Welcome friends. My name’s Alex. If you’re visiting, it’s great to have you here. I’m one of the pastors here, and I am a little bit nervous about the sprinkler system. I’ll be honest. Does anyone know? the ratio of heat required to set up a sprinkler. My overall theory is if the sprinklers go off, if I’m getting dunked in a dunk tank, you guys are all getting sprinkled, and that seems like it’s somewhat even.

We are in a series on the book of Revelation into this second week, about to head into a section called the seven churches of Revelation. The lamps, as you see here, are seven, and that will come into play in As we talk about this the book of revelation is a monster of a book it is long It is difficult.

We’re going to wrestle with it together as a Community One of the questions I got from last week was how do I feel about some of the literature or do I really feel as? Just angsty about some of the literature around Revelation as I proclaim to be, particularly this little series here, the Left Behind series.

And I decided this, I don’t because it allows us to do things like this.

If you are wondering what I might be doing for my next haircut, there’s a look into the future for you. Here’s the struggle with, I’m going to move this in a second because I know you won’t be able to focus, here’s the struggle with some of the literature around Revelation and why part of our work as we start in the series is to clear some of the ground is that books like Left behind books like the late great planet Earth some of the popular literature around revelation They give us a few false precepts a false Understanding of revelation.

Here’s just three of them as you read these kind of books one It teaches you to read revelation as a road map It gives you this sense that the things you’re reading about are definitely chronological and all literal and are going to unfold in a linear fashion. Now that may be how those things unfold, but that would be a huge break from the type of literature we’re reading here, this apocalyptic genre that does something different to that.

It comes at the subject slant and is designed to give us a different perception of some of the things that we have already understood. It teaches you to read Revelation, As a roadmap, it teaches you that fear. is our primary motivation. Last week we talked about the feeling many of us who follow Jesus as teenagers had that your parents went to the supermarket and came back twenty minutes late and you suddenly said, wait, have I been left behind?

Am I okay? It teaches you that the reason to follow Jesus is fear as to what might happen to you. Now sometimes within scripture and beyond that is how people come to know Jesus. But most of the time People come to know Jesus and to follow him because of a revelation of his goodness and kindness to us.

Sometimes, people just grasp the ethical teaching and are so pulled in that leads them to seeing Jesus as he really is. But rarely is it fear. that leads us to follow Jesus well. And the third one is this, it assumes that the end times, whatever those might be, and now, like in this generation, and if they’re not, then the book has no purpose for us.

Now these might be something like the end times, may be that period that Revelation talks about in part, or seems to talk about in part, But every generation since Jesus has believed that. Believed those to be the end times. A few things there that it may be like we need to clear the ground from.

Last week we began the book with these words, the revelation from Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon be done. take place. Word soon there is a fascinating word. It leaves a broad range of time. It’s not necessarily an immediate thing. But the central point that I want you to remember throughout this series is this, that the centerpiece of Revelation is the Word.

I said last week that Revelation provides the end of the story, although there is more to the story it turns out. Turns out we’ve been reading a prologue and are now moving on to something grander when we read Revelation 21 and 22. But there’s more to this sentence. Revelation provides the end of the story and it centers around Jesus.

He’s the subject and the object of Revelation. He is always in the midst of it. So if there’s three bad ways to remember or to read Revelation, here’s three things I think the book intrinsically asks us to remember as we read it. And you can write these down if they’re helpful to you. The book’s purpose, unashamedly.

is to reveal Jesus, to show him for who he is. It’s to encourage us to expect Jesus return. That was the beauty of the early church. This understanding that Jesus was coming back for them when they didn’t know, but that he was coming, he would not leave them orphans. And finally, this one that will land in mostly today to keep us faithful.

Even when times were hard to keep us faithful when times were hard the early church was a Persecuted church who lived with this constant question of what is going to happen to us now? Are we alone? Are we going to be okay and the repeated refrain of revelation and especially these letters to seven churches that will read in This next part of the series.

He’s over and over again. I see you I am with You are loved. You’re going to be okay. As we move into Revelation and to these seven churches, there’s just a few things that I wanted to let you know about before we get into this. The number seven will come up over and over again throughout the book.

