The Challenge of Philadelphia: Sermon on Revelation 3:7-13

Attalus was nervous as he walked into the curia, ready to speak before the senate of the Roman Republic. If the clouds had battled the sun for space in the sky that day, well, it would only have mirrored the battle in his own deeply ambitious heart. Attalus, you see, was a prince... but the second son. His older brother Eumenes was the king of Pergamum. But mighty Rome was displeased with Eumenes. Senators had hinted to Attalus that, if he wanted the throne, it was his for the asking. And so began the struggle.

For years and years, the close-knit bonds of Eumenes and Attalus had been famous. Foreign kings had advised their own sons to be like Eumenes and Attalus, who together had grown the Kingdom of Pergamum from small beginnings into a burgeoning world power “by their concord and agreement and their faculty of mutual respect” (Polybius 23.11). Eumenes, the king, had long been an ally of the Roman Republic, helping them in assorted wars. The Peace of Apamea had given him many new territories. But when the Achaeans revoked the honors they'd once awarded Eumenes, making Eumenes severely depressed, Attalus vowed to travel there and intercede – asking the Achaeans to restore the honors, if not for the controversial Eumenes' sake, then as a personal favor to well-liked Attalus (Polybius 28.7) – it was proof of Attalus' “brotherly love” to Eumenes (Polybius 27.18).

All the meanwhile, Eumenes was helping the Romans in their war against the Macedonian king Perseus, who'd been stirring up trouble. But Eumenes foolishly traded secret messengers with Perseus – Eumenes had hoped for bribes to negotiate a fair end to the war, and was willing to withdraw support from the Romans to help even things out (Polybius 29.4-9). Eumenes had lost the Romans' trust and good will. In time, Perseus was beaten, and in the power vacuum, Eumenes' kingdom at Pergamum came under attack by the Galatians (Polybius 29.22) – and since Eumenes was persona non grata in Rome, he sent Attalus to ask the Roman Senate for help. It was there that some Romans enticed popular Attalus to ask for the Pergamene throne (Polybius 30.1). Temptation was nearly overwhelming – Attalus had always yearned to be king. But in the end, his loyalty to Eumenes won out – he faithfully executed what Eumenes had sent him to Rome to do, and left (Polybius 30.3). Attalus went home, loving his brother more than his own ambitions.

In time, Attalus' costly display of loyalty to his brother earned him a nickname. Because Attalus had shown so much brotherly love, he was nicknamed 'Brother-Lover' – or, in Greek, Philadelphos. Years later, either Attalus or Eumenes founded a new city at the border of the former regions of Lydia and Phrygia – a Greek city to help bring Greek culture to the locals. And they named it, after Attalus' nickname, the city of... Philadelphia. A city to forever remember Attalus' brotherly love for Eumenes.

Down through the years, Philadelphia grew into a fine little town. Situated on the south side of a local river, it was separated by a ridge of hills from a rich volcanic plain that people just called the 'Burnt Land.' It turned out to be very good soil for growing the grapes whose juice could be turned into wine, and so vine-growing became the cornerstone of Philadelphia's industry. The people lived out their days, falling in love with sports, cheering for the winners to get their trophies, wreaths, or crowns. But in the first century, things got troublesome for the city of Philadelphia. Earthquakes began to hit – the city was nearly atop a fault line. Every time one struck, the town was slow to recover. It suffered aftershocks for years. At times, the Philadelphians had to flee the city as it cracked and crumbled around them, and go live in the countryside for years. Over decades, they cried out for help. And some emperors sent it. The Philadelphians were so glad, they changed the city's name to honor the emperors – adding names like 'Neocaesarea' and 'Flavia' to their city. Just like Attalus, they wanted to be loyal, especially in the light of such generosity. Who wouldn't be grateful? The Philadelphians loved Caesar.

But then, just a few years before this letter, the Emperor Domitian – trying to rebalance the food supplies for the empire – wrote out an edict to rip up most every vineyard to free up land for corn production (Revelation 6:7). If put into effect, the idea would have killed Philadelphia – corn didn't grow well in their kind of dirt, they were totally dependent on their vineyards. The hot, piercing sting of betrayal ripped through the city – the very same emperor they trusted as their benefactor was the man who gave orders without the slightest thought to how it would devastate them. By the time John sees visions on Patmos, the people of Philadelphia are overwhelmed with a weary disaffection and disappointment with the imperial office – once bitten, twice shy.

In this vulnerable, shaken, resentful town, there lives a church. It isn't a big church. It isn't a rapidly growing church. It isn't a church of hustle and bustle. Jesus remarks that he knows that the church has “a little power” (Revelation 3:8c). Not a lot of power. Not no power. Not a typical amount of power. Just a little power, a bit of strength. There are perhaps no more people in the Philadelphian church than there are in ours. It's a small church. And it's stayed small for a while, because they haven't had a great deal of success in evangelizing their neighbors. Oh, they've tried – otherwise, they'd be catching the same flak over it that some other churches had. But their aspirations of growth are frustrated; they feel landlocked. They're small. And yet Jesus has chosen them, out of all the churches in Asia Minor, as one of the seven he'll speak to directly. In some of the other letters, Jesus has dealt with large churches in big, venerable cities. But the Philadelphian church, little and weak and poor though it might be, isn't left out. They, too, get to hear the voice of Jesus. Jesus has an eye on them. “I know your works,” he tells them (Revelation 3:8a). Jesus pays as much attention to the little Philadelphian church as he does to the bigger churches of Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, and Sardis. Their “little power” is no disqualifier from the attentions of Jesus Christ.

We find out that this frustrated little church has gone through some significant trials in the past – tribulations of the sort that have struck other churches – and this little church has been faithful and borne up under it. “You kept my word and did not deny my name,” Jesus tells them (Revelation 3:8d). “You kept my word of patient endurance” (Revelation 3:10a). When times were tough and times were dry, when the pressure was on, when it got hot, this little church stuck it out. It wasn't anything the world would call heroic. Didn't involve grand signs and wonders. It was just everyday faithfulness in tougher times. And Jesus noticed and appreciated it.

