To Sardis: Strengthen What Remains

Today, we're going to continue our series on the churches of Revelation 2 and 3. So far, we've looked at four of those churches. We're not going through them right now for their prophetic message. We're going through all those seven churches to show that, one, they were real churches. They existed at the time that John wrote to them, and they all had very specific issues.

There are seven churches that developed seven different ways. When you look at the area that they covered, it's amazing. They all developed so differently. But then you realize they didn't have mass transit, and they didn't have communications like we have now. So they were in some ways isolated from each other. They would have known about each other. Some people would have visited, but it would have been quite a trip to go from Laodicea to Ephesus by the main roads. There were mountain ranges in between and all kinds of problems.

But we've looked through four of them. We've seen how each of those churches had their own set of problems. They were commended by God in some ways. Smyrna was commended the most of the four we've looked at because the people of Smyrna were incredibly poor, and they were persecuted. And they were not able to rise up out of their poverty basically because of the persecution. And yet they're commended as people who stayed faithful to God. There's nothing bad said about that church, which is interesting since most people will look at a persecuted, poor church and say, well, they must have something wrong.

They must be doing something wrong. God must not be pleased with them because look how much they're suffering. But the truth is they were a church that suffered all the time, their whole history. And yet God commended them because they were people who stayed true to Him and true to God's way. As we go through all these, we'll see that the one delivering the message is Jesus Christ. He is the head of all the churches. And that all these churches, by the way, are given a message that all the other churches are also supposed to read.

We're supposed to read all of them. And as we go through them, it will also become more and more apparent that Christ says He's coming to each of these churches. And He gives them a very strict warning.

So as we go through them, let's look at what the church at Sardis, which is who we're going through today, what that church was like when John wrote to them. We actually don't know a lot outside of Revelation, but we know some. And then look at what kind of congregation that would be today. And then look at what does that message mean to us? Can we be in danger individually for having the same approach that they did? Like I said, we'll cover the prophetic message after we're done with them.

But let's look at them first of all, the message to them and the specific message of what we can draw from them. And then we'll look at the prophetic message. So let's go to Revelation 3. And let's start at verse 1. And the angel of the church in Sardis writes, These things says he who has the seven spirits of God and the seven stars. It is another reference as we've gone through these, reference to Jesus Christ.

We'll cover that in a little more detail when we get into the prophetic meaning of it. These things says he who has the seven spirits of God and the seven stars. I know your works, that you have a name, that you're alive, but you are dead. Now this is real important in understanding this church. People knew Sardis as being a good, solid church.

You know, if you would have gone to Pergamum and asked, hey, have you ever been to the church in Sardis? Yes, that's a good, solid church there. They've been around a long time. They're doing what's right. They're good people. You like those people in Sardis. And what Christ tells them is, you have a reputation, but it's not a true reputation of who you really are.

You know, it's interesting. We don't know a lot about the city of Sardis at the time. We know some. It was an old city. As we've looked at many of these, these were old cities. Athaiathar had been there a long time when we went through all of them. Pergamum, Ephesus, the church in Ephesus had been there about 50 years by the time we get to here. So even the church had been there a long time.

But Sardis was a city that had been built at least 700 years before John wrote to them. During that time period, they had been a very wealthy city, and numerous times they had been conquered by different armies, as much of Asia Minor had been. All those cities were under not constant, but regular attacks. I mean, Cyrus, the great that we see in the Bible, the Persian king, had actually attacked and conquered Sardis.

Others that had conquered them was Alexander the Great. Of course, the Romans had too. An interesting point about the name Sardis. It's plural. It'd be like saying, Nashville's.

Now, the reason they think that is because the city had started on top of them about a 1500-foot plateau, and over time it spread out and covered the entire plateau. And then it just sort of started to spread out all over the base of it. So it became a very large area, and so it was plural. There's all these Sardis here. You know, one city, but it's plural. It'd be like going to New York. You know, you go to New York. Boy, you see Manhattan, Brooklyn, if you cross the bridge.

You see the Bronx, Harlem, and that's New York. You could call it New York's. Right? Because these different sections of this one city. Well, that's sort of the way Sardis was. It was sort of a conglomerate of cities that came together to make one city, so its name was literally plural. What's interesting about it as we go through what he says to the church there is the city itself. The city was known at this time for being past its glory days. You know, the great days of Sardis, the great day of wealth and influence as a major city-state, was gone. And they were in a state of decay. You know, we talked about how beautiful some of the sites were, Ephesus, you know, and the amphitheater there and things. Now, they had nice buildings in Sardis, but, you know, people would say, I remember when Sardis was. I remember when it was a much greater city. I remember when it was, and it had been decaying for quite a while.

Now, think about that as we go through here the message to the church.