In the scriptures, for the most part, seven is seen as the number of completion. There’s seven days in the book of Genesis. It gives us this seven cycle that begins right at the beginning. It appears in multiple other places. Throughout Revelation, you’ll see it over and over again, which leaves us with a question.

Are these literal churches that we’re talking about? Or are they just exemplary churches? Churches that we’re supposed to learn something from? And the answer may be They’re both literal churches, and they are more than that. But because of the number of questions that come up here, especially in this series, I’d love to remind you that we do a podcast on Thursdays.

It’s just a chance to come back to the sermon subject, and just to wrestle with some of the things that I forgot to say, wanted to say, wished I’d said better, some questions Aaron had as he sits and listens and feels that sense of I don’t really understand what you said there and so let’s go back over it, make sure we’re all on the same page.

These seven churches that we’ll read about in chapters two and three of Revelation are churches all in modern day Turkey. They’re churches that definitely existed at some point. But throughout the study of the book of Revelation, different people have had different understandings as to what we’re supposed to take.

Some have said these are simply letters to churches now. They were messages for those churches, but not for today. Other people have said that the churches just have distinct messages for us now. They weren’t. literal churches back in the first century and then the theories get a little weirder and weirder from there This is one of the theories that kind of made me yeah No question about this one that each church represents a period In church history in this theory, the first church represents the church from 33 AD to 200 ad the second church from 200 to three 30 ad the third church from the fourth century to the sixth century.

The fifth church from, so the fourth church from the sixth to the 15th century. The. 5th church from the 16th century to the 18th century and the 6th church from the 19th century to the early of 20th century and the 7th church finally from the mid 20th century to the 21st century. Do you see the problem with that reading?

Maybe you already see it. One, isn’t it just weighted towards biblical times, like the New Testament period, and our period. It seems to highlight those as special periods of time. Look at the gap of maybe a hundred and seventy years in the first church, and then a hundred and thirty years for the second church, then we’re up to two hundred for the third church, and then finally for the fourth church, it’s sixth century to fifteenth century.

Nothing really happened there. Everything was pretty much the same. There was no real changes. No big events. There was the split of the Eastern Church and the Western Church. There was quite a lot going on. But this theory seems to suggest that the times that matter were the first century and second century and then our period today.

And then the big lurking question is what happens If there’s no end times right now, what happens if we hit the 22nd century and the 23rd century and the 24th century and the 25th century? You are out of churches and you’ve still got dates to fill. This is the struggle with putting these kind of theories onto the book of Revelation.

So today we turn to the first church. If you have a text in front of you, I’m going to invite you to open it to Revelation chapter 2. As you remember from last week, just turn all the way to the right. If you hit the maps, you’ve gone too far. To the church in Ephesus, from the one who holds the seven stars in his right hand and walks amongst the seven lampstands, I have seen your deeds, your hard work and your diligence.

I know that you hate those that do wicked deeds, that you have tested those that are apostles and are not, and have found them. to be false. I see your perseverance. I see your endurance in doing good works. You have not grown weary, but I have this against you. You have left the love you had at first.

Consider how far you have fallen. Repent and return to me. Repent and return to me is the invitation of the first letter to the church in Ephesus. In verse 1 we read to the angel of the church in Ephesus. Ephesus was a place of affluence in the first century. It was a place that had enormous wealth because of its inland port.

People came from all sorts of places. It was known as the gateway to the west. It was part of the Roman Empire. One of the four richest cities in the world. There was money everywhere in Ephesus, and there was religion, too, in Ephesus. It was a place that the church grew mostly amongst the lower classes.

It was a place where religions competed against each other. Amongst the seven churches, it’s somewhat unique because it’s the only one that we get to see the beginning of. The other churches are not mentioned in scripture till now, but this church is mentioned in Acts chapter 19. So if you want to stick a thumb in Revelation chapter 2, flip over to Acts chapter 19, we get to read these words.

