“Nevertheless I have this against you, that you have left your first love.”
Nevertheless I have this against you
Although Ephesus has many fine qualities as a church (Re 2:2,3), yet they do have a fatal fault. There was something amiss in this church. Jesus now passes from commendation to condemnation. It is possible to both have distinction and disrepute at the same time. Jesus notes both their strengths and their weaknesses.
“I have” indicates that this charge is still outstanding against the Ephesian church. Nothing has changed it so far. They have done nothing about it. It may be that they spent so much time under combat conditions that they suffered from combat fatigue spiritually. They took their eyes off the Lord. They became more task oriented than person oriented.
The church at Ephesus faced two problems, one from without and one from within. We found the problem of without in verse two, false teachers. Now we come to the problem within, loss of love for the Lord. He no longer had the pre-eminence in their lives any longer. They gave their lives to other priorities.
that you have left your first love
The word “left” means to leave, leave alone, forsake and neglect. The Ephesians distanced themselves from their first love. They no longer loved the Lord Jesus as they did when they first came to Christ.
The phrase “your first love” precedes the phrase “you have left” (in the Greek) making the first phrase very emphatic. They not only took their eyes off the Lord but they lost fellowship with Him. The principle is that regardless of how much the Bible you may know, regardless of how much you serve Him, regardless of past victories, we cannot walk with the Lord without loving Him.
What is our “first” love? It is the love that we knew for the Lord when we first became Christians. At that time, we had a great sense of gratitude for sins forgiven.
Forty years after the establishment of the church in Ephesus they still held to sound doctrine and worked ardently for the Lord, yet they did not love Him as much as at the beginning. This may be due to a second-generation problem. Most of the congregation was by now second generation.
The problem of the church at Ephesus was not their orthodoxy but their orthopraxy. They lost red-hot love for the Lord. This was so serious that He says in the next verse that He will remove the church from existence if they do not deal with it. This eventually happened when Islam invaded Turkey and wiped out Christianity in Ephesus.
PRINCIPLE:
Orthodoxy and service do not displace love for the Lord.
APPLICATION:
Today many churches stand in danger of becoming churches without influence and impact. They will exist as orthodox but inconsequential churches. Few, if any, people will come to Christ through these churches. The people will not experience the reality of walking with the Lord.
There is a tendency for our love for Christ to cool down if we take Him for granted. Has your heart grown cold toward the Lord? This has the same effect on the Lord as on your wife when your love grows cold toward her.
It is possible for our Christianity to become merely an orthodox routine. It is possible to walk with the Lord in many wonderful areas yet have one fatal flaw. The church may run smoothly. People may serve willingly. No scandals destroy the reputation of the church yet the inner dynamics imperceptibly run dry. Decline creeps in so gradually that we do not notice our heart growing cold.
The honeymoon of your Christian walk is long gone. Your love for the Lord has grown cold. You are orthodox. Your loyalty to truth is unquestionable but your love is cold. Your fellowship with the Lord dwindled to a low ebb. You no longer enjoy spiritual joy. Your Christian life is routine and apathetic. You are mechanical in your Christianity. You do not love other Christians as you once did.
We lose the ability to assess objectively our spiritual life when we do not acknowledge this creeping pattern. Instead of dealing with our sins, we justify ourselves. We judge others instead of judging ourselves. We become critical and censorious. We are no longer passionate about evangelism. Compassion diminishes into something very feeble.
In the next few verses, the Holy Spirit says to “remember” and “repent.” These actions are the solution to a cold heart. The church needs both work and worship. There is no tension between the two. Work grows out of worship. If work does not come out of worship, then our motive is not from love.
Thanks for this – very helpful insights! May we all exercise and attend to the love we have instead of becoming ‘smarter sinners’ whose lives are relatively unchanged.
Thanks Will.
thanks for this.it helps me to reflect more.
