I am back again to look at the Revelation.
Chapter 4, the second half of verse 5:
There were seven lamps of fire burning before the throne,
which are the seven Spirits of God.
Chapter 1:
Grace to you and peace, from Him which is, and which was, and which is to come;
and from the seven Spirits which are before His throne.
Seven lamps of fire burning before the throne, which are the seven Spirits of God.
I will do my best to help those who were not here this afternoon to come into line with us in the way that we feel we are being led at this time.
We were pointing out that the seven lamps of fire before the throne represent the sevenfold ministry of the Holy Spirit in relation to the Lord Jesus, as He is presented in Revelation 1.
Careful reading and meditation upon these three chapters will, I think, make it quite clear that the presentation of the Lord given in Revelation 1 is the ground upon which the churches are being judged—representatively, the Church—and that judgment is in the light of all that the Lord has given.
We said that there comes a time in the history of the Lord’s people, not at all infrequently, when He comes to draw up the accounts and to challenge and test in the light of what He has given. A crisis may come in the individual life, as in the life of the whole Church or any local representation of it.
There comes a time when the Lord, having given and been very patient, and having sought to make His grace known, must, of necessity for Himself and for them, say, “Now, we cannot just go on giving and teaching. We must know where we are over it all. We must see how much there is that really represents what has been given.”
It is a time of crisis, a time of deep searching, perhaps a very painful time. Very great issues are bound up with such a time, for all the future. That is what is represented by these three chapters so far as the churches are concerned.
You go on through the book and find that the same thing is carried into the world and the nations. Everything is being judged in the light of the fact of Jesus Christ.
The title of the book ought to be its first words. I notice the title men have given it: The Revelation of John the Divine. The book says that it is The Revelation of Jesus Christ. That is the title, and it applies to the whole book—not only at the beginning, but right through.
Everything is being brought to the judgment throne by the Holy Spirit.
This presentation of the Lord Jesus has a sevenfold characterization. That is, He is presented in seven particular features, and the lamps of fire correspond to those features. These lamps of fire are the burning testimony of the Holy Spirit to the Lord Jesus, heavenward, before the throne.
Later in the book, the phrase is used outwardly: “the seven Spirits of God sent forth into all the earth.” So, in heaven and on earth, everything is being judged and determined according to Christ. That is the final judgment of everything, or the basis of the final judgment.
That is rather a poor synopsis, or summary, of a lot of time and ground covered earlier.
We looked at the first of these lamps of fire. I would like just to add a word to what we said in that connection, relating to the first feature of Christ presented: clothed with a garment down to the foot.
This is the Holy Spirit’s burning testimony to the fact that it is only what Christ is, as a covering for all that we are, that can stand before God. That is one of the seven things that the Spirit says unto the churches—unto us.
How greatly has the Lord taken pains to burn that into the Church! It must be a Church that is covered as to its whole natural life. If it is not, as at Corinth and some other places, it is exposed to terrible judgment.
The judgment, or threatened judgment, of the church in Corinth was, as you know, that all its works would go up in smoke in the testing of the fire; and they would be saved only, and just so as by fire—when nothing else remained, just getting through, everything else lost.
Why? Because they were naked. That is, as you look into that letter, it was what they were in themselves. Paul says, “When this and that obtains, are ye not men? Do ye not speak as men? You are behaving as men.” He is saying, “This is not Christ. It is just not Christ to behave like that, to go on like that, to do those things, to have those conditions. That is just not Christ.”
You are naked before God. You need to be clothed with Christ.
That is a burning thing in the New Testament: that we may not be found naked before Him in the judgment. The first lamp of fire—how intense is its heat, how searching is its light, how discriminating is its effect.
Oh, dear friends, do not take this just as words or teaching. You and I have to stand in the everlasting burnings now, and the test at last is going to be: how much of Christ adorns us, for the hiding of what we are in ourselves?
Something to think about, to pray about—our background. That is the testimony of Jesus.
Now we pass to the second lamp. These lamps are the energies of the Holy Spirit, for a lamp of fire is a thing of energy. There is nothing passive about that; it is energetic.