So, let's pick this up in verse 2 now. He says to them, I remember he tells them, you're actually dead. People think this is a good church, but it's not. He says, remember therefore how you have received and heard. Hold fast and repent. Therefore, if you will not watch, I will come upon you as a thief, and you will not know what hour I will come upon you. That's an interesting statement. That is the statement that Jesus Christ makes in his prophecies about his return over and over and over again. I'm going to come back, and you're not going to be ready for me. And here, the church of Sardis is told, I'm coming to you. Now, the church of Sardis died all in a long time ago. But that shows you there is a prophetic meaning to this too, as we'll go through later. He says, you have a few names, even in Sardis, who have not defiled their garments. And they shall walk with me in white, for they are worthy. So he's looking at the people with this attitude, and he says, some of you in this congregation, that congregation in Sardis, we look now through history, even today we have to ask ourselves, can I have an attitude of the people like Sardis? And he says, well, some of them are going to be resurrected and change their Christ's return. He says, he who overcomes shall be clothed with white garments. But notice this next statement, and I will not blot out his name from the book of life, but I will confess his name before my father and before his angels. I will not blot out his name. You know what? Usually what you see in the Bible is, and I will put your name in. The emphasis is, come to me, repent, come to God, and God will write your name in the book of life. These people already have their names in the book of life. This is a frightening statement.

In other words, you have to be watchful. You have to repent. You have to come back to me and hold on to what you have so that I will not blot out your name. So this message to Sardis is about how not to lose their salvation. And yet, their reputation outwardly... This is a solid church. Believe me, if you walked into the church at Thyatira, remember we talked about Thyatira last week? You wouldn't have said, wow, what a great church! I mean, they had all kinds of pagan customs, all kinds of wrong doctrines. There was known sexual immorality going on all over the church. It was a mess! But that's not what it would have felt like. You could have walked into Sardis and felt sort of like, oh, it's good to be sort of home here. These people seem to have it together.

But their reputation wasn't what they really were.

Then we know here in verse 6 where he says, He who has an ear let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. In other words, everybody, all the churches need to read the message to all the other churches because there's something important for all of us to learn from it. He gives them five things they have to do. They have to be watchful.

As we go through this, you're going to see the only term I can use that really captures the problem with Sardis, they were sleepwalking through their Christianity. There's this self-absorption that they had that everything's okay and I just go through my life.

That's easy to do. You ever have routines you get into? You get locked into routines, you just live them, live them, live them. You don't even know what you're doing after a while. Their Christianity was a routine. They're told to strengthen the things that remain. They had no zeal. They had lost a lot of truth. And they're told, grab hold of the little bits and pieces you have and let God strengthen that. Or you will die. Your church will die.

The third thing is, remember therefore how you have received and heard. They had forgotten how God had called them and how God had worked in their lives. They'd forgotten it. They took it all for granted now. The fourth thing was, hold fast. Don't let go of this. Hold fast. And then the last thing is to repent. That would have been a little bit probably surprising to the Sardis church, but we're a good solid church. Why would we need to repent?

You know, it's so far that we've gone through this. Oni Smyrna wasn't told they had to repent. Of all the churches we've covered so far, there is a command for the church to repent. Not the world, but the church to repent.

So they must overcome. Now this leads us to a question.

How can a church die?

What causes a church to die and what are the symptoms of a dying church? Now, when I say what causes a church to die, I understand in God's plan, some churches are only supposed to be there for a certain amount of time.

In other words, God can start a church someplace, and that church could be there for a generation or two generations or three generations or a hundred years, and then it's done. And that church dies off. I mean, I've seen churches in a town that was maybe a had a real bad economic downturn. You go back in the 70s when there were some really bad economic problems in the United States, and had large churches. And over time, more and more people lost their jobs, more and more people moved away, and after a while there's 15 people there. Most of them are retired. And the church dies out. Now that wasn't this problem. In other words, it's not like, oh, you people need to repent. Your church died out. No, that's just... That is what it's like to live with... Interact with the world that we live in and God's work. What we have here is a church that literally spiritually died, but still existed. It appeared to be just fine. But it wasn't. And that's why we need to read this. Because is it possible that there are times we may feel spiritually fine? We're okay. And we're not. Not before God. So let's go back through those five things that Jesus told him.

And I'm going to put it into exact phrases that allow us to look at ourselves. And say, okay, am I guilty of that? First one, people in a dying church are not spiritually watchful.

It reminds me of the man that told me one time that he kept Christmas all his life because it's what his family did and it's what his church did. He never understood why or even questioned it. He just did it.

Right? How watchful are we? Or do we do it because it's just, it's what I do. It's what I do. This is especially true if you've grown up in the church. You do this because it's what you do.

