Text: Rev 2:1-29
In the name of + Jesus. Amen.
In today’s reading, we hear four of the seven letters of Jesus to the churches delivered by John the apostle. There is a pattern that should cause us in our modern churches to take notice. Our Lord judges the churches based on two things: their doctrine and their works – which our Lord often speaks of as love.
For indeed, there are two ditches into which we Christians and our congregations can fall. The first is to be doctrinally pure, but lacking in love and good works. This is an easy trap to fall into dear friends. We can reduce the faith to abstracts, to logical deductions, to memorized proof texts from the Scriptures, and to nothing more than dogmatic rightness – while overlooking actual righteousness.
Our Lord praises the Church of Ephesus for their fidelity to the apostolic doctrine and in their condemnation of the Nicolaitan heresy. But He warns them to “repent” as they have “abandoned the love [they] had at first.” And “if not,” He will “come to [them] and remove [their] lampstand from its place.”
The other extreme is to focus on good works, but to be doctrinally unfaithful. This is a cross for many of our modern churches that are more concerned with “niceness” and image than fidelity to the Scriptures. Our Lord warns the Church of Pergamum, who “held fast [His] name, and [they] did not deny [His] faith” even under persecution “where Satan dwells.” However, unlike the Ephesians, the Christians at Pergamum tolerated the Nicolaitans. Jesus commands them to “repent.” And “if not, [He] will come to [them] soon and war against them with the sword of [His] mouth.
Similarly, our Lord praises the Church of Thyatira for their “works, [their] love and faith and service and patient endurance.” However, they are tolerant of a certain woman in the congregation who claims to be a “prophetess” who is committing the same errors as the Nicolaitans: sexual immorality and eating food sacrificed to idols. However, our Lord also encourages those who rejected this so-called prophetess and her teachings to “hold fast… until I come.”
The Smyrnaeans are given a different kind of letter – one that warns them of persecution to come and encouragement to “be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life,” says our Lord.
The Christian life is both
doctrine and practice, both confession of the truth and living a life of
love. We must not neglect love in
pursuit of doctrine. We must not neglect
doctrine in pursuit of love. We are
called to hold both, even as our Lord Jesus Christ teaches us in purity and
loves us. And we must also take our
Lord’s encouragement to heart concerning times of persecution and
tribulation. For “the one who conquers will
not be hurt by the second death.”
“He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.”
Amen.
In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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