In the sermon 'Restoring Your First Love' by Scott Brown, the central theme is the call to rekindle one's love for Christ, as reflected in Revelation 2:1-7. The speaker highlights the commendable qualities of the church in Ephesus, such as diligence and devotion to purity, but emphasizes the serious issue of having left their first love. The sermon suggests that the 'first love' could refer to the initial fervor experienced at conversion or the most intense love shown at any point. Brown underscores the importance of repentance and returning to initial works as a means of restoring this love. He warns against the dangers of doctrinal pride and the risk of faith becoming mere ritual without heartfelt connection to Christ. The sermon outlines six steps to recover from a loveless state: remembering past fervor, repenting, re-engaging in initial works, acknowledging potential consequences of inaction, personally embracing the message, and reminding oneself of the blessings of overcoming. Through these steps, believers can prevent spiritual drifting and reignite a fervent love for God and for one another. The sermon concludes with an encouragement to apply these principles both personally and corporately to foster a vibrant, loving community.

Please open your Bibles to the inerrant, all-sufficient Word of God to Revelation chapter one, chapter two I mean. And I will read verses one through seven just for review. We will only be handling however verses four to the end. So verse one, to the angel of the church of Ephesus write, these things says he who holds the seven stars in his right hand who walks in the midst of the seven golden lampstands, I know your works, your labor, your patience, and that you cannot bear those who are evil. And you have tested those who say they are apostles and are not and have found them liars.

And you've persevered and have patience and have labored for my name's sake and have not become weary. Nevertheless I have this against you that you have left your first love. Remember therefore from where you have fallen, repent and do the first works or else I will come to you quickly and remove your lamp stand from its place unless you repent. But this you have that you hate the deeds of the Nicolaitans which I also hate. He who has an ear let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.

To him who overcomes, I will give to eat from the tree of life which is in the midst of the paradise of God. Let's pray. Father, I pray that you would use these words to increase our love. I pray that you would use these words to penetrate into the secrets of our hearts. That you would use these words to bring up any thing that is foul, anything that is poisonous in our souls, any distraction, anything that is keeping us from loving you so that our love would grow.

Lord as a congregation we want to love you. We want to be a people who are known by our love and we pray that you would now help us with these things. Amen. One of the things that I feel about our congregation is that it's a very sweet congregation. I am very grateful for our church on a number of fronts and so a passage like this which is a very direct rebuke to us is something that I want us to handle carefully and honestly.

And you see the love of God in this section of Revelation where you see the kind intentions of God. He wants to deliver his people from a loveless life. He wants to deliver his people from being like that heater that's just blowing cold air. He wants to deliver his people from just drifting to anywhere, but actually moving toward things that are really life-giving. God's design for His church is such a beautiful design, and all of the things that are here are designed to sweeten our life together, and we can give thanks to him for that and again this just brings us back to the whole purpose of Revelation and that is to display how glorious and beautiful and majestic our Lord Jesus Christ really is And you can see His majesty through His commands.

We use the illustration of drifting, that we drift. This is why Martin Luther made it very clear that the central matter of the Christian life is repentance. That the Christian is always in a pattern of repentance. It's a good thing, it's a cleansing thing, it's a refreshing kind of thing. So the Christian is always aware of the areas that he needs to repent.

The person who says I'm okay probably isn't a Christian. But if you talk to a real Christian and ask them, you know, to gauge the intensity of their love, you won't find real Christians say, oh I'm just soaring. They're not gonna say that because they're aware of their own hearts, They're aware of their lack of discipline. They're aware of all kinds of things. So I think that this passage of scripture is very helpful to us to keep us from drifting and to bring us back to a hotter heat, a hotter furnace burning in our hearts.

You know the Lord Jesus Christ addressed this in John 16 with his disciples, or John 21 with his disciples and he was talking to Peter and he said Simon son of Jonah do you love me more than these? This is the same kind of question you've left your first love is this is it is another way to communicate what Jesus was driving at. Do you love me more than these? And when he asked that question, there are different things that all of us could think of. Was he saying do you love me more than these boats and these nets and the revenue?