And this is a, just a story I love, a fascinating story with all these little elements in it. So enjoy this with me for a moment. Verse 11. God did extraordinary miracles in Ephesus through Paul so that even handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched him were taken to the sick and their illnesses were cured and the evil spirits left them.

Some Jews who went around driving out evil spirits tried to invoke the name of the Lord Jesus over those who were demon possessed. They would say in the name of Jesus whom Paul preaches, I command you to come out. Seven sons of Sceva, a Jewish chief priest, were doing this. One day the evil spirit answered them.

Jesus I know, and Paul I know about, but who are you? That’s a podcast aside. I don’t know what to do with that today. Then the man who had the evil spirit jumped on them And overpowered them all. He gave them such a beating that they ran out of the house naked and bleeding. Next part of the scriptures, verse 17, let’s jump here.

When this became known to the Jews and Greeks living in Ephesus, they were all seized with fear and the name of the Lord Jesus was held in high honor. Many of those who believed now came and openly confessed what they had done. A number who had practiced sorcery brought their scrolls together and burned them publicly.

When they calculated the value of the scrolls, the total came to 50, 000 drachmas. That’s like years and years of wages. In this way, the word of the Lord spread widely and grew in great power. As a follower of Jesus, I approve of the burning of the books. As a book lover, this terrifies me. I’m like, just imagine all the things that were lost here.

Notice how this church begins. What do you see there? This church doesn’t stop. Because they have a great strategic plan. This church doesn’t start because their budget is balanced. This church starts out of a deep passion for Jesus and who he is. There is a spirit ledness to this word, work that allows them to reach those that are outside of the community, invites people in from all sorts of backgrounds, all sorts of faiths, and reveals Jesus to them.

No one is out of reach of this church because of their deep passion to open their doors to whoever will come that way. All sorts of people with all sorts of backgrounds, Jews and Greeks, people that have practiced sorcery, people from all backgrounds, they were welcomed in here. You might say this, that the church of Ephesus began with a spirit led welcome of those on the outside.

Just hold on to that as a thread for a little bit. We’ll come back to that in a little. moment. On to the next verse 2, back to Revelation. To the angel of the church in Ephesus write, those, these are the words of him who holds the seven stars in his right hand and walks amongst the seven golden lampstands.

Couple of references to seven and a couple of references to light. Last week I gave you a warning that revelation dabbles in this type of metaphor that, that tends to be difficult to translate. It’s not just a simile where it says something is like something. It’s not just a simple metaphor where it might say you are like something.

Where there’s like a couplet of things that you know what you’re talking about. But it’s this term hypokatastasis. Where it just makes a reference and we have to do the hard work to figure out what is this Referring back to and revelation over and over again. We’ll do this 600 odd times we’ll reference back to an Old Testament book or some part of Jewish History and we’re the ones trying to catch up So I wanted to draw you or create a computer image for you to see how words seem to work in scripture Maybe this will help you as it helped me For a moment, I want you to imagine all of Scripture and all of the Jewish writings around Scripture as like this line that starts on the left and moves across to the right.

And for a Jewish writer, this is how some of their metaphors work. Imagine something is mentioned, in this case, light. To them, that would throw up a line upwards, like a point. So when God says, let, when it says, God said, let there be light in Genesis one, you’ve got your first reference to light.

And so it sends up a line. It’s like a reference point and then scripture continues. And again, it does something similar. We’ll talk about light. Let’s pick Isaiah chapter 49 verse six. I will make you a light. for the Gentiles, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the world. Something new about light.

Not just that it’s God’s gift, but it means something for the followers of Yahweh. So another line goes up. Now you can draw a line between those two lines and you have this common understanding that’s slowly growing about a particular subject. And so then perhaps there’s another line that appears when we read in Matthew chapter 5.

You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people put light, a lighted lamp, and put it under a bowl. Instead, they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everybody. Can you see how, for a Jewish man, author, they have this growing knowledge of what light means in their past history.

