CATM Sermon - October 27, 2019 - The Churches of Revelation - Thyatira and Sardis
So far we have looked at 3 of the 7 churches in the book of Revelation. We’ve seen a pattern in the way Jesus communicates to the churches.
That pattern is that Jesus begins with gratitude and even praise to the churches for what they are doing right. Then Jesus offers His critique, talking about what needs to change or improve in that church’s conduct. Finally Jesus offers a word of peace or a word of encouragement.
Pastor Arleen referred to this as the hamburger approach - you have the bun on the top and the bottom, and then the meat in between.
There’s a couple of things we need to remember as we continue to look at the churches of Revelation.
The first thing is that these were churches full of people just like us. Like us are loved by Jesus, they have been saved by Jesus, and like us, they enjoy the fruit in their lives of a relationship with God through Jesus.
And at the same time, like us, they sometimes struggled to live faithful to the gospel, in the midst of a world outside them that was suspicious of them, or outright hostile to them.
And these churches, like us, also struggled to live faithful to the gospel while dealing with the world inside them - doubts, painful pasts, the conflict between what the flesh wants and what the spirit wants.
AND, these churches, who like us were so dearly loved by the living God, had to contend with the enemy of their souls - Satan.
The one who prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour (Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour 1 Peter 5:8).
The world, the flesh and the devil have never stopped being influences that we must face. We must take up the fight and NOT allow these things to interfere or compromise our following of Jesus.
This was true for the churches of Revelation and it’s true for us.
That’s the first thing to remember as we begin looking today at these 2 churches.
The other thing to remember is that Jesus is speaking to these churches for a reason. What is that reason?
The reason Jesus is speaking to them is that He loves them. He wants them to be full of joy and deeply connected to Him.
He wants them to be free of baggage, free of lies, free to serve God and to thrive personally and collectively as a church.
Jesus wants them, like He wants us, to live life in Him to the full.
That also means living life on mission: Living life on the mission of Jesus. The mission of Jesus can be described In a few different ways:
The mission of Jesus was to seek and save those who are lost. That is a way of describing our mission as followers of Jesus.
The mission of Jesus was to proclaim the good news to the poor, to preach freedom for the captives, to give sight to the blind, and to declare God‘s favor.
So Jesus wants us to live life to the full, on mission to the world.
But this is not what Satan wants. It is not what the enemy of our souls wants.
It is in fact the exact opposite of what Satan wants.
He wants lost people to remain lost. He wants broken people to remain broken. He wants the blind to remain blind.
Satan wants individual Christ-followers, and he wants whole churches to be OFF-mission, contending, and LOSING the fight against the world, the flesh and the devil.
Satan wants us distracted, deceived, arguing amongst ourselves, not alive to the Spirit of God. In fact he wants the church to be dead.
Jesus said,“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full”. John 10:10
So as we look in some detail at today’s passage, and as we look at the communities of followers of Jesus in Thyatira and Sardis, let’s remember what Jesus wants his church to be. How He wants us who belong to Him to live life to the full.
That’s His heart. That’s His goal as He speaks to the churches in the book of Revelation.
Let’s look at the first church in today’s reading:
Thyatira - The Fruitful Church Deceived by a False Teacher
To the Church in Thyatira
18 “To the angel of the church in Thyatira write:
These are the words of the Son of God, whose eyes are like blazing fire and whose feet are like burnished bronze. 19 I know your deeds, your love and faith, your service and perseverance, and that you are now doing more than you did at first.
Thyatira lay on the road that connected the cities of Pergamum and Sardis and went on to Philadelphia and to Laodicea.
That was the road that was used for the mail and communications within Roman empire, and it was super busy with business people from Asia and the east.
So Thyatira was a major commercial centre, a real business town. Especially of the cloth-dyeing industry and of trade in things made from wool.
In our passage today we’re presented with a series of four questions—
What was the situation of the Church in Thyatira? Who was Jezebel? What did she teach? What do the promises made to the Church at Thyatira mean?
The letter opens with a description of the Risen Christ which is a little unsettling. His eyes are like a flame of fire and his feet like burnished bronze.
The description is taken from that of the angelic messenger in Daniel 10:6 : "His face was like the appearance of lightning, and his eyes like flaming torches, his arms and legs like the gleam of burnished bronze."
The flaming eyes stands for two things, blazing anger against sin, and then the awful penetration of that gaze that strips the disguises away and sees into a person's inmost heart.
The brazen feet stand for the immovable power of the Risen Christ.
We’re not then expecting a message which begins like that to be a soothing, feel good kinda pep talk.
So it’s a bit of: “Get ready...what’s a comin’ is a storm”.
But...what’s the first thing Jesus says? “I know your deeds, your love and faith, your service and perseverance, and that you are now doing more than you did at first”.
There’s something intense coming...but first, Jesus is saying: “I know you. I know the good things you do. I know that you have love - and that’s no small thing.
