Book of Revelation - Ch. 3, Vs. 1-6 (04/29/2018)

don't lean back. When I lean back, I increase the distance. And you all know if I lean back twice as far, it's one -fourth as strong.

That's my physics lesson for today. That's what we're doing in fact in physics over the week is how the intensity falls off with the distance from the mic.

So I should know that. So I'll lean forward. We will begin today in Revelation 3, verse 1.

And unto the church and to the angel of the church at Sardisrite, these things saith he that hath the seven spirits of God and the seven stars.

I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest and art dead. Be watchful and strengthen the things which remain that are ready to die.

For I have not found thy works perfect before God. Remember therefore how thou hast received and heard and hold fast and repent.

If therefore thou shalt not watch, I will come on thee as a thief and thou shalt not know what hour

I will come upon thee. And thou hast a few names even in Sardis which have not defiled their garments and they shall walk with me in white for they are worthy.

He that overcometh the same shall be clothed in white raiment and I will not blot his name out of the book of life but will confess his name before my father and before his angels.

He that hath an ear to hear, let him hear what the spirit saith unto the churches. Now while I've been talking this has been sinking down, hasn't it?

So I'm going to retry that. Maybe it's just a matter of not squeezing hard enough.

That is quite alright, you can leave it in. Let us pray.

Most gracious Heavenly Father, thank you for this day and thank you for all the many gifts that you have given us.

Thank you for giving us this place that we can come to each Sunday morning and study the word of God.

Thank you for giving us the Holy Spirit to guide us in our study. And most of all, thank you for giving us your son that he might bear the burden of our sin and we might bear his righteousness which will give us the ability to enter into his kingdom because we know we're not able on our own to do anything that will get us there.

We praise you, we praise your son, we praise the Holy Spirit.

Bless us and keep us. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Okay. Unto the angel at the church of Sardis write.

We've been beginning each one of these passages, each one of these letters, with the meaning of the name.

I've got some different meanings for this name.

The literal meaning of Sardis means the red ones. The red ones.

The ones who are red. And I believe that may infer, that may relate to the fact that they were big into the production of dyes.

But that may have been Thyatira. I may have my churches mixed up. Many scholars infer from that name that he's talking about the escaping ones or those who come out.

Or he's talking about a remnant coming out. Coming out of what?

Well, coming out of the previous church. The church at Thyatira. There are many scholars that believe or view the previous church, the church at Thyatira, as a foreshadowing of the

Roman Catholic Church. And a time that we refer to as the

Dark Ages. We talked about this a little last week. It was a time when the church in Rome took the

Bible away from the people and said only they could interpret it.

In fact, they kept it written in a language that was so obsolete that the people couldn't read it even if they knew how to read.

And most of them didn't know how to read. They still recommend that their job is not to read it.

And if they decide to read it anyhow, it's not their job to interpret it. Only they can interpret it.

I think that that's probably a valid point. It was a time when the

Roman Catholic Church, the Queen of Heaven, were exalted above Jesus.

We talked about that last week. It was a time when the church told the people that if they wanted to interact with God, they had to pray to Mary, the mother of Jesus.

They had to pray to Mary, the mother of Jesus, to get to God. Apparently, they hadn't read 1

Timothy 2, verse 5. They hadn't read that. I'm going to read that to you. You don't need to go there.

We're just going to fly by because we're not really in the church that we're going to deal with this morning anyhow.

For there is one God and one mediator between God and man, and it doesn't say the mother of Jesus.

It says the man, Jesus Christ. Well, I guess they couldn't allow you to read that passage, could they?

They tore it out? That page is not in the Bible.

I am way too literal today. Well, it can be compromised by what you add, and it can be compromised by what you remove.

So when you look at the church at Thyatira, it's no wonder that he addressed himself as the

Son of God. Now, those same scholars that view the church at Sardis, I'm sorry, the church at Thyatira as the

Roman Catholic Church, view the church at Sardis as a foreshadowing of the

Protestant Reformation. Now, if that's your position,

I would like to warn you up front, embrace it with care and don't take too much because there's not much good said about either church.

