The Danger of Loveless Religion
Combatting the snare of formalism
“‘I know your deeds and your toil and perseverance, and that you cannot bear with those who are evil, and you put to the test those who call themselves apostles, and they are not, and you found them to be false; and you have perseverance and have endured for My name’s sake, you also have not grown weary. But I have this against you, that you have left your first love. Therefore remember from where you have fallen, and repent and do the deeds you did at first.’” (Revelation 2:2–5)
Jesus’ words to the church in Ephesus are illuminating for a number of reasons. For one, they show us that there is a very real danger of being engaged in a whole host of good things — toil and perseverance, not bearing with evil, discerning false teachers, etc. — but doing so from a loveless heart. That is, from a heart no longer animated by a sincere love and affection for Christ.
This, it seems, is what had happened to the believers at Ephesus. They had, as Jesus here says, “left” their first love (v. 4). They had departed from the warmth they had at the beginning and were now soldiering on in their Christian duties, neglecting the main ingredient. Jesus therefore calls them to repentance and bids them to “do the deeds you did at first,” showing in no uncertain terms that, to the risen Christ, loveless religion is a serious and intolerable offense. Faith without works may be dead, but religion without love will soon join it (v. 5).
This raises an essential point, one that each of us ought to reckon with. As the text demonstrates, we sinners have a natural and dangerous drift toward formalism rather than reality with God. Like our first parents, we find it easier to reach for fig leaves than confront our Maker face-to-face. What this means in practice is that instead of honesty, we frequently settle with hypocrisy; instead of sincerity, we lean toward feigned obedience. We put a great deal of effort, in other words, into maintaining the show of religion even while the life and substance of it flew the coop somewhere in the dusty past. As long as the form is maintained, we think, God will be pleased — or, at least, He might be pacified.
But God is not pleased by vain, dispassionate worship (Mal. 1:10). New moons and sabbaths are wearisome to Him when unaccompanied by the obedience of faith (Isa. 1:14). Thus, in order to truly please God with our worship — a term, it should be said, which encompasses every sphere of our lives, not simply Sundays — we need to offer it from the heart. To be more specific, we must offer our worship to the Father through faith in His Son, by the Spirit’s power, and with the entirety of our hearts being properly invested. We must, as the famous passage goes, love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength, and love our neighbour as ourselves. This is what it means to present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, “which is your spiritual service of worship” (Rom. 12:1).
If this sounds like a tall order, that’s because it is. As it turns out, in order to worship the triune God, we must actually know the triune God. Pretenders and hypocrites are left to flounder in their own folly.
But it must be asked, what should we do if we feel ourselves to be the pretenders and hypocrites? What should we do if we find that we have fallen in with the Ephesians and formalists? Several things, I think.
First, we should remember that no temptation has befallen us that is not uncommon to man (1 Cor. 10:13). Revelation 2:2–5 is in the Bible precisely because the sin of formalism is one we are prone to fall into. We therefore can take comfort in the fact that this is not a unique or peculiar sin. Jesus is a skilled Physician who has delivered many sinners from this malady, and we are no exception.
Secondly, we should simply listen to Jesus’s words. We should “remember from where [we] have fallen, and repent and do the deeds [we] did at first” (v. 5). The temptation when dealing with this particular sin is to assume that, because we lack life and vigour, we are necessarily consigned to sit and do nothing until that life returns. Like a jogger panting on the side of the road, we think we have no choice but to pause until our breath returns.
But that is not what Jesus tells us to do. In fact, what He says is quite the opposite. According to Christ, when we realize that dulness of heart and cold, rigid apathy has begun to set in, our response should be twofold: we should think back to those times when we knew we loved Him, those earlier days when we were filled with zeal and devotion, and then, spurred on by the remembrance of past grace, we should set our hands to the plow and get busy doing those things again.
There is no place for passivity here; no place for glum, inert reflection. The kind of repentance Jesus prescribes is active and energetic. As one writer put it, when we come to the Word and feel “helpless, cool, unstirred,” we ought to take a page out of Elijah’s book: heaping wood upon the pyre, heed until the fire!1
John Piper, The Calvinist.