It began with a God given gift. It’s become a subject of what it might mean to reach out to those around you. And then in Jesus, it’s concretely this image of a lamp and a lampstand that’s giving light to the world around it. When John in Revelation writes about one who walks amongst the seven.

lampstands. For a Jewish writer, they got a whole bunch of history that says, you know what this means? There’s another line upwards. It says, you are the light of the world. of the world. You, this church in Ephesus, you are this lampstand. You are light to those around you. The church in the first century was deeply aware of their call to be a light to the world.

Hold that as another strand for just a moment. So first strand, we’ve got this church of Ephesus, deeply aware of its goal and mission to reach those outside of it. walls, even though they may not have had walls. And then now this other idea that this image of light goes back throughout Jewish scripture as a missional kind of idea.

Verse two, I know your deeds, your hard work, and your perseverance. I know that you cannot tolerate wicked people, that you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them. to be false. This church, it seems, has a really good understanding of what it is to run a good staff in our terms or a good system.

They have had people come and have tried to take leadership roles and they have spotted those people that are wolves in the sheepfold and they have said no to them time and time again. They have a good understanding of the character that they want to play. in their leaders. I love this passage because it seems to remind me that the frustration I have at how church operates all over the world is something Jesus sees as well.

Have you ever had that moment? Have you ever had a moment where you looked at something in the worldwide church, perhaps this church, perhaps a church down the road, perhaps a church anywhere, and you said how does it work like this? How did these kind of people repeatedly get invited in to run things?

How is there so much brokenness in leadership, so much narcissism, so much abuse in the church? The beautiful gift of this passage is we get to know that Jesus sees that too. When you see that, he says, I see that. And that’s not what I have for my church. This is Apollo Quilliboy. He is a pastor in the Philippines, or worse, he was also on the FBI’s most wanted list for his repeated abuses of his congregation and those around him.

He’s a picture of what happens when the church allows just anybody to sit in those leadership positions. In the movement from the 1st to the 2nd century, there is this change in church culture. This moment where suddenly the church is a place where you can find power and responsibility. Where you can potentially find wealth and suddenly all sorts of people appear in the time of revelation and start trying to find themselves in those positions.

It’s an image of just what happens in one generation. And so if you’ve experienced that kind of abuse in church, Jesus says, I see that. And that is not my church, it’s not what it was made to be. This church in Ephesus has done a good job of making sure those sorts of people are not left in positions of power.

And then we move on into verse 3, the one thing that Jesus holds against this church. Yet I hold this against you, sorry, verse 4. You have forsaken the love you had at first. Something is now missing. Something in this church is now off. They started so well just a generation ago, and now something here is different.

A few kind of cultural references that may help us understand just what’s happened here. Oh, I’ve missed a missed a verse there somewhere. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, one of the characters mentions of the city of the nation of Denmark, that there’s something rotten there. It speaks to a shift in a nation over time that you might be able to spot.

But something that we might be able to see in so many different things. Maybe if you’ve got a background in some kind of organizational leadership maybe think for a moment about the structures that you created, the things that you saw. Maybe you began in like a startup situation. When you began, it didn’t really matter who was in charge.

Didn’t really matter where anybody sat. Didn’t really matter what anyone got paid. You had this culture that was thriving and you were doing something together. Everything was working and then suddenly the company starts making a little bit more money and suddenly start, people start arguing about which office they get, who gets the corner spot, who gets to park closest to the entrance.

They start wrestling over like pay scales and all of those different things. And slowly over time, the culture. Maybe you have a band that you love to listen to and you’ve seen this kind of thing at work and then they have this album that they release and it’s just fantastic. Everything about it is beautiful.

Because as somebody once anonymously said, a band has their whole life to write the first album and then a month to write the second album. And so when they released the second album, suddenly you get this sense of there’s something missing here. The magic is now no longer present because why? When they were writing the first album, they were hungry and they were desperate to make it together.

When they write the second album, they’re busy picking out window drapes for the mansion they just bought. They’re on Letterman, whoever was famous at the time, they’re doing talk shows, they’re over and over again having to present themselves to the world. It’s a picture of what happens when the magic is lost.