So now we're going to how Jesus identifies himself or portrays himself to this church.

So here's what he says, And unto the angel of the church at Sardis write,

These things saith he that hath the seven spirits of God and the seven stars.

That letter begins innocuously enough. Christ's introduction of himself does not hint at the severity of the situation at Sardis.

If you recall to the church at Thyatira, Jesus introduced himself as the divine judge.

He says, These things saith the Son of God, who hath eyes like a flame of fire, and his feet are like fine brass.

He identifies himself to Sardis, Thyatira, as the divine judge.

But here in Sardis, even though like the church at Thyatira, Sardis faced imminent judgment, he depicted himself as the sovereign ruler working his will through the

Holy Spirit and through godly leaders in the church. I'm going to read the passage again.

These things saith he that hath the seven spirits of God, that's the Holy Spirit, and the seven stars.

Remember what the seven stars, what he told us the seven stars represented? The leaders of the churches, of each of the churches, the pastors or the elders of the churches.

And the seven spirits, well that was the Holy Spirit. It was the seven -fold spirit of the

Holy Spirit. But here, that's all he does.

That introduction, though, serves as a reminder to the Sardis church of what they lacked.

What were they missing? What was the church at Sardis missing?

Well maybe that's too early. What they were missing, they had the leaders.

They had the seven stars. They had the leader of the church. What in the introduction were they missing?

The spirit, the Holy Spirit. They lacked the spirit.

Now, we're going to go to the next verse. I don't know if they had grieved the

Holy Spirit so the Holy Spirit left. I know this, that the spirit was not present and working in that church.

That's what he's getting ready to say. Now, normally what would happen here, if we followed the pattern of the first three letters, we would have the name, the meaning of the name.

We would have the description of the depiction of Jesus as he speaks to the church.

And the very next thing in every letter was a commendation. Something good said about the churches.

When he talked about Ephesus, he said, I know thy works and all these things they have done, yet thou lack us one thing.

When he talked to Philadelphia, not Philadelphia, that's afterwards. When he talked to Smyrna, he started with good things.

Even when he talked to Thyatira, he started by listing the good things. He doesn't start there here.

Jesus deviates from the pattern set by the previous letters. There is no commendation of the church at Sardis, at least not yet.

So here's what he says, I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest and art dead.

Bam. Right away he opens with criticism. Devoid of the spirit, the church at Sardis was dead.

Populated by an unredeemed, unregenerate people, an assembly pretending to be a church.

It was a dead church. It was proclaimed dead by Jesus Christ himself.

Now the question for us as we go through these letters, and every one of these letters have something to say for us, is how is a modern church to know that it is dead or in the danger of dying?

Not reading the Bible and knowing where they should be, that's one thing, yes. The few believers should be speaking out, okay?

How else do we know that the church is in danger of dying? When they tolerate sin, when they invite the world in, that may be the greatest danger, yes sir.

A good reputation in the community might be a bad sign. I'm not going to, I'm not going to, you can cut that out of the, that is a harsh thing to say, isn't it?

But that may be exactly what God's saying.

I don't have any control of what's cut in and what's left in and what's left out anyhow.

Brother Virgil says that he'd rather have the world mad at him than Jesus.

I'm with you brother. Well let's look at some of the things that I've listed.

You can say these are good or not good, I don't know. When the church is more concerned with the forms of worship than with spiritual reality, it's in danger of dying.

When it focus, is that my phone ringing? When it focuses on curing social ills, when the focus of the church is curing social ills rather than changing people's heart through the gospel of Jesus.

When it's more concerned with material than spiritual things, brother

Virgil, when it's more concerned with what men think than what

God said. When it is more in love with doctrinal creeds and systems of theology than it is with the word of God.

That is the doctrinal creed. The creed may or may not be a valid creed.

And if it is a creed that is not valid, then being enamored with it will lead you away from the spirit.

Yes sir? If it's good doctrine, it's great.