1 Corinthians 13:13 says: “13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. You have something you need to have. You have love! Good on you!
And you have faith. You genuinely believe the gospel. Unlike so many who hear the gospel and it just doesn’t land for them, it just doesn’t matter, unlike so many you DO have faith.
Awesome! Deeds, love and faith. AND...service and perseverance.
So Jesus begins with high praise, not any kind of stern rebuke. This is positive. I’m sure their ears perked up when they heard these first few words. Sweet!
But then this:
20 Nevertheless, I have this against you: You tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophet. By her teaching she misleads my servants into sexual immorality and the eating of food sacrificed to idols.
Ok. What’s this about?
From inscriptions discovered at archeological sites in present-day Thyatira, it’s clear that this city had a huge number of trade guilds.
These were groups created for mutual profit and pleasure of people employed in certain trades.
There were guilds of workers in wool, leather, linen and bronze, makers of outer garments, dyers, potters, bakers and slave-dealers.
These guilds were like clubs for people in the same profession. At these gatherings people would learn about jobs coming up and they could get signed up for work.
Kind of like a teacher’s union or a plumbers union or an actor’s union.
Here was the problem of the Church in Thyatira. To refuse, to REFUSE to join one of these guilds would be like refusing to join a trade union today.
It would mean giving up all prospect of making money, and thus surviving.
Why should a Christian not join one of these guilds?
They held common meals. But these meals would very often be held in a pagan temple and even if not,
they would begin and end with a formal sacrifice to false gods, and the meat eaten would be meat which had already been offered to idols in worship.
And more than that, often these communal meals were occasions of drunken parties and loose morality. Was it possible for a Christian to be part of such occasions?
So we can see part of the problem: the threat came from inside the Church.
There was a strong movement, led by the woman referred to as Jezebel, who pushed for compromise with the world's standards in the interests of business and money, of just getting along more easily with the culture around them.
But the answer of the Risen Christ is not unclear of fuzzy. A follower of Jesus can have nothing to do with such things.
You might wonder about the name “Jezebel”. It’s unlikely that was the actual name of the person causing trouble in the church.
It’s more likely a reference to an Old Testament person of that actual name who earned a reputation for wickedness.
She was the daughter of the king of Sidon, and the wife of Ahab (1 Kings 16:31). When she came from Sidon, she brought her own gods and caused Ahab and his people to worship Baal.
It wasn’t that she would have wished to banish the worship of Jehovah, if the prophets of Jehovah would have accepted Baal in addition to Jehovah.
But she killed the prophets of the Lord and at her own table supported four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal (1 Kings 18:13; 1 Kings 18:19).
That was the original Jezebel.
But now this ‘Jezebel’ of Thyatira was an evil influence on the life and worship of the Christian Church.
She didn’t apparently want to destroy the Church; but she wished to bring into it new ways which were, in fact, destructive of the faith.
She wanted the church to be compromised – its worship divided, tainted by devotion to falsehood, to an idol.
So for us, what does this mean? For the church as a whole, what does this mean? It means that truth matters. It means that God is God and will not accept split devotion.
A little bit of Jesus, a little bit of Buddha. It’s a call to watch out for something that can creep into a fellowship, which is idolatry.
As a young Christian I heard of various cults, some of which had locations in the downtown core.
I learned about them, about why they were off the mark, and I had some interest in attending an occasional service there myself to see for myself what they were up to.
But I learned, from people who I trusted, about the dangers associated with the way they worshipped and what they taught.
And I guess I understood that I was very young in the faith and that I could still be influenced in the wrong way.
So, I never went to any of those places. Likewise palm readers or any such departure from what God in the Bible permits.
So what do we learn from this passage?
At the very least we can draw from this that it’s not impossible for Christians to be misled.
For the pressures around us and within us to cause us to drift away from God.
Pressures outside us – external pressure to make us conform our thinking to the worlds thinking.
So...be careful. Don’t dabble in any kind of spiritual practice or even game, that has any potential to drag you down. Ouija boards, tarot cards, horoscopes. Any kind of occult or mystical practices.
Depending on who you hang out with, you could face real pressure to participate in such things. Be careful. Don’t go there.
Anyone who pressures you to do anything that would violate your conscience or, even more important, because it’s more reliable than our consciences, to violate Scripture...
any one who pressures you to do such things, that person is not your friend.
There is much more to say about the church of Thyatira. The key phrases are these:
Revelation 2:23b I am he who searches hearts and minds, and I will repay each of you according to your deeds.
Quickly, there is a judgment day coming. God who knows us inside out will repay us according to our deeds.
He wants our love and our faith and our service to reflect complete devotion to Him. This is our freedom, this is our joy, this is our deepest purpose and meaning.
This of course is not referring to our salvation, which is not a thing we earn through our works.
Ephesians 2:8 For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, 9 not of works, lest anyone should boast.