Maybe you can see this kind of thing at work when you look at the 2015 Denver Broncos. You’ve got Peyton and a Super Bowl and everything’s great and then you wake up in 2016 and he’s retired and the team is a mess. It’s not what it used to be. Maybe you see it in church where you have this time as a startup, where I was as a church plant where you will get there at seven o’clock in the morning because you have a rented building and you have to get here to put the chairs out.

You’re here working and working because you believe in the mission of it. But now there’s a staff person to do that and you don’t need the church set up anyway. It’s just there all the time. It’s that angst of what used to be? What did we used to have here? There was a magic, a fire to this place that just, it just doesn’t seem like it’s there anymore.

It speaks to any kind of shift where what was seems wonderful and what is now doesn’t seem, seems like a poor reflection of what used to be. You see it in a marriage where you used to look at each other with this delight in your eyes. And now she stays at the office later than she has to. And he times his gym times to meet up with a 20 year old who’s 10 years younger than him, but seems like she’s more into him than his wife is.

It’s all of those things that lose what was, and they become something else in the midst of that. Sometimes these are just humorous things, the things that don’t really matter. It doesn’t really matter whether a band has a great second album. But it does matter whether a marriage continues to thrive where two people continue to have eyes just for each other.

You see all sorts of ways with this sense of what was diminishes and what’s left seems like something less. This is a picture of Elijah Goldman, a beautiful Haitian kid that was adopted by a wealthy Christian family in Michigan. Everything was great for the first few years as they welcomed this kid into their home.

And then as he hit his teenage years, they started to struggle with some of the things he was going through. Started off by them sending him off to a boarding school in Jamaica. Then he started to write home to talk about the conditions of the school, how abused he felt. He missed his friends, he missed being a track star back home, he missed being on the football team, he missed his community, he missed his adopted parents, and he begins to write things like, Can I come home?

He gets no reply. When the school gets shut down for abuse across the board, his parents left him in Jamaica because to hear them, he was no longer the kid that they wanted. Do you see in that the tragic reversal of the prodigal son story that we looked at just the other week of a father who’s desperately looking for his children and now we see a Christian family living out the opposite of it?

They leave a child lost in another country because it no longer feels like the right thing for their family. Do you feel that something is rotten in the state of Denmark? It’s what happens when a church loses its first love. Something is missing. There’s been all sorts of conversations and commentaries as to what exactly Jesus means when he says first love.

Is he talking primarily about the church’s love for God? Is he talking about the church’s love for each other, for the internal community? Or is he talking about the church’s love for the world around it? While I would suggest that all three probably intermingle more than we might expect, I suggest that the primary reference is the last one.

This is a church that began as being for the world around it. This is a church of which Jesus calls a lampstand, makes this specific reference, which across church history has been to speak of the church’s missional role in the world around it. I would suggest when Jesus says you’ve lost your first love, he says to this church, you no longer have your passion for those around you that you used to have.

You’ve missed something. Something’s gone. Something’s gone. Oscar Wilde once said, There is only one thing worse than not getting what you want. And that’s getting it. And that’s getting it. The church in Ephesus suddenly has what it wanted, it is now respected, it is growing, it’s a picture of what happens when a thing succeeds in its mission.

And when you look at that in the church world, what is, what is missing is this thing called liminality. Liminality is, in philosophy, the space in between what was and what is to come. It’s the place of hard work where you long for the startup to succeed. And then there’s the place of you arrive and the thing is done.

Liminality is the church plant phase where everything is difficult. And then there’s the thing where it’s we’re done, we hired a pastor, we have a budget. What do we do now? It’s the place of winning the Super Bowl versus the place of desperately trying to get to a Super Bowl. It’s the place of writing that first album, whereas when you’ve written it, you you’ve arrived.

That same tension that we talked about in all those culture environments is the same thing. that this church is going through. They have made it, they have succeeded to a degree, and Jesus says of them, and you lost the energy that was there at the beginning. You lost that book burning energy that started with the place on fire.

You, you lost that. Now I’m not suggesting that we need to burn books. I have lots of books in my office and you are not going anywhere near my office. That’s not the point. But the point is to say, how can we hold on to that tension of like, how can we build something together that matters in this kingdom of God?

