President Harry Truman enjoyed telling the story about a man who was hit on the head at work. The blow was so severe that he was knocked unconscious for an extended period. His family was convinced that he was dead. The funeral home was called, and the undertaker picked him up at the hospital. Early the next morning, the man awoke and sat straight up in the coffin. Confused, he blinked several times and looked around trying to put the whole thing together.
He thought: “If I’m alive, what in the world am I doing in this soft, satin-filled box? If I’m dead, why do I have to go to the bathroom?”
The man showed signs of death though he was alive. The church at Sardis, in Revelation 3, showed signs of life but it was dead. If we were to approach these seven churches as a physician, we would diagnosis Ephesus with heart problems. They left their first love. Smyrna would have a strong, healthy knee jerk reflex. They responded obediently to the touch of the Lord though they were being kicked by persecution. The churches at Pergamum and Thyatira would be referred to as an internal specialist to deal with the false teachers and unholy practices within the church. However, the doctor would simply pull the sheet over the head of the church at Sardis. It may be the harshest rebuke of the seven churches. There is no compliment to this church from the Lord Jesus.
Sardis was located at the intersection of five major trade routes. This brought the city wealth. Even the mountains brought the city wealth as gold was swept out of the mountains by the river that ran through the center of the city. It was the home of the famous King Croesus (KREE sus). His wealth is legendary. He minted the first gold coins. Sardis was thought impregnable. Yet, twice it was conquered while the city slept.
Notice the message to the dead (v.1), the message to the dying (v. 2-3), and the message to the dedicated (v. 4-6). The mark of the church is reality. What is said and done is a true reflection of what they are inwardly.
Jesus says to the church at Sardis:
Write to the angel of the church in Sardis:
Thus says the one who has the seven spirits of God and the seven stars: I know your works; you have a reputation for being alive, but you are dead.
(2) Be alert and strengthen what remains, which is about to die, for I have not found your works complete before my God. (3) Remember, then, what you have received and heard; keep it, and repent. If you are not alert, I will come like a thief, and you have no idea at what hour I will come upon you. (4) But you have a few people in Sardis who have not defiled their clothes, and they will walk with me in white, because they are worthy.
(5) “In the same way, the one who conquers will be dressed in white clothes, and I will never erase his name from the book of life but will acknowledge his name before my Father and before his angels.
(6) “Let anyone who has ears to hear listen to what the Spirit says to the churches.
First, ….
I. THE MESSAGE TO THE DEAD (REVELATION 3:1)
Write to the angel of the church in Sardis: Thus says the one who has the seven spirits of God and the seven stars: I know your works; you have a reputation for being alive, but you are dead.
To understand the book of Revelation, the interpreter needs to understand the use of numbers. The number seven represents perfection. Jesus is not referring to seven spirits of God. He is referring to the One perfect Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit. God formed Adam from the dust of the earth, but he didn’t come alive until God breathed life into him. If this dead church is going to know life, it must have a work of the Holy Spirit.
Dr. Carl Bates, a past preaching professor at SWBTS, said, “If the Holy Spirit were to somehow die, if that were possible, some churches would meet next Sunday and never know the difference.” This is the church at Sardis. The Holy Spirit has not died but the church has died to the power and the presence of the Holy Spirit.
Cut the electricity to this building and much of what we are doing at this moment stops. This invisible force cools the home and cooks the food. It freezes the water and dry’s the clothes. Electricity has the power to turn darkness into light.
The Holy Spirit is the invisible and powerful presence of God in the life of a believer. John Stott said, “the greatest gift the Christian has ever received, ever will or could receive, is the Spirit of God himself. He enters our human personality and changes us from within. He fills us with love, joy, and peace. He subdues our passions and transforms our characters into the likeness of Christ. Today there is no man-made temple in which God dwells. Instead, his temple is his people. He inhabits both the individual believer and the Christian community.”
Apparently, there was little evidence of the transformation of lives into the likeness of Jesus Christ. There was no sense or sign of the Holy Spirit’s presence in the midst of this church. Maybe this is the meaning of the statement in v. 2: for I have not found your works complete before my God. They did the work of the church, but it didn’t fulfill God’s purpose. They met for worship. There was singing and preaching but it didn’t result in the people meeting God. That’s the fulfillment of worship. They taught the Bible in Sunday School but lives were not being changed. The purpose of Sunday School is not to fill heads with knowledge but to fill lives with God. The church was full, but it wasn’t sincere. It was just a show. It wasn’t real. It was hypocritical. There was lots of religious work, but it didn’t fulfill God’s purpose. This church is dead because it is dead to the power, the presence, and the purpose of the Holy Spirit.