And yet there is a problem that now vexes this little church, and it isn't one for which any blame is laid at their feet. Just like in Smyrna, the letter to Philadelphia mentions a “synagogue of Satan” (Revelation 3:9a). The local synagogue was notoriously compromised, even from a mainstream Jewish perspective – the rabbis would later comment that “the wines and the baths” of this area “have separated the ten tribes from Israel” (b. Shabbat 147a). Yet evidently, this compromised synagogue was engaged in concerted efforts to bully the tiny church in their neighborhood. The synagogue community was legally exempt from the laws of emperor-worship, and yet they excluded and excommunicated Jesus-following Jews from their fellowship, casting them out and leaving them devoid of protection. They likely cursed Jesus-followers in their gatherings. And they were determined to win Jewish Christians back into their fold, and even convert Gentile Christians in Philadelphia. Their preferred tactic, it seems, was to de-legitimize and demoralize the church. The synagogue authorities were telling this struggling little church that there was no safety outside the synagogue, that there was no security outside of the synagogue, that there was no salvation outside of the synagogue. They told the church that God's kingdom was going to come for Israelites, and that those outside the synagogue's doors were going to miss out. They maybe quoted the verses from Isaiah about Gentiles coming and bowing at the Jews' feet (Isaiah 45:14; 49:23; 60:14).

Between their frustration in failed growth and the haunting voices of the synagogue's taunts, the Philadelphian church has become deeply discouraged. The light has faded from their eyes. They harbor no great thoughts for their church's future. They doubt their own salvation. They have nightmares about being shut out from God's presence because they picked the wrong version of Israel's faith. They've been faithful to Jesus, having kept to his name without denying it, but now these taunts have them struggling to defend their faith from the scriptures of Israel, and doubts are creeping in.

Are we anything like the church in Philadelphia? While a neighboring religious body may not taunt us and try to lure us away from the church, we are at times subject to discouraging voices. We, too, may be faced with the whispers of discouragement. Our hearts may hear whispers like, “You'll never do enough to overcome that past stain. Do more, it's never enough.” And when that whisper comes, we need to know that our stains have all been devoured by the glory that is in Christ Jesus – he saves to the uttermost, regardless of the worst of all our stains and all our weaknesses. But then comes the second whisper: “The difficulties you endure are proof that God doesn't love you, because would a loving God really lead you through what you're facing now?” And we need to know that it's true that “through many dangers, toils, and snares, we have already come,” but these are either gifts of God or else tools he'll tame for our blessing, if we only trust him enough to receive it. But then comes the third whisper: “Don't you know your religion has no place in the modern world? Get with the times! These outdated beliefs will fade into history.” So the whisper may say. But we need to know that the so-called 'modern world' is too small and artificial to last, but the gospel never expires, never grows stale – the gospel will always endure, for Christ is risen.

Ah, but then comes the fourth whisper: “Can't you see that you're too old to be useful? What could you possibly do that's of value now?” And when that whisper comes, we need to know that elderly believers have done marvelous things for God throughout history. Moses was in his eighties when he went up to get the Ten Commandments. Isaiah preached into his late eighties or nineties. Simeon and Anna, who held and announced the infant Messiah, were at least in their eighties. Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, was a bold witness for Jesus in his late eighties. Anthony, one of the first monks, was 87 when he left the desert to go help steer the church back to the right beliefs; he lived 'til 105. John the Silent, a later monk, lived to 104 and still gave helpful advice to anybody who visited with him. The eighties and nineties are not too old to be used mightily by God.

Oh, but then the fifth whisper attacks us: “Your church is so small. Your church doesn't grow. Look at all the big things around you. Can't you see that the big things are where it's at? Your church is insignificant. It can't possibly do any good.” So the fifth whisper might say! But the Philadelphian church was small. That church had not been growing. They surely heard this same whisper that we have. The things that discourage us, they faced too. And yet that whisper of discouragement is countered by the assuring voice of Jesus.

What does Jesus say? He introduces himself, first, as “the Holy One, the True One” (Revelation 3:7a). The local synagogue may have been casting doubt on Jesus. But Jesus opens for the church the prophecies of Isaiah, and there we find that Israel's God was called “the Holy One of Israel, your Savior” (Isaiah 43:3), and that he'd one day be known especially as “the God of Truth” (Isaiah 65:16). Jesus reminds the church that he is the God who gave the Law and inspired the Prophets all along – a God “holy and true” (cf. Revelation 6:10).

And it's as Israel's holy and true God that Jesus can say to the little Philadelphian church: “I know your works” (Revelation 3:8a). He's said this to all the churches – sometimes what he sees isn't very healthy. But actually, Jesus doesn't have a single bad thing to say about the Philadelphian church. The last thing they need is another word of discouragement. There's enough of that in their lives already. And Jesus first of all just wants them to know that he sees them. They may be small and weak, but he pays as much attention to them as he does to the biggest churches. They are not beneath his notice. The Philadelphian church, to Jesus' eyes, is every bit as precious and valuable as the most active and lively megachurch. And the same must be true for us. If we live in faithfulness to Jesus, we can rest assured that his eyes have caught that. And not out of his peripheral vision. Jesus is looking straight at our church. The name of this church is spoken in heaven. And we are discussed and seen with the same attention as Petra or LCBC, Weaverland or Willow Street, even megachurches. Jesus takes no less notice of our works than of theirs. Jesus takes no less notice of any one of you than of kings and stars.

