06-10-12 More About Ephesus

Rev. 2:1-7 "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:

' I know your deeds and your toil and perseverance, 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; and you have perseverance and have endured for My name's sake, and have not grown weary. But I have this against you, that you have left your first love. Therefore remember from where you have fallen, and repent and do the deeds you did at first; or else I am coming to you and will remove your lampstand out of its place unless you repent. Yet this you do have, that you hate the deeds of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes, I will grant to eat of the tree of life which is in the Paradise of God.'

This morning I want us to return

to Revelation 2

and to the first of seven messages our Lord sent

to seven local churches in Asia Minor.

When we began our study of Revelation

I promised I would try to offer you

a summery phrase

for each of the sections we move through.

So I’ll backtrack just enough

to give you a title for the passage we looked at last week.

If you were with us

you will remember that we looked at our Lord’s message

to the church at Ephesus,

recorded in Revelation 2:1-7.

In that message

we saw a church that had fallen in love with doctrine,

a church in which knowing the truth

had become more important

than knowing the Lord.

The title I would offer you

for Revelation 2:1-7 is this:

Doctrine is King!

They had replaced their true King,

Jesus Christ,

with KNOWLEDGE -

good knowledge,

correct knowledge,

Biblically sound knowledge.

But in this first message

Christ reminds them

and us

that He did not call us to a doctrinal system,

or a set of religious truths.

He called us to Himself.

I really must resist the urge

to get side-tracked in this study,

but I can’t let this go without mentioning once again

what I consider to be

one of the great tragedies

of our highly refined Christian system today.

Some of you may have noticed

the severity of Christ’s comments

to the church at Ephesus,

telling them that either they return to HIM

or He will end their existence as a church,

and you may have thought that sounded a little severe.

I mean, really!

Here was a church in which

Biblical truth was being believed

and taught.

Why in the world would Christ tell them

that He was going to, “remove their lampstand out of its place -- unless they repent”?

It sounds harsh to us

because we as a church culture

are infected with the same disease,

and we, too, don’t even know we’re sick.

You see,

our Lord never intended for us

to learn doctrine ABOUT Him.

He intended for us

to learn doctrine THROUGH Him.

Let me phrase it differently.

God’s goal with us as His creation

is not to seek to draw all people

to a correct BELIEF SYSTEM.

God’s goal

is to draw all people to HIMSELF.

Now,

when I put it like that,

of course we all agree,

and nod our heads,

and say, ‟Amen”,

if we’re the type who says, “Amen”.

But we do it

against the backdrop of a Christian world that absolutely denies it.

Much, if not most of the teaching we do

in our Churches

and Bible Schools

and Sunday Schools

and books, and tapes, and seminars

assumes that there is great value

in organizing and presenting

doctrine about God.

Few churches will allow a man in the pulpit who does not have

at least a BA degree in theology,

and preferably a Master’s

or a Doctorate.

Without even thinking about it

our Church society makes two undisputed assumptions.

1. Without certain academic qualifications

a person is really NOT qualified

for teaching leadership in a church,

2. and with those academic qualifications

a person IS qualified to teach.

The truth is,

neither assumption is Biblically sound.

You see,

our Lord did not call us to learn doctrine ABOUT Him,

He called us to learn doctrine THROUGH Him.

Because of my own religious heritage,

one of the great surprises for me

when I began studying the Gospels on my own

were some of the things I saw Jesus NOT doing.

I saw Jesus NOT teaching His men.

I saw Jesus not gathering them together

for daily teaching on the Pentateuch.

I saw Him not offering them

a twelve week series on the minor prophets.

I saw Him not offering a night class

on the Book of Isaiah.

I saw Jesus not teaching His men about God.

What I saw was Christ

simply inviting His men to be with Him

and get to know Him.

And everything they came to understand about their Creator,

grew out of that friendship.

Who they understood God to be,

how they related to Him,

what they expected from Him,

and what they saw Him expecting from them

all grew out of that friendship.

The incredible freedom they had

following Christ’s departure

to be totally themselves

and yet totally in submission to their Lord

grew out of what they had experienced

during the years they lived with Him on earth.