Jesus says to the church at Sardis, “I know your works; you have a reputation for being alive, but you are dead.” The church was admired in the city and region. The other six churches knew about the church at Sardis. There was no false doctrine taking root in the fellowship. They were not having to confront deviant people like a Balaam or Jezebel. Maybe it was large for churches in that time. They had many programs to disciple the members and minister to the community. There was no shortage of money or members serving. Every indication was that it was alive. But outward appearances can be deceiving. The reputation didn’t match the reality. They are hypocrites. In God’s sight, they are dead.
What is deadness that looks like life? It’s a person doing their own thing but claiming God has asked them to do it. It’s hypocrisy.
To call yourself a “Christian” is to claim you live by a certain ethic. This week I had two conversations with business owners who told me their business was a “Christian business.” I took that to mean that their business had a different standard than the world when it came to its job performance, treatment of customers, and motivation for profit. However in the past, I have encountered businesses that make the same claim, but it is reputation without reality. It’s hypocritical. This is what was true of these Christians and this church.
None of us can escape the accusation of hypocrisy. There is, however, a difference between those whose Christian faith touches every part of their life and those who compartmentalize Christ to Sunday and not Monday, church and not home, and prayer and profanity. That’s spiritual deadness.
One more evidence of deadness is found in v. 4: “But you have a few people in Sardis who have not defiled their clothes, and they will walk with me in white, because they are worthy.”
This death involved hypocrisy. What they professed as real was false, but, a second characteristic of this death was defilement. Sin had seeped into the church. It wasn’t as obvious as Balaam or Jezebel, but Jesus Christ had detected it. Beneath the pious exterior of this respectable congregation was a secret uncleanness.
Os Guinness is an author I recommend. He was raised in China by parents who were medical missionaries. When he was a small boy, his father gave him two stones to carry in his pants pockets. It was a part of his dressing each day. In the right pocket was the stone from his father. It had written on it the motto of his father, “Found Faithful.” In the left pocket was the stone with his mother’s motto, “Please Him.”
In the mad rush of escaping China during WWII, he lost the stones, but he never forgot the lesson: “Be Faithful” and “Please Him.” The church at Sardis like the church in America was not experiencing the frontal attack of persecution or the raging internal disease of false teachers and blatant immorality, but, it was being duped into accepting the world’s standard of sexual compromise, lascivious materialism to the neglect of God’s kingdom, and the use of language, drink and entertainment which could not be distinguished from people who didn’t claim to be Christian. They were hypocrites. There was no reality to their claim of being a Christian. This is the message to the dead.
II. THE MESSAGE TO THE DYING (REVELATION 3:2-4)
Jesus says to the church:
(2) Be alert and strengthen what remains, which is about to die, for I have not found your works complete before my God. (3) Remember, then, what you have received and heard; keep it, and repent. If you are not alert, I will come like a thief, and you have no idea at what hour I will come upon you. (4) But you have a few people in Sardis who have not defiled their clothes, and they will walk with me in white, because they are worthy.
What can be done for a dead church? He gives the church five commands. Be alert, strengthen what remains, remember, keep it or obey, and repent. The good news is that in this dead church there is a godly remnant.
This is a message throughout the Bible. Noah is righteous in the middle of a godless society. Lot is grieved about the wickedness of Sodom and Gomorrah. God informs Elijah that he is not alone in standing against King Ahab and Queen Jezebel. Despite the murder of the godly, there are 7,000 who have not bowed their knee to Jezebel. Jesus spoke of his disciples as a godly remnant in an “adulterous and sinful generation” (Mark 8:38). Starting with this group, Jesus can bring a dead church back to life.
“Be alert” Jesus says. It sounds like what He said to the sleeping disciples in the Garden. Jesus is near. Don’t miss Him. Open your eyes. Seize the moment.
In his book Grace Abounding, John Bunyan describes a day when he was inexplicably released from doubt and despair. While passing through a field, troubled in conscience and fearing that all was not right, the sentence fell upon his soul: "Thy righteousness is in heaven." Writes Bunyan, "I thought I saw with the eyes of my soul Jesus Christ at God's right hand. There was my righteousness. Wherever I was, or whatever I was doing, God could not say of me that I lacked his righteousness, for that was ever before Him. Moreover, I saw that it was not my good frame of heart that made my righteousness better, nor my bad frame that made it worse, for my righteousness was Jesus Christ himself."