Not only that, but Jesus wants to say to the Philadelphian church and ours: “I have loved you” (Revelation 3:9c) – have loved and do love. Jesus looks at you, he knows your works, and he loves you! Jesus loves our church! Jesus loves each person here this morning! Jesus loves your family. Jesus loves your neighbor. And Jesus does – really does – love you. The whispers of discouragement, then and now, may try to cast a shadow over his love for you. They may heap up dark accounts of circumstances, they may raise question after question about events of hardship in the hands of a loving God. The whispers have had their say. Over them all, Jesus shouts, “I have loved you!” Oh, church, do you know this morning that Jesus loves you? He loves you infinitely more than Attalus loved Eumenes. Not once has Jesus considered turning his back on you – not even during your worst sin. Open your heart to his love! Let it wash over you in abundance, like the ocean flood surging into a teacup.

Another thing Jesus wants to say to the Philadelphian church and ours: “I am coming soon” (Revelation 3:11a). Jesus had warned some of the other churches that his spiritual presence was going to visit them and bring them punishment. He warned Ephesus that he'd “come... and remove [their] lampstand from its place” (Revelation 2:5), he warned Pergamum he'd “come soon and war against them with the sword of [his] mouth” (Revelation 2:16), he warned Sardis he'd “come like a thief” if they didn't wake up (Revelation 3:3). Here, Jesus will visit a church not to punish but to help – he'll come to bless and assist, to strengthen and protect them. He pledges that “because you have kept my word about patient endurance, I will keep you from the hour of trial that is coming on the whole world, to try those who dwell on the earth” (Revelation 3:10). Because they persevered earlier, so keeping his word, Jesus is going to keep them spiritually secure during the coming tribulations – the forces of the world may kill the body, but Jesus will seal the faithful believers' souls and keep them alive. He has no plan to leave us to eternally languish in internalized shame. If we trust him and hear his word, we're his, full stop.

Now, the synagogue in Philadelphia scoffs at all this. They make out that their door is the door of the world to come. They scold the church, discourage the church, as a tactic to lure people away from the church and into compliance with their understanding of the Law. They claim to have locked Jesus-followers out of the kingdom of God. But Jesus has a different idea. Jesus turns the pages of Isaiah to the twenty-second chapter, where we find the story of Shebna and Eliakim. Shebna had been the palace steward of King Hezekiah. Shebna had been the one overseeing the royal household, with control of Judah's finances and with the keys to the palace. But Isaiah warned that, due to mismanagement, Shebna was about to be demoted. His role would be given to a man named Eliakim: “I will clothe him with [Shebna's] robe..., and he shall be a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and to the house of Judah, and I will place on his shoulder the key of the house of David. He shall open, and none shall shut; and he shall shut, and none will open. And I will fasten him like a peg in a secure place, and he will become a throne of honor to his father's house” (Isaiah 22:21-23). That's what God promised to give Eliakim. Eliakim was going to have 'the key of the house of David,' which would allow him to control access to the royal palace – and, hence, control the access of the people to their king. Eliakim would choose who could see Hezekiah and who couldn't. In later Jewish interpretation, Eliakim becomes a high priest with 'the key of the sanctuary' to control access even to God's temple (Exodus Rabbah 37.1; Targum Isaiah 22:22).

And Jesus says that he's the truer and greater Eliakim. Jesus is the one who “has the key of David – who opens and no one will shut, who shuts and no one opens” (Revelation 3:7b). Jesus controls access to everything in or beyond the universe. No one can get into anything unless Jesus unlocks it. And nobody can lock what he's left open for somebody. Jesus is the true gatekeeper. Jesus is the holy doorman. Jesus has the key of access – even access to God's kingdom. In calling the synagogue frauds and liars, he's shut their door, and nothing they do can open it. But to the little church he says, “I have set before you an open door which no one is able to shut” (Revelation 3:8b). They don't have to listen to their local synagogue's taunts. Jesus has opened a door for them, and no one – not a synagogue leader, not a priest, not a governor, not an emperor, not devil or archangel – can budge that door and slam it in their faces. And Jesus has opened that same door of access for us. And nobody can shut the door on you. For you stands “a door... open in heaven” (Revelation 4:1), so long as Jesus opens it.

In just the same way that Jesus sets before them an open door of heavenly access, an open door to the kingdom and to the world-to-come, Jesus is also setting before them an open door to the mission field. God had once “opened a door of faith to the Gentiles” (Acts 14:27), and “a wide door for effective work [had] opened” for Paul (1 Corinthians 16:9), and elsewhere Paul asked the church to pray “that God may open to us a door for the word, to declare the mystery of Christ” (Colossians 4:3). And now, Jesus says, he's opening a similar door for gospel preaching to the Philadelphian church. Not only can they take their message straight to the synagogue again and trust the Spirit's presence, but they're also situated very well to send out missionaries to unreached nearby regions. They may be small, but Jesus can open doors for the gospel delivered by small churches. And he can open doors for us to “declare the mystery of Christ,” if we pray for doors to open. Jesus has the key.

Jesus promises that he will give fruitfulness to the Philadelphian church, in time. They may be subject to the whispers of discouragement and the pressures of persecution, but Jesus takes the triumphant prophecies of the synagogue and turns them around. Where the synagogue read Isaiah and expected the Gentiles to come bowing down to them, Jesus says that it's the discouragers from the Philadelphian synagogue whom Jesus “will make them come and bow down before your feet, and they will learn that I have loved you” (Revelation 3:9bc). The church may be small, the church may be weak, the church may be belittled, but Jesus will vindicate them very openly and publicly one day. Their neighbors will learn that the God of Israel loves the church as his people. And there is the hope – we can hold out the hope – that what Jesus describes isn't just an unwilling submission but a joyful conversion: that the former discouragers, in awe, come and humble themselves to receive the good news that is available for them precisely through Jesus' love to his church. And just so, although the church is routinely mocked and derided in twenty-first-century America, nevertheless we may hear this promise: that one day, Jesus may well make the church's fiercest critics come bow before believers' feet – and we may hope that he'll do it in a joyful conversion, like he did with Saul of Tarsus.

