“Therefore take heed to yourselves and to all the flock, among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of God which He purchased with His own blood. For I know this, that after my departure savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock. Also from among yourselves men will rise up, speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after themselves. Therefore watch” (Acts 20:28-31, emphasis added throughout).
These were some of the apostle Paul’s final recorded words to the church leaders in Ephesus. He charged them to take heed, to watch, to pay careful attention to the spiritual condition of the church, because false teachers would be coming to pervert the truth.
They listened.
Paul’s warning came roughly three decades before John wrote the book of Revelation—and what we see there is a church that certainly appears to have taken Paul’s warning to heart.
Jesus’ assessment of the Ephesian church begins with admirable praise: “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 have persevered and have patience, and have labored for My name’s sake and have not become weary” (Revelation 2:2-3).
That’s a glowing review. Not only were the Ephesian members diligently rooting out the “savage wolves” Paul had warned them about—false apostles who claimed to represent Christ, whose perverse words would destroy the whole congregation if left unchecked—but they were also laboring without growing weary. They were doing the work God had for them to do, and they weren’t getting tired or worn out by it.
It’s hard to imagine a more positive description of Christianity in action—tireless dedication toward doing what’s right and preventing evil from gaining a foothold.
And yet in a couple sentences, Jesus will threaten to disown and disavow the entire Ephesian church unless the members make some radical changes.
How can that be?
In verse 4, Christ’s assessment of the Ephesian congregation takes a sharp turn. But we don’t find a laundry list of faults and shortcomings in that verse—just a single item: “Nevertheless I have this against you, that you have left your first love.”
To our modern-day ears, that phrase might not sound quite so serious. We tend to associate someone’s “first love” with concepts like “puppy love”—a very genuine but very fleeting kind of emotional attachment. It’s a feeling we might experience before we understand what love truly is.
That kind of first love is a slurry of powerful emotions not necessarily grounded in reality, almost certain to vanish in the face of life experience and clearer perspective. It’s real and tangible, but also fleeting and transient.
That’s not the kind of “first love” Jesus is talking about. [1]
He isn’t taking the Ephesians to task for failing to maintain an adolescent maelstrom of supercharged emotions. The whole situation is far more serious than that. He says that what the Ephesians have lost is putting their spiritual future in jeopardy.
Jesus tells them, “Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent and do the first works, or else I will come to you quickly and remove your lampstand from its place—unless you repent” (verse 5).
Jesus is not some distant observer of the seven churches.
Earlier, Jesus clarified to John that the seven lampstands “are the seven churches” (Revelation 1:20). He introduced Himself to the Ephesians as “He who holds the seven stars in His right hand, who walks in the midst of the seven golden lampstands” (Revelation 2:1).
He holds (from the Greek word krateō, Strong’s #G2902, implying a strong grasp) the seven stars of the churches in His right hand. He walks in the midst of the seven golden lampstands, personally inspecting and evaluating them.
When He tells each of the churches, “I know,” He does not mean that He is aware of them from some report He received. He is there. He sees. When He says, “I know your works,” He means, “I know you. I know the things you do. I know who you are.”
This can be a comforting or an intimidating thought. Jesus will never misunderstand us, but He will also never be fooled by us. He will force us to confront the things in our lives that we need to overcome.
Here, He confronts the Ephesians with the one thing He has against them: that they have left their first love. If they do not repent and “do the first works”—if they do not remember from where they have fallen—they will forfeit their place and their future within God’s Church.
Jesus Christ Himself will do the removing.
Taking a closer look at the Greek gives us a better sense of the seriousness of the situation. First of all, the Ephesians haven’t just momentarily stepped aside from their first love. The Greek word for “left,” aphiēmi (Strong’s #G863), tells us that they have abandoned and forsaken it.
They are charged to “remember therefore from where you have fallen,” but we’re talking about more than a stumble. The Greek word for “fallen” places “emphasis upon extent and suddenness” (Louw and Nida Greek-English Lexicon, 13.59). The NIV translates it this way: “Consider how far you have fallen!”