Now, there's a lot of places in the New Testament where Jesus tells his disciples to watch. Let's look at one of them here in Luke 12. When we talk about watching, it's true that there are times he's directly talking about prophecy. And here's where we have to be careful.

We have to be careful with prophecy because we can get so excited about things going on around us that we take the prophecies and we give them meanings they don't have. We have to be very, very careful. That's why watching is important. There are many prophecies that we will not understand until they're actually fulfilled. If you remember the sermon I gave, six weeks ago, maybe two months ago now, where I talked about no, receiving a vaccine for coronavirus is not the mark of the beast. Now, I didn't say you should go get the vaccine or not get the vaccine. That's a personal decision based on... that's a health choice, okay? That could give you my opinion, but I'm not going to because my opinion is my opinion.

But it's not the mark of the beast. And how did I prove it? We just went to and showed what the Bible says the mark of the beast is, and it can't be that. And the reason why is because the beast isn't on the scene yet. There is not a temple where he's being worshipped yet, where the antichrist is being worshipped, and they're not requiring you to take this mark because you refused the worship, the image of the beast, and participate in a religious ceremony. So it can't be the mark of the beast because none of that's happened yet. Now, I'm not saying it's good or bad. I'm not saying it's good or bad. I'm always very, shall we say, nervous about many things that happen to the world that are supposed to be good, whether they're good or bad. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the mark of the beast. Okay? It's not the mark of the beast. Yet, I had my neighbor ask me this week. He thinks I'm a Seventh-day Adventist. They keep telling him about me. He thinks I'm a Seventh-day Adventist. They keep telling him I'm not, but he doesn't believe it.

He said, do you think that the vaccine is the mark of the beast? And I said, no. Oh, good. I don't either. And so we talked a little bit about it. And he says, I don't know if I'm smart enough to even know the Bible. We ended up in a very interesting conversation where he honestly talked about his own spiritual questioning. I thought, wow. It was a good conversation. But it started with the mark of the beast. We have to be real careful. Notice what Jesus says here. Starting verse 35. Let your waist be girded and your lamps burning. Be spiritually clothed. You're awake. You have a lamp. The problem with Sardis is they're sleepy. This is a sleepy church. Oh, they just... Yeah, it's a fun church. We all get together. We have a good time. They have great little potlucks.

But they're spiritually sleepy.

He says, you keep those lamps burning. And you yourselves be like men who wait for their master. So you're waiting. You're anticipating something. When he will return for the wedding, that when he comes and knocks, they may open to him immediately. Blessed are those servants who the master, when he comes, will find watching. Assurely I say to you that he will gird himself and have them sit down and will come and serve them. And if he should come in the second watch or come in the third watch and find them so blessed are those servants. But know this, that the master of the house had known what hour the thief would come. He would have watched and not allowed his house to be broken into. Therefore, you also be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect. The point being here, you and I have to live every single day of our lives, as if we are, because we are, preparing for the return of Jesus Christ. And it doesn't matter if it's 500 years from now. Now, you and I don't believe, I mean, I don't believe it's 500 years from now, but it doesn't matter. Because you know what? My belief has nothing to do with what God's going to do. He doesn't ask me my opinion.

God's going to send Jesus Christ back when it's time for him to come back. It sure seems like it's getting close to that. But it doesn't matter if it is or not. Whatever time I have left has to be spent watching and waiting, anticipating, and wanting to be part of that. Because that then drives your decisions. Whether they're social decisions, business decisions, you know, those priorities determine how we answer questions and what we do.

Now, notice the next parable. Because in verse 41, Peter said to him, Lord, do you speak this parable only to us or to all people? I don't understand. Okay, I get the meaning of this parable because sometimes they said, we have no idea what you just said. Okay, so, okay, we get this parable. But is it for your disciples or is it for everybody? The Lord said, Who then is that faithful, a wise servant, whom his master will make ruler over his household to give them their portion of food in due season? So in other words, he's saying, okay, it's the disciples I'm talking to now. Blessed is that servant whom the master will find so doing when he comes. Truly, I say to you that he will make him ruler over all that he has. But if that servant says in his heart, and here's a problem that you would have found in Sardis, my master is delaying his coming. It begins to beat the male and female servants, and to eat and drink and be drunk, the master of that servant will come on a day when he is not looking for him, and in an hour when he is not aware, and will cut him in two and appoint him his portion with the unbelievers. Wow! Once again, this is a statement of salvation, and the statement in Sardis is a statement of salvation, blotting out of the Book of Life. So he says, I'm talking to my disciples, and what happens when you lose that vision, and I brought this out a number of times, here earlier this year, when the whole COVID situation was just getting everybody off the proper vision, the proper vision of God, and what's happening to us. The point we're making here is, or that Jesus is making is, when you lose that vision, you begin to mistreat each other, and when you lose that vision, you begin to allow sin into your life. Now, what's interesting about Sardis is they are not accused of things that Thyatira was accused of. Remember, Thyatira was actually participating in paganism, idolatry. Thyatira had widespread sexual immorality. You notice that Sardis isn't accused of that?

