Yet I hold this against you: you have forsaken the love you had at first. 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 lamps
Revelation 2:4-5 NIVUK
I won’t ever forget a flight we once took in the Philippines. It was from Cebu to Manila and was delayed by an hour. Our daughter was young at the time and was in her buggy.
When flights are delayed, the gate staff are normally nowhere to be found. They usually hide themselves away so as to avoid problems with stressed and disgruntled passengers.
But not this airline. Their gate crew were in full uniform and seated beside the passengers in the gate, chatting away, making sure everyone was okay and keeping people informed of whatever they knew.
I’ve never seen that again. Anywhere.
It’s such a delight to see people remembering what they are there to do.
If only we Christians did the same.
These verses should come as an intense shock to the system. Ephesus was a very important place in ancient times, and for Christianity even more so. Paul himself spent two years there (Acts 19:8-10). When he left for Jerusalem for the last time, it was only the Ephesian elders to which he said farewell (Acts 20:17-38). He wrote a lengthy letter, which contains little negative content, if any.
Ephesus was a rich, cosmopolitan city with a strong and growing Christian community. It was known for good deeds, hard work, perseverance and theological orthodoxy (Revelation 2:2-3).
So why would the Lord send them this rebuke?
The answer is stunning: they had forsaken their first love!
And this should really give us food for thought.
They had the right theology. They had the right actions. They had the right approach to dealing with error. They had everything right.
Except one thing: the love had gone out of their relationship with God. They did these things because they were ‘right’. They did them out of habit. They did them to tick a box.
They did not do them out of love.
And that was the problem. Their motivation was all wrong.
God gave them a really powerful warning. If they didn’t get this right, their lampstand would be taken from its place – in other words, the church in Ephesus would disappear.
But why would He do that?
The reason is that there is a slippery slope from doing things just for the sake of it, to not doing them at all. The Israelites found themselves on this slope during the post-Exile period. Take a look at these shocking words from Malachi:
‘A son honours his father, and a slave his master. If I am a father, where is the honour due to me? If I am a master, where is the respect due to me?’ says the Lord Almighty. ‘It is you priests who show contempt for my name. ‘But you ask, “How have we shown contempt for your name?” ‘By offering defiled food on my altar. ‘But you ask, “How have we defiled you?” ‘By saying that the Lord’s table is contemptible. When you offer blind animals for sacrifice, is that not wrong? When you sacrifice lame or diseased animals, is that not wrong? Try offering them to your governor! Would he be pleased with you? Would he accept you?’ says the Lord Almighty. ‘Now plead with God to be gracious to us. With such offerings from your hands, will he accept you?’ – says the Lord Almighty. ‘Oh, that one of you would shut the temple doors, so that you would not light useless fires on my altar! I am not pleased with you,’ says the Lord Almighty, ‘and I will accept no offering from your hands. My name will be great among the nations, from where the sun rises to where it sets. In every place incense and pure offerings will be brought to me, because my name will be great among the nations,’ says the Lord Almighty. ‘But you profane it by saying, “The Lord’s table is defiled,” and, “Its food is contemptible.” And you say, “What a burden!” and you sniff at it contemptuously,’ says the Lord Almighty. ‘When you bring injured, lame or diseased animals and offer them as sacrifices, should I accept them from your hands?’ says the Lord. ‘Cursed is the cheat who has an acceptable male in his flock and vows to give it, but then sacrifices a blemished animal to the Lord. For I am a great king,’ says the Lord Almighty, ‘and my name is to be feared among the nations.
Malachi 1:6-14 NIVUK https://bible.com/bible/113/mal.1.6-14.NIVUK
The journey towards offering God substandard, dishonouring worship begins with simply doing things out of habit, and ends with questioning why we do them at all. It begins when the enthusiasm has gone and we are simply following God out of routine or because it’s what we have always done.
It had always amazed me that a huge tanker or cruise ship weighing thousands of tons can easily drift off course because of sea currents and the tide. Captains and pilots have to monitor this drift very closely and stop it as soon as they can, otherwise they might end up far off coast or even in deep trouble.
It’s precisely the same for us.
So how do we stop this slide?
God gives us three ways.
The first is realise where you are.
The Ephesians had to realise – and this must have been tremendously painful – that despite everything they were doing that was right and proper, they had forsaken their first love. That is: the vim and vitality and enthusiasm they'd had when they had first decided to follow Jesus Christ had gone and been replaced with the dull mundanity of ritual and rules.
Now, there is a place for ritual and rules. They help us maintain our discipline. They provide structure. They help us organise and make sense of things.
But they cannot ever be the sum total of what it means for us to follow Jesus.
The best way to know if this is all your relationship with God consists of is to ask yourself this: what happens when they are taken away? What happens when you cannot do them anymore? What happens if they are changed?
If it feels like your entire life is collapsing and you have nothing left, then guess what: you have a problem.
It wasn’t just the Ephesians who had this problem. Look at some of the cutting prophesies the Jewish people received before the Exile:
The Lord says: ‘These people come near to me with their mouth and honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship of me is based on merely human rules they have been taught.
Isaiah 29:13 NIVUK
Let this truth sink in deep: this is a verse Jesus used to rebuke the Pharisees (Matthew 15:7-9).
So then, the word of the Lord to them will become: do this, do that, a rule for this, a rule for that; a little here, a little there – so that as they go they will fall backwards; they will be injured and snared and captured.
Isaiah 28:13 NIVUK
Why is it so bad?
Because it doesn’t take us long to elevate our rules and traditions and ways of doing things until they become a snare to us – or even an idol.
There is a startling example of this in the Old Testament. The Jews were being attacked by deadly snakes because of their disobedience, so the Lord told Moses to make a model snake and set it on a pole, and anyone who looked on that model snake lived (Numbers 21:4-9).