Because they were fishing. They just finished fishing. Do you love me more than these boats and these nets and the revenue? Because they were fishing, they just finished fishing. Do you love me more than your business and all the excitement of being in the marketplace?

Or what's he saying, Do you love me more than these other disciples love me? Is your love greater than the other guys or he could have meant do you love me more than the fish and the bread? He could have meant do you love me more than these things that are around? You know, whatever more than these means, it's very clear that all the things that men and women love are covered. All the things of this world, all the relationships of this world, the work, the money, everything in this world is covered.

And when we when we read these words of Jesus, you've left your first love, I want us to just encourage, Be encouraged to think about, think across all the different categories of your life and to have it penetrate deeply. And when the Lord asked Peter this question, he was grieved, Especially after he said it a third time when he said do you love me and Then Peter answered the question and he said yes Lord You know that I love you. Those are some of the tenderest words in the Bible And Peter really did love the Lord. You know everybody likes to crack on Peter for being so impulsive and all this kind of stuff Peter loved the Lord. There's no question about it and in order to move Peter to continue to work his love out in his life he said feed my sheep and he said tend my lambs so our love does work out in the works that the Apostle John speaks about in Revelation I know your works Well the works are manifestations of love but the works aren't the end of it all and they don't really tell the entire story.

So the Lord, as we've seen so far in Revelation chapter 2 verses 1 through 7, in the first four verses, He knows. He has eyes like a flame of fire and He's wise and He knows the quality of our love. Then the apostle identifies wonderful things about this church. First of all their diligence, second their devotion to purity, third they were very careful and they were willing to call people liars if they really were. Fourth, they patiently held fast to their faith.

And fifth, they hated all the right things. So that's what was so good about this church. But in verse four, we encounter the complaint. Nevertheless, I have this against you. It's a very strong language.

That you have left your first love. And this really is the same question that the Lord Jesus asked Peter, do you love me? And there's a key word here that we have to think about. It's the word first, first. You have left your first love.

And it's important that we ask what does he mean by first? Well, before we get to that, let's just recognize this is a secret sin. The Lord is turning his attention to expose a secret problem of the heart and he's probing into the private thoughts of the hearts in that church because while the outward appearance wasn't irrelevant, it didn't tell everything and that's the truth about all of our lives. And it's a very serious sin. I don't think we should act like It's you know, not that big of a deal this is a very big deal in first Corinthians 16 22 the Apostle Paul tells the Corinthian Church how serious it is.

He says if anyone does not love the Lord let him be accursed. So it's a very serious sin and when we get to the end of this passage we'll see the seriousness of it again. Now is he talking about love for Christ or is he talking about love for one another? My view is both. They're inextricably connected.

If you love Christ, then you'll love one another. One follows the other. And so it is legitimate to ask do we love one another. Now this passage of Scripture I think is really important particularly in highly doctrinal, doctrinally sensitive churches, reformed churches who place a high value on sound doctrine. Because often their love grows cold.

And what happens sometimes is you have people who are very, very doctrinally sensitive and doctrinally aware, and they understand what the Bible teaches about things they can sometimes get a little bit hard and get very distinctive and all they ever do is argue about doctrine and they be they can become jaded and they can become divisive in this sense. They divide themselves against others. And they develop an attitude of you're not as good as I am and their love grows cold. They've been so careful with their distinctions and they should be careful with their distinctions, but they've not been careful with their heart. You know you've seen what they call caged stage Calvinists.

Caged stage Calvinists. The caged stage Calvinist is a person who finally realizes that God is sovereign in salvation and that's the only thing that they can talk about. And they use God's sovereignty in salvation to beat everyone they meet over the head with it. And they really forget that they used to think the same thing. So I mean, I think you find it in different manifestations.

You know, you can find it in a church where, you know, you have particular distinctive doctrinal persuasions and people come to the church and they get fed up with you and they leave and you say, well, okay, there you go. That's gonna happen again. We're not gonna love these people when they come. We just don't want other people to come because they're just gonna find out, they don't agree with us doctrinally, and they're gonna leave, so we're not gonna love them. Well, that's another way it happens.