When we land in a space of comfort, we never land in a space that might be called liminal. Alan Hirsch said of the modern day church, and I feel it for myself, this message is one that I like Wrestle with is a gut punch. Too much concern with safety and security combined with comfort and convenience has lulled us out of our true calling and purpose.

We all love an adventure, or do we? Or do we? Do we really long to wrestle with God in those deep places? Do we really long to create something that means something in this city, in this world? It’s a wonderful question to ask, and the suburbs has a way of making that question all the more pertinent. The pastor Eugene Peterson said this of his first adventure into working with a suburban church.

I began to be appalled by the way of life of these people. They all seemed so atrophied, so security conscious, so blended into a stereotype. There were no sharp edges, no engaging conversations, no differences. All the houses were being built to the same basic blueprint. Those of you who live in Highlands Ranch say, I know of what you speak.

I have been there. They seemed to have settled for so Oh, sorry, same basic blueprint, but also the conversations and social activities. They seem to have settled for so little. And here I was preaching and teaching the kingdom of God, which seemed to me to be a radical piece of good news. Something large.

But they translated it back immediately into the world in which they were hoping to be comfortable and retire in security. I don’t know if I could, I didn’t know if I could last very long. It seemed impossible to get a hearing for the gospel in that context. I have a guy that manages our retirement funds and not long ago he sat down with me and he said, so if you keep doing what you’re doing you’ll have plenty of money to retire on.

And in a sickening way, I suddenly looked at him and said, am I longing to be old now? With all respect to anyone who may or may not call themselves old in the building, I think. It felt like this weight on me, this longing to get to that point where I could say I did the thing. And yet the place of saying we’ve done the thing is not the place of the kingdom of God, it seems.

Bilbo Baggins famously said, it’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door. You step onto the road and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to. But you do actually have to step out of your door. You actually have to move. Jesus seems to wrestle with all of these things with this church that has experienced something like affluence and something like success and still does so much right.

But actually when it reflects back on what it once was, it might say, we lost the magic. We lost the way that it was supposed to be. Consider how far you have fallen is his invite. Repent and do the things you did at first. Go back to the old book burning ways. Go back to the ways that you invited those from far off into the space.

Go back to the ways where you got to share stories of the way that God had impacted your life. Somewhere here there is a picture of those that were transformed and become untransformed in the process of doing church. together. And Jesus says, this is not what I made this thing for. Consider how far 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. What does that mean? What does it mean in a world where so many awful churches, seem to continue to do just fine? Where the budget is met, the mission seems to take place.

And yet the same thing said of this church, Jesus might say of that church, or perhaps even, in a riskier question, this church too. It doesn’t say that the church will close down. It doesn’t say that it won’t have a visible presence anymore. But he does seem to say something like the mission of that church I’m no longer behind it.

in the way that I was. We have to be careful to distinguish between God’s constant presence all around us and God’s particular presence in a place. And it seems somewhere here the conversation is, somewhere I keep living like this and I no longer endorse this mission. I’ve, as it were, stepped out of what you are doing here.

And at the end, this beautiful invite to hear, whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To the one who is victorious, I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God. This passage is fascinating to me, because it’s a church that on the surface is doing great, and Jesus says of it, this is not what you’re called to be.

This may be a place we take it personally where we say, how do I look in the space of worship? And where have I been in the past? What does life look like for me as a follower of Jesus? What was it like to live in the liminal space of hunger and thirst for the kingdom of God where my desire to be involved in everything that was happening was great and I had this longing to take it someplace?

And perhaps there was a point where you arrived there, and now it feels like the hunger by nature, it disappeared, it, it left. What does John mean when he says first love? You’ve lost the love that you had at first. And what does he mean for me? Some questions that I might encourage us to ask individually and together.

What does John mean by first love? How does that speak to you? Where has your journey, your story with Jesus led you? Perhaps there were moments where you encountered the things that Jesus talks about here. You encountered those who shouldn’t have been in leadership. You met with abuse. You met with angst and struggle.

