Can You Be Right About Everything and Still Get It Wrong?
Notes from the message preached by Nate Bush at New City Church in Albuquerque, NM, on August 26, 2026.
Does God Actually Know What You're Going Through?
The letter opens with a description of Jesus as the one who walks among seven golden lampstands. Earlier in the book, those lampstands are identified as the seven churches receiving these letters. The picture is not of a distant God watching from somewhere else. It is of Jesus moving through the middle of his people.
Then comes the line: "I know your works, your toil, and your patient endurance." - Revelation 2:2
He knows. That is the first thing he says.
What Was Actually Happening When Revelation Was Written?
This matters, because it is easy to read Revelation as a coded map of the future and miss that it was mail. Real mail, sent to real people, in a genuinely terrible moment.
John wrote it around 95 AD from Patmos, a prison island. He describes himself as a partner in tribulation — a word that means pressure, distress, being squeezed. He was there because he would not stop talking about Jesus.
The decades before had been brutal. Nero had blamed Christians for a fire in Rome and turned his persecution into public spectacle. By the time John was writing, Domitian was in power, and refusing to say that Caesar was lord could cost you your livelihood, your standing, or your life. Christians were treated as a threat to the Roman way of doing things — not a private belief system anyone could safely ignore.</new_str>
The city of Ephesus was a hard place to be a Christian specifically. It had a temple built for the worship of the emperor. It had a temple to the goddess Artemis, staffed by thousands, where religious prostitution was part of the practice. Acts 19 records a riot that broke out there when a silversmith named Demetrius realized that Paul's preaching was cutting into the market for handmade gods. The crowd chanted for two straight hours.
Scholar Daniel Akin notes that one of Ephesus's own philosophers said the city's residents deserved to drown, and that he could not bring himself to smile because of the filth he lived in. Even locals thought the place was a mess
Political worship. Sexual brokenness sold as religion. A consumer economy built on all of it. If that sounds unrecognizable to you, congratulations on not living in 2026.
Where Do You Look for Light If You're Still in the Tunnel?
Nate shared something from his own hard season. He went to a Christian psychologist, Dr. Wes Beavis, expecting encouragement, and got this instead: more bad things are going to happen to you. So stop looking for the light at the end of the tunnel. Look for the light in the tunnel.
That is the actual message of Revelation. Not that difficulty ends soon, but that Jesus is present inside it. Scholar Shane Wood describes the book not as a fantasy or a history written in advance, but as a pastor's letter to people with real heartache and real lives
Christianity has never claimed that suffering is avoidable. It claims that the God at the center of it was pierced through the hands and feet and cried out that he had been abandoned. He is not squeamish about your tunnel. He has been in one.
What Did Jesus Actually Praise This Church For?
Quite a lot. They worked hard. They endured. They refused to go along with things they believed were wrong. They tested people who claimed spiritual authority and called out the frauds. They had not gotten tired.
By almost any measure a church uses to evaluate itself, Ephesus was crushing it.
So Why Does Jesus Say "I Have This Against You"?
Because they had abandoned the love they had at first.
Here is the dynamic underneath it. When the culture around you feels hostile, you feel tension — and almost nobody enjoys tension. So we resolve it, and there are only two easy ways to do that.
Give up truth in the name of love. Stop saying anything that puts you at odds with the world. Call it tolerance and go quiet.
Give up love in the name of truth. Decide everyone out there is a lost cause, pull the wagons into a circle, and get very good at being right.
Ephesus took the second exit. And Jesus, who had just finished commending them, tells them it is severe enough that he will remove their lampstand — meaning he will end the church — if it does not change.
Is It Better to Build Walls or Dig Wells?
Walls are easier. Walls let you define who is in and who is out, and the rules do the work for you.
Wells are harder, because if people are drawn to the grace of Jesus, they arrive with everything else too — the history, the baggage, the story they inherited, the habits they have not sorted out yet.
Jesus was accused of eating with the wrong people. His answer was that healthy people do not need a doctor, and that he wanted mercy more than sacrifice. "For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners." - Matthew 9:13
Any version of Christian obedience that does not produce love of God and love of neighbor at the same time has missed the point of the whole thing. A church that is all truth and no love does not last a generation.
That is not a figure of speech. Ephesus was one of the great centers of the early church. As N.T. Wright observes, there is no functioning church there today.
Why Can't You Just Teach or Hire Your Way Out of This?
You cannot hire it. Ephesus had arguably the most stacked leadership history of any church in the New Testament: planted by Paul, shaped by Priscilla and Aquila, pastored by Timothy, and later led by John — the same John writing this letter, the one who would go on to write that you cannot claim to love God while failing to love the person in front of you.
You cannot teach it either. Jesus does not correct their doctrine. He tells them to do the works they did at first. It is not a knowledge gap. It is an action gap.
How Do You Get the Warmth Back?
Remember. Think about the beginning — the fire, the awkward honesty, the willingness to be embarrassing about it. The early church in Acts met constantly, ate together, sold their possessions to cover each other's needs. There was an enormous amount of energy in the room.
Repent. If your heart has gone cold toward the church, or toward people who do not believe what you believe, name it. If you find it easier to argue with strangers online than to know your actual neighbors, that is the thing.
Recommit. Do the works you did at first. It is often easier to behave your way into believing than to believe your way into behaving. The heaviest weight in the gym is the front door.
Refocus. This is not home. The letter ends with a promise that the one who holds on gets to eat from the tree of life — the tree guarded off at the end of Genesis. The picture is Eden reopened. Everything that went wrong, put back.
Until then, the tension does not resolve. That is the assignment.
Life Application
This week, pick one person you have quietly written off — someone whose life or beliefs you disagree with, who you have decided is not worth the effort. Do not debate them. Do something ordinary and kind: text them, invite them to eat, ask about their week, and actually listen to the answer. You are not compromising anything you believe by doing it.
Ask yourself these questions as you reflect on this message:
Which exit do I take when I feel tension — do I go quiet to keep the peace, or do I get sharp and certain to protect the truth?
Is there someone I have stopped loving because it was easier to be right about them?
When did I last do something for someone who could not do anything for me?
If I am honest, has my faith made me warmer over the last five years, or colder?
