Do the things that you did at first

Read Revelation 2:1-7

Last week we examined Paul’s words to the elders in Ephesus.  He told them that he had given all that he was and could be to them while he was with them.  Now it was their turn to lead and shepherd and defend the gospel against all attacks.

We consider the church in Ephesus and get a snapshot of this body’s life at some point after Paul’s counsel.   We will leave the angel of the church and the seven churches of this letter for another day and proceed directly to Christ’s counsel.

So let’s get to it.  What about Ephesus?  They had good deeds, they worked hard, and they persevered.  It sounds like they were running a good race.

On top of that, they did not tolerate wickedness.  They defended the gospel against those claiming to come with authority but who twisted the words of the Christ.  There were even some really bad actors out there called the Nicolaitans and the church sized them up as enemies of the Lord and stood against them.

It’s not that they hated these people but they hated what they did.  Jesus said, “Me too.”

As you read this first part, it sounds like the beginning of the citation for a meritorious service medal and then we come to what we translate as the word yet. Yet, I hold this against you.

That sure messes up the award ceremony.  Yet, I hold this against you.  Hold what against them?

You have forsaken your first love.

Think of the days and weeks and months after you were saved.  Some would say that you were on fire for the Lord.  Everything somehow was about sharing the love of God that you knew in Christ Jesus.  You were singing and living, All to Jesus I surrender.  All to him I freely give.

You were in love with the Lord.  The story varies some with each person, but there was something very special in the beginning.  It’s something that is hard to sustain and easy to lose or let atrophy.

It’s something that can move from passion to intellect almost unnoticed.  A church body can go from passion to programs and think they are doing just fine.  Programs are great until they leave the passion for loving God and each other behind.

It seems like a church can be doing everything the right way without doing the right things.  A church without love for God and love for each other at its core is hollow, but not hopeless, for there is counsel.

Repent and do the things you did at first.

We have been talking about repentance for a few weeks.  Most of the time we think of repenting and turning away and leaving behind the evil ways of the world. That’s exactly what we should do.  I think most here have done that and are on their journey of discipleship striving to please the Lord.

We want to please the Lord.  We want to love the Lord.  He first loved us!  He sent his son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.  We live in the mercy and grace and favor of the Lord and we want to passionately respond in love.

 But do we sometimes just get into a, drift into, find ourselves in more form than function?  Are we saying the right things and doing good things but leaving out the passion we had at first?  How would we know?

Is Sunday worship where you are supposed to be or where your heart tells you that you have to be?

Do we rejoice with everyone who comes through our doors?

Do we see the face of God in everyone we meet, even the ones ranting against him?

Do we long for people to know the peace that we know?

Do we have a contingency plan if this Jesus stuff doesn’t work out or all we all in?

When we say The Lord’s Prayer together, is it rote recitation or does knowing the words help us communicate?  Does knowing the words help us commune with the Lord?

Do we ever just go through the motions in worship, or on Wednesday night, or in life?

Do we try to put God’s word into formulas?

Do we try to fit God into a box?

Do we want everything to fit into our own understanding?

Have we forsaken our first love and exchanged it for some equation about life?

Do we take life for granted or have we learned to number our days?

What if, we find ourselves drifting away from the passion that we once had?  We are told there is a cure.  Repent and do the things that you did at first.  These are not new things to learn but resumption of the passion you had in the beginning.

We have a consciousness about us that warns us about sin.  We try to stay away from those things that are not pleasing to God.  But what about the less than obvious stuff.  What about one day becoming like another?

What about just wanting to get through the song instead of making it an offering to God?  Is there a dichotomy between what your lips are singing and a joyful sound?

What about, “Oh man, another Wednesday night?”

What about, “Gotta have that dollar for Martha or a for a goat and two chickens?”

What about, “Gotta make my tithe?”

What about, “Gotta read my Sunday school lesson?”

How many times do we just go on to the next thing?

There is something special about life.  There is something special about love.  There is something special about God’s love for us and how we respond to it.

If we have lost what is special, then get it back!  Repent and do the things you did at first.

Is there a reward in the age to come?  Of course, there is.  Your will enjoy paradise!  That’s cool beans.  We know that part.

But what about now?

I will tell you from experience that life lived with purpose and passion far exceeds one lived just to make it to the next day.  We are designed for so much more than existence.

God knew us before he formed us in the womb.  We are fearfully and wonderfully made and we know what to do.  Do the things we did at first.  Do the things we did when we first came to Jesus.