In his letter to the Ephesians (written some 30 years before the book of Revelation), Paul praised them for “your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints” (Ephesians 1:15). But that love didn’t last. Over time, Jesus says the Ephesians had walked away from—abandoned—the initial love they had as His disciples.
It’s obvious from the rest of the letter that they hadn’t walked away from the Christian faith, but the love that Jesus expected to see in their congregation—the love they once had—was now gone.
After abandoning their first love, the Ephesians fell hard and fast. It was a spiritual plummet—even though they were still tirelessly laboring on behalf of God. It seems impossible that both these things can be true at once, and yet that’s exactly the situation that Jesus describes.
To understand how that can happen, we need to answer the question we’ve been dancing around: What is a “first love”?
John, who recorded the vision of Revelation, had this to say about love: “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love” (1 John 4:7-8).
Earlier John had also quoted Jesus, who said, “If you love Me, keep My commandments” (John 14:15). And John had likewise written: “But whoever keeps His word, truly the love of God is perfected in him” (1 John 2:5) and “this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments” (1 John 5:3). The love of God also includes love of God’s law and love of God’s truth.
Love is something that both comes from God and defines God. Our own love for God is incomplete if it does not include obedience to His law and love for our fellow Christians—the two are inextricably bound together. “If someone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen? And this commandment we have from Him: that he who loves God must love his brother also” (verses 20-21).
The kind of love God calls us to have—toward Him and toward each other—is a love defined primarily by our actions, not our feelings.
Paul described the Church as the Body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:12-14)—not a loosely related network of like-minded believers, but a spiritual organism where the welfare of each individual is deeply connected to every other member of the Church. “If one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; or if one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it” (verse 26).
That’s the context of our love for each other—a single spiritual body, connected together in Christ. Our decisions, for good or for bad, impact others.
Here’s the benchmark John highlighted for the Church: “By this we know love, because He laid down His life for us. And we also ought to lay down our lives for the brethren” (1 John 3:16).
Christ showed us His love by becoming our sacrifice. That same attitude of willing self-sacrifice ought to define how we show love to each other.
John continued, “But whoever has this world’s goods, and sees his brother in need, and shuts up his heart from him, how does the love of God abide in him? My little children, let us not love in word or in tongue, but in deed and in truth” (verses 17-18).
James asked a similar question in his epistle: “What does it profit, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can faith save him? If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Depart in peace, be warmed and filled,’ but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit? Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead” (James 2:14-17).
The love God is looking for in us—the love the Ephesians had drifted away from—the love we must have as Christians—is a love defined by action.
The Ephesians had spent decades—decades—on high alert against the internal and external threats Paul had warned them about. Savage wolves outside the congregation. False teachers speaking perverse words within the congregation. A constant motivation to test, to defend—to doubt the intentions of everyone around them.
It wasn’t paranoia. These threats were legitimate.
For example, their city was home to the temple of Artemis (called Diana in some Bible versions), one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Visitors to the temple could purchase silver shrines of the pagan goddess, which “brought no small profit to the craftsmen” of the city (Acts 19:24).
In an economy like that, men like Paul would have been public enemy number one. The craftsmen of Ephesus actually started a riot in the early years of the Church, claiming that “not only in Ephesus but in almost all of Asia this Paul has persuaded and turned away a great many people, saying that gods made with hands are not gods. And there is danger not only that this trade of ours may come into disrepute but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemis may be counted as nothing, and that she may even be deposed from her magnificence, she whom all Asia and the world worship” (verses 26-27, ESV).
In response, the city was “filled with confusion” (verse 29) while a mob spent roughly two hours chanting, “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” (verse 34, ESV).
The gospel of the Kingdom was a threat to the stability of the Roman Empire. Pliny the Younger, the Roman governor who wrote to Emperor Trajan around A.D. 110 concerning the appropriate way to persecute Christians, confirmed the concerns of the Ephesian craftsmen.