Every believer who goes in search of Jesus has these moments of self-revelation where Jesus removes our blindness to our true condition. Don’t leave this worship experience and go back to your regular routine that has put you to sleep to Jesus. Don’t pray the same prayer. Practice a spiritual discipline that you have neglected like scripture memory or meditation. Do something to shake yourself awake. There is something Jesus wants to show you that will make you come alive. Friend, if you don’t do something different for having been in worship, you might be dead!
Once awake, the godly remnant are to “strengthen what remains.” The word “strengthen” was often used in the early church for nurturing of believers.
New Christians are weak and immature in their understanding and practice of the Christian faith. They need to be taught, encouraged, and have modeled what mature faith looks like. This is the duty of the church. The godly remnant is the instrument Christ wants to use to move the majority of the church back to spiritual life.
Some things are more caught than taught. A dead church needs godly role models.
Next, we are to remember. Someone said the shortest road to repentance is remembrance. Jesus established the Lord’s Supper for us to remember Him and His loving sacrifice for our sin. He wants us to remember forward. Thinking back on the sacrifice of the cross is to influence how we respond to Him in the future.
Remembering our service to Christ in the past is to direct our service for Him in the future. Maybe you can’t get on the floor with the kids but that’s not the end of what you can do for the Lord. Remembering our brokenness over sin is to give us a repentant spirit for the sin in our life now. Can you remember the last time you knew the conviction of the Holy Spirit over sin in your life? Our past is to preserve and promote holiness in the present and future.
The word “keep it” means obey. It doesn’t have an object. Live an obedient life that pleases God. My eye caught the statement that a pastor won the competition for the TV program The Voice. His final song was I Can Only Imagine. Carol and I listened to several songs sung by this pastor from Mississippi. I listened to several of the comments by the judges and in particular his coach. Todd was an exceptional talent, but do you know why he won? He worked hard to perfect his performance. He obeyed his coach.
For every Christian that you admire their Christian life, you must understand it is not because they have a temperament that is simply bent toward godliness. It is because daily, sometimes monotonously and sacrificially they have said no to sin, Satan, and selfishness to obey Jesus. Life begins to return when we obey. Just start obeying the thing the Holy Spirit is putting in front of you. That may be regular prayer or Bible reading or challenging your stinking attitude. Obey is Jesus’ word to this church.
The word repent pulls all of these together. In every way, they need to bring a halt to this downward spiral in their spiritual life and get right with Jesus. Let me make it plain about repentance. You are truly repentant when you want to change from sinning against God and wanting to obey God. You may love your sin, but it causes you more pain because it hurts God, whom you love too.
Repentance makes you alert to your sin. You see your wrong. You challenge yourself to remove the sin and strengthen your relationship with Jesus. Remembering your sin creates a longing for more of Jesus. You begin to obey even if it is hard. You repent.
Jesus warns the congregation that if they do not repent and realize their deadness, Jesus will bring the congregation to an end. The fire in the heater is gone out, but the blower is still blowing. There’s no warmth. The Holy Spirit has removed His power and presence. They are meeting but He is not with them.
Jesus promises believers who have not stained their garments with compromise with the world will one day reflect Christ’s righteousness and purity and their names will never be removed from the book of life. If they don’t wake up, the same fate that happened to the destruction of the city when it slept will happen to the church. If they will repent, they will experience a new life of purity with Jesus Christ and will walk in the victory procession with Jesus.
A miller had a grist mill. People would bring their grain to him and he’d grind it between two large stone mills. The grinding stone was turned by gears moved by a wheel turned by the flow of water from a river. One day he arrived, and the mill wouldn’t turn. The flow of water was just a trickle. He didn’t try to turn that grinding stone in his own strength. He walked back up stream and removed some debris that had fallen in the river and blocked the flow of water.
If the Holy Spirit is pointing out to you that something is wrong in your spiritual life, you need to go back upstream and discover what you have allowed to accumulate. Dig it out. Repent. The Holy Spirit will again flow through your life in power and presence.
III. THE MESSAGE TO THE DEDICATED (REVELATION 3:5-6)
(5) “In the same way, the one who conquers will be dressed in white clothes, and I will never erase his name from the book of life but will acknowledge his name before my Father and before his angels.
(6) “Let anyone who has ears to hear listen to what the Spirit says to the churches.
The book of life is drawn from the O.T. and the context of Sardis. Exodus 32 is the account of Moses coming down from Mt. Sinai and finding Israel celebrating around the golden calf. God had revealed His holy law. The people had sworn to do everything the Lord commanded. Now Moses finds Israel in idolatry. They have made a mockery of God in their witness to the surrounding nations. Three thousand die by the sword.
