SO WHERE DOES THAT LEAVE US?
The destiny of every human being depends on his relationship to Jesus Christ. It is not on his relationship to life, or on his service or his usefulness, but simply and solely on his relationship to Jesus Christ. Oswald Chambers
In this series we have experienced both the power and the love of God. Only He would set aside His awesome power and authority to reach out to His precious bride in love. To awaken her out of her slumber and warn her of the danger surrounding her; the danger of allowing her heart and affections to wander. And while many view His words as demanding and harsh yet we hear in them the voice of one who continues to cry out for her to return in spite of all that she has done. I wonder if we could—would—do the same.
As we reflect on history it isn’t hard to see that our God has been consistent—immutable—in the way He has dealt with His creation. One only needs to look back at how He dealt with Israel when she strayed from Him, ignoring His Word and His prophets and assimilating into the world around them; becoming “of” the world. Here in the opening verses of His Revelation we find that nothing has changed; only the ones to whom the letters were written.
The messages have not changed because “the message” has not changed. It is one of love that reaches out with open arms and cries out for a wandering bride to return; a message of restoration and reconciliation. Do you remember God’s words to the prophet Hosea?
Hos 1:3 When the Lord began to speak by Hosea, the Lord said to Hosea: “Go, take yourself a wife of harlotry and children of harlotry, for the land has committed great harlotry by departing from the Lord.” So he went and took Gomer the daughter of Diblaim, and she conceived and bore him a son.
The name Hosea in Hebrew means “deliverer” and Gomer means “completion.” In Hosea God would not only show His faithfulness but in Gomer the total unfaithfulness of Israel. God sent His prophet to take a whore for a wife, representing an unfaithful Israel. God calls Himself the husband of Israel and as a wife she had continually been unfaithful to Him. So He told Hosea, who was a pure man, to go join himself in marriage to one of them that had committed spiritual fornication against Him. He was to wed one that departed (from following after) the Lord and bring her into remembrance, to forget those things which were behind and once again follow after the Lord. Hosea was called to make the same choice that was facing God. He was faced with choosing to be faithful to Israel who was guilty of spiritual adultery. Sadly, God could not forgive Israel for what she would not acknowledge and therefore He gave her the desires of her heart.
How clearly this reflects our relationship with Jesus. Do we really want Him to be our Lord and Savior; our God? Do we resist His guidance, His Word? Is there a lack of holiness in our life? How about the church, is it mired in a culture of tradition that we demand of it? Unfortunately, in many cases the answer is a resounding yes. And it’s here that we tread on very slippery ground.
As we begin to slip and slowly slide down that slope, drifting away from God in our pursuit of self-satisfaction we begin to find ourselves headed in a direction toward the one place we never want to find ourselves. The more we drift the more our pride refuses to acknowledge how spiritually empty we are until we wind up at a place where we don’t think we have any sin to confess. It’s all about the faults of others or the circumstances of life that are against us. At some point we draw close to the point at which we become closed to the call of God’s Spirit:
Matt 12:31-32 “Therefore I say to you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven men. 32 Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man, it will be forgiven him; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit, it will not be forgiven him, either in this age or in the age to come.
We place ourselves in danger of failing to repent for our sins and if we continue in that state it means that they cannot be forgiven. It is denying the power of God to forgive and restore. God cannot forgive the rejection of His Son and He will do anything He can to keep that from happening. One only needs to consider the Laodiceans and how God continued to reach out to them in spite of how far away they had drifted. For us it is possible to say “no” to God for so long that we no longer are capable of saying “yes” in order to receive His forgiveness. That was exactly where God found Israel in Hosea’s day.
Unfortunately, today there are many Christians who say they believe in Jesus, pray and take an active role in their church; good Christians. But they are not really growing in their faith, deepening their relationship with Jesus or leading others to Him. Paul warned us that this attitude strikes straight at the heart of God:
Eph 4:30 And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.
Paul’s use of the word “grieve” in relationship to our resisting God’s love is exactly how God felt with regard to Israel. Anything that blocks His love and forgiveness for us is what grieves Him; putting possessions, people, power or position ahead of Him. Anything that deflects us from following the “individual” calling He has set before us to love and serve Him and others causes Him pain. It is for that very reason that God continues to confront us with what we are and what we have failed to be and do. Our culture-bound church that tolerates the humanistic society around us grieves God deeply. As Lloyd Ogilvie so aptly put it: our sensual, sex-centric, pornographically saturated culture might even make the priests of Baal blush!
How awesome then that He “could not” give up on His wife—Israel—no matter how unfaithful she had been. Even more tragic was the fact that Israel not only continued in sin, she no longer acknowledged her sin and didn’t seek His forgiveness. It’s the same way Jesus elects to choose us, His bride, when we reject His faithfulness with our unfaithfulness; no matter what depths we sink to. But His redemption does not come without a price as He will not—cannot—turn a blind eye to our sin. And so He confronts us with our sin and provides a way to heal us. But it’s still up to us. We must turn from our sinful past and look to Him as our only source of redemption and restoration. Paul understood what that entailed.
Phil 3:13-14 Brethren, I do not count myself to have apprehended; but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, 14 I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.
That is the path that God took with Israel when He asked Hosea to take Gomer as his wife; a wife that later returned to where she came from, where she sank even lower than before. And what did God do?