Jesus has even more promises to give to the Philadelphian church – and to us. The Philadelphian church read the scriptures. They had to, especially in their conflict with the synagogue. And as they read those scriptures, they knew the story about how Solomon, in building the temple, had ordered “two pillars of bronze. … He set up the pillars at the vestibule of the temple. He set up the pillar on the south and called it Jachin, and he set up the pillar on the north and called it Boaz” (1 Kings 7:15, 21). And there those named pillars stood, looming sturdily in the court of God's temple. It was a beautiful picture of stability in God's presence. Years later, God had turned to his prophet Jeremiah and promised, “I make you this day... an iron pillar... against the kings of Judah, its officials, its priests, and the people of the land. They will fight against you, but they shall not prevail against you, for I am with you, (says Yahweh), to deliver you” (Jeremiah 1:18). Just like the temple's pillars of bronze, Jeremiah would be an iron pillar, unmoved by all the resistance of Judah. It would have sounded like quite the dream to the Philadelphian church, whose parents and grandparents and great-grandparents had been repeatedly chased out of their hometown by earthquakes.

And so, to them, Jesus vows, “The one who overcomes, I will make him a pillar in the temple of my God; never shall he go out of it” (Revelation 3:12a). For all the demoralizing whispers that tell us we're outcasts, Jesus will answer that we have a place inside. For all the earthquake shocks of life that threaten to topple us, Jesus replies that we can be made sturdy pillars in God's temple. And never can we be chased out. The world and its forms may crumble around us, all else may be shaking and quaking, but we're receiving “a kingdom that cannot be shaken” (Hebrews 12:28). And in that kingdom, we stand as sturdy pillars, never needing another place.

Jesus knows about Philadelphia's trouble with earthquake shocks. Jesus also knows how Philadelphia has taken on other names throughout the years, but been betrayed by her namesakes. Philadelphia had taken names to honor unworthy kings who left her deserted. Jesus knows that. So it's with great deliberateness that he offers a name that won't go sour: “I will write on him” – on the overcoming believer – “the name of my God and the name of the city of my God (the New Jerusalem which comes down from my God out of heaven) and my own new name” (Revelation 3:12b). Later rabbis would say that, in the end time, the Messiah and the Holy City would both have the same name as God himself (Pesikta de Rab Kahana 22.5a; Midrash Psalms 21.2). It's all one name, one glorious name, the name that inextricably links God and Christ and Holy City. To bear the name of Jesus will be to belong to God. To bear the name of Jesus will be citizenship in the New Jerusalem. A single inscription will say it all. And Jesus will write that name on each believer's forehead, just as the high priest of Israel had a forehead-mounted gold plate with God's name on it (Exodus 28:36-38).

What Jesus is offering is a fabulously beautiful picture. It would have dazzled the little Philadelphian church. It should dazzle us just the same. In the face of the whispers of discouragement, Jesus sees us, Jesus pledges his love for us, Jesus opens doors into the kingdom for us, Jesus promises to vindicate us, Jesus promises to protect us, Jesus promises to prosper our ministry, Jesus welcomes us into God's temple, Jesus gives us a permanent place, Jesus gives us stability, Jesus makes his own name our access code and our identity. Jesus makes of us what our neighbors cannot dream. He gives the simplest believer a glory beyond Aaron and Moses. Young or old, big church or little church, it doesn't matter – Jesus' promises abide the same. And all he asks is this: “Hold fast what you have, so that no one may seize your crown” (Revelation 3:11b). Don't let any whispers of discouragement or earthquake shocks steal that trophy you're aiming to wear. “A little power,” sure and steady and sturdy, outlasts the race. Just “hold fast what you have!” Don't be demoralized, don't be discouraged. The risen Lord Jesus writes to assure you what you have in him. The future is bright for a faithful small church, only hold fast what you have in Jesus!

The Challenge of Sardis: Sermon on Revelation 3:1-6

The times were old. Ezekiel had been gone twenty years. Daniel, in his seventies, was living out his senior years in Babylon. But far away from them, in what people said was the strongest spot on the face of the earth, the king of the Lydian empire surveyed the destruction of a great kingdom: his own. Croesus, crowned with a wreath and clutching a scepter, poured out a libation from his throne on the pyre, as his servant Euthymos, at his bidding, carried forward the torch that Croesus hoped would wipe away his defeat and help him rise to heaven, made immortal in victorious smoke. Croesus lamented how foolish he'd been in misunderstanding. He'd made a grave mistake in picking a fight with another great empire, far-away Persia, when they'd absorbed the Medes. But Croesus had gone on the warpath, following the Royal Road with his armies to Pteria. And Cyrus had, from the Persian side, done the same. And there they'd fought it out to a draw. A ruinous stalemate of wasted lives and mangled dreams. In the aftermath, Croesus had retreated to his capital city, the place whose Pactolus River running with gold had made him fabulously wealthy. For the autumn and winter, he released his foreign soldiers so they could tend to their fields, and he sent word to his allies in Egypt and Babylon and Sparta to join him in five months so they could triumph together in the spring. And Croesus thought all would be well.

But what Croesus hadn't counted on was that Cyrus had not given up the fight and gone back to Persia. No, in a sudden twist, Cyrus and the Persian army showed up at Croesus' gates. Croesus sent out the Lydian cavalry, but Cyrus spooked their horses with his camels. Croesus was forced to retreat into the citadel that loomed over the lower city. And Cyrus camped around, laying siege to the capital of the Lydian Empire. Yet Croesus wasn't at all worried, and neither were the Lydian soldiers. After all, their citadel was the strongest and safest place of all. Around city and citadel alike, the walls were thick and high, and the citadel on three sides was set atop sharply sheer vertical cliffs. Its reputation preceded it: it was the fortress that could never be breached, never be taken. And so Croesus and his men rested securely.