That's right. And that would fit very well with the next phrase, systems of theology.

Ways of looking at God. Not God himself, but ways that you, the box that you put

God in when you look at him. That's the systems of theology. That's the creed that some people, everybody has a creed.

Everybody has a creed. Yes sir? Well, there's no question about that particular topic.

You may be good on that topic and bad on something else. And the warning to us is to put every creed, every doctrine up in comparison with the

Bible, with the actual word of God and see if it matches what the word of God says or not. And if it's not, discard it or change it.

That's the only... What about the church of Ephesus though?

That is absolutely correct. You can have all the doctrine right and still not be concerned with God.

And that would be another sign that your church is in danger of dying or is already dead.

They're missing the point of the word of God. Well, at least one of the points of the word of God is the love that we should have for each other and for God.

And it's a love that we don't have because the object of our love earns it.

It's not that you're in love with your wife because she's the prettiest girl in Texas. She's the prettiest girl in Texas because she's your wife.

That's how you look at her. It's how you look at her. Or when the church loses its conviction that the word of God, I'm sorry, that every word in the

Bible is the word of God Himself. When you lose track of the fact that every word in the

Bible is a word from God Himself, then your church is in danger of dying.

No matter what its attendance, no matter how impressive its buildings,

Brother David, no matter what its status in the community, such a church, having denied the only source of spiritual life, is dead.

Now, what does that mean? What church are we talking about right now?

We're not talking about First Baptist Church in Corsicana, nor Northside, nor Park Meadows.

We're talking about Sardis. Is all lost for the people in Sardis?

Well, if you read the next verse, you'll see that that's not the case. Well, if we go back to the beginning and talk about the meaning of the name, the remnant, there's a remnant, but not the entire church.

Even here in Sardis, all is not lost, or all are not lost. When I wrote that,

I wrote that as like a collection all, but all in the sense of each and every one in the church, not each and every one of the people that attend that church are lost.

Some are. The most are, but some are not. Be watchful and strengthen the things which remain, that are ready to die, for I have not found thy works perfect before God.

Remember, therefore, how thou hast received, and heard, and hold fast, and repent. If therefore thou shalt not watch,

I will come on thee as a thief, and thou shalt not know what hour I will come upon thee.

Christ addresses this command to the faithful remnant of true

Christians that are in Sardis. If their church was to survive, it desperately needed life, and Christ laid out for them a path to spiritual restoration by giving them five steps to follow.

The first thing they needed to do, they needed to wake up and be watchful. The sin, the church needed to confront sin and error.

Somebody here, when I asked, that was what they said. We do not need to tolerate, we should not tolerate the presence of sin and error in our church.

Can we? I'm not going to even go there. That would take me too far afield. We're all sinners, but some have been spared our sin because Christ took it upon himself.

Second, they needed to strengthen the things that remain, things which were about to die. The third step was for the faithful remnant to remember what they had received and heard.

They were faithful and they were remnant. They had heard and received something. They needed to go back to the truth of the word of God, remembering the gospel and the teaching of the apostles.

Now, you know by now, this is the very last book that was written in the

New Testament. In fact, in the Bible, the very last one. By this time, Paul's letters were in circulation.

The rest of the New Testament had been written. In fact, Peter talks about Paul and his writings being part of the scripture.

When he says in 2 Peter 3, 15 -16, an account that the longsuffering of our

Lord is salvation. Even as our beloved brother Paul, also according to the wisdom given unto him, hath written unto you.

As also in all of his epistles, speaking in them of these things, in which some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable rest, as they do also with the other scriptures.

So what he's done is he's identified Paul's letters as part of the scripture. Some things are hard to understand.

I'm going to add to what Peter said. Some things are impossible to be understood by anyone other than someone who is led to his understanding by the

Holy Spirit. If you don't have the Holy Spirit in you, you can attend seminary for 20 years and come out as uninformed as you went in.

