August 12, 2025 Show with Chris Durkin on “The Resurrected Christ Reforming His Church”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs, chapter 27, verse 17, tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now, here's your host, Chris Arnson.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnson, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Tuesday on this 12th day of August 2025, and I'm thrilled to have a returning guest today, Chris Durkin, who is pastor of Colts Neck Community Church in New Jersey and co-host with Pete Hegseth of the Fox Nation documentary, The Life of Jesus.

Pastor Chris recently led a prayer service by the invitation of Pete Hegseth, who is now, as you know, our secretary of defense at the Pentagon, and we'll be hearing more about that as well. But today, the main theme of our conversation with Pastor Chris Durkin is the resurrected Christ reforming his church, a study on the seven letters in Revelation 2 and 3.

It's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor Chris Durkin.

Chris, it is always a joy to not only listen to your program, to be involved in it, and I can speak on behalf of so many people, whether in Pennsylvania or New Jersey, all over the world, brother. We appreciate your daily work and how you edify the church through this ministry and this podcast.

So, overjoyed to be here.

Well, thank you very much for that very encouraging word. And before we go into our theme today and also hear about your recent opportunity to lead a prayer meeting at the Pentagon, let's hear more about Colts Neck Community Church.

Yes. So, Colts Neck Community Church is a Bible-believing Southern Baptist church plant. It's along the Jersey Shore. By God's grace, we preach Christ and Christ is Lord. We teach the Bible. We are expositors.

So, every single Sunday, we gather to sing, we gather to worship, we gather for fellowship, and we gather as we study the word, verse by verse. This summer, we're studying the Psalms, not just on Sunday mornings, but also on Wednesday evenings.

We will be starting a new study in First Peter in September, and we just finished studying the topic of tonight's broadcast, which is the seven letters to the seven churches in Revelation. So, if you are in the New Jersey area and you are looking for a solid Bible-believing church, then come gather with us.

Praise God. Thank you for his grace. We all need his grace. You are welcome here, but you will hear the truth of God's word. You will hear the truth of his gospel, and we will, by God's grace, take your discipleship serious.

We want to equip you for the work of ministry. Amen.

And I know that you are having on November 30th, which is a Sunday, a guest preacher or speaker who I just had on the program yesterday, Dr. Jason Lyle, the Christian astrophysicist, author, and conference speaker, and also founder of the Biblical Science Institute, whose website is biblicalscienceinstitute .com, and he is speaking at Colts Neck Community Church on Sunday, November 30th, on the astrophysics of the star Bethlehem.

Can you give us more details on that?

Yeah, we really appreciate Dr. Lyle's ministry. We really appreciate his solid theology that, of course, informs his scientific research, as it should be. So we're overjoyed to have Dr. Lyle come. He's going to be preaching.

We have three services on Sunday morning. Dr. Lyle will be preaching at all three on Sunday morning. And then on Sunday evening, we're going to have dinner, food fellowship, and he's going to be teaching on the astrophysics of the star of Bethlehem, and then we'll do a Q &A.

And then that following day, he's also going to do a special event for the homeschool families out there, and it's going to include curriculum, and we want to pour into homeschoolers as they continue to raise up their children in the knowledge and the fear of the Lord.

So on Monday, it's a special additional day where Dr. Lyle is going to pour into our homeschool families. It's open to everyone, but that's the focus on that Monday, December 1st.

Well, I know from firsthand experience that you are going to have a riveted audience. Dr. Lyle just recently spoke at my most recent Iron Trip and Zion Radio Free Pastors luncheon, and every seat in the audience was riveted to what he was saying, and I had a host of men afterwards approach me to thank me for inviting them because they were so blessed, and even more emails with those kinds of comments came pouring in later, and I look forward to having him back.

So you are definitely in good hands with Dr. Lyle, that's for certain.

Yes, amen. Thank you, Chris.

And if anybody wants more details on Colts Neck Community Church in Colts Neck, New Jersey, go to coltsneckchurch .com, coltsneckchurch .com, and God willing, later on in the program, we will repeat that for you.