Or, at least, they did until the Persian soldier Hyroeades suddenly appeared in the fortress. For he, the previous day, had seen a Lydian soldier climb all the way down the cliff to fetch a fallen helmet, and then climb back up again. So he'd spotted the footholds. And Hyroeades, with others following, had ascended the cliff and the wall to the citadel. And, trusting vainly in their reputation, the Lydians had made no preparations to guard that spot by which the Persians came in. If they had been watching from atop the walls of their spot of great confidence, it could have saved their empire. Instead, it condemned it to the dustbins of history. For the great kingdom of Lydia fell in the loss of its capital city: Sardis.

A third of a millennium passed. From Persian hands, the city of Sardis was handed over to Alexander the Great without a fight, and then when his vast empire split at his death, his general Seleucus took the corner where it lay. In time, his great-great-grandson Antiochus came to power, and was away fighting when his own uncle Achaeus rebelled and set up his throne in the citadel of Sardis. And so Antiochus, rightful king, had to come to lay siege against the city where Uncle Achaeus was cooped up. But a year passed, and more. Achaeus and the Sardians were safe inside their impenetrable defenses. They had enough supplies to weather a lengthy siege. It seemed as safe and secure as anything could be. The Sardians enjoyed their reputation for impregnability. It was the strongest spot on earth, after all.

But one of Antiochus' soldiers, a man from Crete named Lagoras, watched the patterns of the vultures as they rested after meals atop the wall between the citadel and the lower city. And he reasoned that if those walls were guarded, the guards would never tolerate the vultures. So in the night, Lagoras and some friends carried ladders and propped them up. And at daybreak, while Antiochus' main army created a diversion by attacking a gate on the opposite side, Lagoras and his team snuck like thieves up the ladders, crept through the city, and helped to saw another gate open from the inside while others worked it from the outside. And before Achaeus could even realize what was going on, he'd lost the lower city of Sardis to Antiochus.

Golden Sardis, you see, had a reputation, ever since it was the capital of a mighty empire. It had the reputation for being impenetrably defended. And yet, two occasions over the years exposed the reputation as hollow, for on those two occasions, the defenders of Sardis were so wrapped up in their reputation that they neglected to keep watch over the places they thought were safe and secure. And in the failure of their vigilance, in the pride that led them to neglect their vulnerabilities, Sardis was twice invaded and conquered by Cyrus and Antiochus. Over the years that followed, Sardis stopped being a major power. The gold supply mostly dried up, cutting off its immense wealth. The city lost all its political significance, and by Roman times, the proud residents found themselves living off the nostalgia of an obsolete reputation – a great name that no longer matched the reality.

Over six centuries after Cyrus took Sardis and over three centuries since Antiochus did the same, we find – as we eavesdrop on a letter from the Risen Lord Jesus to the church meeting within those thick, high walls – is that what was true of the city had become true of the church, as well. The church of Sardis had once been golden, and its fame had gone out far and wide. It was like the name 'Alive' was emblazoned on its forehead and trumpeted with bugles and fanfare through all the churches of the land. It was a lively and bustling church, safe and secure in the gospel. But now, while the name 'Alive' is still tattooed across the church's face, it no longer seems appropriate. “I know your works,” Jesus tells them. And we expect it to be followed by a compliment. Jesus adds, “You have a name that you are alive” (Revelation 3:1b). “But...”

But it doesn't fit any more. The real recent history has belied their name, their lively reputation. Their pride has drawn them inward. The church in Sardis has become a quiet, tame, domesticated bunch. They are no longer spiritually lively. Their praises are mumbled. Their prayers are rambling. The clock ticks down, and they see it go by. They're no longer evangelistic. Church punctuates their week but doesn't define it. It's just an event and a place. They put together a decent front when visitors from the other churches pass through town. But in truth, their works are incomplete in God's sight. Jesus himself says it: “I have not found your works complete in the sight of my God” (Revelation 3:2b). Everything they do is left at half-measures. When it comes to spiritual things, the church isn't giving it their all. Maybe they think they are. But they've forgotten when being a church is all about. They've forgotten that it's life and power and heavenly thunder. Instead, the church in Sardis is a dried-up husk of a church, their glory and life stolen away. They bear the name of Christ, but they don't really confess him before others (cf. Revelation 3:5c). They acknowledge Christian truth in theory. But they aren't leaning on it. They don't really believe Jesus could be present in their midst – I mean, what are they, religious nuts? How embarrassing! So, having domesticated the whole church experience, we find that Jesus says most of them have “soiled their garments” (cf. Revelation 3:4a). Unclean, unfit for polite company.

In fact, Jesus goes so far as to tell them, “You have a reputation for being alive, but you are dead” (Revelation 3:1c). Some of the most chilling words Jesus can say to a church: “You are dead.” Dead, and they haven't read their own obituary! Dead, and they haven't spotted their tombstone! Dead, and so delusional they can't even grasp it! Theirs is a zombie spirituality, soulless but shuffling through the motions while rotting away. It's been allowed to dry up and decay under their very noses. They're coasting on the easy road to defeat, and yet they're too drowsy and inattentive in their spiritual lethargy to even notice their fatal fall.

We can readily imagine them shuffling drowsily to church and then drowsily to lunch each Sunday. In the week drowsily earning their keep, drowsily watching their movies, drowsily enjoying their vacations, drowsily seeing their kids and grandkids themselves grow to mature zombiehood, all drowsily settling down and settling in with the world around them, shuffling their way through a hollow string of days and years. Oh, we will be discipled, we will be formed, either with the stream of culture or in defiance of it – there is no third choice. And as one wise man said: “A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”

The believers in Sardis, together as a church, used to be a living thing! They used to be able to swim upstream! They had originally received and heard a living gospel (Revelation 3:3a). But they forgot its life. They forgot its vitality. And now what they're left with is the collapsed shell of obsolete godliness, a mere powerless form, left behind like the exuvia of molted cicadas, still stuck on the bark of the tree, still looking as if it could move, but utterly empty of anything alive.