If these lamps of fire correspond to those aspects of Christ in the presentation, what is the second lamp? To what does the Spirit direct attention in the second place?
Again, look at the vision of the Son of Man, and then look at the churches. You come upon it immediately:
Clothed with a garment down to the foot,
and girt about at the breasts with a golden girdle.
We know that, in biblical symbolism, a girdle suggests or represents strength unto action. Girdedness is not looseness. It is strength for action; the garment drawn together so that it does not in any way interfere with the work on hand.
The breasts ever and always suggest the service of love, and the gold, as we know well, is that which is of God.
Putting these three things together, we have Christ in that feature of steadfast purpose for love—purposeful divine love—as against the fickleness and inconsistency of human love, of man’s love, where God is concerned.
I said that you come upon it immediately in the address to Ephesus. With whatever commendation and recognition of value, the final word is:
I have this against thee, that thou hast left thy first love.
Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen,
and repent, and do the first works.
First love—first what? There is your example.
The Lord comes in this steadfast, purposeful, consistent divine love, to which they—and we—owe everything. Where would any one of us be tonight if He had not kept on loving, persisted in love? If He had been as fickle as we are, as inconsistent as our love is, where would we be?
That was the trouble which, to the Lord, was greater than all the other values of Ephesus. With Him, it outweighed everything else. Indeed, He placed the continuance of that vessel and its service to Him upon this issue: first love.
Turn to the Gospel by John. We have this in John 13:
Jesus knowing that His hour was come that He should depart out of this world unto the Father,
having loved His own which were in the world,
He loved them unto the end.
The next thing is the girdle of that love:
He riseth from supper, and layeth aside His garments;
and He took a towel, and girded Himself.
Then He poureth water into the basin, and began to wash the disciples’ feet,
and to wipe them with the towel wherewith He was girded.
Having loved, He loved unto the end. Persistent love.
I read this morning what we all know so well: how one man declared that he loved his Master and could stand up for anything, even to death. We know what happened.
But I noticed this: when it says that about Peter—his declaration that though all should forsake Him, he would not, that he would go to death—it says, “So said all the disciples.” We put it all onto Peter, but they all said the same thing.
We can almost hear them: Peter said that; then another said, “So will I,” and another, “So will I.” So said they all.
And Jesus said:
All ye shall be offended in Me this night:
for it is written,
I will smite the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock shall be scattered abroad.
Then, when the soldiers came from the high priest with their torches and their weapons, it says, “They all forsook Him, and fled.”
He knew all about them—how they were made, what would happen. He told them so. But having loved, having loved, He loved unto the end.
He was indeed girded with that kind of divine love that presses through, suffers long, but does not give up. Persistent love. Faithful love.
We all agree that that is a characteristic of the Lord Jesus. We must be impressed with the fact that the very first thing He talks about to the churches is that very matter. When He comes to the seven churches, that is where He begins.
I do not want to rush on, dear friends, because I am not concerned to say so much. I am concerned that we should all stand in the light of the lamp of fire ourselves and see, in its light, what the Lord is after—what is here called first love.
What are its characteristics? Well, of course, it is faithfulness to the first motive.
I trust it can be said to be true of all of us here: there was a time in our Christian experience when the Lord just captured and captivated us in such a way that He gained a complete surrender of our lives to Himself and was everything.
When it first became like that—if anyone here cannot say that, it is not too late. It is not too late. You can be captivated by the Lord Jesus more than once in your life. Some of us do know mightier captivations at different times.
But those of us who do know that first, initial experience, when we saw the Lord and the Lord found us—how full of Him we were, how absorbed we were all the day! While we had to be engaged in other things, we were just longing for those other things to be got out of the way in order to get busy for the Lord in a more direct and immediate way. How He filled everything for us!
The Apostle Paul gives us a marvellous picture in his letter to the Philippians. First of all, he says that this is exactly what happened to the Lord Jesus Himself.