Moses in his role as the covenant mediator, pleads for the Israel before the Lord. Moses acknowledges these are a terribly wicked people. Please forgive them. But if God won’t do this, then, Moses requests for God to blot him out of the book that God has written. This book was the book of census in which the twelve tribes of Israel and their inheritances were recorded. Those who had participated in the worship of the golden calf were erased from the book.
The difference between Moses and Christ is the fact that when Jesus Christ intercedes for his people their names will never be removed from the Book of Life. Jesus said in John 17:12, While I was with them, I was protecting them by Your name that You have given Me. I guarded them and not one of them is lost, except the son of destruction, so that the Scripture may be fulfilled.
Those in Sardis who do not repent will discover they are dead. Like the Israelites whose names were blotted out of the book of census will discover their names never were in the Book of Life.
In Greek life, there was a book that contained the names of citizens of that city. Eventually it came to mean the record of the gods. If a citizen was associated with a capital crime, his name would be erased from the citizen record. It was a way of saying that we are erasing any memory of the person.
The idea of removal from the record was a metaphor for destruction. However, those who remain unspotted from the pagan morality are promised an eternal reward in the presence of God.
The message to the dedicated is that you will have a new identity, a new citizenship, and a new future. It is the promise of eternal life in heaven.
CONCLUSION
Margaret Manning Shull tells about her friend who rejected Christianity. She wrote:
Over coffee at the ubiquitous Starbucks, my friend shared the story of his departure from his Christian faith. He did not leave his faith over a whim or because of some intellectual crisis he couldn’t resolve with his dearly held beliefs. He left because his work as a journalist led him into Christian circles where he met some of the most influential Christian leaders and teachers. He left his Christian faith because as he traversed these circles, he saw very little evidence of what he had believed was true, Christian transformation. What he experienced was a group of men and women who resembled the world more than they did Jesus, and whose lives showed little resemblance of his character. The dissonance between what was espoused in word and what was clearly missing in deed caused him to doubt the transformative power of the gospel. If Christianity made little difference in the lives of these Christian leaders— to whom so many look for guidance and example—what difference could it make in his life?
This is the destruction created by dead churches and dead Christians. We all struggle with hypocrisy. When you hold up the mirror of the life of Jesus Christ, you see the imperfections in your life. We all know there should be more transformation in our life than there is. We’re still losing our tempers, coveting, lusting, being judgmental, and struggling with idolatry.
God can use you and change you despite your starts and stops. Start again. We follow the God of hope. He is the God of the resurrection. He can give you new life. He can breathe new life into our church. Maybe the last piece of the puzzle to fall for Northeast to experience a fresh wind of the Holy Spirit is for some this morning to conclude this service with a new resolve in their heart to live for Christ like you once did.
I think a strong case can be made that changing a life is probably the biggest change to happen in our world. We’re being told the Covid virus is going to change our life. Maybe it will be a lot. Maybe it will be a little. I’m convinced the biggest change occurs when a person is truly converted to a follower of Jesus Christ. Here’s my reason. For a person to really change, he has to change his God. People who meet the living God are different, not perfect but different. In fits and starts, they change. You know it is real.
Is Jesus Christ really with you? Have you changed? Are you still dead? Repent. Change your God.
When we stand to sing, I ask that you go to the foyer. There a godly deacon and wife will be there to meet with you. They will listen, give you spiritual counsel, tell you how to know Jesus, and pray with you. Don’t delay. Act now.
Online you can get the same help. Please let us know what your need is and how we can contact you. Someone will quickly be with you.
PRAYER
Jesus, you really lived 2,000 years ago. You lived a sinless life. You died on a cruel, brutal cross but three days later, You came back from death to life! This is real! Are we so dead that our heart no longer leaps over this reality?
It means our God is real. Death is truly defeated. Heaven is real and the home of every true believer. It explains why the church is the greatest reality in our life. The church will outlast America…democracy…The church will outlast the sun, moon, and stars.
God please convict us of deadness so we can pour our life into the only thing that lasts and produces the greatest transformation—a relationship with Jesus Christ and His church.
1. Seasons, Swindoll, p. 262.
2. What Christ Thinks of the Church, John Stott, p. 79.
3. https://www.rzim.org/read/a-slice-of-infinity/the-undeception-of-the-story
4. Stott, p. 85.
5. Sermon, “To the Church of Sardis,” Kim Riddlebarger.