So what did the Israelites do? In Hezekiah’s day, they were worshipping it (2 Kings 18:4).
Isn’t that what people still do nowadays? They cling to religious songs and worship patterns and ways of doing things that served them well in the past and almost venerate them. But like the Jews, they have been led to worship a created thing instead of the creator (Romans 1:25).
If this has happened to us, if our relationship with God has drifted into ritual and rite and nothing else, then we must recognise where we are. It will do us no good if we try to convince ourselves that everything is okay.
Apart from realising where we are, the second step us to realise how far we’ve gone.
At one stage in their relationship, my uncle lived in Scotland while his fiancee lived in Cornwall, a distance of around 600 miles apart.
At the same time as they were courting, the band Dire Straits released their brilliant album ‘Brothers in Arms’. The first song in that album became their song:
‘Here I am again in this mean old town
And you’re so far away from me
Where are you when the sun go down?
You’re so far away from me’
Almost twenty years later, history repeated itself in our family: my brother courted a girl who lived in Swindon – more than three hundred miles away – and I courted the girl who became my wife, who lived seven thousand miles away.
When you are apart from someone you love, it makes no sense to fool yourself into thinking the distance between you is short, because it isn’t. That is just a fact. Even more so if they are several time zones away. You have to find a way to live with it. There is no other way.
But you have to plan to be together again.
It is the same with God. If your relationship with Him is not what it should be, there is no point fooling yourself or acting like everything is fine when it is not. You will fix nothing if you do that.
You have to recognise that there is a problem and how big the problem is.
King Josiah had no difficulty admitting this.
The Temple had fallen into rack and ruin due to the idolatry of previous generations of kings and their lackeys. Josiah sent priests in to restore what had been broken when the priests happened upon the Book of the Law.
When they read it, they saw precisely why Judah was in so much trouble: generations of disobedience.
They took this document to the king, well aware of its scathing criticism of his ancestors. He had it read to him and this was his response:
When the king heard the words of the Book of the Law, he tore his robes. He gave these orders to Hilkiah the priest, Ahikam son of Shaphan, Akbor son of Micaiah, Shaphan the secretary and Asaiah the king’s attendant: ‘Go and enquire of the Lord for me and for the people and for all Judah about what is written in this book that has been found. Great is the Lord’s anger that burns against us because those who have gone before us have not obeyed the words of this book; they have not acted in accordance with all that is written there concerning us.’
2 Kings 22:11-13 NIVUK
He recognised there was a problem. He realised just how far the people were from God. He resolved to do something about it.
He was like the Prodigal Son, who came to his senses and resolved to make that long and arduous journey back to his father (Luke 15:17-20).
The realisation of how far we are from God is not an easy one and neither is it a comfortable one. It hurts. Of course it does. But it is necessary. This pain fuels our repentance, even when it seems impossible. It drives us back to God.
But that brings us on nicely to the last step in our journey back. We must realise where we are and how far we are from where we ought to be, but we must also realise the way home.
And this realisation is both simple and profound.
The way back is to do the things we did before.
Let me give you an example. The Covid pandemic was a serious risk to our health, but not just to our physical health. Our mental, emotional and spiritual health were also at risk.
There are many millions still bear the scars of this.
Once the real panic and fear from the pandemic began in earnest, I personally realised that I had a choice: I could either allow myself to be tossed and turned with the crowd, or I could root myself in the Word of God.
Before then, my readings and prayers were quite short and lightweight. I realised something had to change. During university, I had built quite a formidable quiet time and began writing my thoughts down – which then became the backbone of sermons in Romania.
This time I restarted what I had done many years before. The thoughts I jotted down became this blog.
Has your Bible reading lapsed? Do it the way you did it before. Has your prayer life collapsed? Do what you did before. Has your attitude shifted? Think the way you did before. Has your fellowship with others drifted? Talk to them like you did before.
Do you want the ‘good old days’ to return?
They won’t come back with Bible versions or old songs or old prayers. They will come back if you do the things you did before you started to drift.
But maybe you are like Naaman. He couldn’t see the benefit of dipping seven times in the Jordan (2 Kings 5:11-12). He thought the river was dirty and thought his own rivers back home were better. But when he obeyed, he was healed and his skin became new again (2 Kings 5:14).
God is telling you now to go back to the way you used to do things. You might despise it. You might wonder how it will work. You might fear disappointment. You might feel all of these things. But the important thing is to obey, and then the blessing will come.
So we see, then, the danger of a dry, boring, listless, lifeless Christianity. Boredom is not, as many would have us believe, a virtue. It is, instead, a vice: something we might hang onto because it seems familiar, but something that will ultimately rot our walk with God from the inside.
Instead, if our life with God has become dry, we must realise that this is a problem. We must realise just how far we are from God, no matter how painful this realisation is. And we must realise that the way back to God is to do the same things we did at first, with the same attitude and enthusiasm.
Boredom in church and in our spiritual life is a real problem. If we experience it, we need to do what we do with many electronics and computers when they start to go wrong: we need to press the Reset button.
It might seem strange at first, but this is what God is asking us to do. And when we obey Him and repent, that is when the blessing comes.
Prayer
Lord Jesus, save me from boredom. Forgive me if my walk with You has been reduced to meaningless routine. I repent of anything that had led to this. Help Me to find my way back to You, I pray. Amen.
Questions
1. How is your relationship with God? Is it vital and alive or stuck in a rut? How did it get there?
2. How can you improve it? Can you think of three ways you can do this?
3. Why is it so shocking that the Ephesians received such a stark warning? What can we take from this? that is good for us? What good effects does it have? Are you willing to embrace it?
Comments