Pride and Inattention are a toxic marriage. They give birth to the twins Laxity and Complacency, and the whole family allows the house of God to fall into disrepair around them. From there, only a fraudulent facade can be put out to give the illusion of substance, masking the mismatch of their name with the hollow void where life should have been – but isn't. It's like a Potemkin village. The story goes – and it's mostly untrue, but the old Russian story is – that Grigory Potemkin, a Russian governor, wanted to impress the Empress as she came to see how he'd rebuilt a devastated province. So as she was traveling by barge down the Dnieper, each day he would have fake houses and fake storefronts built to look like a village, and a team of peasants would pretend to live there each day as the empress sailed past; and then when she'd moved on, they'd tear it all down and hustle down river and build the village again, to make another fake village for her to see. A Potemkin village – just the looks and the name, but a mere front and a fraud. How many Potemkin churches litter the American landscape? How many of our lives have become spiritual Potemkin villages by which even we ourselves are often fooled?

What I'm talking about is what we've come to call nominal Christianity. It's nominal in that it has the name, but the substance doesn't measure up. It's Christian existence in name only. And it is a problem. Forty-five years ago, Billy Graham spearheaded an effort to call together thousands of Evangelical Christian leaders from across the world to meet in Lausanne, Switzerland. From that pivotal meeting, the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization was born. Six years later, in June 1980, that committee sponsored meetings in Thailand to explore the plight of nominal Christianity in each of the big traditions of the Church: Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant. In the papers they produced, they defined a nominal Christian as “one who... would call himself a Christian or be so regarded by others, but who has no authentic commitment to Christ based on personal faith.” They identified five types of nominal Christians, including “one who attends church regularly and worships devoutly, but who has no vital personal relationship with Jesus as Savior and Lord.”

By December 1998, the Lausanne International Consultation on Nominalism met in England and produced what they called their Statement to the Churches on Nominality. They stressed that even churchgoers can be nominal Christians, saying: “Many people attend church whose faith may be described as nominal in that it has little influence on their daily lives, habits, or personal devotion. Others attend, but their conviction or commitment is weak.” And nine months shy of twenty years later, in March 2018, the Lausanne Global Consultation on Nominal Christianity met in Rome and produced a Statement on Nominal Christianity:

Nominal Christians can be described as follows: People who identify with a Christian church or the Christian faith – (i.e., the 'name') – but are in contradiction with basic Christian principles with respect to becoming a Christian, faith, beliefs, church involvement, and daily life. … Without repentance and faith in [Christ], turning from sin, trusting him alone for our salvation and transformation, and obeying him as Lord, there is no authentic Christianity. … The reality is that nominal Christians may be found in every congregation, every denominational tradition, every theological stream, every generation, every cultural context, and every diaspora people.

How easy it is to slide toward nominal Christianity, and not even realize it! How easy it is to think you're alive but really be dead. We can readily assume, on the basis of past events – a prayer we said one time as a kid, a track record for Sunday School attendance – that our continued motions mean continued life. But they don't. It is perfectly possible to become a nominal Christian without noticing – we forget what living faith looks like.

Sardis is everywhere. Sardis is across the globe. Sardis is down the street. Sardis is maybe in this sanctuary. If the original Sardian church stays as they are, then they're in danger. If there's anything their history should have taught them, it's what happens when Sardis loses focus and coasts on a reputation! It's that kind of thinking that let Cyrus come and break the Lydian Empire. It's that kind of thinking that let the ladders of Antiochus go up and reclaim the city. Sardis knows what it means when kings come and sneak in like thieves through cleverness instead of direct force – it means the city has been exposed and must fall. And now Jesus warns the church of Sardis that in the same way, “If you will not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what hour I will come against you” (Revelation 3:3c). If the Sardian church doesn't react, Jesus will slip in and pull the plug and call time of death. And everything they really trust in can't keep a sneaky King out.

But that isn't what Jesus wants to see happen. He doesn't want to have to come like a thief. He doesn't want to come against them at all. He doesn't want them to be dead! He can't bear the thought of a dead church! He's in grief as he looks at churches thinking that their spasms of rigor mortis are the stuff of healthy Christian living. And yet that's the delusion we so easily hold, which lulls us into our cozy complacency. To churches like this, maybe like us, Jesus yells in our ear, “Wake up!” Wake up, get alert, pay attention, be watchful! Recover your vigilance, leap into action! “Strengthen what remains and is about to die!” (Revelation 3:2a)! The church is in the emergency room – the church needs drastic resuscitation, and there's no time to waste, because the patient is dying – and the patient is them! Every second counts before the last glimmers of hope for revival fade away!

And the only intervention that stands a chance is this: “Remember, then, what you received and heard. Keep it and repent” (Revelation 3:3a-b). Get back to the living gospel you heard at the start. Cling to it, sustain it – don't keep it around as a taxidermied mantelpiece, but go back and recover the beating heart and heaving lungs and sizzling neurons and flexing muscle fibers, and embrace the living gospel and don't let it out of your arms this time. Don't be shipped to the morgue. Don't be shipped to the taxidermist. Let this shocking word be the defibrillator that resets a rhythm of repentance and breathes life back into faith. But how? What do we have to do? In 1980, the Lausanne Consultation on World Evangelization said this:

Today's churches must develop patterns of organization that both gather their members together into the presence of their heavenly Father and also release them to be the salt of the earth. Worship will therefore be a high priority that we need in the churches. We need a worship that is scriptural in principle and truly indigenous in its expression. We need a worship that is for joyous participants rather than admiring spectators. … The ministry of the Word will be equally important … The churches we need will be churches where prayer is central. … The churches we need will not allow a passion for the lost to be relegated to an article of faith, but rather to become the motivating force that leads God's people out to evangelize expectantly. … We pray for the Holy Spirit to do a new thing in all of our hearts, so that our churches will become communities that reveal something of the loveliness of Christ to our fellow-men.