Probably more so, because you will have developed more false creeds, more boxes to put

Jesus in, more ways to view him. You can't get there without the

Holy Spirit guiding you. Well, he says, which they that are unlearned and unstable rest, as they do also with the other scripture, unto their own destruction.

Fourth, we have to go back to the truths of the gospel.

They needed to keep them. Having gone back to the truths of the doctrine, the scripture, they need to keep them.

And finally, they need to repent. With remorse and sorrow, the believers of Sardis, if they were to confess and turn away from the sins, if they do that diligently, that would bring about a revival.

The consequences are severe if they don't.

Christians are warning them, if you do not wake up, I will come like a thief and you will not know at what hour

I come unto you. Coming like a thief always carries the idea of imminent judgment.

The threat here is not related. A lot of people take this to be a reference to his second coming, but that's not what this is about.

This is a threat to the church at Sardis. And the threat is, if they do not repent, the

Lord will come and destroy the Sardis church. You can extrapolate that into a warning of judgment that all dead churches will face at Christ's return.

So if your church is dead at Christ's return, the church will be destroyed, but not necessarily all the people in it.

Thou hast a few names even in Sardis, which have not defiled their garments, and they shall walk with me in white, for they are worthy.

Who is that? The believer, the elect, the remnant within the church.

Not the church as a whole, but the part of the church that is still true to the

Jesus. Is that a commendation? For the individual it is, but is it a commendation for the church as a whole?

Absolutely not, because most of them are not that way. Yes sir? I think it does.

I think that you can find believers in every church. Now, why are they there?

Why would a believer be in a church that was condemned? Maybe to speak out.

Maybe the Lord put them there and kept them there to speak out.

I say, or they're complacent, or they just, you know, Brother David said all the time, your mother, there's people that are like that.

We can look at it like that. Why would you not leave? There's a reason, like John said.

Well, I can look around. Since I have started coming to this church,

I think you came before I did. Just barely. But it's essentially the same time. You left the church you were going to.

I left the church I was going to. I look around and almost everybody I know that the

Mitchell children are an exception, but almost every one of us left where we were and came here because we felt more at home here, more comfortable here, more fed here.

Exactly. And you just thrown this out there, but we didn't even go to the church. We went to OCD Bible study for many years, and that was it.

We looked. But you could not find a place. We didn't feel comfortable.

We left a church we didn't go to. Actually, I left a church that I did go to, and I was appalled every

Sunday morning about things that went on, and finally I said I can't. In fact, the whole group of us, the family,

I can't attend there any longer. I guess

I agree with all of that.

Well, it might not be laziness, but it certainly is a lack of individual study, and it's hard to study and treat the

Word of God as the final authority and then do the kind of thing, attend the churches that focus on the kind of things that they focus on.

The church we attended was very good on their view of abortion.

They were very much against it. They thought it was a social illness that needed to be dealt with, and they were strong on that piece.

But homosexuality, they said, was a genetic defect.

Well, they had to say that because the deacon's son was. And I'm not going to go any more than that, but that was one of the reasons, not the only reason, that was the reason that I was looking to leave.

That's not the reason I stayed. The reason I stayed when I came to this church is,

Brother David, I had a problem when I was at the last church. I would go in and I would sit there and I would nod my head and I would doze off, and when the time to quit was there,

I was always ready to leave. When I got here, I found that even when

I was under the influence of Benadryl, which sometimes

I am, and it forces me to sleep, when I wake up,

I'm back attentive, and the only other time was the one I, like I apologized to you last week for doing, hearing five words and then tangenting off and staying there.

But bouncing back in occasionally, I was never at a point where I didn't feel like I was being fed by the

Holy Spirit when I was here. Not fed by Brother David. He was the voice that brought the thought to mind, and sometimes the

Holy Spirit led me to focus directly on everything he said, and when I did, it was a great message.

And sometimes he led me to focus on the things he needed me to go to, which you guys didn't need, but it was only me.

And it was still a great message. He will see that we will get a great message if we focus on the right things.

That's all the commendation, Brother David, I'm going to leave you this morning. I really like that, because what was happening is you were being influenced by the

Holy Spirit. He was leading you to the message you needed to hear, regardless of what message was going out to the group.

