Fall From Grace
- Jake Chambers
- Oct 11, 2009
- Series: SDSU
Revelation 2: 2-3,6
The church in Ephesus has endured attacks from false teachers, apostles, and those who want to embrace poor doctrine. Jesus commends them for their hate of poor doctrine. He reminds them that they are not alone, and he sees their patient endurance as the world and even believers that are with them start to twist, flip and blur doctrine. Jesus hates the excuses for sin and sees how many false teachers allow lies and compromise to creep into the church. It is emotionally taxing, physically frustrating, and difficult to bear when even in the church, local or universal, the cross, repentance and other sound doctrine is blurred. We have to be on guard against false doctrine today and on guard against no doctrine.
Today, Christianity is under attack and some of the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith are being replaced, attacked or simply ignored. This is not happening just with new age spiritualism or other religions, but within the church. Many feel that this is something new, but, as we see in this letter, it is nothing new and Christ is well aware of it. They may come in new forms but it is the same false teachers, lies and schemes of the devil that were happening before. I want to briefly talk of a few ways this is happening in the universal church today.
1. The emergent church: The emergent church started as a movement to reach the postmodern world by being culturally relevant with the gospel. In the mid nineties church leaders started questioning if we had to have an organ and wear a robe or meet in a traditional building with stained glass windows. As a result, pastors started dressing like the people they were trying to reach, worship leaders wrote new music to hymns to sound like something on the radio, and the church started meeting in dark warehouses lit with artsy candles. There are many doctrinally sound, Bible-preaching Jesus-loving churches that are trying to be culturally relevant to bring the gospel to more people. Unfortunately, Satan took a good thing and started to ask "Did God really say that?" Many leaders started not just questioning cultural things, but doctrinal things. Now the emergent church is often doctrineless with paintings replacing preaching, expression replacing confession, sharing feelings replacing sharing scripture, and the cross is no longer talked about because it may offend. As a result, about fifteen years after the emergent movement started, most doctrinally-sound churches are clarifying that they are not part of the "emergent church" or even the "emerging" church but prefer to be called "missional." Like in Genesis, when Satan asked "Did God really say that?" the emergent movement is more about questioning God than worshipping him.
2. Practically this has led to retreats like the one I went to last year where the focus was being a "follower of Jesus." This sounds fantastic, as I love Jesus and want to follow him. But throughout the weekend, we never once talked of us being sinners in need of a savior, never once talked of the cross, and decided that being a follower of Jesus meant choosing whatever Jesus you wanted to follow. We had speakers share how they were Hindu followers of Jesus, Muslim followers of Jesus, and Buddhist followers of Jesus. Christianity was the only religion looked down upon because it is close-minded and believes that one is only saved by following Jesus as God, not that we can follow him as one of many gods, one of many prophets or one of many good teachers. Like the church in Ephesus, there was strong opposition to anyone who would call someone to repent of worshipping anyone other than Jesus. Hundreds of people who had once called themselves Christians stood and applauded when the distinction between Jesus + Buddha was blurred by saying being a Buddhist follower of Jesus was like flying a two-winged plane with Jesus as one wing and Buddha the other. Many left the retreat deciding that we really can know nothing and that God is actually just a conversation about God.
3. Other churches or movements are old and dying traditions who have kept the robes, stain glass windows, etc., but have forgotten about the gospel. They forgot that Christ is who built the church, and at some point stopped making church about Christ. They are trying everything but Christ and the cross to keep people in the doors. No one is ever called to repentance or pointed to the cross, but the leadership will take any suggestion for a service. For instance, last week at my wife's parents’ church had animal dedications. You could bring your pet and have it dedicated to the Lord. Seriously? They moved from the doctrine of Imago Dei to imago dog and the church decided it would be a good idea to dedicate Dalmatians. If this sounds crazy, it is. But when you are at a church that does not preach the cross or preach repentance, then you see no new believers and need something to do. Your church ages and dies out so there are not babies to dedicate or new believers to baptize. To generate some new life into the church you start saving Chihuahuas. Yo quiero communion.
