to be both Mr.
Valiant-for-Truth and Mr. Great Heart.[3]
Through
neglecting it, these believers had lost their once warm, passionate
relationship with God. It had become
dry, distant and cold. However, as I
said above, God wants and desires relationship with us above all other things. It is this that we were created and redeemed
for. We were redeemed to live in union
with God and to love him, not merely to serve him and work for him. And it is living in his love that meets our
deepest needs. When these believers lost
their first love for him – in fact, it even says that they had forsaken it (2:4) – God took this
so seriously that he warned them that if they continued on like this, then he
would close their church down by removing its lampstand. This is how serious this issue is for God.
The root of all backsliding is forsaking
our first love. Either we learn the
lesson of living in heart-warming intimacy and walking with him closely, and reaping
the benefits of this by keeping our faith fresh and alive (and thereby keeping
our church alive too), or else we eventually lose what we have in God. It is spiritual freshness that brings life and
causes things to flower and bloom, but dryness kills off spiritual life...
God
says that if we do not want him in intimacy, then ultimately we cannot really
have him at all. With God, it’s
either intimacy or nothing. An empty,
dry, stale marriage is as bad as an empty shell of a church that has lost its
fire, zeal and intimacy with God. In
this state, it is not fit for its intended purpose. Couples whose marriage has gone dry begin to
drift apart and the end result is often separation and divorce, the ending of
the covenant commitment they promised to one another in their vows at the very
beginning.
Marriages
can only survive and be what they are intended to become, if true, intimate and
meaningful love is nurtured and survives. But for this to happen, the couple has to
commit themselves to doing what is necessary to regain the love they have lost.
They have to return to doing what they did
at first. And it is
recovering intimacy which is the key to this. Saying sorry, coming together and dating
again, making the time and space to spend quality time alone together, making
love once more, committing to putting into place a right balance between work,
home, family and marriage responsibilities, and so on...
It is no
different with God. Our love for him and our
desire to spend quality time with him is far more important to him than our
work for him will ever be. We
tend to get so easily distracted by other things and by schedules which demand
priority that we simply become too busy (even in God’s work). We lose our intimacy with God, because we do
not value or prioritize it.
Church was
never intended to be primarily about the program that we run every week or the other
activities that we do. In the first place,
it is about God himself. We are the
Bride of Christ, so God wants real, genuine, close relationship with us above
all other things. He yearns jealously to have us for himself (Jas. 4:5, cf. Ex.
20:5-6). When we are born again and filled with the Holy Spirit, we are brought
into deep, inner, spiritual union with God himself:
‘…he who unites himself with the Lord
is one with him is spirit.’
(1 Cor. 6:17)
So
our first call as believers is to love him, to worship him and to live with him
in intimacy, and then to do his work and the rest of our daily
activities. If the freshness of love for
God is within us, then we will be blessed in what we do for him.
Re-establishing our intimacy with God
The theme
of desire, passion and strongly expressed feelings runs throughout this letter
to the church at Ephesus. Scholars tell
us that the word ‘Ephesus’ may well derive from a root word meaning ‘desirable.’
The letter refers to such things as the
passion of first love, a lack of tolerance of wicked people and a hatred of
free sexual relationships, and the promise of paradise as the place of living
eternally in close fellowship with God.
Jesus
presents himself to them as One walking among the lampstands of the churches
(2:1), seeking fellowship with those whose hearts will respond to him (cf. 2
Chr. 16:9), with those who will devote themselves to be close to him (Jer.
30:21). We can perhaps detect the pain and
disappointment of his heart when he says plainly that in spite of all they are
doing for him, yet he holds something against these people whom he loves
deeply. Open, plain, honest and direct
speaking in the uncovering of deep, inner feelings and desires is the language
of marriage and intimacy known only to those who have walked closely together
in love. He can say it to them, because
they should know that, painful as it is to hear it, yet it is meant in love and
expresses the yearning cry of his heart for their good. We are more likely to receive truthful rebuke
and respond to it constructively if we know that the one who says it loves
us. He calls them back to what they had
known before:
‘I
remember the devotion of your youth, how as a bride you loved me and followed
me through the desert, through a land not sown. Israel was holy to the LORD, the firstfruits
of his harvest.’
