For three sabbath days the Apostle Paul preached in the synagogue at Thessalonica. A great stir ensued. Jews were converted, a great multitude of pagan Greeks were reached and not a few of the leading women of the city. Persecution broke out, and Paul and Silas were obliged to leave these young converts all too soon.
He showed his solicitude for them by writing two letters. They evidently were out-and-out converts for he praises them. He speaks of “Your work of faith, and labour of love, and patience of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ, in the sight of God and our Father” (1 Thess. 1:3).
Thessalonica was a very young assembly. It was made up, as we have seen, of recent converts— Jews, pagans, chief women of the place. But young as it was, immature as they must have been as babes in Christ, they possessed the vital spring that led to their Christian activity. Faith made them work; love made them labour, hope made them patient—
“Work … Labour … Patience.”
How different alas! was the case of the well-established, highly gifted Ephesian assembly.
They were the recipients of wonderful teaching, as witness Paul’s epistle to them. If we can count on the dates at the heading of the epistles, Paul wrote to them in A.D. 64 and the Apostle John addressed the angel of the church in Ephesus in his “Revelation of Jesus Christ” in A.D. 96. Thirty-two years had rolled by, and alas! instead of increase in the things of God, we read “I know thy works, and thy labour, and thy patience” (Rev. 2:2).
What a contrast to 1 Thessalonians 1:3 There the spring of the activity is happily mentioned; here in Revelation 2:2, we find an ominous silence as to the spring of it all. Why is this? Because Ephesus had left her first love. Here is the first mark of declension in the church, as it is the first mark of declension in an individual. It does not say that faith or hope waned, but love.
1 Corinthians 13, the great love chapter says in closing, “Now abides faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” Why should love have this pre-eminence? God is called “the God of hope” (Rom. 15:13), that is, hope is a characteristic feature of God; but 1 John 4:16 tells us “God is love,” that is, love is His very nature.
Moreover, faith will turn to sight, hope to glad realization; then faith and hope will cease, but “love never fails.” Prophecy will fail, for it will be fulfilled, and when the last prophecy is fulfilled, prophecy will fail, that is, cease.
Tongues will cease, for there will be only one vehicle of speech in the eternal state. Nationality, confusion of tongues, Babel, will cease in the triumph of God’s counsels in grace. Knowledge, that is relative knowledge, will vanish away in the fulness of knowledge that all will share in the coming day. One will not know more than another. “Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (1 Cor. 13:12).
“When faith and hope shall cease,
And love abide alone,
Then shall we see Him face to face,
And know as known.”
But this absence of the spring of Christian activity in the address to the Ephesian church (Rev. 2:1-7) is serious. It is a challenge to every one of us. We live in Laodicean days—days when Ephesian departure has become full blown.
1 Corinthians 13 tells us how much we may do, and yet be wanting the true spring of Christian activity, how we may appear to be as active as ever, and yet be altogether missing the mark. You may speak beautifully—have “the tongues of men and of angels”—your theology may be sound, your language convincing and clear, and yet no result. Nothing but empty noise—“sounding brass”—“tinkling cymbal”—if love is not the spring.
We may have wonderful knowledge, our Bibles may be worn to rags, our notes and comments numerous, correct and illuminating; we may be able to prophecy, to look with unerring eye into the future and unfold its mysteries; we may be able to remove mountains, to surmount the impossible, and yet if love is lacking be nothing. “God is love.” If love were lacking in Him He would cease to be God. So if love is lacking in us, whatever our knowledge and power may be, we are nothing.
We may be self-denying, ascetic, ready to immure ourselves behind high walls or live a life of complete self-abnegation, strip ourselves of all our possessions to feed the poor, and even give our body to be burned, but it profits nothing—nothing, if love is lacking. “Love never fails.”
Now all this is a staggering challenge to the writer and the reader—a challenge we cannot escape. How far is the true vital spring of Christian activity characterizing us?
Perhaps a poignant example of declension on these lines is seen in the mission field. There are earnest Christian people, who have been undermined by Modernism, and lost their grip on the Fundamentals, because they have lost their grip on Christ.
For instance, travelling between India and Australia we saw two young ladies, and happening to get into conversation, learned to our great surprise that they were missionaries in a Mahommedan country. The moment something vital and fundamental to Christianity was mentioned there was an ominous silence, an unspoken resentment. They talked of education, of raising the status of the people among whom they worked, but nothing of salvation and eternal life. They left the sad impression that they had given up evangelization for education: had given up the fundamentals of the Christian faith and were content to be mere social reformers, missionaries for this life, but not for the life to come.
A little later one saw with sadness one of them in scanty evening dress, leaving a large part of her body shamelessly uncovered, sitting in a deck chair, leisurely smoking a cigarette, talking to a man of the world. As a woman in many ways she may have been an estimable person, but as a missionary she was an utter disgrace to the name. On the same journey we came across another missionary, who essayed to present Christianity to Mahommedans, Hindus, Parsees, Sikhs, etc. All he did was to press the golden rule—do to others as you would be done by—as the essence of Christianity. A Mahommedan or Hindu or any other pagan might press this equally. This so-called Christian missionary was leaving out the very vital essence of Christianity—“Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” He divorced the Sermon on the Mount from the essentials of Christianity, and by it he was deceiving the very heathen to whom he set out to be a missionary. No wonder Laodicea is to be spued out of the mouth of Him who is “the Amen, the faithful and true Witness, the Beginning of the creation of God.”
These are illustrations of how there may be activity, but the spring absent. Alas! they could be duplicated by the thousand.
Works without true faith, labours without true love; patience without true hope, and what then? Spued out of Christ’s mouth is the doom of Laodiceanism.
May each and all be concerned about themselves in relation to this Laodicean day.
“Work … Labour … Patience.”
Shall we earnestly seek to fill this up in the only way in which “work, labour, patience” is of any avail? God grant it. “Work of faith, labour of love, patience of hope.”