Now these examples are frustrating and so ridiculous that they are a bit humorous and Christ does have much to say to these churches and movements, who, like Satan, do a lot of preaching but never preach repentance or the cross. The church in Ephesus is not like any of these churches. In fact, the church in Ephesus is commended for being vigilant against junk like this happening in their church. Jesus understands the patience, endurance, tears, and battle to keep sound doctrine. Jesus is encouraging all the doctrine nerds out there. He is stoked that the church in Ephesus is listening to White Horse Inn, John Piper, Mark Driscoll and reading JI Packer, RC Sproul and Tim Keller. The church in Ephesus loves the puritans and get excited about Richard Baxter, Jonathan Edwards or Pilgrim's Progress. This is the church full of wives who read their children Augustine's City of God as a bedtime story, and the kids like it! This is a church that thinks studying their Greek and Hebrew lexicon is a good first date. This is a church that writes weekly systematic theology studies into their wedding vows. These are the guys who use terms like Christus Victor or verbal plenary inspiration as pick up lines. Jesus is not angry with your love for doctrine. Doctrine is beautiful. In fact, Jesus hates the teaching of the Nicolatians. He hates it when false teachers rise up in the church when the cross is belittled and when truth is twisted. Doctrine and doctrine nerds protect the church. We need people who are on watch for liars, heretics and nut jobs. Not everyone has this gift. Some people think everyone is honest, every teacher is good, and all doctrine the same. We need the faithful doctrine nerds to remind us that is not true.
Revelation 2:4
But all of our doctrine and efforts to protect the church are completely meaningless and useless if we have forgotten our first love.
Eph 2:4-6: “but God being rich in mercy, because of he greatness with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ - by grace you have been saved - and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus."
Rich in mercy. Have we forgotten the mercy of Christ? Many of us do not remember or know our predicament without Christ. Remember that we were in fact dead in our trespasses. Death is all we spiritually had and death is all we spiritually deserved. Physically, we deserved death and spiritually we were dead (not dying, but dead). And Christ gave that which was dead life. "In view of God's mercy" do you have God's mercy in view? Do you see how his mercy motivates us to love? When we think of mercy in the context of movies we think of the bad guy who gets a huge sentence and is guilty and is begging for mercy, "Have mercy on me, have mercy on me." We can take our doctrine, our works, our rewards and everything else and stand before God completely guilty. If we look to God with our own spiritual autobiography filled with all the reasons that we should have access to the tree of life, everyone’s autobiography will read the same thing—dead in our trespasses. Without Christ our spiritual story never even begins, never was and never will be. We are born spiritually dead, separated from Christ.
The church of Ephesus is in a terrible place because they have forgotten their first love. In gross arrogance they stood in front of the cross and spit on Jesus with the rest of the criminals and said, “I don't need you, I have John Calvin. I know Greek. I have reformed theology. I podcast John Piper. Jesus, I am not like these other people. I can explain why syncretism and antinomianism is wrong.” We spit on our savior when we fail to remember the depth of our offense and the grandness of his forgiveness.
Revelation 2:5
Have we fallen from grace? Have we forgotten our desperate need for forgiveness, and, in our own arrogance, decided we no longer need forgiveness? We need forgiveness. Judgment day is not going to go well for us without his great forgiveness. We nailed our Lord to a filthy Roman cross. We need forgiveness. We don't have any righteousness of our own but filthy rags. Our arrogance that takes pride in our doctrine or we see ourselves as better than those with doctrinal differences. Our righteousness is like filthy rags. Our head knowledge is worthless if it doesn't touch the heart.
Christ is warning a doctrinally sound church against their pride of comparing themselves to others and thinking they have some self righteousness they do not have.
Remember the love you had for the Savior when you saw your predicament as one separated from him for eternity and it was pardoned at the cross. If you have never seen the depths of your sin, you must know you are eternally separated from God. You are headed full blast to hell, and will have to explain to the Father why, when offered a life of living for Lord Jesus, you chose instead to live for yourself and shouted with the crowds "Crucify him, crucify him!" All your lies, selfishness, frustration, greed, lust, bitterness and filthiness are seen in their entirety by God. All of it. The little justifications you make. The decision to worship work, your girlfriend, sex, money or yourself over God that you make every single day of your entire life—all of it in its grand entirety is seen by God and deserving of judgment and has put Christ on the cross. We deserve nothing but death! You deserve nothing but death. Your sins separated you from God. You need forgiveness. You! This is where the term "rich in mercy" comes from, because if Christ was poor in mercy we would still be dead spiritually and certainly would not be alive physically.
"But God" But God has forgiven all of it. Past, present, and future forgiveness. Christ took all of it. Do not fall from this grace. Do not fall from the mercy and forgiveness of Christ. When we present our own righteousness we re-present our old biographies that only read "dead in our trespasses" when Christ has handed us a new autobiography that reads "by grace you have been saved!" We don't need to add anything to this. We don't need to whiteout any parts of this, just boast in the grace of Christ and present his work on our behalf.