After his initial attempts to “check and cure” the “contagious superstition” of Christianity, which had been spreading through cities and villages and rural districts alike, Pliny was relieved to find that “the temples, which had been almost deserted, begin now to be frequented; and the sacred festivals, after a long intermission, are again revived; while there is a general demand for sacrificial animals, which for some time past have met with but few purchasers. From hence it is easy to imagine what multitudes may be reclaimed from this error, if a door be left open to repentance” (Epistulae X.96).
Pliny believed he could stamp out the fledgling Christian religion by forcing believers to publicly recant (and executing anyone who refused). He, too, saw the threat of a religion that left Roman temples deserted and sacrifices unpurchased—and the easiest way to remedy it was to kill anyone who clung to Christ.
Savage wolves, indeed.
Internally, false teachers claiming to represent Jesus Christ were another grave threat. Decades before Jesus sent His message to Ephesus, Paul upbraided the church at Corinth: “For if he who comes preaches another Jesus whom we have not preached, or if you receive a different spirit which you have not received, or a different gospel which you have not accepted—you may well put up with it!” (2 Corinthians 11:4).
The first and second centuries were filled with false narratives about who Jesus was and what Christianity ought to look like, and believers who blindly accepted everything everyone said were at serious risk of ending up with a corrupted version of the true gospel.
The Ephesian church put up an admirable defense on both fronts. Their works included “your toil and your patient endurance” (Revelation 2:2, ESV); they were “enduring patiently and bearing up for my name’s sake” (verse 3, ESV).
But it’s not hard to imagine the toll that decades of patient endurance and constant toil might take.
They hadn’t grown weary, but somewhere, in this decades-long process, their first love had faded. And love is supposed to define our faith.
“By this all will know that you are My disciples,” Jesus told His friends shortly before His death, “if you have love for one another” (John 13:35).
This love is not optional. It is not a nice side benefit that comes with our Christian faith. It sits at the core of our faith. If that love is missing, we are failing as disciples of Jesus Christ.
Christ’s warning to the church at Ephesus is stern and crystal-clear: a church not defined by godly love is no church at all. It is not a partial church, it is not an underperforming church—it is a church at risk of losing itself. Jesus warned that unless the Ephesians undertook some serious course correction, “I will come to you quickly and remove your lampstand from its place” (Revelation 2:5).
No lampstand, no church.
That brings us to our next big question: How do we make that course correction? If our first love is missing, how are we supposed to get it back?
Thankfully, the answer is in the warning. Jesus urged the Ephesians to do three things: “[1] remember therefore from where you have fallen; [2] repent and [3] do the first works” (verse 5) .
The process starts with looking back. There was a time when the Ephesians had the love they now lacked—they are commanded to remember, to dredge up their memories of what that time was like.
It’s not that God expects us to recapture some emotional high—although if our excitement for serving God has waned over the years, it’s worth asking why. What Jesus expected of the Ephesians (and what He expects of us) is to reflect on the practical, intentional love that naturally flourishes at the beginning of the Christian journey—love for God and love for each other. That initial love is often expressed through a strong motivation and zeal to learn, grow and serve.
That kind of love is core to being a Christian, but the Ephesians had lost sight of it. They must remember what they had abandoned.
Second, they must repent. The Greek word for “repent,” metanoeō (Strong’s #G3340), literally means to change the mind—but its actual meaning goes deeper than that.
Repentance is an internal change that leads to external action. When we repent of something, we aren’t just changing how we think about it—we’re changing what we do about it. We’re changing our course to reflect the change in our hearts.
Repenting of sins also requires seeking God’s forgiveness for those sins. True repentance begins internally. But it never ends there.
This is reflected in the third and final instruction to the Ephesians: to do “the first works.” Just as “your first love” can also be translated, “the love that you had at first,” so can “the first works” be translated, “the works that you did at first.” Remembering would fix their attention on the love they had lost. Repentance would set them on the path to reclaiming that love. Their next step was to start doing the works they did at first.
Christ’s solution to the lost love of the Ephesians didn’t involve them conjuring up a strong emotion.
Godly love involves how we feel, certainly—but it is far more rooted in what we do.
To recapture their first love, the Ephesians would need to do the first works, not feel the first feelings. As they would make the conscious choice to do works that express love toward God and their fellow believers, the feeling of brotherly love would no doubt return as well.