I like to prepare for worship.  I send out the worship bulletin at the beginning of the week so others can prepare as well.  Being prepared for worship does not deprive us of spontaneity, it facilitates it.  Preparation facilitates passion.

I like to look for blind spots.  I can’t always see my own blind spots but God has put us together as a body so we can help each other, not to condemn our shortcoming but to help us navigate out of them.

I love an editor.  They will challenge you.  I remember about 25 years ago; I sent an article to the U. S. Naval Proceedings.  It is the premier professional journal for the Navy and Marine Corps.  This was the best article that I had ever written.

The editor called back and said we like it.  Cut 250 words.

What?  There was not a wasted word in the whole thing, or so I thought.  I took the challenge and discovered how much better it could be after cutting out those words.  Realize that you don’t just pull out words here and there.  You rewrite and rewrite and review and rewrite.

That would suck the life out of you unless you had a passion to write.  The second and third and twenty-third rewrite had as much passion as the first.

I love a real editor who knows his stuff.  They renew the passion that led you to write in the first place.

Jesus gives us life and life abundant and life eternal.  If we need to rewrite something in our lives, we do it with the same passion that we wrote the first draft of our response to his grace.

The result is that we are on fire without burning out.  The passion for our Lord and for each other continues.  There is no form over function in our programs.  Their function is to share the love of God.

Some of you may not relate to my writing illustration.  I get that.  There are few of us with that passion, but most of you can relate to some form of athletic competition.  You played football or basketball.  You ran track or played baseball or softball.

In the beginning, you had an eagerness to learn and do better, but at some point, you felt comfortable about your skills.  You went from game to game with confidence but without improvement.  Thank the Lord for that person who is losing both their hair and their voice known as the coach.

Praise the Lord for the person who sees what we need to work on and challenges us work on it with renewed passion.

I know that you have all seen terrible coaches that can only scream at you when you make a mistake.  Move those images out of you mind and replace them with one who sharpens your skills, who challenges you to do the best that you can with your skill set.

You don’t always have to learn something new.  You just need to apply the same passion you did at first to those basics that come into play game after game.

Sometimes we have bad habits.  What do we do?  Repent and do the things you did at first.  Sometimes it takes a coach to see those habits.  Drop the bad habit and get back to basics with the passion you had when you started.

How many of you have ever played on a team that the day before you called and cancelled the game because your opponent was too tough?  Who does that?

Nobody does that.  Some teams probably should do that if all they can do is worry about how badly they are going to lose.  Many, and I would venture to say most, take to heart what their coaches say and put passion into improvement.

It’s not that you have a bad team or a bunch of bad skills; it’s that you need some passion on some of the basics—passion like you had at first.

We have been saved from sin and death.  We will spend eternity with our Lord. This life that we live now is our discipleship or the fullness of our salvation.  We need counsel more than we need condemnation.  We need coaching more than we need counsel. 

So when we hear, you have lost your first love, we don’t hang our heads and mope around.  We get ready for the correction.  In this case, it’s drop the bad habit do the things that you did at first. 

We are teachable.  We are coachable.  We hunger for being able to live every day with passion without burning out.

Let’s love one another with the same passion that kids go camp with.

Let’s spread the gospel with the same passion that we share when school is closed for weather.

Let’s hunger for God’s word with the same passion that we have for a steak dinner.

Let’s learn to live each day with the same passion for the Lord that we did at first.

Let’s turn away from things that we are only doing in form and return to the things we do with passion.

Repent and do the things we did at first!

Love like we first loved!

Amen.

Innocent of your blood

Read Acts 20:22-36

Have you ever had any regrets?  Do you have those things that you wish you hadn’t done or perhaps things that you wish you had done but the opportunity came and went?

We have all missed opportunities.  We have transposed the look before you leap counsel and just dived in.

We have done some stuff that we regret.  Maybe it hurt someone.  Maybe it was just stupid.

I remember in high school, my friend had a car with something that looked like a deer whistle on the front of each side of the hood.  I think maybe they had little lights in them or maybe they were just for looks.  I don’t know that part.

One day we were going from one end of the school to the other and most of us were walking.  My friend pulls up and says, hop on.  It was only a hundred yards or so, so I hopped on the hood with my legs hanging outboard.  All went well.  Sure, he gunned it but I was just fine, at least I thought I was.

Little did I know that when I hopped on that car I would have a Hold my beer moment.  I didn’t have any beer but in retrospect, it was a Hold my beer moment. 

