The Church of Ephesus

3 am: How Jesus wants you to live, seeing that externals are not enough but love for Christ is.

Before we start our time in the word together, lets pray that the Lord blesses our time.

Pray:

I would like to start by asking a few question, why did we come from a different church to you all this weekend? Why did we? Let me ask a different question. Why has this conference come and gathered? Is it a chance to see old friends, is it a chance to get away, or maybe a time for rest? These may true but why, what is the purpose of all of us gathered here? Why has this conference continued for so many years? You all are sitting in those chairs right there, but do you know why there is even a youth program here? ****pause***

I can tell you why. There may be a statement out there of why this conference meets, we come to you with a mission statement to remind us of our purpose but it all can be boiled down to one word, just one. That word is love.

That is why we are here, love for Christ is why this conference meets. Love for Christ and love and care for your lives, your souls, your eternal destiny is why we come to guys. And that is why we come with joy. We have the joy of knowing Christ and the love has for us, but we also have a joy where we love you. I do not know every person, you all pretty much know me, I am the guy who stand up here and yells and talks a lot, and I am the one who sings like a dying walrus in the back room. But there is there are two things that I would like to make sure that you know about me, that number one, I love Christ, and number 2 even though I do not know everyone of you, I can honestly say that I love you and I care about. I would also like to let you in on a secret, each of the staff has the same heart, they love Christ and they love you. And our prayer is, that everyone in this room loves Christ above everything.

Our prayer is not that your actions are good or you look like the “good kid” outside. We do not care so much about externals. We care about the heart, because that is what Jesus cared about. Your external or your outward actions are not enough. They are not enough to get you into heaven, into the kingdom of God, or as we will look at a little bit later, into paradise. reminds us that our works did not save us and reminds us that even our best works our as filthy rags in sight of God.

You could think about it this way, so far this camp we have run around, played soccer, thrown the frisbee, pelted dodge balls at each other, and we have down all this under the beautiful yet hot california summer sun. Now what happens when we run in the heat, we sweat and we stink and we smell and we become just gross. Now, I would take a guess and say this is true for some but imagine if you were tht unclean and you have not showered yet this camp. First we say just Ewwww and gross but now imagine that after you did not take a shower that you but clean clothes on. Would you be clean or dirty? Dirty right. If though your clothes, your externals looked good underneath you are still gross and disgusting.

Now lets turn that around, if your external actions look good but you do not have a love for Christ you are not welcome into his kingdom.

So, with that as our intro and starting us off let’s turn our attention to God’s word, and we will continue looking at the letters to the churches in Revelation and today we will be in chapter 2, looking at the church of Ephesus, and this is found in verses 1-7 of chapter two in the book of Revelation.

***PAUSE***

If there is only one thing I would like you to see in this letter it is, how Jesus Christ would like us live, seeing that our externals are not enough but love for him is. I am going to say it again because this is the framework of our entire time right now. So here it is again, we want to see how Jesus Christ would like us live, seeing that our externals are not enough but love for him is.

I will have three points in this message to hopefully show this, but before we look at those, I would like to look at verse one and remind us who is writing this letter.

Let’s read verse one of chapter 2.

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Message to Ephesus

1 “To the angel of the church in Ephesus write:

The One who holds the seven stars in His right hand, the One who walks among the seven golden lampstands, says this:

As we have heard already and see in chapter 1 John is writing this book but Jesus is the real author. Taking a look at verse one we see Jesus as, the one who is holding the angels of the churches in his hand and also he is the one who is actively walking and working through out the churches. This is who the author is, it is Jesus. If we were to look back to chapter one we see Christ in his power, his glory and he has a message for the church of Ephesus but that does not mean we should tune out. Skip down to verse 7 with me, look at what the first part says,

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7 ‘He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.”

Jesus is the one who holds the angels of the churches in his right hand. This shows and gives a feeling of

If I am not mistaken everyone in this room has at least one ear. So we all need to hear what the Lord is saying to the church of Ephesus here and apply it. So lets dive in.