But there was sin. We're going to talk about the kind of sin that would come into sleepwalking people.

We're just going through their daily lives, living life as it comes, living a Christianity that's sort of half awake and half asleep. So we're told to be watchful. Watching is an action. So the first thing you have to do to make sure that you don't have this Sardis attitude is you have to take action. And that action is based on watching. Watching not just what's happening around us, but watching and making sure we don't beat each other, okay, that we don't mistreat each other in the congregation, and making sure that we're not letting sin just sort of in the fringes of our lives. Okay. They were told to watch. The second point, people in a dying church totally are totally comfortable in their church just the way it is, okay? It's the way it's been done for years. We're comfortable with this. I'm not talking about changing major doctrine.

I'm talking about allowing decay.

Allowing decay. You know, I read a number of articles as I was working on this on... It was interesting. Surveys done on dying churches just out in Protestantism. And there were all kinds of symptoms that they came up with. And one was that people no longer care about helping anybody else. They only care about their own social activities and their buildings. And the man who did the survey actually went around a lot of churches and he said, I got to the place I could tell a dying church. I would walk in and they would be having meetings about... you know, building meetings. And yet their buildings were decaying. The building had become symptomatic of something else that was happening in the church. I thought that was interesting.

You know, I like going back to Pennsylvania every once in a while where I grew up. Back in the 70s, when there were some economic difficulties in the United States, there were cities, little towns in Pennsylvania, and I came from Appalachia, so some of those were pretty area, but some of those towns would die off. I mean, the one town... the town where I grew up in went from being a really vibrant little town to a place where you wouldn't even walk down the main street at night because there were, you know, gangs of kids out hanging out on the corners because everything was shut down.

I think I've told you this before. We had a house. It was built on top of an old coal mine. It was a big two-story house. People forgot the coal mine was there because they had shut it down years ago, and they were having foundation problems with their house. They would work on the foundation, work on the foundation, but as weeks went by, the house just got slid more and more into the ground until the second story was the only thing outside the ground, and you realize it was sliding into a coal mine down below. They had to come tear it down and fill in the hole. It was a decaying town. It's not so much anymore because they brought in some businesses. What's interesting is they brought in some businesses, some companies, not retail businesses. People said, okay, if I'm going to work here, I'm going to live here. So younger people moved in, started to buy up all the old houses and fix them up. And now it's being revived. Now I can go into other towns in that same area, and they've never been revived. And what you see is, it's even you can see it in the faces of the people. You know, everything's shut down. Not much is going on. All you'll have the Veterans Hall and the maybe the Elks Club or something like that, where you just see older people going in there where they're doing the same thing they've done for 40 years.

They just do the same thing. They just they go in, they have their meetings, and they eat their lunch.

And you just look around, it's like all the cars are old. What's funny is the turn on the radio stations, and I've even mentioned this to my wife. Watch this. Try to find the most local radio station. And they're playing rock music from 1975.

They're frozen in time. Now, there's other towns that aren't like that at all. So it's easy. It'd be an interesting study which ones are dying and which ones revived. Sardis is the town that never revived.

They're just going through the motions. And you know, they're sort of comfortable with it. And so they're comfortable with the way their churches run, and they're comfortable with the way things are done, and they're comfortable with the sermons as long as you don't challenge me too much. They like a good, challenging sermon that you could say, I hope Bob's listening to that.

But they don't want to be challenged because they have no vision on how God is working in their lives today. You know, let's go to Romans 13. Romans didn't have the problems of Sardis, but you know, all churches have a little bit of this. So what he's talking about here applies also to the attitude that we see in Sardis.

13 verse 11.

And do this. The way he starts this sentence, is this the way it's broken down in English? In Greek, it's not exactly the beginning of the sentence. But here it is.

This is the message to Sardis, too. Now, this was written many, many decades before John wrote, but it's the same problem. Wake up, because if you don't wake up, sin is just breaking in slowly into your life. Oh, you're not going to church on Sunday. You're going to church on Sabbath. You're keeping the Holy Days. You're doing this stuff. You can quote certain passages of the Bible. You're really good at quoting old literature. You can quote literature from 1955, or 1965, or 75, or 85, or 95. And you're good at 2005. We're good at that kind of stuff. But there's no enthusiasm for what God is doing. Because it's a sleepy church. So that's why they're told they have to strengthen the things that remain. See, if you go through those five things that we saw at the very beginning, you're seeing each one of these is just a modern application of those things. You have to strengthen the things that remain. The third point, people in a dying church forget how God has worked in their lives. What happens in a dying church is the church only exists to take care of its own internal needs. Now, every congregation has its own internal needs. We need to do that, right? But when people make decisions like, well, I want to go to that church because they have good babysitting. There's a spiritual problem with that.