Thanks for the comment Kenn
It is resurrecting, refreshing,and redirecting. Thank you very much for dedicating life in making this exposition available for us. God bless you and always is my prayer. Pastor Abraham A. Malayo
Thank you for your commentary on this. It helps me to understand better and asses myself in studying this book.
Thank you as well Jay
First of all Dr Grant, I would like to say how much I thoroughly enjoy your commentary. I’m going through a Revelation Bible study right now at my church and I’m just not understanding much. I’m becoming so frustrated that I feel like giving up. But your commentaries have made it easy to understand.
While reading through Revelation 2:4, I think I may have discovered a typo. I sincerely hope that you don’t mind my pointing this out….
In the fifth paragraph of the "Application" part, on the second line, where its reads “Instead of deal with our sins…” should that read “Instead of dealing with our sins…?”
Maeflower, thank you very much for calling attention to the type. I have corrected. Please notify me if you see any others.
Dr. Grant,
Thank you for really hitting the nail in the head: may my work come naturally as a result of worship. If work does not come out of worship, then my motive is not from love. May we always cherish our first love, Jesus Christ, the Author and Finisher of our faith. God bless you richly!
Julia
In this paragraph the word love referees the word agape. And it forms as a noun not as a verb. The Ephesians church left their first love not to Jesus. They did many things for Jesus. They persisted steadfastly, endured much for the sake of His name, and have not grown weary. The first love is love for the Church. It represents the feminine noun of the word implying not the act of loving but the object our love. In other words they are not stoping love , they are stop having a love. ( also recommend study Ephesians to grasp more). Therefore the Holy Spirit uses the feminine word of love and Jesus is not a girl. It shows His bride, His only love… The church.
God bless!!!!
Daniel,
Note that in the Greek the stress is on the adjective “first.” One of the issues in interpreting this verse is what does the word “first” mean. Does it mean first in the early days of the church in Ephesus? The joys of the time when we were first converted often does not continue throughout the years of the Christian life. In this case the Ephesian church needed to repent of their apathetic love toward the Lord and fellow believers. Therefore, the word “first” does not mean their primary love but the love they had at the beginning of their salvation. The church was filled with second and third generation Christians.
The context is the Lord speaking as the Lord of the lampstands—the church. Scholars differ as to whether the word ἀγάπην refers to love for each other (as you say) or whether it refers to love for the Lord. Yet, another group of scholars make the term to refer to both love for each other and for the Lord. Your interpretation is a possibility but it cannot be dogmatically asserted.
Since John uses a noun for “love,” there is no object required. However, if he uses an event as an occasion for the word the idea would be “you no longer love as you once did.”
The word ἀγάπην is noun, accusative, singular, feminine contained in a subordinate clause with the syntactic force of a direct object. ἀγάπην is modified by the definite article. It is also modified by the pronoun σου. It is modified by its adjectival relation. Therefore, it is dangerous to extrapolate the feminine as exclusively referring to the church in this context; it probably in my view refers to the principle that the Ephesians lost their first love for the Lord and for fellow believers that they had when they first believed. We need to syntactically view how John uses ἀγάπην in this context.
Thanks for reminding me
Thank God for this revelation,I am bless. God bless you.
Thanks this was helpful !
Thank you for this insightful teaching.
Thank you Dr. Grant, for this commentary, I hope we can get for all the churches and if possible for the entire Book of Revelation. In addition, it is impossible to claim that we love God who we have not seen if we do not love our neighbors whom we have seen (1 John 4:20) – Scripture interpretes scripture, let’s help each other grow orthodoxically and orthopraxically!
Sophy, I am not sure if you implied that all of Revelation is not available, but it is. Use the “Navigate to a passage,” then choose “book,” where you chose a book of the Bible, then another popup occurs, where you can choose the verse you want. Also, if you wish to go to the next study, just click on the verse in the upper right corner.