I put the meaning of it this way. It is not exactly what is said, but there is no doubt that this is what it meant. Speaking after the manner of men, there was a point when the love of the Son toward the Father, in terms of the Father’s interests and glory, heart, purpose, and desire, was so great and so captivated Him that He stripped Himself of everything and emptied Himself of all heaven’s glory.
What He called in His prayer, “the glory which I had with Thee before the world was,” He let it all go out of His life for the Father and for the Father’s love for this world.
That is one side of the picture. You turn over the page and find that that same love has been begotten in the heart of this man Paul. He tells us, in such strong and full terms, what effect it had upon him.
He tells us of all the glories that men call glories in this world: glories of ancestry, inheritance, birth, training, position, and achievement—all the things that this world calls glorious.
Then Jesus came into the picture for Paul, and he said:
What things were gain to me, these have I counted loss for Christ.
Yea verily, and I count all things to be loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord.
Here is a man, perhaps only in human terms, following the way of his Lord—the way of love—showing that first love with him, right at the beginning, meant the Lord having first place in all things. Nothing else could possibly stand in the way or take the place of the Lord Jesus.
That is personal—personal, and the effect that it has.
Now, we know the Ephesians had had an experience like that. By the way, let me put in parenthesis: I heard that one of the brothers gave a message on this here a few weeks ago. I deliberately refused to inquire what he said or to read the notes, because I am always afraid of the subconscious. Something might come out that was not my own.
So I am quite ignorant. If the Lord says the same thing tonight, then the Lord is speaking. That is my point—the Lord, not anything that has come secondhand.
The Ephesians had had an experience like this. You know what happened when the word was preached to them, when the Lord Jesus was brought to them. They were devotees of the arts and the pagan mysteries, and they had a library which ran into a very great sum of money in value.
When Jesus came through His servant in the marketplace, they piled up their books, their charms, their costly things, and sent them all up in flames. That was the value of first love.
Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen.
This is what the Lord comes back for. He says, “I have loved you like that. Oh, I have loved you, and kept on loving you, like this. At very great cost, but I have not counted the cost. For love’s sake—for love never does count the cost in that way.”
“I have loved you like that. I have given you so much. I really have given you so much, for so long. What is the measure of your return? What is the measure of that where you are concerned?”
Is it like that now? Was it more like that at one time? Is it less like that now?
Blessed be the man or the woman here who can stand up today and say, “No, it is more today than ever.” More today than ever—that is good.
But it may be that some of us have got to meet this challenge.
Oh, the blunted edge—blunted by familiarity with divine things. How the edge can be blunted by familiarity. “Oh, we have heard it all before. We know it all.”
Perhaps that was Ephesus’s tragedy: familiarity, an easy facility for getting divine things.
When people cannot get them, they hunger. Some said to me even today, “We starve; we come to be fed.” There are many, many like that in this world, we know.
But when it is so easily obtainable and there is so much of it to hand, how it blunts the appetite—the edge of the appetite. We settle down because, well, it does not matter very much. We do not take the trouble or put ourselves out. It is always there when we want it.
There was a time, perhaps, when we would go miles—hundreds of miles—for a bit of spiritual food. Today, perhaps, we might not be willing to walk very far. So much, when we feel inclined, is there.
Forgive me if I put it wrongly, but you know it is so possible for first love to lose its edge because of this familiarity, this facility, this abundance—that it is there.
Or it may be the loss of freshness in a walk in the Spirit. No, a life in the Spirit, a walk in the Spirit, always has a freshness about it. Really, it does. It does not matter, dear friends, how long you have been on the way, how much you have received, or how much you know.
This is the marvel of a life in the Holy Spirit: you never seem to overtake what there is for you. It does not lie in the past. You know quite well that your life will not be long enough to catch up with what you already have.
I am not exaggerating what I am saying. Life in the Spirit has about it a continual freshness, newness, and sense that there is something more—something more.
That was the characteristic at the beginning, was it not? What a world we have come into! What a new world! How everything is new! What can we do with it? So big, so wonderful.
Is that true of every one of us today in our spiritual life? It is a wonderful world that we have come into—the world of Christ.