Because the church is a spiritual problem. Because that's not why we go to church. That's not why we're part of a congregation. Remember, when we're talking about this, one thing that becomes very obvious is going to church isn't the issue. If you just go to church, you're already in trouble. It's being part of the congregation that's the requirement. These are churches. These are congregations. A congregation is more than a collection of people. It is the family of God that He's working in. That's what it is. Anything less than that, and we're not fulfilling what we're supposed to fulfill. That's, by the way, that's why you and I need to be concerned that probably over half of our church isn't here today. We need to keep in touch with them. We need to find out how they're doing. We need to make sure they're still there.

We're there for them. Because if it's just counting the church, we've missed the point.

We have to be interacting with each other because that's what we're supposed to do.

But remember, for the people in Sardis, church was a habit.

They didn't inspire other people to follow the gospel. How can you inspire other people if you're not inspired yourself? If you don't have a fire for the gospel, if you don't have a fire for what God's doing, there's no way you're going to inspire somebody else with a fire because God works through us to others. It is God who does it.

If we don't have that fire, then we'll have to give it to them or help light that fire by somebody else. The problem with a dying church is they find it very difficult to be relevant to people outside their congregation.

Every church has its own culture. We have a culture—there's nothing wrong with that, by the way. We have our own culture, but we have to be careful that we don't make our culture righteousness. We don't make our culture we did a PAC, Public Appearance Campaign, and we were running Beyond Today on— what was that station?

It was an all-religious station, and probably half of the religious programs on there are black preachers. So we would have large numbers of African Americans come to some of our PACs. We had this one group—I loved having them there because they were the most interactive group. I would say something, an ADL Amen. And I'd walk over and say, you're right, say it again, an ADL Amen. It was great.

And afterwards, one of the women came up and said, you're our heroes because we're a Sabbath-keeping church. We were never part of any church. You know, they started 30, 40 years ago. They don't even know how they started. And we just—you're our heroes. We watch you all the time. I said, well, I've never been a hero before, except my little son.

And I remember Victor Cubic saying, you know, we were talking later. He said, well, what we'd have to do to maybe invite some of them to come to our church. He said, Gary, what do you think? I said, well, you really want to know what I think? He said, yeah.

I think we'd have to get better music.

Yeah, I said, yeah, I can see that. Yeah, I said, you know, let's say that our music— and I'm not against all of it, but, you know, it's not the only definition of sacred music isn't by the waters of Babylon, okay? It's more than that.

So we can't make our culture the only measurement of righteousness. Our culture isn't wrong, but it's not the measurement of righteousness. And sometimes it could use a little infusion of something, right?

I'm not talking about, okay, let's all, you know, become Pentecostals. You know, that's not what I'm saying, and you all know that. That's a doctrinal issue. But we have to realize that to a dying church, nothing can ever be changed.

You would be shocked if you saw the hymnal that I sang out of as a child in the radio church of God. Most of you would say, well, that's all Protestant stuff. Yeah, it wasn't a whole lot different than the Methodist church I came from. How many remember that little gray hymnal? How many is old enough to remember? Oh, wow. Oh, yeah, the little gray hymnal, remember? Yeah. Even, oh, Mr. Haggard wouldn't raise his hand. He just shook his head.

That's why in a dying church, they almost never trained new leaders.

They lived so much in just grinding out the day, they didn't even look forward. And sometimes a church dies because there's nobody for God to use to lead it. Now, a guy can raise up stones, but you understand what I'm saying. Disciples making disciples is what this is all about. If the disciples aren't making disciples, he'll have to do it some other way.

Hebrews 10.

Here, remember, they forget how God worked in their life, how new it was to come into the church, how exciting it was, and what they had to go through. And that's why I find what is written here in Hebrews to be so interesting the way it's written. Hebrews 10 and verse 32.

To encourage the Jewish Christians, Paul writes, but recall the former days. He didn't say, live in the former days. He said, remember what it was like when God called you. But recall the former days in which after you were illuminated, and after God's light came into your life, and everything changed. You saw the whole world differently. You endured a great struggle with sufferings, partly while you were made a spectacle, both by reproach and tribulations. He says, remember how difficult it was to come into the church? And some of you coming into the church over the last few years, it hasn't been that difficult. I mean, as far as outside influences. To come into the church years ago meant maybe losing a job, ostracization at school. It was a different time than people went through. And he's telling them, I mean, we've gone through nothing, what they had to go through. And he's telling them, remember what it was like? And he's writing to Jews. When they left the Jewish community to follow Jesus Christ as the Messiah, they were excommunicated and ostracized.