We zipped down the hundred yards in no time and then he put on the brakes.  I slid the length of the hood across those things that were sticking up and landed upright on my feet.

I did feel a little something on my right leg.  It was wet.  I had torn my jeans and torn a chunk of flesh out of my leg.  There was some flesh just hanging off of there.  I couldn’t see it very well but I could feel that flesh just hanging there.

I think my friend who was driving about passed out when he got out and looked at it.

Realize that my Hold my beer moment had not yet come.  I put some athletic tape on it to get me home, thinking that when I took it off, the whole thing might stick back together and be healed.  It wasn’t.  That chunk of flesh was still hanging on the back of my leg.  It was hard to see and harder to do what I did next.  I got some scissors and cut it off, poured some bleach on it, and taped it back up.  I probably stuck a cotton ball in it first.

Duct tape, cotton ball, and bleach—now that’s some redneck first aid. 

Who would do such a thing?

Because I was a high school kid who was not going to admit the level of stupidity that preceded the self-inflicted surgery, I did.  I lived but it wasn’t something I would want to do again. 

We didn’t have a lot of money, but my parents did manage to have enough to get me started in college.  Had I told them about how stupid I was, I figured they would have spent that money on a better investment. 

In hindsight, that whole episode was all on me.  From the moment, I hopped on the hood of that car, I knew I should have just kept on walking.  I knew better.

There are other times when we wish that we had done something that we didn’t.  Maybe it was to try out for the track team or ask a girl out for a date or apply for a job.  We see a lot of things that we didn’t do in the realm of confrontation.

Our minds play tricks on us.  Upon examination, This is what I told that guy turns into That is what I should have told him turns into OK, I wish I had the backbone to have said anything at all.  What you say on Facebook doesn’t count either.

I think that we all have regrets.  We are a forgiven people, but we have some things that we wish we had not done.  I have no doubt that God has taken even our worst mistakes and used them for good.  We are called according to his purpose.  We love him, but we also look back and wonder, What was I thinking?

You know what’s as bad, perhaps worse than the boneheaded mistakes that we made?  The ones that we watch our kids make.  We wish that we could genetically pass on our experience.  We do share our experience with them.  We counsel them, but they have to make their own decisions and their own mistakes.  That’s life.

But sometimes, we counsel others or give them what we believe is very sound advice.  We don’t know if they will take our advice or not.  They are the main stakeholder in this equation.  It’s their call, but we might say, Hey!  This is on you.

Pilate after giving in to the crowd and sending Jesus to the cross, washed his hands.  He was saying that he was innocent of this blood.  He was telling the crowd, This is on you.

You don’t really get to do that in something like Pilate’s case where the ultimate decision is yours.  The blood of Jesus was still on his hands even though he didn’t want to own up to it.

But sometimes we have influence in someone’s life.  Children are an easy example, but as Christians we have influence upon the people whom we know and who we work for or work for us.  We have influence on others in every walk of our life.  But what is our obligation to the way they live their lives?

Paul was headed to Jerusalem.  He wanted to get their by Pentecost so he didn’t stop at every place that he had ministered on his way north and west. 

One place that he did not stop was Ephesus.  He had spend about 3 years their and if he stopped by, then an overnight visit would just not be enough.

So he asked the elders to come meet him at the port.  He wanted to visit but he couldn’t stay long so this was the best option in his mind.

It’s interesting, at least to me, that the stop previously mentioned was in Troas where Paul did spend a little time.  On the first day of the week, he gathered believers, they broke bread, and he preached into the night.  In fact, it says that he preached on and on.

One man was seated in a third-story window and fell asleep.  The text says he fell into a deep sleep.  He wasn’t just nodding off, he was down for the count, or worse.

He fell out of the third story window and was found dead.  Paul brought him back to life. 

You might think that would wrap up the service, but no.  Paul went back inside.  They broke bread and he preached until morning.

Paul preached a man to death and after he brought him back—by the power of the Holy Spirit—he went on preaching.

But at this point in the scripture, Paul is headed to Jerusalem but wants a quick visit with the elders at Ephesus.  It’s important.  He probably won’t see them again.  He has been warned that things might get dicey in Jerusalem, but he is going none the less. 

But it is important that he meet with these men.  These are the leaders of the church and his friends in Christ and he won’t see them again on this earth.

But he also has a message for them.  I am innocent of your blood.

What does this mean?

Paul did not hold anything back.  He preached to these people, lived with these people, was an example for these people, and confronted those who attacked the gospel.