Eighteen years later, the 1998 Lausanne Statement to the Churches on Nominality had more to say, and I quote:

In ministry to those who attend churches..., churches should be encouraged to help Christians discern and resist the relentless pressures of the modern world, consumer cultures, mass media, and self-centred values. Christians should be encouraged to review their use of time and money, attitudes to relationships in family and community life, and their service of others, particularly those with special needs. … Churches should also encourage the demonstration of faith in unconditional love, non-manipulative friendships, and unselfish care. … The prayer of the Consultation was that God would revitalize the whole Church, transforming the cultures and societies of the world, placing the Good News of the faith before all people, and drawing nominal Christians to a life-transforming faith in Christ.

And twenty years later, the 2018 Lausanne Statement on Nominal Christianity gives us a few final pointers:

We call the churches we represent, and all churches everywhere, to:

1. Pray for all those who are Christians in name only, that they might come to a saving faith in Jesus Christ.
2. Pray for a spiritual awakening of nominal Christians, a strengthening of the weary and struggling, and a renewal of our commitment to disciple all those who bear the Name.

Recognizing the commandment of Jesus to make disciples of all peoples, we urge our church communities to:

1. Prioritize a holistic discipleship that brings all believers to maturity in Christ.
2. Proclaim the biblical gospel with clarity and boldness but always attending to the context so that the message of Christ is properly understood.
3. Plant new churches and work for the renewal of existing churches – churches that embody the joy of the gospel, that reflect the character of Christ in their community life, and display the power of the Spirit in transformed lives, to the glory of God.

That last bit is crucial. Can there be such a thing as a Christian who goes beyond just a name? Yes! Jesus goes on and praises a few 'names' in Sardis who retain a living faith and who keep themselves pure from the laziness of worldly compromises: “You have still a few names in Sardis, people who have not soiled their garments, and they will walk with me in white, for they are worthy” (Revelation 3:4). Those people are not nominal Christians – they are the real deal. They haven't “soiled their garments.” They “are worthy” to “walk with [Jesus] in white” – the white robes of a triumphant army, celebrating a victory they all share. Living faith is the condition, the qualification, to walk with Jesus, to share his victory, to be justified and sanctified in union with him, and so to have a real relationship with him and not just a theoretical one.

For a church like Sardis that seems to have accepted nominality as normality, I'm sure these 'few' seem like they live an unattainable standard. I'm sure they seem odd and off-kilter. I'm sure a church like Sardis, confronted with these words, may wonder whether it's even possible to come back to life from the dead. Can there be hope for the cold campfire of a church, all dull gray? Is there anywhere Jesus could poke that could revive a spray of orange sparks to brighten the dusky air? Or have the embers all burned through to dead ash?

Questions like those are why Jesus presents himself the way he does. When he opens each letter, he introduces himself in the way that church most needs to hear. And what the church of Sardis most needs to behold in Jesus is this: that he's “the One who has the seven spirits of God and the seven stars” (Revelation 3:1). The Jesus who died and lives again is the Jesus who holds the angels, the planets, and the fates in his hand. Nothing can slip by him, because everything we think governs the course of events is flowing through the scars of the nails. And from him flows a sevenfold Holy Spirit – a Holy Spirit wide enough, rich enough, diverse enough to reach every one of these seven churches, which signify every church on all the earth. The Holy Spirit has enough life, the Holy Spirit has enough power, to whip ashen embers into flame, to electrify and revivify, every church from pole to pole. The Holy Spirit is more than up to the challenge of Sardis. If only they'll turn back to the living gospel with a living faith, the Holy Spirit will breathe life back into the Sardian church and into every Sardian Christian. The sevenfold Spirit of God has life enough for Sardis – and life enough for us.

Jesus hasn't given up hope for Sardis. Jesus hasn't given up hope for us. And to those who overcome through a living faith, Jesus has some promises: “The one who overcomes will be clothed thus in white garments, and I will never blot his name out of the book of life. I will confess his name before my Father and before his angels” (Revelation 3:5; cf. Matthew 10:32). To you with a living faith, Jesus offers victory and his companionship. To you with a living faith, Jesus offers a permanent place for your name. To you with a living faith, Jesus offers his very own lips to brag about you where his Father and all the court of heaven can hear. Jesus is not ashamed of any believer and any church who keep to a living, breathing, evangelizing faith.

Where does that leave us? Jesus ends his letter by saying, “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches” (Revelation 3:6). This letter and its warning and its hope was never meant only for a single city in the first century. The words of Jesus fly on the Spirit's wings to every church across space and time, and they reach us here as well. If “the Spirit says” these things “to the churches,” then the Spirit says them to us – but do we have ears to hear it for ourselves? Will we hear it, really hear it? Or will we nod politely, shuffle out, say “Fine sermon, preacher,” and then continue the routines of the dead and dying?

Jesus is talking to me. Jesus is talking to you. Where do we fall between the name and the substance? Where do we settle between life and death? Are we awake and alive? Are our works complete before God? Is each of us worthy to walk with Jesus in the pure brightness of a living faith? Are we strengthening and fortifying those places where we just assume we're okay? Nominality must not be our normality! Oh, may we welcome the sevenfold Spirit from the hands of Jesus, and may we awaken anew to a living gospel and a living faith! Amen!

The Challenge of Thyatira: Sermon on Revelation 2:18-29

With doom around the corner, the Queen-Mother of Israel took a deep breath, steadied her nerves, and finished applying her make-up. She'd use every trick she had to make it through this alive. After she'd dolled herself up and slipped into her most revealing outfit, she slinked to the open window and watched as the horses carried the hot-headed general Jehu and his top soldiers within sight. The queen-mother tried her best to seduce and entice him. But he wouldn't listen. So she taunted him, reminding him of another general, Zimri, who'd murdered his way to the throne and lasted just a week. But Jehu would be neither seduced nor intimidated. Yet she stood in a firm fortress, surely safe and secure, until he called out for any supporters within the fortress to help him. From behind, she felt the familiar hands of three eunuchs grab her roughly. Her balance toppled, her heart rate soared as she tumbled out the window. As the ground approached so fast, her life flashed before her eyes.

