FERGUSON: Well, those of you who know me know
that nobody applauds you before you say anything in Scotland, so it's very nice to have one's
self-image encouraged by American friends, and very good to see so many of you who over
the years here have become good friends, and look forward to meeting some of you that I
haven't yet met. Now, the theme this morning, this afternoon
– Christ's message to the church. I realize many people come to conferences
without bothering to look at the program, so for those of you let me tell you what was
on the program, and that was that the remit given to me was to choose one of the letters
from Revelation chapters 2 and 3, to select that letter as though Christ were speaking
to the Christian church in the West. In many ways those letters are really prescripts. They were intended to be read by all of the
churches, and it must have been quite something as the book of Revelation made its way, perhaps
just one copy, each church making a copy as it made its way along there in Asia, and as
one church and another heard what Christ thought of the other churches, you can't help wondering
how they must have felt as they realized that Christ had already taken the X-Ray of their
church, and others would hear it. Ligonier does very few things without giving
secret challenges to the speakers, and this particular address allotted to me came with
the secret challenge, which if I was willing to accept it, the tape would self-destruct
in 30 seconds, and that was to choose one of these letters, one of these prescripts. The difficulty in doing that, of course, is
that your choice probably indicates what you think about the church, doesn't it? Just think about it, there are seven of them,
which one would you choose? You would choose the one that said what you
thought about the church, because that's what you think Christ would be saying to the church
today, and so I've chickened out. And I'm going to deal with the first of them,
which you will find in Revelation chapter 2, first 7 verses, written to the angel of
the church in Ephesus. "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 name’s sake, 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 this 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." The book of Revelation is, in many ways, best
understood as the movie version of Matthew 16:18. Matthew 16:18 is best understood as the consummation
of the promise that God gave in Genesis 3:15, and the whole of the Old Testament story is
simply an unpacking of that fundamental verse, that throughout the ages until the coming
of the singular seed of the woman, Jesus Christ, there would be conflict between the seed of
the serpent and the seed of the woman, until Satan himself, the serpent, would seek to
crush the heel of the seed, Jesus Christ, and in the process his head would finally
be crushed. Jesus says "I will build my church, and the
gates of Hades, the seed of the serpent will seek to overcome it, but be unable, because
I will build my church." And in the picture of the church's history
that's given to us in the Book Of Revelation, the serpent of the Garden of Eden has grown
large, as John tells us, in Revelation chapter 12, into the size of a monstrous red dragon,
who having failed to devour the Christ child who was born to rule the nations of the world,
would then go on in pursuit of those who belonged to the Christ child, and seek to engulf them. And in some ways these prescripts to the book
of Revelation are the Lord Jesus' indication to these different city congregations of where
they stand in that conflict. And the rest of the Book Of Revelation – because
these churches are in very different situations – churches in different parts of the earth
today would more identify with one of these churches than with others of those churches,
but the whole book of Revelation is for all of those churches, and this is a marvelous
illustration in itself in the grace of God, how the one message of the gospel touches
different churches at different points to bring them not only to conflict in the battle,
but ultimately to bring them to victory in the battle, as we are told here in verse 7,
"To the one who conquers I will grant to eat of the tree of life, which is in the paradise
of God. But there's a principle that runs through
each of these letters, it's the principle that the apostle Peter enunciates, isn't it? That the time has come for judgement, discrimination,
analysis to begin at the house of God, and I suspect that Peter draws that from the prophecy
of Ezekiel. You remember as Ezekiel sees in these visions
into what is really happening in the church in Jerusalem, and sees that the real problem
is not the external forces on the church, but the internal, spiritual decay in the church,
and he sees judgement beginning literally in the house of God, and then this vision
of the glory of God leaving the house of God, and departing. And this of course is the very principle that
Jesus applies here, that unless the church in Ephesus repents, then He will remove the
candlestick, the symbol of the light of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ,