Thanks be to God that it is grace that brings us to saving faith in Jesus.
Another key phrase is Revelation 2:26 “To the one who is victorious and does my will to the end, I will give authority over the nations...”
Jesus calls us to persevere, to keep moving forward in our faith. To “continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose”. Philippians 2:13
Thanks be to God that He is at work in us and that we can be confident that
Phil 1:6 being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.
Past Splendour And Present Decay
The letter to the church in Sardis is different than the one we just looked at.
It’s a critique of a false reputation, or a reputation the church once had and was still known by, but that was no longer true of them.
Someone said of Sardis that nowhere was there a greater example of the melancholy contrast between past splendour and present decay.
To the Church in Sardis
3 “To the angel of the church in Sardis write:
These are the words of him who holds the seven spirits of God and the seven stars.
Huh? 7 spirits of God? Isn’t there just one Holy Spirit? Yes. This is founded on Isaiah chapter 2 in a prophecy about the coming of Jesus written 750 years before He was born:
A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.
The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him—
the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding,
the Spirit of counsel and of might,
the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the Lord—
and he will delight in the fear of the Lord.
Isaiah 11:2-3
And the 7 stars refers to the 7 churches we are studying.
Then Jesus says this:
I know your deeds; you have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead. 2 Wake up! Strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have found your deeds unfinished in the sight of my God. Rev 3:2
So what Jesus is saying about the Church at Sardis is that, although it has a reputation for life, it is, in fact, spiritually dead. Ouch.
What does He mean?
The New Testament frequently equates sin and death.
We read: The one “who is self-indulgent is dead even while they live" (1 Timothy 5:6), The Prodigal Son is he who was dead and is alive again (Luke 15:24).
The Christians in Rome were people brought from death to life (Romans 6:13). Paul says that his converts in their pre-Christian days were dead through trespasses and sins (Ephesians 2:1; Ephesians 2:5).
So again, Ouch.
But how is this so. The commentator Barclay is helpful here:
1. Sin can lead to the death of the will. If a person accepts the invitations of sin for long enough, the time comes when he cannot accept anything else.
Habits grow and it becomes overwhelmingly hard to break them. A person can come to hate his sins and to love them at the same time.
There are very few of us who have not experienced the power of some habit that we’ve fallen into.
2. Sin can lead to the death of feelings. The process of becoming the slave of sin does not happen overnight. The first time a person sins they might do so with many huge qualms.
But the day comes, if they go on taking what is forbidden, when they do without a qualm that which once they would have been horrified to do. Sin, as someone said, "petrifies the feeling."
3. Sin is the death of all loveliness. The terrible thing about sin is that it can take the loveliest things and turn them into ugliness.
Through sin the yearning for the highest can become the craving for power; the wish to serve can become the intoxication of ambition;
the desire of love can become the passion of lust. Sin is the killer of life's loveliness.
It is only by the grace of God that we can escape the death of sin.
And what is the grace of God, for you and for me? It is the gospel we have heard and we have responded to with our whole hearts, our whole lives. And that’s why Jesus says: 3 Remember, therefore, what you have received and heard; hold it fast, and repent.
No matter if, like the church at Thyatira, we have fallen into error, we have been deceived or we have deceived ourselves;
and no matter if like the church at Sardis we have drifted from being alive in Christ, full of passion for the gospel and full of yearning for God,
to a place of NOT being alive in the Spirit, the GRACE of our God in Jesus Christ is right here, for the taking.
Do you want to renew your faith in Jesus?
Have the churches we have been looking at so far in our series on the churches of Revelation sparked a realization in you that you need to, you want to draw nearer to God?
That’s been true of me. I see strengths in those churches and I see weaknesses. I see strengths in myself and I see weaknesses.
But mostly I want to see Jesus. Church, let us lift up our eyes to Jesus. Let us turn our hearts to Him.
May it never be said of us that we refuse to change when God is calling upon us to change and giving us grace by His Spirit to change.
Change to what? To being more like the One we follow.
To being more in love with Jesus Christ, our Maker and Redeemer. He is calling us,
He is calling us in this world of hardship and this life of suffering to cling to Him. And when we cling to Him, allowing no idols in our lives, permitting nothing to compete with His glory, we will be victorious.
And what is the promise of Jesus to us who believe in Jesus, with us who seek by the grace of God to live lives that honour His majesty?
Well, Jesus says:
5 The one who is victorious will, like them, be dressed in white. I will never blot out the name of that person from the book of life, but will acknowledge that name before my Father and his angels.
May we have ears to hear what the Spirit is saying to us. May we have hearts that keep short accounts, eager to turn to Jesus the moment we sense ourselves on a drift. May we rest peacefully in the arms of Him Who loves us, Him Who adopted us into the family of God,
He Who says (let’s read this together):
“My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand”. John 10:27-29
Amen.