And would you have had that same message had you been at home? Maybe, maybe not. Probably not.

You probably needed a goad to get you started. You can be too enamored with what the pastor is saying.

You can be too enamored with what the pastor is saying to hear the Word of God.

I think that's true. I want to give you

John MacArthur's view of this verse. Even in a church like Sardis, there is yet a remnant that is undefiled.

In the midst of this dead church, filled with unregenerate people, a few true

Christians were scattered like flowers in a desert. There were not enough of them, however, to change

Christ's overall evaluation of the church as dead. The church was dead, but he had not forgotten those who remained faithful to him.

So in answer to your response, Paul, I go and say, do you think there are true

Christians in a dead church? Or can there be true Christians in a dead church? I don't remember exactly how. There can be, and they can be in a dead church right now.

But even so, Christ has not forgotten those who remain faithful to him.

He never does. They can be lost sheep there too.

I was going to say it would be more dangerous to be a lost sheep there than anywhere else, but I've changed my mind.

That is certainly not even close to true. If you are a lost sheep that you have nothing to worry about, the

Lord will not miss on any of his sheep. Yes, ma 'am? Well, they are, and I would say even in a small congregation, there's a likelihood that there's an unbeliever or two.

Yes, ma 'am? In that case, if the church repented and came out, then they wouldn't face this imminent judgment.

But this church did. There are those in it.

It calls for the true believers to speak out in the dead church. It does. Yes.

We all stay too long. We all stay too long in a dead church. and you're not caring right, like if you don't have the peace of understanding of election predestination, then you feel this hate of, oh it's up to me to reach out, reach out, reach out, and spread the word, and then you dilute the church with the ghosts that they bring in to save them.

And so you're back in exactly the same condition that the church at Ephesus was.

If I work hard enough, I can bring the world to... It is a place of edification of the believer rather than evangelicals.

Yes, Brother David. And so what would have happened, what would have happened if he passed away while he was still attending the church at...

Okay, he didn't allow that. He wouldn't have allowed it, and we know in retrospect that he didn't allow it because it didn't happen.

But, let me take it away from Brother Mitchell. If you stay in that church, if it is your role to be a burr under the saddle of the pastor, and you stay there until you die, will the

Lord forget you? Not if you're his. She had all the women.

And she had about, I don't know, 50. It was a big class, and she loved teaching.

And Sean and I were talking about, well, how did she handle staying in that church where the deacons would go out on the front porch and smoke everything?

So he was doing church, and the pastor was duty -carrying about sin, and the devil preached on sin.

And it was the strangest environment, and how could she be happy there? Well, her church was that group that she taught.

And she focused on helping those ladies because she knew they weren't leaving. And she lived in a home where her husband used to go anyway, so she knew how to block that out.

I guess that's a good example of how some people can stay in a church like that and be not deviled.

And she died still in that church, and that was your point.

That was my point. In fact, I got a— Well, there's a good—and it's sad to me that she didn't get to experience—I think she would have—

I've got two references, one in Malachi, chapter 3, verse 16.

I'm just going to read it. He's talking about the children of Israel. So if they're there, if they're in the community, and the community as a whole does not receive the

Lord, doesn't fear the Lord, and there are those that do, he will spare them as a man spareth his own son, his son that serveth him.

Well, that one is a little obscure. I'm going to go to Romans 11 and get one that's precisely to the point, starting in verse 1.

I say then, hath God cast away his people? He's talking about the

Israelites. God forbid, for I am an Israelite of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin.

God hath not cast his people which he foreknew. What ye not that the

Scripture said of Elias, how he maketh intercession to God against Israel, saying,

Lord, thou, they have killed thy prophets, and have digged down thine altars, and I am left alone, and they seek my life?

But what saith the answer of God unto him? I have reserved to myself seven thousand men, who have not bowed the knee unto the image of Baal.

Even so then, at this present time, also there is a remnant according to the election of grace.