Not only the people they went to church with, many of them were blood. These were your family, because these Jewish people had stuck together for hundreds and hundreds of years. You're being ostracized by your family. He says, remember that? And then I love this next statement. And partly, while you became companions of those who were so traded. He said, remember how hard it was? You come into this church and you think these people are all crazy. We're still sort of crazy.

One of the greatest trials we face as Christians is what?

Living with each other. Yeah, it's supposed to be that way. We're supposed to get close enough to each other, but dedicated to God and dedicated to each other so much that that's what we do. That's what we do.

For you had compassion, what Paul says, on me and my chain. So he talks here, he gives him a little bit of, you know, just sort of personal comments. Then verse 35, Therefore do not cast away your confidence, which is great reward. For you have need of endurance, so that after you have done the will of God, you may receive the promise. He says, you've got to stick this out. God is teaching you endurance, faith in God.

You know, one of the greatest dangers we face right now, I keep thinking as we go through these, when this COVID situation is over, and then there'll be a new crisis. I'm not being fatalistic. That's life. Right? There'll be a new crisis to face. When this COVID thing is over, well, we have become like Sardis. We all come back together and sleepwalk through this. Or will we be like Ephesus, where we'll all come back together, but we've lost our love of the truth and love of God and love of each other. But we have the, boy, we have the doctrines, right? Because Ephesus had the doctrines, right? Or I worry when we come back and just be like they had to see him.

All these messages need to be looked at. What are we going to be as a congregation as we come back as a congregation? We're fighting to do it now.

That's why all those who aren't here have to be remembered and have to be contacted, have to be talked to, have to be loved.

I told you about the man who drove by church just to make sure we were there because he was quarantined at the time.

He was that lonely. He drove by just to make sure we were here. Well, that was actually more of his room. He says, For yet a little while, and he was coming, will come, and will not tear. Christ is coming back. Oh, we're back to that. Okay, we're working towards a goal here. Now, the just shall live by faith, but if anyone draws back, my soul has no pleasure in him. So he quotes the Old Testament. But verse 39, this is the message to us. This is the message that Sardis didn't hear. But we are not of those who draw back into perdition, but of those who believe to the saving of the soul.

This is a dedication for the long run. It's a total dedication to God in his way. And that's why he told them, Remember therefore how you have received and heard. Remember how God brought you here, and you're not the stay standing still where to keep moving forward. So that was the third of the things he told him in Revelation. The fourth one is, people in a dying church do have a set of biblical doctrines, but they have a lack of depth of understanding.

Just like the man I talked about who kept Christmas, he said, but I didn't know why.

If you grow up in this church, and we have people here in four generations. I was looking at my grandchildren this morning, you know the fourth generations in our family in this church.

And I told them, You have to prove this for yourself. God has to call you. I can't call you. This just can't be your church. This is God's church. You want to be part of it? You have to prove this for yourself. You have to live this for yourself. You have to come into this because you believe God has drawn you into it, and you believe it, and you follow it. That's why Jesus said, Blessed are those who hunger and thirst. You won't get this until you hunger and thirst. And if you don't know how to hunger and thirst after righteousness, go ask God to make you feel that way. Pray it long enough. Boy, are you going to be shocked.

Pray long enough. God, help me to hunger and thirst after righteousness. How can I help you? I challenge you to do that.

And you're going to experience an emotional and spiritual hunger you've never experienced before.

But see, we just can't have a set of biblical doctrines and lack depth of understanding. Because you know what that's like?

It's like a child who's hungry. And I want to get with my grandkids. I fight this all the time. I'm hungry. And you know how you solve that? A pack of Twinkies and a Coke. And I'm not hungry anymore. And you know the truth is, they don't feel hungry after they do that. They eat the junk food. They drink the Coke. I'm not hungry anymore. Life is good. I'll go out and play some more.

But it's going to make them sick.

That's what it is to live in a church like Sarnass.

You keep eating spiritual junk food, and it feels like you're full.

And you're not. You're just eating poison. So they have this understanding.

But it's so shallow. Oh yeah, we keep the Holy Days. So yeah, oh, well, how was the pizza tabernacles? It was great. Every day after services, we spend all day on the beach. Okay, what else did you do? Oh man, we found these great restaurants, we take out food and took it home to our condo. It was a beautiful condo. It was great. Okay, what else did you do? Oh, let me share the presents I got, or things I bought.