Revelation 2:5a
Remember the works you did at first. Don't you see that a heart that remembers the forgiveness it has received has different motivations. "Return to the works you did at first." If we are forgiven much, we are free to love much. Now our works come out of love. We are inspired by love. Do you see how this changes how we share life with one another? It changes how we love one another. It changes how we treat one another. It changes how we share the gospel and how we gospel one another. We don't stop doing works, but we start doing them as one who has realized all he has been forgiven of. Like the prisoner who says "have mercy on me, I will do anything," if given mercy, they will start off in tremendous gratitude doing whatever is asked. But soon our hearts grow dull and we forget that we don't deserve this life or the forgiveness, and instead an arrogant heart of entitlement begins to form. Oh how far we fall.
Revelation 2:5b
Repent! Repent of this pride and arrogance and all of your filthy works that you think justify you before God. Repent of boasting in your autobiography that points to your spiritual death and repent of trampling all over God's grace by thinking you have earned it. Repent of taking pride in crucifying Jesus. Repent of belittling your sinful state. You think your sin is cute, but you would not think it was cute if you saw the water and blood spewing from our Lord’s pierced heart and spilling out his side. Repent of being motivated out of a heart of anything but love for Jesus. If we do not repent, then we are not the church and our lampstand will be put out. The church will be gone and we will no longer be his church, his bride or his redeemed. Come to the Lord and receive his mercy and return to your first love. You are a sinner in need of a Savior. Everyone of us is. All the time.
Revelation 2:7a
You must hear this call to repent. Please hear this. Don't let this be stolen by a promotion at work, a text from a guy you like, or even dinner after service. Let this warning be heard in a way that your hearts hear it, and in a way that leads to repentance and a great loving hope!
I want to acknowledge that we fall from grace everyday and this is why we need to be reminded of the gravity of our sin and the beauty of the gospel. I want to acknowledge that many of us have fallen so far from grace and have become so dependent on ourselves that we have forgotten what it even looks like to be in love with our Savior. I want to confess with you that this is a great battle of mine. I hate the Nicolatians and that often leads to pride. A pride that forgets I need Jesus and the gospel just as much as the Nicolatians, emergent village, or the golden retriever dedicators need the gospel. I need a reminder of what a heart that remembers their first love looks like, and perhaps we all do. Maybe even now the Lord is prodding your heart to remember its first love or to fall in love with Jesus for the first time, but you don't even know what this heart looks like. Maybe you’re saying you had me at "dead in our trespasses" now show me a heart in love with Jesus!
Psalm 130.
I believe the Psalmist in Psalm 130 models a heart that is motivated and drawn by its first love.
Psalm 130:1-2
It is a heart that pleas for mercy. A heart that realizes it total depravity and complete need of the gospel. We need the gospel. We need the gospel all of the time and our need for the gospel never stops. This is why we gospel ourselves, gospel each other and gather to hear the gospel on Sundays. May we have hearts that plead for mercy.
Psalm 130:3
The psalmist knows that he cannot stand on his sin in front of the Savior, that no one can stand righteous in front of the Savior. He has not forgotten the depth of all of his sins. He has not forgotten his offense against God, that we have led to Christ being crucified.
Psalm 130:4 FORGIVENESS.
His pleas for mercy are heard. His iniquities are washed away and he is a forgiven sinner. It is remembering the grand forgiveness of the Lord Jesus Christ that will launch his heart into a state of adoration of the Lord Jesus!
Psalm 130:5-6
He longs for the Lord. He desires God. His soul is thirsty for the Lord. Like a watchman waits for morning, so he waits and longs for the Lord with a deep soul craving to fill his soul. Watchmen have to stay up all through the night with darkness, cold, fatigue, and fear creeping and draining on them. The daytime meant rest, warmth, comfort, and the end of a night full of woes. Are our souls longing for the morning, for Jesus to arrive and take away all darkness and fear?
Psalm 130: 7-8
A heart in love with Jesus knows that Christ not only died to forgive us but he rose to redeem us. A heart with an eternal hope in God's promised redemption for his people! Redemption is coming. Our redeemer lives and he will redeem us from all our sin. Not just forgive it but change it, transform it, and use it for our redemption and good. We get to embrace our redemption stories and are no longer slaves to our sin, but can now share our past and present sin to show how gracious our Lord is to redeem it an use it for his glory.
Revelation 2:7b
This brings us back to the final verse of this letter. The repentant, forgiven sinners whose hearts have been changed to love Jesus will get to freely eat of the tree of life for all of eternity. And this is not only a promise of eternal life but a promise of redemption. Our first fall from grace in Genesis will be forgiven, restored, and redeemed. God's people will be spiritually and physically alive with Jesus in the place he created for them. His creation will be restored and redeemed for all of eternity. That Creation will once again be back in order. We will have eternity with our Lord Jesus.
Revelation gives us a glimpse of the beauty of what this might look like, and I would like to close by charging you to have a heart filled with love that hopes in the redemption described in Revelation 22:1-5.
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