So doctrinal distinctiveness can go astray. And this church in Ephesus was a faithful church doctor. I mean, they upheld sound doctrine. Praise God that they did. That was the right thing.

It wasn't the right thing to be mushy about what they believed. Now, John uses a word left. You've left your first love. And it has to do with with something that departs slowly by degrees and slowly by degrees you send it off. It doesn't happen overnight.

It happens over time. And that's why the idea of drifting is, I think, helpful to connect with this whole thing. So Christianity isn't just a set of ideas that you embrace, it's really a matter of the inclination of the heart as well, it's both. And it's very possible to have all the outward appearances, all the sound doctrine of faith, and be empty at the same time. That's what he's saying.

You can have both, and it's really dangerous if you have both. And of course, Jesus doesn't accuse them of outright apostasy because they're not apostate in that sense. But they had sound doctrine and they had empty hearts. They had firm convictions but their hearts were really far from the Lord in that sense. So there are different ways that your love for the Lord drifts away and I want us to ask how has it drifted away in your life?

I've been asking that question ever since I knew I was going to preach on this. How has my love grown cold? How have I left my first love? And all of us, we can think about that in terms of degrees because there's a way that I think many would say, I don't love the Lord like I want to. And then there are some who really are in danger, real danger, and if you're in danger please do what this passage of Scripture says to do.

They they got to the place where they'd rather cling to their theology and serve the church than love the Lord and that was enough for them. Now here's another question that we should ask about these words. Is Jesus speaking of first love in terms of the first love you had when you were converted, that's one kind of love, or is he talking about first in intensity? And There's no way to tell from the text. The word can mean both.

The word can mean first in intensity, and it's also used first in time. And so The way that I read this is that, have you left the love that you had at first? Or have you left the love that you have had before? Those two ways. I think we should think of it like that.

So here's my advice. Ask how you loved the Lord when you were first converted. What was that like? And also ask how did you love him when you seemed to love him the most? Do you know when that is?

And go back. The Lord is asking us to go back and evaluate. I want us all to go back. Everybody go back in this church. Don't just keep rolling on.

Don't just keep building bigger barns. Go back. Go back to those two points of your life. The Apostle John has written much about this already. Like he said, if you love me, you'll keep my commandments.

He said in John 14, 21, he who has my commandments and keeps them is he who loves me and he who loves me will be loved by my father and I will love him and manifest myself to him. So one way to ask the question about your love is, am I keeping the commandments? Are you breaking the commandments of God? Are there areas that you are rebellious before God and you're breaking his commandments? Are there?

Because your disposition toward his commandments tells you something about your love for Him. If you love me you will keep my commandments. He who has my commandments and keeps them, it is He who loves me. So as you go back, ask yourself the question about the commandments. I mean even right now, is the Lord convicting your heart about any particular commandments that you've been breaking?

Anything in the word of God that you've been violating? Because love and obedience to the commandments of God cannot be separated. You can separate outward duties in love for God, but you can't separate obedience to God and love for God. Those things are inseparable. Jesus in John 15 10 said if you keep my commandments you will abide in my love.

You will abide in my love. You will abide in my love. So I don't want us to just think emotionally about this. I don't think the Lord Jesus would let us just think emotionally about it. We want to think in terms of his explicit commandments.

If you keep my commandments you will abide in my love. I heard a friend of mine last year preaching at one of my conferences and he said something I wrote down and somehow I bumped into this piece of paper that I wrote it down on this week and He said the problem with conservatives is that they know what to hate, but they're not sustained by the love of God He said they don't see the below the surface they hate the fact of abortion I'm quoting him and the sexual revolution they hate the liberal causes their activists But they don't love This was the problem with the moral majority 25 years ago. They were moral, but they were Christless. So this is an appeal to identify the secret heart level issues that are going on in the church. I can't do it.

I can't look into your eyes. But there is one who does have eyes like a flame of fire. And he's looking. And I pray that he's able to pierce through all of our pride, all of our self-justification, and to really come before him in humility and seek his face for any way that we have left our first love. Now, the corrective action.