and the church in Ephesus would therefore be no more. You and I, my guesses are far better at analyzing
the world than we are at analyzing the situation in our own churches. If I may say so, as an insider/outsider to
the conservative Christian community in the United States, many of us have been far too
good at analyzing what is wrong with the culture, and far too myopic in analyzing what is wrong
with the church. But whether this is the letter that applies
to us, or whether once we have read this letter we would listen to the other letters, it is
of the very essence that we listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches, and
especially what Jesus Christ Himself is saying. I have five things to say on the basis of
this passage, and we will just see how many of them we manage to get through, but first
of all I want you to notice – and this is hugely significant – how Christ presents
Himself to the church in Ephesus. You notice in the vision that John has of
the Lord Jesus, in the first chapter, He is described in a multi-faceted way, but then
in each of these letters the Lord Jesus points to one particular dimension of His person
and ministry, as though to say "In your situation there is an aspect of my ministry to which
you need to pay particular attention." And interestingly here in the prescript to
the church in Ephesus what Jesus draws attention to is that He is the one who holds the stars
in His right hand and He walks among the candlesticks. The stars are the angels of the churches,
perhaps as many commentators think, the leadership of the church. He holds them in His hands and He walks among
the candlesticks. It's a remarkable picture actually of the
way in which the One, the Son of Man of whom we sing of His bleeding hands and His wounded
feet, that now those wounds made glorified above are hands that hold the ministry of
the gospel in the churches of Jesus Christ, and those feet move among the churches discerning,
testing, probing. And the essential principle that He is expounding
here, isn't it, to the church in Ephesus is that the church is his, He is its Lord, and
in saying that He is underscoring what I rather imagine in the Western Christian church, and
not least in the Reformed Western Christian church. He is underlining how easily we fall from
asking the question "What does Jesus Christ really want?" Some of you belong to sessions or leadership
groups in your churches, however they are named in the particular grouping that you
have – is it the single, most frequently asked question, or at least in your minds,
what does Jesus Christ want here? Or only, what is it that Jesus Christ agrees
with me about wanting that I want here? And this was so clearly in the church at Ephesus,
that had seen so much of what Jesus Christ wanted and would produce, yes at a cost, but
now they are beginning to drift, and what Jesus Christ wants becomes incidental. Those of you who followed Dr. Martin Lloyd
Jones' expositions of the Book of Romans will remember when he comes to the exposition of
Romans chapter 3 "And he’ll raise the whole of mankind before the judgement seat of God,
so that every mouth may be shut, and the whole world be held accountable before God," he
pauses – I can almost hear him doing it – and saying ‘Here is my definition of
a Christian. A Christian is a man whose mouth has been
shut.’ But my dear friends, you wouldn't get that
impression meeting every Christian you know, would you? Not even when the issue is what does Jesus
Christ really want for His church, because He has told us in the Scriptures, but we are
so inculturated in our world that we decide what pleases Jesus Christ by what pleases
us. We even – even in the Reformed church, bring
in the experts to tell us how well we are doing, how glorious our worship is, and the
voice of Jesus Christ is never consulted. We are really speaking about what we enjoy,
and about what we are doing, and we are not really searching and seeking out the Scriptures
to reflect with deep self-analysis and humility "Lord Jesus Christ, what do you want for the
church?" Because one of the things that was clearly
happening in the church in Ephesus, which was one of the three greatest churches in
the world, set within one of the great centers of the Roman Empire, cultural center, one
of the Seven Wonders of the World was in Ephesus, but what concerns the heart of the Lord Jesus
Christ is that they seemed to have ceased asking "What will please the Lord Jesus Christ?" You dare not assume that is what please you
incidentally, and you can only find it out by probing the Scriptures, immersing yourself
in the Scriptures, and constantly asking the Spirit "Show us how this applies Lord, how
your will is good and perfect and acceptable, because we consecrate everything to you to
that end. One of the obvious illustrations of that is
just what I've said, that there are experts who will come and tell you that the worship
in your church is outstanding. But they mean no more than you have a good
choir, organist, band or orchestra, that your preacher is eloquent, because there's only
