Tag: work

Seven Churches 1: Ephesus (Revelation 2:1-7)

Revelation 2:1-7

There’s probably someone in your life whose opinion of you is important to you. This is somebody whom you long to please. It may be a spouse, a parent, a boss, or some other significant figure in your life. I tell a story in my book about how I longed for my parents to be pleased with my school reports, and how I misunderstood their unconditional acceptance of me.

For Christians, and for churches, the One whose opinion of us we cherish is Jesus. And when we come to the so-called ‘Letters to the seven churches’ in Revelation, we get to hear what Jesus thinks of the churches to whom Revelation is addressed.

They are not really seven letters. The whole of Revelation is an elaborate letter, and these are seven royal pronouncements about the churches.

But we are going to look at these seven royal pronouncements about the churches in the coming weeks. We are going to see what Jesus thought of those churches and use that as a way of considering what he might think of us.

The pronouncements are very similar in their style. They start by describing Jesus, using some of the material about him in Revelation chapter 1. They end with a call to hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches, and a blessing for the obedient. In between, we usually find both praise and criticism (although sometimes it’s only one and not the other).

If we’re going to concentrate on what Jesus thinks of each church, most of these sermons will focus in on the praise and the criticism. And that’s largely what we’ll do today with the congregation at Ephesus.

Firstly, what’s good about the congregation at Ephesus?

Jesus lists seven good things about them, which for simplicity I’m going to summarise as three: hard work, right living, and right belief.

Hard work can be seen in the way Jesus says,

2 I know your deeds, your hard work and your perseverance. …

3 You have persevered and have endured hardships for my name, and have not grown weary.

Hard-working people who keep going in the face of difficulty and even opposition are often the backbones of many churches. We know those people who will always take on something that needs doing, however busy they already are. Many of our churches stand or fall on the old maxim, ‘If you want a job done, ask a busy person.’ It’s been said that many churches are like a football match: twenty-two thousand people in the crowd desperately in need of exercise watching twenty-two people on the pitch desperately in need of a rest. What we do without our ‘twenty-two people desperately in need of a rest’? Churches would close without them.

And we know people who keep on loyally serving the church, even when other people are making snide remarks about them.

Right living appears when Jesus says,

I know that you cannot tolerate wicked people (verse 2b) …

6 But you have this in your favour: you hate the practices of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.

Some churches are very lax in what they accept in terms of the lifestyle of their members. They won’t hear anything against their friends. Woe betide someone who comes in – be they a minister or another church member – and says that something is wrong: then look to see how the church reacts.

It happened to a friend of mine who began as a probationer minister at the same time as me. He discovered two Boys’ Brigade leaders conducting a sexually immoral relationship and when he said he wouldn’t sign the form to re-appoint them, a group of church members threatened to march on the manse and smash the windows in.

But at least the congregation at Ephesus knew how to oppose evil. Good for them.

Right belief features at the end of verse 2:

you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them false. (verse 2c)

It’s utterly important to follow right belief. Christianity is a religion based on truth. We need to know the truth about God. It’s simply no good just to say, “I like to believe in God this way,” if ‘this way’ is unrelated to what we learn about God in Holy Scripture. We cannot follow our fancies and what pleases us.

That’s why it dismayed me when I once heard a committed member of a congregation say, “I like having all the different preachers each week, so that I can hear all different opinions about God.” Friends, the job of the preacher is to preach biblical truth. Any deviation from that is unacceptable. It leads us astray spiritually.

So when the congregation at Ephesus opposes these false apostles who have ridden into town with their unique teaching, I say good for them. They are doing something vital. I wish it happened more in Methodist churches. We set our standards too low at times.

There is plenty of reason, then, to commend the church at Ephesus. Indeed, they are doing things that we could do more of. Hard work, even in the face of opposition; a commitment to right living; a desire to stay faithful to the truth of the Gospel. How I would love to see more of these things in our churches today, rather than places where ten per cent of the members do ninety per cent of the work, and where anything goes morally or doctrinally.

But did you also get a sense of a harshness of tone when you heard about what was good at Ephesus? That’s where we come to the second thing we need to look at: what’s bad about the congregation at Ephesus?

That can be summed up in verses 4 and 5:

4 Yet I hold this against you: you have forsaken the love you had at first. 5 Consider how far you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first. If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place.

‘You have forsaken the love you had at first.’ Other translations say, ‘You have lost your first love.’

Jesus doesn’t say what love they have forsaken. Is it love for God or love for neighbour? Well, since Jesus holds loving God and loving our neighbour together as the two greatest commandments, it’s probably both. If we truly love God, we also love our neighbour.

If the Ephesians have lost love of God and of neighbour, then no wonder all their good qualities still sounded rather harsh. Loving God and loving our neighbour, all in response to God’s love for us in Christ, is the foundation of Christian living. The Ephesians have got rid of the foundations and although they don’t realise it, their Christian faith is collapsing.