And it left you bruised and battered to the point that you might say, I don’t know what that means for me anymore. Maybe the invite for you is to remember that, that actually it wasn’t Jesus behind those people. It was those people behind those people. That isn’t the church that Jesus created. And maybe there’s an invite to healing, an invite to recovery.

Maybe the call for you is to reflect back on the Sermon on the Mount. We just spent a year in it, and we saw all these opportunities that Jesus leads us into, all these ways that he might call us to act in the world around us. We talked about the love of enemy. We talked about profound acts of forgiveness, of grace to each other.

Maybe there’s some wrestling there. Is there somebody that you have pushed aside, somebody that has pushed you aside, and now you see no way forward to even interacting with them in a healthy way. And yet when you first followed Jesus, you felt that call to forgiveness of those around you. And maybe the call is now to learn to forgive again.

It was the thing that you engaged in passionately for the church. In some way, you just got burnt out. And maybe there’s a call to say, no I followed, I went into this because of you, Jesus. It was you that pulled me and you that drew me, not the thing itself. Maybe Jesus has a challenge for you there.

Other people or a people group you have demonized have there been those outside Maybe those that you might say they burn that they practice sorcery or something like we read in Acts not literally sorcery But something like it you said those people are disqualified. Those are on the outside and yet The profound call of the Church of Ephesus was to welcome in anybody that would have this message of Jesus and to watch the transformation take place.

Have you landed in a space where you find yourself distinctly judgmental about those outside of you? the church. When the celebration of Jesus in this passage is that the church has spotted those who act wickedly inside the church, not that they have spent lots of time judging the activities of those not following in the way of Jesus.

Here’s a pointer, my friends. Don’t be surprised when people not following Jesus don’t act like Jesus. They never signed up for that. And the way of Jesus is profound and difficult and hard and can be only entered into by choice. Is there a way that you’ve started to look at those outside the church and felt your primary call is judgment and yet your real call is to pray for them and to share the message of Jesus with them.

As this church first did. Jesus comes alongside this first church and says to paraphrase, there is something rotten here, not everything, but something. And he offers a pathway to healing. A pathway that begins with repentance, with confession, and a return. So as Aaron comes, I’m gonna invite you to stand with me.

Take a moment to take inventory. You can stand, it’s okay. I gave you permission. Take a moment to wrestle with how this word comes to you. As I have had to do with me. Maybe there’s a way that you see some of that trajectory in your own life. You see this rising passion, this immersing in the things of the kingdom.

And somewhere you might say to yourself, yeah, I lost my first love. Something went missing. Something was off. Maybe there’s a way that you’ve lost a sense of mission. Not saying that you need to do street evangelism. I’m not saying that you need to enter into kind of big apologetic arguments on the street.

But maybe there’s a call to be prayerful for someone you’re in relationship with. Maybe there’s those around you that you’d say, I’d love to see them walk in the way of Jesus. Maybe there was a season of your life where you prayed for them. That season is now gone. Somehow you gave up hope of that. Maybe the invitation is to begin again.

Maybe you started to turn all your focus into dreaming about what the world might look. And the way that you did that was to judge those who acted out of whack with the way of Jesus. Maybe the invitation is to say, don’t walk in the way of Jesus. Your invitation is to prayer to this deep concern for the world around you.

However, God is speaking to you. I believe is that for every one of us, the spaces Where we might say I missed this. This was what I was called to and I didn’t do it. Or maybe there’s ways that we concretely acted and we shouldn’t have. And that comes into this confession that I’m going to invite us to read together and then afterwards as a prayer that I’ll pray over you.

So together we pray. Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed by what we have done. And by what we have left undone, we have not loved you with our whole heart. We have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We are truly sorry, and we humbly repent. For the sake of your Son, Jesus Christ, have mercy on us and forgive us, that we may delight in your will and walk in your ways to the glory of your name.

Amen. And my prayer for us is this, the almighty and merciful God, grant us forgiveness of all our sins. Strengthen us with all goodness. And by the power of your Holy Spirit, keep us in the way of eternal life, that we might eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God. Amen.