one who can tell you what the quality of your worship is, and He has told you in the Scriptures
the measurements He uses of that quality, and that's one of the things that clearly
concerns the Lord Jesus here. And He does as He presents Himself to the
church – He does that by telling the church in Ephesus what He knows about them, and there
are things He commends. He commends them because they've persevered
in the face of difficulty. Verse 2, "I know your works, your toil, 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" and “you,”
verse 6, "hate the works of the Nicolaitans", a false teaching group in the first century,
"which I also hate." But do you notice something here in this? In a sense these are the things that Christians
can do aren't they? Can stand firm against the foe. We can smell false teaching at 20 paces, and
some of us can shoot it in the eye at 50 paces, but there's something missing, and what is
missing is that they have abandoned, He says, the love they had at first. And this, particularly interestingly, because
they had very special privileges. This was – actually I think this was the
church that had the most privileged ministry of the Word in the entire history of the Christian
church bar none, since the days the Apostles were in Jerusalem, and one might even go beyond
that and say even including that church. This was the church that had the eloquence
of Apollos. This was the church in which the Apostle Paul
had spent most of his ministry in terms of "Where did he spend a good chunk of time?" He was three years in Ephesus, this is the
place where he left Timothy to continue that ministry, the traditions of the early church
pretty much guaranteed to us that at some point, the apostle John himself also ministered
in the church at Ephesus. In the providence of God I've specialized
in being called to churches where there have been famous ministers, without exception. Tremendous privilege. But you know there's such a thing as vicarious
spirituality. It expresses itself this way "So where do
you go to church? What's your church?" "I sit under Steve Lawson's ministry, or I
sit under R.C. Sproul's ministry, or I sit under Alistair
Begg's ministry.” You must really be some Christian. But it can all be vicarious can't it? Biblical Christianity is not going to an assembly
where the Word of God is preached. Biblical Christianity is being an assembly
where the Word of God jumps out of the pulpit and starts running around the church, and
transforming people's lives. And the staggering thing about this particular
church is it had this extraordinary tradition of ministry. And it had persevered, and had struggled,
and in some senses conquered, but it lost sight of the main thing, and it could die
because of losing the main thing. More than that, Jesus could come along and
remove it's candlestick for loss of the main thing. And what was the main thing? It was the love they had at first. Now, how do we know what that love was? Well, we need to go back to the first, don't
we? Here are some illustrations of what it meant
for them to abandon the love they had at first. This is what Christ has against the church,
and this is the third thing I want us to notice. In early days, they loved the Word of God. That was the chief characteristic of this
community. They loved the Word of God, they loved being
taught the Word of God, and they loved the ministry of the Word of God. How do I know that? Because Acts chapter 19 tells us that Paul
hired the lecture hall of Tyrannus, you remember? And one long-standing manuscript tradition
of the book of Acts says to us that he did this for five hours in the middle of the day,
for up to three years. And Christians gathered in Ephesus, it looks
as though they gathered from other parts, and for three years he poured the Word of
God into them, and they loved it, and they grew, and the result was that the whole of
Asia heard what the Word of God was doing. Ever puzzle over the expression that Luke
uses in the Acts of the Apostles, that the Word of God grew? Now, that's false teaching isn't it? The Word of God doesn't grow, it's given to
us once. What does that mean? It means there were such a color and an acceptance
of the Word of God that it seemed to fill and fill and fill and fill and keep on growing
like that stone that ran down the mountain in the vision of the book of Daniel until
it consumed these people, till they were like you remember what Spurgeon said about John
Bunyan, that if you pricked him anywhere he would flow Bibline. That's one of the rarest commodities in the
Christian world and the English-speaking world today. Most Christians have more Bibles than they
know what to do with, and know almost nothing of what is in them, except a few texts. I am ashamed to say that is a broad experience
the statistics tell out to us. And yet we think we have it. That perhaps there's never been a church like
our church. I remember once a man telling me "Don't you
think this is the greatest church in all the world?" I didn't have the heart to say no. I think the church I'm in is the greatest
church in the world. I wonder if you understand what that means. Five hours a day for three years, and all