It is out of love for God that we work hard for the church. It is out of love for our neighbour that we long for right living. It is out of love for God that we want to believe the right things about him (and worship him appropriately as a result).

But sometimes we get so caught up in the busyness of working hard for the church, of defending holy living, and advocating the truth about God, that we forget to nurture the relationship of love. We forget our first love. When we see Christianity as all about being busy and forget that it is a relationship of love, we begin to chip away at the foundations of our faith, and we risk it collapsing one day.

It is urgent for every Christian to nourish a relationship of love with our God, and let the ways in which he is calling us to love our neighbours flow out of that. We cannot just come to church on Sunday and let that be the sum total of our engagement with God. Would a marriage survive if a couple only ever spoke to each other once a week? Why then do we think we can do that with our faith in God?

I decided when I came here that the regular pattern of prayer and Bible reading I had been following each day for many years had become rather stale. I have started combing around for other ways of maintaining my devotional life. But if I end up with nothing then my spiritual life will wither away. I need to give attention to this. So, I believe, does every Christian.

Jesus talks about removing the lampstand if we let go of our first love. According to Revelation chapter 1, the lampstand represents the church. What he is saying is that the church dies when we don’t prioritise our first love of loving God and loving our neighbour.

I believe that the Holy Spirit is warning many churches and Christians today that we get so obsessed with the mechanics of church life that we forget the very source of life, our relationship of love with God in Christ that then inspires us to love our neighbours.

And therefore when we do neglect our first love, the church dies. We ponder why traditional churches are declining and closing in our society, and while a fair amount of that is due to us living in a society that has rejected the Christian faith and embraced beliefs and lifestyles that are hostile to Christianity, it is also true that some of the decline is down to us. We have forsaken our first love.

So you will find that I regularly emphasise the need to read our Bibles prayerfully every day to grow our relationship with Christ. It is not an optional extra for keen Christians: it is essential for every Christian.

If you want to know more, then I can soon talk with you about different ways of reading and experiencing the Bible prayerfully. It may involve Bible reading notes, it may involve using some ancient practices of the church to meditate on Scripture. But whatever it is, let’s do it.

If we want to

eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God (verse 7)

that is, participate in God’s new creation, then we need to make developing our relationship with our God our first priority. If we are serious about building our faith and building for the kingdom of God, this is where we start.

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Restoring Work (Easter 5 Resurrection People 6) John 21:1-14

John 21:1-14

Christians are a little too good at times at keeping God in a box. One of the ways we do that is we put him in a church box. The only place we think we’ll encounter God is in a church setting.

But people who do that haven’t read the Gospels very carefully. Much more of the action with Jesus is not at the synagogue or the Temple but in daily life.

And if the Resurrection (and the Ascension) make Jesus present everywhere then we can meet him at the breakfast table, at the shops, and at our place of work, as the disciples did here.

How do we feel about that? Are there times when we would rather he wasn’t there? I remember a Christian businessman saying, ‘On Sundays, my priorities are first, God, second, my family, and third, my work. On Mondays, those priorities are reversed.’

Does this truth make us feel uncomfortable, or is it good news? If, like that businessman, we’re clearly uncomfortable with the prospect, reflect with me now, because actually, it’s good news that the risen Lord is present everywhere, including work.

Firstly, the risen Lord is present to guide our work.

Peter and the lads are experienced fishermen. By going fishing at night they have opted for the time commonly accepted to be the most productive for fishermen on the Sea of Galilee. Yet they catch nothing. Not even some plankton.

Why on earth – apart from desperation – would they take instructions from Jesus, who had been a carpenter, not a fisherman? What does he know?

Well, he must know something, because one of those little unexplained details of the story is that he has already got some fish and is cooking them on the beach!

Of course, as readers of the Gospel, we know he’s more than a carpenter, he’s the Risen Lord. Those pesky fish that Peter and his friends are trying to catch are part of the creation he oversaw.

And furthermore, in that creation the human race was assigned work as a good thing, for it was part of the stewardship of creation under God which is the human calling.

So it makes complete sense that the risen Lord is interested in the disciples’ fishing work. It isn’t inferior because it’s not overtly religious. It isn’t inferior because this is what several of them left to follow Jesus. It’s still valuable as part of what makes for a flourishing world as God designed it.

The same is true for us, whether we do paid work or whether we volunteer, whether we need the income, or whether in retirement we are free to dedicate our time to other causes.

Therefore our risen Lord has a genuine interest in our work, and that involves him guiding us in that as much as in any church decision. Our work is to be a matter for prayer as much as any other aspect of our lives.

Are there areas of our paid work or our volunteering where we are struggling? Have we thought that this was secular and not religious, and therefore not brought it to God? That would be a sad mistake.

You may be an employee or self-employed. You may be a business owner. Or you may be a student. Or you are using free time to make a difference as a volunteer. Jesus is risen and alive and cares about what you are doing. Don’t be afraid to involve him. He wants to be involved.