So he hasn't cast them all out. He hasn't kept them all. In fact, he cast more out than he kept.

But who did he keep? He kept those that were elect.

And why were they elect? By the grace of God. And here in Sardis, God had a remnant, even in the dead church.

There were a few separated among the worldly. There were a few sheep amongst the goats.

A few stalks of wheat among the tare. And then we come to verse 6 of Revelation.

He that overcometh, the same shall be clothed in white rambut. And I will not blot out his name out of the book of life, but I will confess his name before my

Father and before his angels. I am getting close to the end, and I've got a lot to say about this passage.

So I'm just going to, in just a few seconds, stop. But I want you to think about something.

I want you all to read verse 5 again. And I'll read it along with you.

He that overcometh, the same shall be clothed in white rambut.

And I will not blot out his name out of the book of life, but I will confess his name before my

Father and before his angels. Now I'm going to give you a sentence from my next.

This is from John MacArthur. Incredibly, although the text says just the opposite, some people assume that this verse teaches that a

Christian's name can be erased from the book of life. Well, what does it say?

What does this verse say? It says, I will not blot out his name. And you can stretch it so far to say, well, if he will not blot out his name, does that mean that he has the ability to blot out the name?

And so they're going to say, well, he could, if he wanted to, blot out the name from the book of life.

So how you can take this verse and turn it on its head and make it say the opposite of what it says.

It says the opposite.

It says, I will not blot out the name.

That's a fact. Now, I'm just going to let it sit there and you can skew on it for the weekend.

Does that mean, does that verse, can it be read so that it can mean that Jesus could, if he wanted to.

I don't know exactly how to say this because I'm almost putting it in the terms of can Jesus do, is there anything that Jesus can't do?

I'm not trying to say that. But, if you are elect, can you become unelect?

I'll just say it that way. If you're elect, is it possible to become unelect?

Well, what he's really talking about here, if you go down through, it is the living.

It is the book of the living that he's talking about. Can he take the life of an elect?

He can, he does, he will, he always does. And sometimes you'll be taken out of the living and listed among the dead.

But that doesn't. Let me read one more verse and then

I'm going to stop. This is Psalms 69 verse 28.

Let them be blotted out of the book of the living and not be written with the righteous.

Let them be blotted out of the book of living and not be written with the righteous.

Who's written with the righteous? Who is blotted out of the book of the living?

The dead. They're not living. So, there's a difference between the book of the living and the book of life.

The book of life is the book of eternal life. The book of the living is who's alive now.

Can an elect be taken out? Well, we know that. Sometimes we sin to such an extent that the

Lord says, it's time for me to take them out of the book of the living. And they're no longer alive.

But they're His. No, they were taken out right on time.

But they were taken out. But they weren't taken out of the book of life.

So, there's two different books here that we're dealing with. And we'll get to that and hopefully resolve it in a more clear way next time.

But I'm already running over. If you guys got anything you want to add or question or comment about.

Yes, sir. Okay. There's a book of life.

Well, I'll have to look more at that one later. But I do see the point that you're making.

I am convinced that here the resolution is not for the elect being made unelect.

And I'm confident, and this is my box that I'm thinking in, I am confident that the elect are always elect and can never become unelect.

And when I get to the point I can't do that anymore, I'll have to change. I'm convinced that in this passage that we're talking about, that's what he's talking about.

The book of the being taken out of the listed among the living. But now

I'm going to have to rethink. I've got a lot of time to think between now and verse 22.

Chapter 22. This time next year we'll resolve that issue.

Or hopefully the Holy Spirit will resolve it for us. Maybe he will have come and we will know where everybody goes.

We'll know where we are for sure. Most gracious Heavenly Father, thank you for this day and thank you for giving us the many unanswered questions that prod us and provoke us to continue to study your word.

And help us to realize, to understand that as we study, it is your word that is the ultimate referee.

It's not us. It's not our theology. It's not our creed. It is your word.

Give us the Holy Spirit to guide us, to gather what you want us to understand.