he's doing is teaching them the Scriptures, pouring the Scriptures into them. Now, transfer that to the church in the Western
world, yes the Reformed church in the Western world. What kind of appetite do we have and what
kind of diet are we being given? Yes, but we are a Reformed church. You know, I guess I'm old enough now to say
this. I get weary of people telling me they are
Reformed churches in the tradition of Calvin, until they've answered this question: Do you
have preaching every day of the week? Is the whole of Wednesday given over to prayer
in the congregation, and does the congregation gather for prayer? Then you'll be a Reformed church. And yes we live in – no we don't all live
within half a mile of St. Pierre in Geneva, but how little we do in this area of feeding
on the Word of God and loving the Word of God to be taught us is it's good to work that
down in groups that are well-led. But you know, there's a symbolic difference
between what happens in the preaching of the Word and what happens in the small group. You can't help noticing, it's even physical. In the small group we're all sitting, looking
down on our Bibles, and we're thinking hard to answer the leader's question, and then
we're disagreeing, or we're not sure. And there is a symbolism in the fact that
when the Word is being expounded to us it's coming down to us, and even the person who
is preaching it is under it and conscious he's under it, and this is God's Word and
we're all under it, and it's feeding us, and it's getting places that we could never be
brought to in our Bible study groups, as the Spirit strives with our spirits in the beautiful
anonymity of a large company, and reveals things that have been hidden from us, and
probes places where we hurt, and does the deepest counseling of the entire week, and
again and again and again as the weeks pass and the months pass and the years pass. Our lives are transformed by the Word of God. And this was something it looks as though
the Ephesians had lost their love for. And of course, once your appetite begins to
go you lose your love for the food, and then you begin to think your appetite is normal. My brothers and sisters, we have no idea whatsoever
how abnormal our church life really is. Why do I say that? I say that because when I came to the United
States first of all, and visited churches and was handed the bulletin, two things I
would look for: how frequently is the Word of God expounded to the people here, and correspondingly
is it very evident to me that this is a people devoted to prayer? Because the Apostolic motto was "We will give
ourselves to prayer and the ministry of the Word of God." And there is 25 minutes in a Sunday morning. And in congregations, even congregations that
think of themselves as Reformed, the elders and the pastors know the people won't come
out at night. And yet we leave saying it was wonderful. You know, if you're a young man and you leave
an hour with a girl and think that was wonderful, you don't leave saying "Is there any chance
we could meet for an hour the same time next week and keep that up?" You can't build a relationship on that. And yet, you see, we have no idea what's happening,
we haven't seen it. We think we're normal, but we know the Scriptures
so little. And if we're really honest, we love the Lord
Jesus so little as well, that if someone put us into a room with no distractions and said
"I just want you to sit there and think about the Lord Jesus for five minutes" many Evangelical
Christians in the Western world would find that an enormous trial, because we don't know
five minutes' worth of the Lord Jesus. Because we don't know the Scriptures. Because our lives haven't been under the Scriptures. And we think we're normal, and it's a surprise. We understand why Jesus would say that to
those horrible liberals, but would He be saying it to us, and what if the evidence is in our
churches? That we are indifferent actually to the ministry
of the Word. And what is the least attended meeting in
most churches if there is church – such a meeting? It's a meeting for prayer. And we build. And we want really sharp pastors, kind of
Apostle Pauls plus mixed with John. You know, little touch of the eccentricity
of Ezekiel would do us very nicely. And we don't realize that we've maybe lost
our first love. I read some time ago a letter that Peter the
Venerable had written, who was the abbot of the great monastery at Cluny, and he wrote
it to far more famous Bernard of Clairvaux, and he said "You know Bernard, you know what
your real problem is? You do all the things you think are difficult
really well. You fast, you discipline, but you don't do
the simplest thing well at all. You don't really love." Just think of that for a moment. It was apparently possible to say in these
early centuries "See how these Christians love one another." That surely would be one of the singular effects
of the ministry of the Word of God crushing our humility and building up our Christ-likeness,
and the whole community would know. I've sometimes said to people in – particularly