(Jer. 2:2-3)
So we need
to re-establish our intimacy with God. We
have lost our spiritual freshness and vibrancy, and we may be jaded and tired.
We have lost our spirit of praise and faith. In our hearts, we feel cold and far from God,
even though we may be doing his work. Our devotional life is weak and inconsistent. In church meetings it seems like we are just
going through the motions, everything has become dull and lifeless. We may even have become so self-deceived that
we think that everything is actually okay, that if we are doing his work with
seeming success then he must necessarily be pleased with the way things are,
much as the husband who thinks everything is running smoothly and is so
surprised when his wife suddenly bursts out one day and is distressed because
intimacy between them has been drying up for a while, and he didn’t even notice
it happening.
So it’s
about coming back to God and drawing close to him, repenting and confessing our
sin of coldness and the things that have brought it about, firmly resolving to
do away with things that keep us too distracted or too busy, and committing
ourselves to making the time and space to be able to be with him regularly for
quality time together and to linger in his presence, in order to refresh the
intimacy of our spiritual union with him. Relaxing quietly with his word and taking our
time over it so that it once again speaks deeply into our spirits, drinking
deeply at the fountain of his presence, praising and worshipping freely and
openly in spirit and in truth, praying in the Spirit and allowing the Spirit’s presence
and peace to well up from within, so that our hearts are warmed and living
water flows through us once again – doing the things we did when we first became
believers and were living close to God. And then committing ourselves to keeping to
this pattern on a regular basis, realising that it really is the most
important thing we can ever do, as only then can our faith be kept
fresh and alive and our work for God remain effective and fruitful over the
longer term. Not wanting to lose her
beloved, the bride got up and went in search of him. And when she found him, she would not let him
go (cf. Song 1:7-8, 3:1-5, 5:2-8)…
Overcoming
in this way brings us into renewed fellowship with God and into the promise of
eating from the tree of life in the paradise of God (2:7), much as the first
couple walked with God among the trees in the garden (Gen. 3:8, cf. Song
6:2-3). It is a picture of the secret,
inner life of sharing together which intimacy in relationship brings.
However,
not being willing to keep regularly to this pattern simply means that we
potentially condemn ourselves to losing this intimacy again and ending up where
we were before. And so the heart of our
relationship with God will remain unstable... Unstable relationships do not know a life of
inner, secret sharing together and they tend to remain superficial. Much as a married couple that recognise their
problem and become intimate again for a while, but then allow themselves
through the pressures of life to become too busy yet again for each other, and
so the same downward spiral in their relationship begins all over again.
To be
effective as God’s people on earth, we need to be living in the fire, love and
passion of a close, fresh, intimate relationship with God. It is fire, passion and presence that bring
fruit and blessing. All our effectiveness and
fruitfulness for God flow out of our intimacy with him. To be effective for him, we need to be with him consistently. Furthermore, we will only truly love our neighbour,
if we love God first. We cannot minister
to others in the fire and love of God, if we are not on fire and in love with
God ourselves. Our relationship with God
and our work for him have to find their right balance. Continuing to serve tables is no good if it
means that we cannot give ourselves firstly to prayer and the ministry of the
word (cf. Acts 6:2-4). First things must
come first and, with God, first things really do have to be kept as the first
things.
If we carry
on as a church in our dry spiritual state and our busyness, disregarding the
call of the Spirit to repent and come back to a place of intimacy with God,
then the Lord himself eventually leaves. The church’s future depends on our love for
him. A marriage cannot
continue on and on in a dry state without separation occurring sooner or later.
So we will find ourselves without the
presence and blessing of God in the life of our church, and its spiritual life
will wither and die away.
Although a
believer as an individual can always repent and return to intimacy with God,
yet the call of this letter is made to the church as a local body. An outward form, an empty shell may remain
even for many years, but ultimately the church will close down. Its lampstand – the light and life of God’s presence
within it – was removed. The
removal of the lampstand is the ultimate end of a distanced relationship. Jesus himself left and vacated the place, and
our house was left unto us desolate (cf. Matt. 23:38). He left because we did not want him.
He forsook us, because we first grieved
him by forsaking him in our hearts and we did not then return to him when he
called. We did not learn to value
intimacy with him (replacing it with any number of other things), so ultimately
we lost him altogether.
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Notice
THE HOLY
BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by
Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
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