The loss of freshness in the life of the Spirit; the deadly effect of formality, of routine. Many Christian things are routine. We go through the same routine all the time. We bring it down to that: “It is the way it is done. It is the formal thing.”
Oh, God deliver us from the blighting, deadly effect of formality, and make everything living.
Now, we cannot do that, mark you, by trying to be original and changing things in order to get out of a difficulty. You cannot do it that way. This is the burning lamp of the Spirit.
If the fire is not there, no methods, changed methods, uniqueness, singularity, or anything else can take its place. It is the heart of life—the life of the Spirit.
It may be putting things in the place of the Person, even Christian things. Christian work can be a very, very harmful thing if it becomes an end in itself.
The enemy is very busy to make Christian workers so occupied with the work and all its demands, all its many aspects, that they are drawn away from the Lord Himself. That is, of course, the confession and the tragedy of many a servant of the Lord.
“The work—we have got to give an address. We have got to give addresses.” Very well, very well. Oh, there is a subtle snare: always reading your Bible or listening to messages with your eye upon people to whom you are going to give it.
You cannot believe how damaging that is. Perhaps I am only speaking to some here. Dear friends, if you and I do not speak to others the thing that has already spoken to us, dealt with us, challenged us, and faced us up, the Lord deliver us from our speaking.
You see, the work, the business, the demands can just come into the place of the Lord Himself, and the fire is damped down like that.
First love is always characterized by vision and purpose. You know that in the natural; it is even more so in the spiritual. Vision means that there is a future, something ahead, a tremendous prospect. That is a constituent of first love.
You see it in the natural: something to live for, some purpose in life, some meaning in life, something ahead that draws you on. That is first love, plain and simple. We were all like that, really.
If that goes, if that goes, we have fallen. We have fallen. In the eyes of the Lord, we have come down.
First love is preparedness to suffer, to pay a price, to go on with the object of our love whatever it costs and whatever people say or do. That is first love.
We could go on like this, but I am quite sure you know that many, many other features belong to this first love. First love, and because of it, first works.
Oh, may the Lord find His appeal to us having some real effect in drawing out our hearts again. If this does help us, like the lamp; if this does burn us, like this fire, may we listen, repent, and do the first works. Listen to what the Spirit saith unto the churches.
There is the Lord. I know we shall never fully measure up to Him in this matter. We shall always fall short of the pattern. But the question is: there is a lamp of fire—is it burning?
There is no hope unless the lamp of fire, or in other words the Holy Spirit, is having His true effect in our lives. That is why He is here. That is His work: to reproduce in us what is true of the Lord Jesus.
We all agree that this is true of Him. Having loved, He persists in love. He does not give up. His love does not break down and disappear.
The Holy Spirit has come that the love of Christ should be shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit—that kind of love.
This is a call. Let us respond. If, dear friends, you can stand up to this and say, “Yes, I know what you are talking about, but I can say without any hesitation: not today. There is no loss from what there was. Indeed, it is much more so now,” well, all right; that is good if you can say that. I hope we shall all be able to say that.
Nevertheless, the Lord’s word is given to us. He speaks. He returns before us in this vision, and He says, “This is what I am like. This is what I want you to be like: first love.”
Should we pray?
Ah, Father, we can only just pray and appeal to Thee that it may be true of every one of us. Rather than there should be loss and weakening, may there be the blazing up of that first love, the intensity of that love in our hearts.
May all these characteristics of it be made more true. Oh, Lord, save us from all the vitiating influences and possibilities of this life, this world. Deliver us, we pray Thee, from losing anything Thou hast given us.
Thou hast said so much in Thy love. Thou hast given us so much in Thy love. Now Thou dost come for the fruit Thou hast the right to expect.
We do not want disappointment to be in Thy face, disappointment to be in Thy heart. Lord, find in us that which answers to Thine own heart, more and more, that He may be satisfied, seeing the fruit of His travail.
We all need more love—much more love for the Lord. We need much more love for one another. Oh, Lord, increase this great, great virtue in our lives by the mighty operation of Thy Spirit.
In Jesus’ name. Amen.