The Lord is so kind to give us very clear direction. There are six ways that he gives us to work through this process of recovering our first love. Six ways to help us, He's helping us. His glory, his grace just so shines in this section because he shows how kind he is to relieve you of your trouble. You know, have you ever, if you ever, you know, happened upon an animal that was trapped in some way and couldn't get out.

I remember one time we were at the ocean and there was a bird that was all tangled up in a net and it was gonna die and there it was and you know I went and I untangled the net and the bird flew away. But that's what we are like. We're all tangled up and we need somebody, we need help from the outside. And that's what this is right here. These verses from verse 5 on, We are given six ways to get untangled from our loveless life.

Okay, are you ready? The first is remember. Remember, verse five, remember therefore from where you have fallen. Remember. And again I'll just repeat remember the first days that you love the Lord.

Remember when your love was qualitatively the greatest of greatest intensity. Remember how you used to feel about people that you're now not loving. If it is indeed true that the love for Christ is manifested in our love for the brethren, and I think it is, I think it's legitimate to ask, has my love grown cold for people? And maybe a really practical way to ask that is, has your love grown cold toward any person in this church. Just hang on that, has it?

If it has grown cold for someone in this church it means that your love for Christ has grown cold. Cold. So this is an appeal to backtrack, to remember. Jill Beeke in his commentary on this text, he writes, a fading love may not keep us out of heaven, But we can keep heaven out of our hearts if we fail in our love for Christ here on earth. And you know, this kind of love, it's something that always needs cultivation.

It always needs watering. It always needs pruning and or else it won't grow. So there are things that you can do to remember. So The first thing is to remember. Remember, therefore, from where you've fallen.

And I would just encourage us all to be as clear on that as we can. Second, the Lord is getting us out of our tangled net. Repent. Repent. So to repent is to, of course, is to turn around.

You're going one direction and you turn around and go the other direction, that's what repentance means. So you should ask what sins have dampened by love for the Lord. Bitterness, wrath, fear, whatever it is. You know, there are all kinds of sins. But sin erodes love for God.

So do an inventory and repent, turn away from the sin. Go in the opposite direction. This is really a call for us to change our minds about what we've been loving. If you love the wrong things you'll end up loveless in the right things. And if we've left our first love it means we've been loving the wrong things.

We've let ourselves be attracted to unprofitable things, silly things, and we've become silly people as a result, because the things we love are silly. Remember what the Ephesians did? They burned their magic books in the city and caused a riot as a result. Now, You know, the Ephesians got rid of all their magic books and they got rid of all the idols that they spent so much money on and filled the pockets of Demetrius, you know. And Maybe there's something that you need to uninstall.

Maybe there's something you need to turn off. Maybe there's something you need to throw away. Maybe there's something you need to unsubscribe from. Maybe there's something you need to burn. Maybe there's something you need to get rid of.

I mean you might look at your computer and ask, does this cause my love for Christ to grow or not? Do I love that? Does my love for that cause a deprivation of love for Christ. You know in Psalm 119, King David, one of our great heroes, Psalm 119 verse 176, David admits that he has slipped. He said, I've gone astray like a lost sheep, seek your servant for I do not forget your commandments.

David realized he had become like a lost sheep and he wanted to come back and he needed God's help. So he cries out to God for help. Bring me back, Lord. Bring me back. Maybe that should be your prayer.

The third thing that the Lord in his kindness calls us to do, verse 5, and do the first works. Do the first works. In other words, start doing stuff. Fan the flames. Here's a reality about the way God built us.

Emotions are activated by deeds. When you start doing things your emotions change. And this is all wrapped up in the doctrine of thanksgiving. By the way, you're not a victim of your emotions. The Bible makes that very very clear.

You are not a victim and so he says rejoice always, pray without ceasing. In other words you're not you're not a victim. He says be not anxious for anything. In other words you're not a victim of your anxiety. Repent of your anxiety and love the Lord.

