Revelation 2:1-7

Sermon Notes

Revelation: The Hope of Glory

Vision      Chapters       Content
1                  1 – 3               7 churches
2                 4-8:1              7 seals
3                  8:2-11            7 trumpets
4                  12 – 14           Battle against Satan
5                  15-16             7 bowls
6                  17 – 19           Downfall of Babylon
7                  20 – 22          New Heavens & New Earth

Revelation 2:1-7 – The Letter to the Church at Ephesus

7 Letters to 7 Churches exhibit a common pattern:

• City/ Name of the church
• Reference to Christ from ch. 1
• Commendation
• Accusation
• Exhortation
• The summons to hear and heed
• Motivating promise

“The gospel pulls us into community. One of the immediate changes that the gospel makes is grammatical: we instead of I; our instead of my; us instead of me.”
Eugene Peterson, Reversed Thunder

Letter to Ephesus:

• Jesus Christ: Holds the 7 stars in His right hand & walks among the 7 lampstands
• Commendation: I know your works deeds, doctrinal purity, patient endurance/perseverance
• Admonition: Abandoned/forsaken your first love
• Exhortation: Remember, Repent, Return…[repeat]
• Summons to hear/heed
• Motivation: “to the one who overcomes I will grant to eat of the Tree of Life”

What can TVC learn from this letter to the church at Ephesus?

• When it comes to repentance, what do we ultimately need to repent from?
• What does it mean to really love Jesus?
• What does the Bible teach about how Jesus responds to repenting sinners?
• How do we hear/heed God best?
• How can we stir up our affections and rekindle our love for Christ?

” I want deliberately to encourage this mighty longing after God. The lack of it has brought us to our present low estate. The stiff and wooden quality about our religious lives is a result of our lack of holy desire. Complacency is a deadly foe of all spiritual growth. Acute desire must be present or there will be no manifestation of Christ to His people. He waits to be wanted. Too bad that with many of us He waits so long, so very long, in vain.”
A. W. Tozer

“You can’t get second things by putting them first; you can get second things only by putting first things first.”
C. S . Lewis

“When we first encounter God’s saving love, it may well overwhelm us. But over a period of years it becomes a familiar part of the landscape, one religious item among many others. The vocabulary of salvation becomes hackneyed, reduced to the level of valentine-card verse. The mannerisms of the saved become predictable. Whenever we are associated with greatness over a long period of time, there is a tendency in us to become stale. What we first experienced (in our faith, in our marriage, in our children, in our career, in the landscape) as earthshaking and soul-changing vision and adventure, we now take for granted. “We lose, in the language of the Apocalypse, our ‘first love.’ We preserve its importance by assigning the event a date on the calendar or by describing it under a doctrinal head. Orthodoxy is preserved even while intimacy is lost.”
Eugene Peterson, Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work