But first comes action.
It is what we choose to do, not how we happen to feel in the moment, that defines true, godly love.
For the Ephesians, and for us, repenting and doing the first works meant treasuring the precious gift of fellowship God gives us through His Church, actively seeking to understand and help provide for the needs of our fellow Christians. That might involve “this world’s goods,” or it might instead be a willingness to offer our time and energy wherever they can make a difference—in conversation, in acts of service, in prayer and so on.
Remember that Jesus was on the verge of removing the Ephesians’ lampstand. Their lack of love was so significant that the Ephesians were on the brink of being rejected by Christ. Reclaiming that love was a mandatory requirement for remaining connected to God’s Church.
If our own love for God and for the children of God is beginning to falter, then we, too, must remember, repent and do the first works.
The charges against the Ephesian Christians were serious—but so was the praise. We can get so focused on what they got wrong that we fail to consider what they got right.
Jesus praised the Ephesians for their tireless vigilance in protecting the truth from those who would have corrupted it. Their labor, their patient endurance—these were traits He valued and praised. He also praised them for hating “the deeds of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate” (Revelation 2:6). We’ll talk more about this mysterious group when we get to Pergamos, but they appear here in the context of “those who are evil” (verse 2).
What Jesus objected to was that the Ephesians had abandoned their first love. That should serve as a warning to us as well.
To “him who overcomes”—that is, to the one who conquers, who obtains a victory over his or her sins and shortcomings—Jesus promises to “give to eat from the tree of life, which is in the midst of the Paradise of God” (Revelation 2:7).
The Ephesians would have immediately recognized the tree of life as a reference to the very beginning of the Bible.
Adam and Eve, the first man and the first woman, lived in an idyllic garden—a paradise—that contained two important trees: the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Adam and Eve disobeyed God’s explicit instructions, eating from the one tree He had placed off-limits—the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The devil had lied in his efforts to deceive them, getting them to question God’s motives and to seek to decide for themselves what was right and wrong, good and evil.
As a result of their disobedience, God banished Adam from the garden, “lest he put out his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever” (Genesis 3:22).
The garden itself would be guarded by angels and a flaming sword. The human race lost access to paradise—and with it, a tree that offered the possibility of eternal life.
After this, the Bible is silent about the tree of life.[2] It vanishes from both the earth itself and the biblical narrative—until the book of Revelation. What Jesus is saying here is huge. Beyond ensuring their lampstand remains unmoved, Jesus is reminding the Ephesians that they have the opportunity to reclaim what humanity forfeited 4,000 years earlier.
If they repent and emerge victorious, God will give them access to the tree of life—and with it, eternal life with God in paradise.
To the Ephesians, the promise of an idyllic eternity with God would have stood in stark contrast to the decades they had spent fending off false teachers and perverted teachings. This was a promise not just of a beautiful future, but of rest from their tireless efforts and patient endurance.
There would be no savage wolves to guard against, no Nicolaitans threatening the truth. They would finally have “rest on every side” (1 Kings 5:4), knowing that “the work of righteousness will be peace, and the effect of righteousness, quietness and assurance forever” (Isaiah 32:17).
Maybe that promise carries a special meaning for you too.
Maybe you’ve spent decades pursuing and defending the truth in your own life, and the idea of a future defined by peace, quietness and assurance is the motivation you need to keep going—to keep defending the precious pearls you’ve been given by God.
But on our quest to overcome, we can’t afford to forget the warning Christ gave the Ephesians. If we lose our love for God and the brethren, our hope of that beautiful future is lost with it.
When we find that the love we had at first is waning, the solution is the same today as it was then. Remember where we’ve fallen from, repent and do the works we did at first.
Footnotes
[1] Other translations—like the English Standard Version and NIV—translate “your first love” as “the love you had at first.” That simple rewording makes the concept a little clearer. Jesus isn’t talking about an unrealistic emotional high, but something both attainable and sustainable.
[2] With the exception of the book of Proverbs, where it appears four times as a metaphor.