Now, also before we go into our main theme about the seven letters to the churches in Revelation 2 and 3, please let us know about this exciting opportunity that you had. Pete Hegseth, our Secretary of Defense, was formerly a member of Colts Neck Community Church, and he had invited you not so long ago to lead a prayer service at the Pentagon.

Tell us about that.

Yes, so we were truly, truly blessed to know Pete and his wife, Jenny, while they were living in New Jersey, and Pete and I became, quickly, friends. And I just want to say this, Chris, before he was Secretary of Defense, and even more than a commentator on Fox News, a very, very accomplished author, by the way, Pete is a genuine brother in the Lord, regenerate, born again, loves the Lord, and it's just a joy for me to tell people that.

Obviously, so many people are familiar with his story, but I can tell you at Colts Neck Community Church, he is on that straight and narrow path, and he is following the Lord, and he wants to not just serve this country and serve our military, which obviously has such high honor and is such a good unto itself, but he truly does believe in Christ as his Savior, and he wants to see the Word of God spread and the kingship of our Lord spread to every single part of society.

So Pete is a wonderful friend, and he invited me to come down to the Capitol and lead a prayer service at the Pentagon, and I was given freedom to preach, freedom to proclaim the name of Christ. And it's a wonderful thing not only to have that opportunity to teach and to preach and to exalt the name of Jesus, but Pete starts those services with prayer, and he calls upon King Jesus for the Lord leading and guiding for not just the military, but for this country.

So it was an interesting thing, Chris. I mean, it was an auditorium in the Pentagon. I don't know if you've ever been there. It's a massive building, one of the biggest buildings in the world, apparently, biggest office buildings in the world.

And when we started, when we began with that call to worship, it felt like any auditorium at any church anywhere. In front of me were not only sailors and soldiers, but distinguished men of high rank and title in our U .S. military.

And because the Lord has opened up this door for Pete, it felt like a church service right there in the Pentagon. And it was such an honor to be a part of. And please, for your listeners, please continue to pray for Pete, our Secretary of Defense, Jenny and all their children, because the Lord is really using him in wonderful and.

Mighty ways.

Amen.

And by the way, anybody who wants to hear Pete's two different interviews on Iron Triple Zion Radio, the first one was on September 26th in 2022, where he discussed battle for the American mind, uprooting a century of miseducation.

And also, the second one was on June 7th of last year, 2024. Pete discussed his more recent book, The War on Warriors. You can hear both of those interviews by going to irontriponzionradio .com and type in Hegseth in the search engine, H-E-G-S-E-T-H, and both of those interviews will come up.

Hope you enjoy those interviews. Well, as we had already announced, you have a profound theme today that we are discussing, the resurrected Christ reforming his church, a study on the seven letters in Revelation 2 and 3.

And if you could give us the background of those seven letters, an overall summary, why they were written, to whom they were written, and sometimes, I think, well-intentioned brothers in Christ go overboard in making things that were written to specific people in the Scriptures.

They make the mistake of always making these things exactly directed toward those of us who are living now, and sometimes that can be an overblown process. But sometimes it's just the fact that eternal truths have their place in the minds and hearts and lives of everybody, no matter what generation they live in.

But if you could, tell us about that.

Yeah, so I felt led, Chris, thank you. I felt led to return the church, our church, Goldstack Community Church, back to these seven letters, and what makes these seven letters significant for many reasons is, obviously, we have the epistles of the apostles.

We have the apostles who are teaching, who are guiding, and when needed, rebuking the.

Church.

And what's interesting about the seven letters of the seven churches is that it is Christ himself, the risen reigning Lord, who is reforming his church. And yes, you could even see it before we get into Revelation chapter 2, that this is by human authorship, it's the apostle John writing from the prison island of Patmos, and you could see even in Revelation chapter 1, verse 4, John addresses the recipients of the book of Revelation, as we call it, this way.

In verse 4 of Revelation 1, it says, John, to the seven churches that are in Asia, grace and peace to you from him who was, who is, and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before his throne.