So bring him that staffing decision. Bring him that knotty problem your lecturer set. Bring him the moral issue you’re wrestling with. He is interested, and he is present to help.

Secondly, the risen Lord is present to give purpose to our work.

I once had a manager who was the sort of person who lived to work. This was a problem for most of her staff, who generally worked to live. The office was everything to Mrs Freeman, and she couldn’t understand those who didn’t see it that way.

Why were the rest of us different? Well, for a few, they had spouses who earned a lot more and so their earnings weren’t a life and death issue. But for many, it was because work was not a place of fulfilment but of frustration or tedium. It certainly wasn’t a fulfilling experience.

I think many people would identify with the latter group. We’ve replaced the Seven Dwarfs’ song ‘Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work we go’ with ‘I owe, I owe, it’s off to work I go.’

And as I’ve said to you before, I’ve had that same experience of frustration and tedium in the ministry just as I did in the office. Those who romantically look on at my work and think it must be some kind of uninterrupted heavenly bliss have never got close to a manse family.

I have also testified before that the Bible verse which just about kept me going during the worst of times was 1 Corinthians 15:58, the climax to Paul’s great chapter on the Resurrection, where he says that a great consequence of Christ being risen from the dead is that our labour is not in vain.

If you remember the sin of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3, you will recall that when God finds them he pronounces various curses on them and the snake. One of those curses is that Adam will find work to be frustrating. The Good News of salvation in the Resurrection reverses this curse, just as it reverses our separation from God by sin.

We heard that promise when we also read Isaiah 65:17-25 in the service:

21 They will build houses and dwell in them;
    they will plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
22 No longer will they build houses and others live in them,
    or plant and others eat.
For as the days of a tree,
    so will be the days of my people;
my chosen ones will long enjoy
    the work of their hands.
23 They will not labour in vain,
    nor will they bear children doomed to misfortune;
for they will be a people blessed by the Lord,
    they and their descendants with them.

Surely Peter and his colleagues in the boat had a sense of this when they dragged their huge catch to shore. After the fruitlessness of the night, now their purpose was fulfilled. They had fish. They could sell fish. They could make a living.

Not everything will be put right now. The vision of complete fulfilment awaits the ‘new heavens and new earth’ of which Isaiah 65 and Revelation 21 speak. (Which implies, by the way, that there will be work to do in the life to come – but it will be fulfilling work.)

However, we can ask the risen Lord whose resurrection promises that coming new heavens and new earth to help us find purpose and meaning in what we are doing now. It may be the chance to serve. It may be creative management of the earth and its resources.

Sure, while sin lasts there will still be frustration. But as the new creation begins to poke through, the risen Lord will bring purpose and meaning to what we do. Let us ask him to make that clear for us.

Thirdly and finally, the risen Lord is present to bless our work.

One hundred and fifty-three fish! Bulging, over-filled, and heavy nets! This is clearly way more than a normal catch!

Over the centuries, various scholars have tried to find symbolic meaning or significance in the number 153, and maybe that’s not surprising, given the many layers of meaning we often find in John’s Gospel. However, those attempts have largely failed, and perhaps we just need to default to a simple explanation.

Somebody counted the fish. The risen Lord had blessed the work of his disciples’ hands.

In Ephesians 3:20 the Apostle Paul tells that prayer can lead to God doing

Immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us.

There is no reason to confine that promise to church work. Paul places no such limit. And this story shows that we can seek God’s blessing through the risen Christ in every part of life, including work such as paid employment, studies, and volunteering.

How significant might that be in the economic situation we are now facing? As prices increase at a rate we haven’t seen for thirty years, as manufacturers’ costs go up, and as household budgets get squeezed to the point where more families are having to make impossible choices, would this not be a great time to ask the risen Lord to bless our work?

So what are the needs of your employer, your educational institution, or your charity? Pray that the risen Lord will be present to bless.

Yes, let’s increase the range of people and causes that we pray God will bless. Not churches and the sick, but all sorts of elements in society. As you walk along the high street in the village, why not pray a blessing on the businesses? OK, there will be one or two whose business you will consider inappropriate for blessing, such as the betting shops, but why not pray that blessing?

The prophet Jeremiah told those Jews who were forcibly taken into Babylonian exile that they should ‘seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which [God] has carried [them] into exile’ (Jeremiah 29:7).

This makes for an interesting challenge: instead of complaining about our society, why don’t we instead pray blessing upon it through the risen Christ?

In conclusion, because the risen Christ is present everywhere to bless we need to get rid of our old sacred/secular divide. Jesus doesn’t see things like that. As one preacher once put it, ‘The only thing that is secular is sin.’

No, see the whole creation as the arena for our risen Lord to be at work, because his Resurrection is the first sign of him making that entire creation new.

And let that vision of the Risen One who transformed the fishing expedition of his friends be one that inspires us to pray and to believe that he also wants to transform our work, our studies, our volunteering, our work in our homes and families.

Because all of those are part of the creation he is renewing. Let’s join him in his work – in prayer and in action.

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