in the United States, "You know, we're desperate to make an impact on our society." Especially this is true of a somewhat larger
church, and we're trying to do every conceivable thing to kind of touch society. Actually there's a very simple thing to do;
cannot fail. You just come to church on Sunday night. You just come to pray whenever the leadership
in the congregation says "Pray." And I guarantee there'll be anywhere between
three and a dozen messages on your cell phone, on your home phone, saying "Where were you
on Sunday night when I called? Where were you on Wednesday?" And you just need to know two words, church
and prayer, and you are likely to get the response "Oh God." And then you are likely to be able to say
"Precisely." You don't need to be eloquent. The sheer, radical counterculturalism of your
life is going to make people start talking about what's happening in the church. And it really does all go down to this. One of things apparently that had happened
in Ephesus was that impact that was made because of the Word of God and it's fruitfulness in
the people's lives. The transformation of character made people
talk, so that the apostle Peter in another context doesn't say "You know, what you really
need to do is to ask people questions about whether they're going to heaven or not." He says "No, all you need to do is ask – answer
the questions they're asking you." Why are people not asking us more questions? Why do we get up to some of the false jiggery-pokery
that sometimes isn't even honest with non-Christians, to ask them our questions? Because apparently there's so little about
our lives and our churches that would make them ask any question at all. And what lies at the bottom of that? If it's true then it's surely that we've lost
our first love. Maybe that was why Paul wrote to Timothy,
whom he had left in Ephesus, as he says in 1 Timothy chapter 1, he says to Timothy, "Timothy
the goal of our ministry is love. Love for the Lord Jesus. Love for His Word. Love for His people. Love for the lost. Love for prayer. And love for His glorious appearing." And the Ephesians apparently had lost it. These words of Jesus remind me of that probably
quite electric moment in the gospels when there was the dinner in the family home of
Simon the Leper, and in the midst of it when, you remember, Jesus was so beautifully anointed,
He turned to Simon who was complaining. He was actually critical of the love that
someone else had shown to the Lord Jesus actually, because it exposed him, and Jesus said to
him "Simon, I've got something I need to say to you." And that's what Jesus was surely saying to
this church too. So how do we apply this in the fourth place? And, I think, when I read this particular
letter – but some of the others – I think, to a friend I had who was a missionary in
Turkey, and was feeling unwell, and had gone to have an X-Ray done, and just because of
the medical system the radiographer had given my friend the X-Rays in a brown envelope,
and she got on to public transport to travel across town to the physician who would read
and analyze them. And what the X-ray people didn't know was
that she herself was a physician, and she opened up the X-Rays, and her first thought
was this "I am a dead woman." And here it's as though Jesus is coming and
saying "Before that stage is reached, let me tell you what I already see on your X-Ray. There's a spot here, and I know what it means. It means you've lost your first love, and
my grace is no longer amazing to you. You don't have the appetite for the Word." For all the struggle prayer is, you don't
love coming together to pray. I remember an elder in the church I served
in Scotland, after he retired he said to me he was free now. He said to me, "You know” – he was in
banking – he said "You know, sometimes at the time of prayer, I had to drag myself here." I admired that, but then I said to him with
a smile "But Bobby, you never had to drag yourself home afterwards, did you?" Because you see, in spiritual things in relationship
to Jesus Christ, there are pleasures that we never taste because we've never tried them,
and astonishingly in the United States of America of all places, because we say in our
heart of hearts they wouldn't work here. And the paradox is, I think that in, perhaps
the nation in all the world which has had the most enterprising spirit of "We can do
it." I come from a nation where the basic spirit
has been "We've never tried it." But you know there is one Scottish malaise
that so many churches actually suffer from: prayer, we've never really tried that. When I came to the United States of America,
to me the most astonishing thing, it was like entering a television set. In the supermarkets the apples were four times
the size, there were 45 more varieties, the buildings were enormous, the churches were
vast. If I could have packed up some church plants
and put them in my pocket and dropped them down anywhere in Scotland, people would have
assumed "That's the new Jerusalem." But the question that lay in my mind was this:
"How is so much of this being built, when the Word of God is largely silent in the property,