So now, is there a certain sense that there are parts, application in these seven churches that are directly connected to his return? Yes, absolutely, I believe that's the case. But even as John is writing to these seven literal churches along a very literal trade route in ancient Asia Minor, which we now call Turkey, I believe that it's Jesus speaking to not just seven historical churches, but at the same time, he's speaking to seven different reactions to the gospel, seven different ways that churches respond to his lordship.

So when we come to the seven letters of the seven churches, however we might take little nuances in interpretation here or there, I think it's very, very important that we do not shy away from turning to the very words of our good shepherd and our chief shepherd, Jesus Christ, as he is reforming not just the churches of Asia Minor, but as this is God's word for all of God's people and all of God's places, this is in fact Christ reforming his bride, reforming his body, reforming the church.

So I really got convicted, Chris, that we should know these churches and know these letters. So as you know, the resurrected Christ himself, he's writing to these churches, and I believe not just writing to these churches, he's building up some of these flocks in their strengths.

He's directing these flocks when they're wandering. Yes, almost every single time he's correcting and disciplining these flocks, these churches when they are deceived, when they rebel. And here's what I think is so significant as far as this historical moment, Chris, in America right now.

The fifth part of this is that Jesus repeatedly says to these churches, if you do not repent, he will take away his lampstand from this flock. Chris, the last time I was on this broadcast, we did a study on Rome, on Roman Catholicism, and all the abhorrent ways that they replace the truth of Scripture with human tradition.

And of course, whenever we do that, it doesn't lead to clarity, it leads to confusion, it doesn't lead to worshiping in spirit and truth, it leads to idolatry. But what I'd like to focus on today is also the role that mainline Protestantism has played in the downfall of not just our society, but even the state that I serve in and the state that I live in, and to apply, to overlay these seven letters to specifically what's going on in our country, and especially with all of these Protestant liberal churches that are full-on heretical, Chris, I mean, full-on rejecting not just the authority and sufficiency of God's Word, but yes, rejecting the gospel of Jesus Christ themselves.

So the introduction to the seven churches of Revelation, you have seven churches, you have the church of Ephesus, which was, as you remember, the church that abandoned its first love, you have the church of Smyrna, it was the persecuted church, you have the church of Pergamum, very interesting, that was the church where Satan's throne, Jesus said, literally dwells.

And then you have Thyatira, the church that tolerated Jezebel, and we can see a lot of that today. You have the church of Sardis, the dead church. Are there dead churches today? My goodness, the American landscape is replete, tragically, with churches that have buildings that the Holy Spirit left them a long time ago.

You of course have the faithful church in Philadelphia, and then lastly, the lukewarm church in Laodicea. So what's very, very interesting and very important is what Jesus says to this first church in Ephesus when he says clearly, and I think this is important for not just our listeners and not just for our country, but for all of pastors, is to remember this in Revelation 2, verse 5, when Jesus says, remember therefore where you have fallen, repent and do the works you did at first.

If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place unless you repent. Chris, there is no fear of God in so many of our churches today. So Jesus, who is the light of the world, Jesus, who is in fact our King, our Lord, he is our master.

He says clearly and emphatically that if these churches then and our churches today do not repent, he himself will take away the lampstand. As if to say, we will have church buildings everywhere, Chris, but the Lord has removed his lights.

The Lord has removed his power. And that's why these churches are dying. They are emptying out and dying in large number. What we're seeing with the fall of mainline Protestantism, as it's called, is quite a remarkable historical moment.

And the big idea that I gave to our church was, it's not just cultural, it's Jesus himself closing those churches down. And we need to remember that as well. Amen.

Well, we have to go to our first commercial break. And if you have a question for Pastor Chris Sturkin, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. ChrisArnson at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name, at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence, if you live outside the USA.

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So please go to royaldiadem .com if you are purchasing jewelry and mention Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. We're now back with Pastor Chris Durkin of Colts Neck Community Church in New Jersey, and we are discussing the risen Christ, the resurrected Christ, reforming his church.

And this is a focus on the seven letters to the church in Asia that are described in Revelation 2 and 3. And if you have a question, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. First name at least, city and state, and country of residence.

I'm going to take a question right away, although I was going to wait till later. I think this is a good question to ask at the very beginning. DeShawn in Brooklyn Park, Maryland asks, can I ask you, did you use any commentaries that you can recommend or the writings of some great Christian hero of yours to help guide you through.

