What Christ approves in Ephesus.
These words disclose the Lord's marvellous generosity. He is quick to see and ready to acknowledge all the good that exists among His people; in this how different from many that speak in His name, and who are perpetually engaged in faultfinding and depreciation. Even where we err, we may ask Him to overrule and bless our very blunders.
I. First the Lord says, "I know thy works." There is to be no dealing with us in the dark, as man is oftentimes compelled to deal with his fellow-man. He brings us into the light. The true knowing of a man's work involves the knowing of the heart, inasmuch as the quality of the work depends on the motive. It is because of this that even our own works are so ill understood by us. There are dim, half-lighted chambers of thought into which we have not penetrated with all our self-scrutiny, and a cunning self-complacency gives everything a turn in our own favour. The Lord knows all our works.
II. Opening out His initial statement, the Lord says, "I know thy labour and patience." (1) One department of labour is Christian learning; (2) a second thought is the labour involved in spreading the Gospel; (3) standing out as the grandest of all things is the doing of Christ's will in our daily life.
III. The Gospel is essentially intolerant intolerant, not merely of evil in the abstract, but of evil men. Such men we must learn to "try" as the Ephesian Church did. And if they are liars, then, whatever their professions of zeal, spirituality, or holiness, we must reject them.
IV. The patience of Ephesus is commended. Christian patience is not the result of a process of deadening the sensibilities. There is nothing stoical in it, no pretence that we do not feel, but the hardihood that is associated with the keenest capacity of suffering, and that has its root in a firm confidence in God.
J. Culross, Thy First Love,p. 27.
Reference: Revelation 2:3. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xviii., No. 1069.