It's junk food. No, I liked all those things. I went to the beach this year, so I did go out on the beach a little bit. Had to say I went out at night. The feast is sort of hard because everybody wants to talk to you. So I want to go play with my grandkids, so I had to take them out at night so I can play on the beach with them without people running up and talking to me. And pretty soon, my kids are running around and the three-year-old's down in the water. You know what I mean? I lose track of them, so I had to go out at night to play with the kids. But that's the junk food. It's wonderful. It's the dessert. Dessert is good, but you'll die if you eat nothing but dessert. What were the sermons about? Oh, I don't know. Why were you there? Well, it was great fun. Yeah, but no. How much time did you spend in prayer during the feast? Well, we went to church. That's not what I asked. See, we eat the junk food, and we think we're full. And there's the problem with a sleepy church. Oh, I feel good. You know how you feel after Thanksgiving? You know, I feel good. I'm tired. I'm going to take a nap.

That's what it's like to be in Sardis.

And that's why God says, you have a reputation. But underneath that reputation, it's just not true.

And that's what He says. They have to hold fast. You have to grab hold of something. He's telling them to do things. You have to grab hold of those teachings, and you have to believe them. You have to grab hold of what you've been taught. And you have to learn what you've been taught. And you have to believe what you've been taught, because it's what you believe.

Because it's part of who you are.

And then the last thing. People in a dying church are comfortable with complacency.

It's okay to be complacent. They were more concerned, the people in Sardis, with comfort than conviction, with comfort than growth.

And here's what happens when you live with that kind of, just, I want everything to be comfortable. Because remember, Christianity, real Christianity isn't always supposed to make us comfortable. In fact, real Christianity is on a regular basis is supposed to make us very uncomfortable.

Real Christianity is supposed to make us uncomfortable on a regular basis.

But what happens in a sleepy church is we just want to be comfortable. But I go to the right church, and I do the right things, and I'm with the right people, so I'm okay.

And that's when we begin to compromise with sin. Now, remember I said, compromising with sin, you don't find the accusations. I mean, there weren't large numbers of people committing adultery and fornication and all the problems that they had in Thyatira. They just didn't have all these sexual sins, at least it appears so, because they're not told about that. They're not worshiping idols, so they don't have paganism brought into the church. So how would they compromise with sin to be so that they need to repent?

What's the little sins?

The sins that come with being comfortable, like going home from services and gossiping about this other person. You know, I was looking over, and so and so was asleep at church. I notice she's been asleep now almost every single week.

Maybe I better talk to the pastor. Of course, she's 83, but that doesn't matter, right?

She's asleep. I'm awake, and I'm watching everybody.

Gossip.

Oh, but that's not it. Read what the Bible says about gossip. It's a sin. But that's not one of the major ones, quote unquote, so we don't... It just sort of creeps in. Gluttony.

I got to work with that one sometimes. I mean, if I ate what I want to eat, I weighed 350 pounds.

You get a... You just can't eat everything you want to eat, right?

How about... I don't get drunk, but you know, I do like on Friday nights, they have a few extra beers, so I'm just, you know... Can't walk, but I'm not drunk. You know, I don't throw up or anything like that. I don't do it all the time. I just go downtown Nashville on Saturday night. Tell you what, we shouldn't be going downtown Nashville on Saturday nights.

I never heard a good story from anybody who went down to downtown Nashville on Saturday night, in the church. I've heard nothing but bad stories.

Now, there's other times I'm going down on a weeknight. That was great. I'm going down on a Sunday afternoon where there were lots of families there, actually. I'm going down on an evening and got something to eat, listen to some music, but I wouldn't go down there on Saturday night.

Oh, but it's okay. I'm not participating.

Okay.

I'm going to cram in my... I'm going to get among 20 or 30,000 people all looking to get drunk and pick somebody up. But I'm not participating. Okay.

1 Thessalonians 5. It's like I don't commit adultery. I just watch pornography. What? Right? But see, that's what happens. We're not doing the big things, but we allow the little things. 1 Thessalonians chapter 5. Once again, you know, the church of Thessalonica wasn't corrected as much as the church in Sardis. When Paul wrote 1 Thessalonians, there's some correction, but it's not near as strong. But he still has to make this point to them because this is a problem we all can have. Any congregation or any member can have. Verse 5. Verse 5. You are all sons of light and sons of the day. We are not of night nor of darkness. Therefore, let us not sleep as others do, but let us watch and be sober. So he's back to, we can't be a sleepy church. We can't let ourselves just feel comfortable. You know, you ever go outside and it's really cold. You're working outside. You come into the warmth. Remember this feeling? When you're a little kid, you're all plain outside, and it's really cold. And you're playing in the snow. You come inside and your mom takes all your, you know, your coat and everything off, and she gives you hot chocolate. And you sit down and you sip that hot chocolate, and you sit there and you get real warm and you fall asleep.

That's the greatest feeling in the world.

But that, we can't do that spiritually.

Oh, I'll just have some more hot chocolate and I'll just go to sleep. We can't do that.