If you're full of fear, I'm just gonna say that your love for the Lord has grown weary, grown cold. If love for the Lord is really hot you won't be fearing. At least it won't be sinful fear. There's a legitimate fear, but There's a sinful fear. That's usually what we traffic in.

So do the first works. You know, everybody who's ever counseled a couple who's in trouble knows that a lot of times it helps that couple who say they've fallen out of love with one another to just start doing the stuff they used to do when they first fell in love. Just go do that stuff. And things change. Often they change.

Do the first works. In other words, do what you used to do. Fan the flames. You know, have you become lax in your pursuit of God and His Word in prayer and really meditating on His Word? Do you begin the day with the Kingdom of Heaven at hand?

Do you begin the day to recalibrate your whole life? You know, it's so important that we start the day right. You know, there's a very famous missionary who used to say, he wouldn't leave, he wouldn't leave his room until he got his soul happy. Don't leave your room until you got your soul happy, happy in the Lord so that you know where you're going, you know what you're thinking, and you're off to seize the day in the Lord. Fourth, acknowledge the consequences of refusing to change.

Acknowledge the consequences of refusing to admit that you've left your first love. This is the end of verse 5. Or else, or else I will come to you quickly and remove your lampstand from its place unless you repent. Recognize the consequences. If you don't turn back you are proving that you do not belong to him.

And then Fifth, embrace this for yourself. Verse seven, he who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. Everybody in all the churches should embrace this for themselves. Hear, hear it, embrace it for yourself. Ask yourself, have I left my first love?

Are there areas where I am violating the commandments of God? Are there areas where I'm not loving my brother? Is there anyone that my love has been disconnected from? And then finally remind yourself of the blessings of victory verse 7 to him who overcomes I will give to eat from the tree of life which is in the midst of the paradise of God. He uses this word overcome so you have these overcomers.

What is overcoming? To overcome is just simply to have faith in the Lord. John spoke of this in 1 John 5, 4, Whoever is born of God overcomes the world. So it has to do with reminding yourselves of what it means to be born again and the blessings that are there that you will eat from the tree of life which is in the midst of the paradise of God. The Lord is offering blessing, He's offering abundance, He's offering paradise to His children.

We have this garden in heaven that we will finally eat of the the the marriage supper of the Lamb and will be surrounded by abundance but we can taste him here there are four tastes everywhere here and you can taste of the paradise of God right here recognize the blessings remind yourselves of the blessings of the victory see the victory that's out there for you see the joy returning into your heart that's out there for you See the stability and the fearlessness and the goodness that exists when you love Him and you keep His commandments. So One final thought before I try to wrap this up and summarize. What we'll find in these letters, and we see it in this letter, are two things. And the first thing really is that God is sovereignly protecting and directing his churches. God is sovereign over the church and he's so good.

But here's the second thing, man is responsible to obey and walk in the ways of God and we can change things. We can change the whole course of our life. We can change the whole course of our church by doing these things, by remembering from where we have fallen, by repenting, by doing the first works, by recognizing the consequences of refusing to change, by embracing these things for ourselves, and by reminding ourselves of the blessings. You can change the course of your life and you can change the course of this church if indeed there's any way that you've left your first love. So the Lord is so good isn't he?

To bring us such life-giving commands, to set us free, to get us unhooked from the traps that we've fallen into and to give us ways out every single one of these ways is a way out of a loveless dead religion in your heart and to increase the knowledge of the glory of Jesus Christ in every single part of your life. So let's do that. The Lord brought this passage to us for a reason at this moment and let's spend the day really considering whether we've left our first love and do all the things that he is recommending for us to do. Would you pray with me? Father your commands are beautiful, your ways are such pleasant ways.

We thank you for piercing us to the heart, we thank you for the way that you change us, that we're not stuck. You've opened up the doors, the gates of righteousness that we might enter in. And Lord, we want to praise you for it. I pray that as we continue to gather as a church that you would continue to sweeten us, correct us, make us more real, make us more loving, make us more authentic in our love. Lord make us diligent, make us make us careful with the truth, help us to hate evil, and help us to keep from falling from our first love.

Amen. Okay.