It seems to me that we are splitting hairs if we choose to think that either the referance to ” first love” refers to love of Jesus or the love that first generartion Ephasus Christians had for one another.Where our relatioship with God is solid this will show in the love we have for one another so a relationship exists between the two. This is taking into account that we are all working out our Salvation.
I think the context of the church being under persecution is unfamiliar to many western Christians.I would think that it would be easy to lose you way under these circumstances especially when at times things may have seemed unjust.
Chris, it is difficult at times to distinguish between the Greek subjective and objective genitive. The decision between the two rests on the context.
SO…. here is my take (leaning not on my own understanding and allowing Scripture to interpret Scripture… God SO loved the world that He told them the truth. And while Jesus was full of compassion…He was not full of compromise and has shown to be perfect in all things and that even in the garden before crucifixion..He (being fully God and fully Man had asked if there was any other way…for this cup to be taken from Him… He didn’t go to the cross guilty of the sin of idolatry…but did everything by the will of the Father. (even though Jesus is GOD with us.)
So….while people may argue over whether we love God or people… we need to love people the way God did…
God so loved the world to tell them the Truth about their hearts condition and the path needs to be corrected in the way that forgiveness is available to ALL. As Jesus died for the sins of the world…not that God desires that ANY should perish, but that ALL would repent and trust in faith Jesus for their Lord and Savior….
So if our first love was a carnal one…. We would be feeding into the old nature (that we are told to as born again Christ Jesus followers to DIE TO that old nature on a daily. So it is my understanding that the first Love is that of a TRUE Love and not the world’s love as we are told to not love the world and to be in and not OF it….
So I think this all goes back to the Gospel and we can point out the truth in love…recognizing that works outside of faith are like dirty rags, (anything not done in faith …is called sin)… so we’re needing Jesus to cleanse us before we are even able to do any deeds that aren’t considered sin… on the other side …faith without deeds is dead. Like lip service where the mouth speaks one thing and the heart is far from God.
When He says …. why do you call yourselves by My Name and not do what I tell you… I believe with all my heart that this is in reference to sharing the Gospel (in and out of season to the ends of the earth)… Jesus died for the forgiveness of all and while we COULD point all the flaws out to those that are either already aware and are being sanctified and it could come across as judgemental…..OR it could be the Holy Spirit using another brother or sister in the Lord to encourage eachother in the saving faith of Jesus where we hold each other accountable and to spurn each other on to live according to the place we are going…on the other side…if we skip repentance and faith and share the adoption model and focus on purpose and step all around the gospel to appeal to the esteeming of the individual…without the forgiveness of sin…. this is a different gospel and there will be those that got “plugged in” to find their “purpose” only to be told by Jesus, I never knew you….and called them workers of iniquity. (big identity problem there) I know this response is ALL over the place…but I truly think we should start with the Gospel. If we start labeling people “good”…without the blood of Jesus covering their debt for sinning…we basically tell God that Jesus’s sacrifice was in vain…cuz there was a way for someone to be good on their own without Someone needing to die…
The old nature wants to continue to rule and reign in the vessel it was in charge of….and this is what I believe is Paul’s “thorn in the flesh” and yet God reminded him that His grace was sufficient and that it is BY THIS GRACE that we are SAVED THROUGH FAITH. (emphasizing…not yelling) HAHA!
Sorry to be potentially all over the place in my thoughts…but I’ll just add, let those that have ears hear what the Spirit is saying….
So what church in Revelation would I fit in? HAHA!
Grounds keeper would be fine…. I would have an eternity to still be thankful for Jesus giving me a clean slate and allowing me to be part of His eternal life package that comes with trusting that His life in exchange for mine was not by my life being SO worth it where He put me in a higher position than His throne…. but knowing that this was the ONLY way for man to be able to have a RIGHT relationship with God… His Truth vs our opinion…. He trumps all!
Jeffery, yes.
Thanks, your explanation was helpful to me.
May God increase your thought.
Helpful and cool, thank you