He says, for those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk or drunk at night. In other words, the point he's making here is, if we are spiritually sleepy, we're going to do spiritually wrong things. We open the fringes of our lives to sin. But let us who are of the day be sober, sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love as a helmet, the hope of salvation. For God did not appoint us to wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, that whether we wake or sleep, we should live together with Him. Now, his use of word sleep here has two different meanings. He uses sleep as a negative sense of being spiritually sleeping. You know, here when he says, it's good, you know, whether awake or asleep, we should live with Him, doesn't mean, oh, whether we're awake or spiritually asleep, we'll be with Him, not after just condemning being spiritually asleep. You see him do this in other places where he'll talk about when Christ comes back and resurrects those who are asleep. In other words, he refers to death as sleep in many cases. And so he uses both of these meanings here together. One is talking about being spiritually asleep, unaware, self-absorbed, and just not responding to God. And then here he says, awake or asleep means alive or dead. The context will always tell you if you go through it. So every once in a while, I'll get a question. What does Paul mean? Why is he... Well, he's using a word that he uses two different ways, and he's using them both in the same passage. So one part of it, he's talking about being spiritually asleep, and then at the end he's talking about being awake or asleep. It has to do with being alive or dead at the time when Christ comes, because we should live together with Him.

When he comes back, we all live together with Him in the resurrection.

And so we're now to that last point where he said, repent.

People in a dying church are very comfortable with their complacency.

And Jesus says to them, repent. Do not let all this sin... All the sin coming into your life on the fringes, that's a symptom of other spiritual problems.

So He tells the church of Sardis all these things they have to do, they need to do.

Remember, on the surface, the church of Sardis has a name, a reputation for being a vibrant church.

Unfortunately, they were sleepwalking through their Christianity.

They're just doing it. They feel it's right. They sort of know it. They've proved it in one way or another. They like the people. And God's Spirit is there. That's what's important. God's Spirit is there. That's why they've got to grab hold of what they have. It's still there. But it's not going to be there forever. If they stay that way. Because He says, you're going to die spiritually.

It's a frightening message. They had a lifestyle of compromising with sin. They had biblical teachings with no depth. And they had a profession of God with no enthusiasm, no inspiration. They had no desire to preach the gospel.

We should have a desire to preach the gospel in every way that we can. And preaching the gospel isn't just on television. That's just a tool. Preaching the gospel is every one of our lives.

Every one of you is a tool to inspire others to God.

My neighbor today, or this week also, asked me about the Trinity.

Here's a man who's been a Lutheran, a Catholic, and he's now an evangelical. And he has no understanding of the Trinity. He said, well, you won't.

So he talked about it some, and I'm thinking, how do I say this without, you know, blowing his mind or just making... I mean, you know... So we talked about the Trinity for a while.

And in the end, he said, you know, that sort of makes sense.

But I just don't understand still. Why don't I pray to him? Why does he appear in the Bible with Jesus, with the Father? He's not there! Where is he?

So we talked a little bit. Now, I didn't tell him everything in the Trinity book. Okay.

I would probably not be talking to my neighbor anymore.

But he gave this little chance that... And he said, you know, that makes me think about some things. I'll think about that. Who knows? I don't know if God's going to work with him or not, but we get these little chances, these little opportunities to tell a little bit about the gospel. As I told him, do you understand why he's your father?

Because you're his son. Oh, okay. You know why Jesus Christ is called your brother? Oh, okay. I get it. I get it. Okay. If the Holy Spirit's not there, what does the Holy Spirit do?

It comes into me. Okay. The mind of Christ, it says, is given to us. And the power of the Father. So the power of the Father and the mind of Christ comes into you.

Oh, that's the Holy Spirit. Yeah. I didn't tell him it wasn't a person. We weren't ready to go there yet. He goes, wow, that makes it all so easy. I understand it. I said, so stop trying to worship the Holy Spirit and just worship God.

I thought, what this little piece of opportunity. I'm thinking, God, help me to say something that can make some sense. It may not mean anything to him. You live that every day, especially when you're out in the world. Those little opportunities will come, not to give information dumps, but to give a little piece of light and see if it stays on or they turn it off.

Sardis people don't do that. They're not inspired enough themselves to inspire anybody else.

So we know then the message of Sardis. We've gone through that. The church that was dying. We've had the corrupt church, the church without love, the church that was persecuted. We've had all these different churches that we've gone through. The compromising church in Pergamum. Now, the last two churches are really interesting. The church at Philadelphia and the church at Laodicea. And I think the message of the church at Laodicea is really, really important in a lot of different ways, because I'll just say this. If you have the Laodicean attitude, the one thing you will know is that you don't have the Laodicean attitude. But we'll talk about that another time.