Understanding the seven letters? Yes, that's a great question. I tried to as much as I can, and I don't know if I have access to those resources in this moment. I try as much as I can, Chris, and there's plenty of solid Reformed writing and Baptistic writing on Revelation.

So I encourage people to always turn to John MacArthur. He's going to be a good pastor theologian to apply these things. I also turned to Thomas Schreiner. He's got a great commentary on the seven letters to the seven churches inside of his own writing on the commentary on the book of Revelation.

There were several different commentators that I leaned on heavily, and I try to do that if possible. Sometimes when you are studying the Old Testament books, there's not as much of a selection, but I can absolutely send to you, Chris, that list of books that I use because there is, as the book of Proverbs says, wisdom in a multitude of counselors.

And this study, the seven letters to the seven churches, of course the book of Revelation as a whole, has always fascinated Christians for hundreds of years. So yes, I can get you that list of commentators.

I could post it on your social media, but I would turn to John MacArthur's work on this subject and Thomas Schreiner's as well. Great. Well, pick up where you left off.

On how each of these churches are not isolated to their day and age in time where the rest of the body of Christ, including today, can ignore them and have no concerns that these letters are addressing them in any way.

If you could correct that flaw or error on the part of many, and tell.

Us how these specific churches apply. Well, yes. Any word in God's Word, of course, it's all breathed out by God. So we got to be cautious that we don't fall into the trap of thinking somehow, some way, that the quote-unquote red letters are more inspired than the black letters, and that's not biblical.

In fact, no one had a higher view of Scripture in Scripture than the one all Scripture points to, Jesus Christ himself. Yet the church would be so blessed. I think it's essential right now for us to return not only back to Christ as Lord, but I think it's so helpful to return back to Christ reforming the church.

So let's use a contemporary cultural analogy, if we could, Chris. I think transgenderism was such a wake-up call. How did we get to this point at our society where people who are biologically born a woman could, just because of social confusion—obviously, you could read a lot of Romans 1 into it as well—somehow think that they are a man and a woman body?

It was a huge wake-up call. And by the way, another one is happening in New York City right now. The financial capital of the world is soon going to have a communist Muslim mayor. That's.

Going to happen. Now— Are you really that confident he's going to be elected?

Oh, yeah. Andrew Cuomo's not stopping him, unless there is such a financial coup by billionaires pulling strings. But I do think he's going to get elected. I'm watching the polls, because obviously in New Jersey, New York casts a very big shadow.

But just for even the fact that it's going to be close—and I do think he's going to win—even the fact that the Democratic Party is going to get around and support a Muslim communist to be the mayor of one of the biggest cities and arguably the financial capital of the world is quite a cultural moment.

So the world is going to think about economics, Chris, right? The world's going to think about culture. But as Christians, we should think deeper that culture is downstream of worship. Ultimately, everything that we see around us is a response to the truth of God's Word, but also those being made in God's image, not worshiping, as Romans 1 says so well, the Creator, but the creation.

So what's happening? And that's why I think if you look at New York City, as well as New Jersey, we have a very, very strong Catholic influence. So let's think about this as it pertains to worship, not just historically in our country over the last hundred years, which I'd like to get into in light of the seven letters to the seven churches in Revelation, but specifically what's happening now.

Not only the cratering of the mainline Protestant denomination and how I personally believe it's the Lord closing those churches, but also how do we get to the point where, believe it or not, Chris, believe it or not, at the founding of our nation—you ready for this?

I just read this—at the founding of our nation, guess what colony was the most churched? Guess what colony out of the 13 colonies had the most people gathering on the Lord's Day for worship?

Can you guess? I can't right now, no.

It's not a southern state. Believe it or not, it's my state. New Jersey has a high number of people gathering for worship at the time of this country's founding. Quite a remarkable transition and shift.

So you can read about this. I'm getting some of these facts and figures from Ryan Berg's book, The American Religious Landscape, and he makes this argument. And believe it or not, not many people know this, Chris, but the time where America was the most churched was not actually at the founding of the country.