Like I said, we are going to look at 3 point of how Jesus Christ would like us to live through the church of Ephesus. So right of the text, we are going to look at the Good of the church of Ephesus, the Bad of the church of Ephesus and the How, the instruction Jesus gives to fix the bad. So, the good, the bad, and the how. Let’s dive in.

Point 1 The Good.

From an outward perspective this church looked amazing commends them for the work that they do. But before we look at the deeds that they were doing and what Jesus says about this church I would like to give you a background of this church.

Now Ephesus was a city in Asia Minor, it was the hub. It was not the capital city but was the busiest and most important city. It would be like here Sacramento is capitol of California but you could say that LA is the biggest and the most important city.

Ephesus was the main trade hub and had many roads leading in and out of the city, which back then you could say that the more roads you had the more important you were as a city. This city was so big, it held its set of games. Where the olympic games where heldin Athens, they had the games in Ephesus. This attracted many people to this city.

But this city was not an upright city. It was full of sin. It was a filthy city that had a lot of crime in it. It was also full of idol worship. In Ephesus there was the temple to the “god Artemis or also called Dianna.” This temple was one of the 7 wonders of the ancient world, which also had a lot of people flocking to it. This false temple was full of debauchery and sin. Now also this city was known to be full of fake magic. All this to say that this city was a terrible, sinful and immoral place. But this city shows God’s power and grace. Because through God’s work through God’s work through the apostle Paul, this ciity turned around. And there was a great strong church established. And this church had amazing leadership though out it’s history leading up to this point. It had the great apostle Paul, you remember the apostle Paul right. He is known as the man thorugh the work of the Holy Spirit who wrote most of the New Testament in your Bibles, he established many churches and suffered for the name of Christ and His gospel. This church also had Timothy who ministered there early in his ministry, he was the disciple of Paul. This church also has Aquila, Priscilla, and Apollos who were great teachers of repentance in Christ, and it also believed that John the one who wrote the book of Revelation also was a minister there before he was arrested for preaching the gospel.

All of this to say that this church went from nothing in a very sinful city to church stacked with amazing leadership to here having Jesus commend them for there work that they doing.

Jesus says in verse 2 of our passage that he knows their and their toil. This is describing their hard work, they labored in study, in their prayer and in their service of the church.

Also in verse 2 and in verse 3 it talks about how they persevered but not just persevered but persevered and endured patiently. You know life is not easy, we are promised to have trials in our lives. Everyone’s life is different and we all are going to have trials. And they will not be the same for each person. Some may have t go throuogh huge trials in there life, but regardless of what each one of our individual trials look like, we are all called to endure. And that was something this church did really well, regardless of persecution or hardships this church really showed a mentality. They suffered for the sake of Christ, those chose to honor him above all else. Listen to

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17 For it is better, if God should will it so, that you suffer for doing what is right rather than for doing what is wrong.

They were a church that showed this and our text in verse 3 says they endured for Christ’s name sake. This was a church that a lot of things right.

And back then just like today there were false preachers. They are as people who go into the church look and even sound correct but are really way off. And they start preaching things that are against the Bible or the added to the Bible. And that is an awful sin and something that we need to look out for. This book the Bible is what we need to stand on because this is truth. All of the guys who are up here preaching are trying to do one thing, we are trying to expose the truth in the Bible and nothing else. And that is what Ephesus did really well. in verse 2 it says

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2 ‘and that you cannot tolerate evil men, and you put to the test those who call themselves apostles, and they are not, and you found them to be false;

They tested them according to the doctrine of Christ, the Bible and the held everyone according to that standard. And also skip down to verse 6

It says that they hated the works and deeds of the Nicolaitons. This was a group who was doing evil deeds and preaching contrary to the Gospel. And the church of Ephesus followed and hated the things that God hates.

Over all this church did the correct things, they worked for Christ, they toiled for Christ, they endured for Christ, they hated evil, tested people according to the Gospel and hated what God hates. But that is not were this letter ends Jesus has more to say.

And that brings us to Point 2 - The Bad

Let’s read verse 4

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4 ‘But I have this against you, that you have left your first love.