Hos 3:1-3 Then the Lord said to me, “Go again, love a woman who is loved by a lover and is committing adultery, just like the love of the Lord for the children of Israel, who look to other gods and love the raisin cakes of the pagans.” 2 So I bought her for myself for fifteen shekels of silver, and one and one-half homers of barley. 3 And I said to her, “You shall stay with me many days; you shall not play the harlot, nor shall you have a man — so, too, will I be toward you.”
Can you imagine the shame that Hosea felt when God first asked him to marry Gomer and then after she returned to her depraved lifestyle and didn’t deserve his reconciliation He asked him to go again, love a woman who is loved by a lover. God never gives up. Man is like that today, he doesn’t naturally desire God in his fallen state and only searches after his own independence; a state that we are ever drawn back to as Christians by our old nature. Hosea is for us the clearest example of why God sent Jesus to purchase us with the ultimate price and why He is sending Him again to call us back from our wandering infidelity. How blessed we are that God’s love for us is based on action and not emotion.
Rom 5:5-8 Now hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us. 6 For when we were still without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. 7 For scarcely for a righteous man will one die; yet perhaps for a good man someone would even dare to die. 8 But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Fast forward now to the Book of Revelation; once again God uses someone holy—Jesus—to call once again that which has become unholy. The very one who was pure from before the moment He was in His mother’s womb was sent to redeem His bride, which time and time again had been guilty of sin.
Eph 5:27 that He might present her to Himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish.
God sent His Son once again to His bride to call her and take her back. His voice shook the churches then and it still does today. He delivered seven messages that touch every level of man’s condition. The church in America today has slowly and almost imperceptible progressed away from the way it was established in the Book of Acts on the Day of Pentecost. Jesus delivered these letters to admonish and yet encourage, to warn of judgment and yet restore and to chasten and yet love. His messages were woven with a golden thread; “remember,” “return” and “repent.” This golden thread is the answer for the true church— His bride—in America today.
To Ephesus – The Careless Church
Ephesus, which means let go was the post-apostolic church to which Jesus said, “you have fallen.” The church was drifting away and letting go of the truth. The love it had for Christ was diminishing and was being replaced with “dead works.”
This was a dynamic church that was energetic in doing the work of the Lord but its cost was its fading love of Christ and their fellow man. The church was the first step down the slippery slope to Laodicea; apostasy. The church in America today is surrounded by cities like Ephesus with every form of distraction and enticement to draw believers away and encourage others to labor and toil against them. In both cases, however, the love of Christ is left out in the process.
There are many in the bride of Christ that find themselves in this very place. The years of toil and demands of life have stripped them of that first love. They still “believe” and haven’t “lost” that love, it’s just been replaced with other things, many of which are built with “good intentions.” When we shift from the simplicity of loving Jesus to working for Him we will surely suffer the loss. When we move away from Him it is usually fueled by a desire to fulfill the soul instead of building a relationship with Him. Thankfully Jesus tells us that this “love” can be rekindled by remembering, returning and repenting.
Let us all take the lesson of the church at Ephesus to heart. We must be ever vigilant because this first step down the slippery slope to apostasy is a subtle one. It is one that many take without any knowledge of the path they’re on or the danger involved. In fact it’s a path that is never seen because that first step is almost always taken with the best intentions in the world. But it’s a step that begins the process of trading the love of God for the works of the flesh; the love of God for the efforts of a “dead man.”
Ephesus had great zeal for truth and right but they had a love that was in fatal decline. We can’t afford to let that happen to us … It’s our choice!
To Smyrna – The Suffering Church
The church at Smyrna was suffering persecution that was to last almost 200 years. To them, Jesus spoke only encouragement telling them that their suffering would only be for a time. It all began with Nero and his attempt to totally destroy the church with the spilling of the martyrs’ blood.
Jesus had experienced the worst the world could do to Him and He understood the persecution the church was enduring. He recognized their abject poverty but yet He encouraged them that they were “rich” in the Spirit. The world considers wealth as value but Jesus considers our spiritual wealth as “absolute worth;” He chose us to be “rich in faith.”
Their works were prosperous and their investment in the kingdom of God made them truly rich. They had His promise that would never be revoked; a promise that secured riches beyond their wildest dreams. But He wanted them to understand that those riches would come at the expense of suffering, and that still holds true for the bride of Christ today. When we’ve been totally emptied of self-trust, have cast ourselves completely at His feet and fully understand that true riches are not found in anything we have attained or have become but are only found in Him, and then we are truly rich beyond measure. He never promised us that it would be easy.
Look at the Christians in Smyrna through the lens of the parable of the tares and wheat (Matt 13). The seeds of evil (tares) were sown among the true believers (wheat) and persecution was the result. But Jesus’ response was to allow the wheat and the tares—the Christians and those persecuting them—to grow together until the harvest. That is what tries (proves) our faith, love, patience and obedience. It’s only when they both are fully mature and the tares have turned black that you can tell them apart. Then comes the harvest and the “wheat” will be gathered into His barn. We will then receive the crown of life and all that have persecuted us will be bound up in bundles to be burned.
There is a time of suffering for each of us and as the days grow short that suffering is going to increase. As a whole the bride of Christ has suffered persecution in the past and she will in the future. When that time comes for each one of us we need to reflect back on Jesus’ words… do not fear those things which you are about to suffer. As His bride we need to wait and watch, not fearing the dark of the night because He has given us His lamp. Therefore let’s tend it carefully and be ready for His sudden call to come forth.
Next time we will reflect once again on the love letter to the remaining churches.