and how can all of this been built?" And there seems to be so little passionate,
intercessory, pleading prayer for the power of the Spirit, the Word of God, the transformation
of lives and the salvation of sinners. And I would say in my lifetime, the single
most obvious difference between my teenage years as an early Christian listening to people
pray and the present day is this: in those days you never were with the people of God
in prayer without them pleading for the salvation of sinners. And nowadays you can go to many prayer meetings,
and the only thing that there is pleading for is somebody's broken leg, and we've become
all so horizontal, haven't we? We would die if somebody denied the Scriptures
to us, and said they aren't inerrant, but in practical terms most of them could be errant,
and we would know almost nothing about it, because we neither read them nor love to have
them expounded to us, and we don't pray that the Holy Spirit would come down upon the ministry
of the Word and transform lives. Maybe this isn't the right letter, but just
imagine that you're sitting there when the messenger has moved on from Ephesus to Smyrna
to Pergamum to Thyatira, and you know having heard Jesus' message to the church in Ephesus,
you know that, that what this messenger is holding in the, in the scroll, or in the papers
in which the book Of Revelation is written, you know inside that brown envelope is the
X-Ray of your church too. And you almost want to say to mine own, I
almost want to say to him, "Would you go around the other churches first? Because I need to take in what Jesus is saying
to the church in Ephesus first of all before I'm really ready to hear anything he might
say in particular to the church in which I'm in now." But you see, Jesus doesn't say this to crush
us. He says this to bring us back. He knows the way to bring us back, our fallen
spirits to restore. And so He says "If you're listening now, if
you're listening, I want you to remember that first love." If your marriage is going wrong, isn't that
what you do? "Honey let's get back to our first love." And to repent and to do the works that you
did at first. Otherwise, the candlestick's going to be removed. I first studied the book of Revelation as
a teenager, actually, with the help of William Hendriksen's beautiful little commentary,
"More Than Conquerors," and I'll never forget as a youngster reading the chilling words
with which his exposition of these verses ends, when he says "There is no church at
Ephesus now. The place itself is a ruin." That couldn't happen in the United States,
could it? There were people living in North Africa for
many centuries loving the Lord Jesus. They'd had the greatest theologian in history,
actually the two greatest theologians in the first five centuries of the Christian church,
and more of them, they had all lived in North Africa now. You know what's in North Africa now: Islam. How do we understand that? We could understand it in terms of the rise
of Islam, but that would only be half the story. The rest of the story is that Jesus removed
the candlestick, because nothing happens apart from the sovereign judgement of the Lord Jesus
Christ. And the first love of our ancestors in this
country, you know what that was for – my dear friends, there's no point in boasting
about them unless you imitate their example – was to give themselves over, "Feed us
the Word of God" they said to their pastors, "and let us pray for the blessing of God." When I was a young man I was serving a summer
assistantship in the remote vastnesses of the Scottish highlands, and I became friends
with a man who was – I think he was probably about 90. All his friends called him Dodo. And I remember Dodo taking me out to the back
of his craft one afternoon and saying "I remember as a 14-year-old boy coming out here on a
Sunday afternoon, and the grass had turned black. And it was the backs of the men who were prostrated
on the ground pleading for the divine blessing," as he put it. And I can still hear him say "And it came." That's what we need, and so we need to remember,
and to repent, and to do the works, and to begin to taste this promise that if you overcome
in these areas, He will give to you to eat of the Tree of Life that is in the paradise
of God. May He save us, my dear friends, before it's
too late. May He increase our hunger for His Word. May He make us men and women of young people
of prayer, and build such character and churches that we will discover that need to be ready
to give an answer to those who are asking us "What has happened here?" It happened once in Ephesus, and it happened
no more. Whatever the Spirit is saying to the churches,
let those who have ears hear. Our heavenly Father, we pray as we bow before
the wonder of your Word and the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you would cover
any words that might lead us astray from him, and empower all words that will point us to
him and His majesty and glory, cause us to humble ourselves before him, in order that
He, and we with Him, may be in our churches, exalted by His grace. We pray it in His name. Amen.