He preached in the assembly and he went house-to-house.  He prepared these men to be overseers of the church.  He prepared them to be shepherds.  He gave everything not only to spreading the gospel in Ephesus but in raising up leaders for the church.

Paul was saying:

You lead.

You defend against the attacks.

You take care of the flock.

This is your charge.  I have held nothing back from you.  Take charge and do your duty.  This is yours going forward.  I gave you everything I had to give.

Jesus told his disciples that as I have loved you so you must love one another.  This raised the bar from love your neighbor as much as you love yourself.  Jesus said he gave everything he had for his followers.

Paul tells these elders that he gave everything he had for them, and that he did not expect to see them again on this earth.  These were parting words, but very intentional words.

Paul was very much in the mindset of to live is Christ and to die is gain.  His death might come soon and he was just fine with that, or he might get to continue his mission and ministry.  We know he got to go to Rome after his trip to Jerusalem.

In this particular encounter, Paul used the words I am innocent of your blood.  I did everything I could possibly do to lead you in the way of the Lord.  I am leaving you ready to shepherd the flock.

He was saying, that when he stood before Jesus he could say without reservation, I did all that I possibly could to save those who could be saved, build your church, and bring glory to God.

What an interesting study.  What a nice to know piece of information.  What an insight into Paul’s life as an apostle, but you know I won’t let you off that easy.

When we stand before Jesus, will we be able to say, I gave it all that I had?

I studied to show myself a workman approved ready for every good work.

I stood my ground against evil and was faithful to you and your word.

I became all things to all people so some might be saved.

I put the words of my Master into practice.

I pressed on towards the goal. I never gave up.

Or…

Will we have some regrets.  Will we recall:

The times we could have shared God’s love and grace but did not.

The instances where we sought our own desires above those of our Master.

The half-hearted effort that we put into our Bible studies.

The casual relationship that we had with our Savior and Lord.

The hopelessness we let govern our decisions.

The days we lived without joy because we trusted our own understanding.

The days that we did not live to the full for any and every reason.

We are saved from sin and death.  We will live eternally with God.  We have an incredible inheritance already stored up for us, but will we have regrets?

There are some things in our past that were terrible, hateful, or just stupid.  Those are forgiven, but what about those things in which we persist?

What about knowing that we need to be the salt of the earth, that people should taste God’s goodness every time they cross our paths?  Are we salt?

What about being a light unto the world?  Are we shining his light every day?

What about loving one another?  Is this a way of life for us yet?

Or, do we have regrets?

It is fantastic to be forgiven and loved in the middle of my ignorance and arrogance and outright stupidity.  What a God of love who took all of this into account before he shed his blood for my sins.

When we stand before Jesus, will we be able to say, I am innocent of their blood.

The ones who I saw every day.

The family that lived across the street.

The family that was barely holding on.

The people who were in line with me for what seemed like forever.

The people I never really forgave.

The ones who needed to see your light in me daily.

The ones who needed to hear your wisdom from me.

The ones who needed to see a godly example in me.

The ones who just needed an encouraging word in their struggle.

I often preach Paul’s words about running the good race, fighting the good fight, and keeping the faith at funeral services.  Those are the easy services.

I like to remind us of Paul’s words that say he became all things to all people so that some might be saved.

I think of studying God’s word to the point of being an exceptional tradesman so that I can practice what I read. 

But today, consider, especially in the context of the most important relationships in our lives, when we say goodbye for the last time, will we be able to say, I am innocent of your blood?

Will we be able to say, I truly repented of the ways of the world and followed God?  I gave you the right example.

Will we be able to say, I gave you everything that I could give to bring you to Christ and live as his disciple?

Will we go forward in this time we have on earth without regrets?

From this point forward, will we do the things that if we don’t do them will produce regret in us?  Will we do the things that will let us say to those whom we love most, I did everything that I could to lead you in the ways of the Lord and prepare you for his service?

Will we?

Amen.

Engaging Ephesians

Engaging Ephesians with homiletic enthusiasm:  AKA growing in grace.

The church located at Ephesus was not one plagued with problems or being led away from one true gospel.  Surely they had their battles, but most of all they were a group of believers who were ready to grow in God’s grace.

Are you worshiping and serving in such a body of believers?  If so, perhaps these messages will help you too grow in his grace.

Chapter 1 – That Predestined word again

Chapter 2 – One in Christ

Chapter 3 – Wisdom of God made know

Chapter 4 – Don’t let the sun go down…

Chapter 5 – Wisdom, Love, & Respect

Chapter 6 – Under His Armor