One of the many thrilling aspects

of the lives of the first century followers of Christ

was the absolute absence of religion

in their presentation of Christ.

They had met Christ.

They were continuing to live with Him

on a day-by-day basis,

and they were presenting to their world

the offer to do exactly the same thing.

Because Christ is no longer physically with us in human form,

Satan has subtly

but, oh so effectively deceived us

into believing that now, for us,

friendship WITH Christ

has been replaced by

knowledge ABOUT Him.

But it’s a lie,

the same lie that was eating the heart out of the church at Ephesus in 90 AD.

Listen to what Paul,

who, to our knowledge,

never personally met the MAN Jesus,

said about the heart of his Christian life.

Philippians 3:8-11:

Phil. 3:8 More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ,

Phil. 3:9 and may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith,

Phil. 3:10 that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death;

Phil. 3:11 in order that I may attain to the resurrection from the dead.

Paul’s goal in the Christian life

was not to know ABOUT Christ.

His goal was to KNOW Him.

He was clearly talking about

a real, personal,

individual,

intimate growing friendship

with Jesus Christ.

Now, I know part of the reason

why we have gotten so far from the real thing.

In our efforts to extend the outreach of the Church,

and to expand the membership roles

of our religious institutions

we have needed a system

that was accessible to people

who have not truly entered into a living personal relationship with Christ.

Listen to this!

This is a prayer Christ Himself prayed

in the presence of His disciples:

Luke 10:21-22 At that very time He rejoiced greatly in the Holy Spirit, and said, "I praise You, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that You have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and have revealed them to infants. Yes, Father, for this way was well-pleasing in Your sight. All things have been handed over to Me by My Father, and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, and who the Father is except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son wills to reveal Him."

You see what He’s saying, don’t you -

knowledge about God

only comes through friendship with God.

The prerequisite for knowing about Him

is knowing Him.

And knowing Him begins

when we submit to Him.

In other words,

only those who have bowed before Him

can begin to learn about Him.

But that doesn’t sell well on the broad market,

so Satan subtly suggests

that gaining knowledge about Christ

is an excellent alternative

to actually gaining Him.

And once we buy into that mentality

DOCTRINE becomes king

and true faith dies.

Rather than the life-centered focus

of the true walk of faith,

we become focused on establishing

and maintaining the purity of our doctrine.

Those who don’t buy into our interpretation

are excluded from fellowship

or viewed as enemies to be guarded against or conquered.

One of the intensely frustrating things

to many in our Christian world today

is that the Bible never seems to answer

the questions we want answered.

We in the church world get into raging debates over eternal security,

and free will,

and predestination,

and the Sovereignty of God,

and pre-trib,

and post-trib,

and on and on.

And we frantically search the Scriptures

for the verses

and statements that will arm us

with the “proofs” that will substantiate

our own carefully crafted systems.

The problem is

because we are asking the wrong questions

the answers we are offered

only confuse us.

We are asking the Bible,

“Which system is right?”,

or even worse,

“How can I defend,

or protect,

or prove my system?”

And then we spend 2000 years arguing over the answers.

But the question we should be asking

is not, “Which system is right?”

The question we should be asking

is, “What is my God like?

And how can I know Him?”

Our Lord spoke such strong words of warning to the people at Ephesus

not because their doctrine was incorrect,

but rather because their doctrine had become an end in itself.

They, like we, had allowed themselves to believe

that competency in content

qualified a person for leadership.

So what do we do?

Doesn’t our doctrine matter?

Yes! It matters a great deal.

But WHY we are learning,

and HOW we are learning

matter even more than WHAT we are learning.

And to try to pull all this together

I’ll make a statement

and then give you a couple of illustrations

to help explain what I’m saying.

Here’s the statement:

All healthy doctrine is a by-product of our personal interaction with Christ Himself.

And by that statement

obviously I am suggesting that there is such a thing as both “healthy”

and “unhealthy” doctrine.

And let me see if I can give you

some hypothetical examples

to illustrate what I mean.

