2+2=5 just doesn’t seem right when we look at it. That is not the way it is supposed to be.

This is the same reaction I have when I read the first part of Revelation 2. It is recorded as follows:

 ¹ “To the angel of the church in Ephesus write: ‘The words of him who holds the seven stars in his right hand,who walks among the seven golden lampstands.

   ² “‘I know your works, your toil and your patient endurance, and how you cannot bear with those who are evil, but have tested those who call themselves apostles and are not, and found them to be false. ³ I know you are enduring patiently and bearing up for my name’s sake, and you have not grown weary. ⁴ But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. ⁵Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first. If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent.

This text relates to the message the Spirit of God reveal to John through Jesus Christ for the church of Ephesus. It starts by making the Ephesians look pretty stinking good. After hearing verses 2 and 3 read aloud to them, they must have been feeling pretty solid, only to have the wind taken out of them in verse 4. Today we bust our bottoms to strive to make verses 2 and 3 characteristic of our own life and the life of our church. We desire to labor for Christ. We seek to patiently wait on him. We try to be nitty-gritty and toil and endure much for his name’s sake. We long to have wisdom and the spiritual eyes to rightly differentiate between a true and a false prophet. We can to have the courage to resist evil and overcome it with good. We want to be among those who persevere and remain faithful to the end.

If the Ephesian church was doing these things, it must have been a real shock to the system to hear verse 4 calling them out for forgetting their first love. If those in Ephesus could live such strong lives in service to Christ yet neglect this fundamental truth of how, through faith in Christ, they had been transferred from a realm of sin, condemnation and death to a realm of righteousness, adoption, and life, then I likely need to evaluate myself as well. Perhaps this is why at times my heart of flesh seems a little stony.

The Ephesians seemed to have their proverbial stuff together. They seemed to know and do the right things, so why then was their heart/ attitude so far off? I think this is a conversation worth having with myself. It has the same flavor as the attitudes of to the older brother in the story of the prodigal son (Luke 15) and the workers who worked the entire day in the vineyard (Matthew 20). Those people seemed to genuinely misunderstand what they deserved. They did the right things, but the heart didn’t follow. The heart can be deceitful. Certainly Satan uses sin and moral failure to cut the legs out from underneath us, but the enemy also employs ungratefulness, indifference, and thinking higher of ourselves than we ought in order to hollow us out. Whereas a moral failure can devastate our spiritual walk and destroy our hearts in an instant, this other attack of the devil seems to be incremental and almost an unconscious way that we allow our spiritual lives to decay and our hearts to harden.

I know often in my own spiritual walk, I misunderstand what I deserve. I try to continue to do what is right, honor the Lord with all I say and do, but arrogance seems to creep in somewhere along the way and my motivation switches ever so subtly from seeking to obey and please God to wanting to please people (which ultimately seeks to please myself a soothe my conscious). Whereas the Cross of Christ is what compelled me in the beginning to demonstrate the character qualities of verses 2 and 3, when I get off track, I am compelled by looking good, appearing spiritual, being labeled as a mature believer. That is a really pathetic way of describing pride. The only way to properly deal with pride and arrogance is repentance.

And so that is what the text tells us here. Verse 5 says the remedy for the Ephesians, as for us, is repentance. Repentance helps bring us back to our first love. It reminds us of how sinful, weak, and inept we are. It makes the power of the imputed righteousness of Christ what fuels our fire. Repentance helps cultivate gratefulness for the height, depth, and width of the love he has for us. The Gospel is good news. We should dwell on it daily. I think we long to. I think that is why I so often pray that God would remind me of the joy of my salvation. Take me back to that time when the full force of the Gospel hit me. Back t0 the time when 2+2=4 not 5.