Now, I think because of our Puritan legacy, I think the theology was the best at the beginning of this country when we had wonderful, faithful pastors like Jonathan Edwards and other wonderful Puritan pastors as well.

But the time when people were going to church the most, Chris, I was shocked to read, was actually in the 1920s. Can you believe, I know, can you believe that this society went from 80 percent, 80 percent, you could look it up, 80 percent of our culture between 1910 and 1920 were attending some kind of Christian church.

There was a little Catholicism that was coming in through immigration, but most of the country was churched. Now, how solid the churches were, how faithful the churches were in the last hundred years, Chris, in the last hundred years, from the 1920s to the 2020s, we have seen a shocking historical downfall, not just of morals and not just of ethics and not just of civic sanity, but of the place of the church.

So what happened? And that's why I think the seven letters in the book of Revelation can be such a helpful guide. If we truly do believe that this isn't just historical, but similar to when Paul writes to the church in Philippi, we don't believe that that was just isolated to the church in Philippi.

Yes, it's Paul's pen, but it's God's Word. So if Christ is reforming the church, I think that every single church has a proclivity to fall into one of these seven pitfalls and traps. And we can learn a lot, should the Lord tarry, about how we, by God's grace, get back to what the Bible has always said, continue to teach the Word, proclaim Christ as Lord, but go to our great Physician as He's diagnosing the sickness of even the early church and these specific seven churches.

Okay, we have another question from Jerry in San Antonio, Texas. And Jerry says, what does it actually mean that Christ removed a lampstand from a church?

Yes, that's a great question. And obviously, when you turn to the book of Revelation, you're going to see certain themes and certain numbers that have a lot of significance. The number seven has a lot of significance, and of course, this issue of lampstands.

So the way that most scholars understand this is that Christ comes and He is walking amongst the seven angels and the seven lampstands, and He is going to remove this lampstand, for example, from the church in Ephesus after even though all of their faithful labor.

Jesus said to the church in Ephesus, and we can get into this, Chris, the church in Ephesus had one of the strongest foundations of any church in the New Testament. Truly a remarkable foundation. The church in Ephesus, for example, was, as you can read in the book of Acts, not only preached by the apostle Paul, planted by Aquila and Priscilla, it had Apollos, who often visited and taught there, it had Timothy as its pastor, the apostle John as its pastor, and now Jesus Christ Himself as the first of the seven letters of the seven churches.

Jesus is now speaking to the church in Ephesus. So a remarkable foundation. And once again, if you want to make any kind of application to the church in our cities and in this country, quite a remarkable foundation, Chris.

Historically, I don't know how you deny that, but what we see in Ephesus is, as many people know, they abandoned their first love. They had all of these wonderful, wonderful aspects of faithfulness and strength.

Jesus said of this church that they were faithful, that they worked hard, that they hated the works of the Nicolaitans. And by the way, it's helpful for us to be able to say that, right, Chris? It's helpful for us to say that God hates sin and so does Jesus.

Jesus commends the church in Ephesus for hating the sins of the Nicolaitans. And I think pastors need to return back to that. If our chief shepherd, if our good shepherd would commend the church for saying, yes, you hate this sin and so do I, then we have to become stronger in our language when we're preaching the law of God and the holiness of God.

So ultimately, to answer the question, I believe taking away the lampstand is not necessarily if there's genuine, regenerate Christians there, because Jesus would often say, okay, he who has an ear, let him hear.

Most of these churches, if not all seven churches, they end with an admonishment for the church to repent so that they could continue the work of ministry. I don't think, Chris, that this is necessarily an issue that anyone anywhere can lose their salvation.

I believe that if you believe in Jesus, you belong to Jesus, that the Holy Spirit is a guarantee, a deposit. It is, in fact, the Spirit of Christ, and Christ doesn't jump out of your heart, whether you're having a good or bad day.

I believe what Jesus is saying is he removes his light. He removes his power. He removes what makes a church a church, and that is the work of the Holy Spirit. So that's how I understand it, and that's why I think it's shocking right now that you see so many churches that are dead—perhaps not fully dead, closed their doors yet, but they are spiritually dead.