Let’s take the Doctrine of Free Will.

You are a fairly new Christian.

You have seen your life changing

in dramatic and wonderful ways

as a result of Christ’s entrance into your life.

You know your sins really are forgiven,

and God truly does love you.

For some time your new life with the King goes great.

And then, suddenly,

you find yourself confronted with a temptation that takes you totally off guard.

Maybe it’s your temper,

or some form of physical or emotional addiction,

or some destructive relationship pattern.

Maybe it’s a negative, bitter outlook on life

that consumes you,

or some form of lust from your past life.

For the sake of our illustration,

lets just say your monthly expense account report at work is due,

and, finding yourself a little strapped for cash,

you do what you have done for years -

you “adjust” the figures

so that you’ll be reimbursed some additional expense money

that you really didn’t spend.

A fleeting thought crosses your mind

that this type of thing

may not be altogether “Christian”,

but you remind yourself that

God loves you,

and He knows your needs,

and, after all, all your sins were covered by Christ’s death anyway.

You turn in the report.

The next day,

for the first time in the ten years you’ve worked there,

your boss calls you into his office

and asks you to justify your expense report.

He finds out you’ve cheated on it,

and the whole thing gets to be a hideous mess.

That night,

as you’re brooding over the disaster of the day,

in your spirit you can hear your Lord saying to you,

“My child, I love you. I will always love you.

This sin, like all the rest of them,

was paid for by my death on that cross.

But every day of your life

you will face choices either to obey Me,

or to disobey Me...to trust Me or to not trust Me.

Those are real choices,

choices only you can make.

And every one of them will have consequences in your life,

either for good or for bad.”

OK, now that is healthy doctrine.

That’s learning about the doctrinal concept of free will

within the context of our relationship with Christ.

Or, we could take this same Christian

and plug him into a class on systematic theology

and teach him all the verses dealing with free will,

and then he could get into raging debates

about how our free will

interacts with God’s Sovereignty,

and he could write essays on the subject,

and it would never touch his daily life.

We’re out of time,

but I’ll give you one more quick illustration,

this one out of the life of my good friend Peter...the fumbling, wonderful Apostle.

We have a doctrine in our Christian systems today that we call “eternal security”.

It is a title given to the belief

that, once a person enters the family of God through faith in Christ,

he or she can never be removed from the family of God.

It is a doctrine that, in certain settings, can trigger raging debates among Christians,

with those involved in those debates

lining up their pile of verses

to be used as ammunition with which to attack their opponent.

OK, I want you to picture a situation

in which you are allowed to enter into a personal conversation with Peter,

and in that conversation you ask him, “So Peter, do you believe in the doctrine of eternal security?”

After spending no small portion of my adult life

studying the life of this amazing Apostle,

I’ll tell you how I think he would have responded to that question.

I think he would have said,

“My friend, I don’t know anything about your doctrinal systems.

All I know is my Lord Jesus Christ.

I know how He loves me.

I know how He responds to me when I say and do the stupidest things in the world.

And I also know that even when I stood up before my world

and blasphemed Him,

and, over and over again, openly denied that I even knew Him

He never walked away from me,

He never disowned me,

He never turned His back on me.

And this one thing I know for sure -

He’ll never leave me,

He’ll never forsake me,

never stop loving me,

and never let go of me ever

until He carries me into the presence of God the Father.”

Do you see the difference?

The doctrine of eternal security is the product of one of our religious systems.

The knowledge of the true nature of the love of Christ for us

is the result of our living with Him and His living with us

through even the worst times in our lives.

And it was this type of knowledge,

the knowledge that grows out of our life with Him

that Christ was calling the Ephesians to return to.

And that same learning process could be applied to every Biblical doctrine:

the sovereignty of God,

predestination,

the purpose and nature of the church,

and on and on.

You see,

what Christ was saying to Ephesus,

and what He wants to say to us today,

is that all healthy doctrine

is a by-product of our growing relationship with Christ.

What we learn about Him

becomes our doctrine.

And any time we attempt to separate knowledge about God

from our relationship with God

it becomes just one more man-made religion.