She'd been born not quite fifty years before, in a city in her Phoenician homeland, when Ashtar-rom, the third of four brothers, was king over the city of Tyre. Her father Ithobaal was the chief priest of Ashtart, the fierce goddess of war and fertility and sexuality. She, his daughter, remembered flickers of those days – how her father oversaw the temple where men and women would come, fulfilling religious vows by offering their bodies to any comer. But she was still a young girl, and her brother Baal-eser still a young boy, when she remembered the news that King Ashtar-rom's brother had killed him and seized the throne. Her father had at first tried to make peace with the new situation, but he saw his chance and went for it. Ithobaal, that cunning man, himself carried out the assassination and became the new king. Baal-eser became a prince. And as for Jezebel, it was her turn to be the princess. She was raised in luxury. Her people had a lock on half the sea trade of the whole Mediterranean, exporting not just that rare commodity purple dye, but wine, glass, cedar wood, and slaves. In her pre-teen years, she remembers what it was like to be part of the Phoenician elite. The upper class – people like her and her father and her brother – gathered in what they called marzeh societies, where they held meals of fellowship with plenty of wine and sacrifices in honor of the dead. A wonderful excuse for a party.

Jezebel was a teenager when Ithobaal took her aside one day and talked about the importance of strengthening diplomatic ties with their southern neighbor, a country called Israel. They had a new king there, Ahab, whose late father Omri – like Ithobaal himself – had wrenched power away from a king before him. And to make the two powers allies, Jezebel was to be married to this Ahab. She remembered the splendor of their wedding day, though she had to admit that her new husband proved to be weaker in will than she expected. Not respectable – but certainly manipulable. With her alluring girlish charms and crafty politicking mind, Jezebel also brought a deep and heartfelt zeal for the gods her father had taught her to love, Baal and Ashtart and the rest. And to her new country she was accompanied by a large entourage of fellow devotees, with whom she promised to keep the spirit of the marzeh feasts alive by hosting these prophets at her royal table with plenty of food and wine.

Jezebel found it wasn't too hard – not with her looks, not with her temptations – to bend her husband to her will. At her request, he built shrines and altars for her gods, putting up a dressed stone for Baal and wooden asherah posts to mimic Ashtart's sacred grove. She had little interest in her husband's country's God; she would keep to her own, though she conceded to a few token compromises, like honoring his God in the names of their children (of whom she gave him plenty). But she hated dissent, and when her gods were blasphemed by spokesmen for the God of Israel, it boiled her blood and then made it run cold. Bringing to bear all her parents taught her, she arranged the deaths of those she could catch. One day, after three years of drought, her husband rushed home ahead of the relieving storm, to sheepishly admit to her that he'd accepted a challenge from Elijah and brought her prophets to Mount Carmel, and that Elijah had gotten the mob on his side in a contest of gods, and that he'd put her prophets to death just like she'd done to all his friends. Furious, her threats chased Elijah into the desert.

In time, her husband came to her in their palace in the royal capital Samaria, sullen and disappointed. Naboth, a land-owner in Jezreel, neighbor to their palace-fortress there, wouldn't sell his vineyard to be Ahab's garden. It exasperated her to see her royal husband fold so quickly. Slipping away, she dictated letters in his name and sealed them with his signet ring, ordering the elders of Jezreel to hire unscrupulous men to falsely accuse Naboth of blasphemy and treason, so that they could hold a show trial and stone him to death. Easy. Once it was done, she told her husband the problem had been dealt with. Elijah predicted doom. Jezebel scoffed.

Three years later, she got the fateful news. Her husband, in his wars against the Arameans, had been shot by an arrow. They'd hosed his bloody chariot off by the pool. He hadn't made it. Her eldest son Ahaziah rose to the throne, and Jezebel transitioned from queen to queen-mother. Two years after that, Ahaziah fell through some weak construction and was badly hurt. He sent messengers to Ekron to ask the god Baal what would happen, but Elijah intercepted them and spoke death. When Ahaziah died, his younger brother Jehoram took the throne. He'd always been her problem child, rejecting her religion. He tore down the standing-stone of Baal outside her palace, and he had a grudging respect for Elisha. In time, Jehoram went to war against the Arameans again, and he was hurt in battle and withdrew to Jezreel to recuperate. That's where she and he were when a commander named Jehu, gone rogue at Elisha's bidding, stormed Jezreel, killing Jehoram and then marching on the palace. Then it was all the tumble out the window, the bloody scene sprinkling the wall and ground, the final sensation of horse hooves trampling over her and the sound of thirsty dogs barking as they run over from the alleys. In the days to come, Jehu would execute all Jezebel's children, bringing a brutal end to the predicted judgment against the faithless queen-mother and her notorious bewitching and violence. Her brother Baal-eser, by then king of Tyre, wasn't long for life either, though Jezebel's nephew and grand-nephew would be next for power.

Shift the scene, nine centuries later, to an obscure town nestled by a small river in the heart of a broad valley, flanked by gentle hills. Notoriously vulnerable, it had been captured and recaptured with every shift in the wind and had only gained stability with the rise of Rome. Ethnically and religiously mixed, the city was a swirling concoction of languages and philosophies, all blended smoothly and jumbled haphazardly together. The city I mean is Thyatira. And under the Roman peace, it flourished. Where Jezebel's Tyre had been filled with marzeh societies, Thyatira was filled to overflowing with the synergasiai, guilds tying together those in the same line of business. And Thyatira had more active guilds than any other town. We have inscriptions from dyers, leather cutters, leather tanners, linen workers, launderers, bakers, potters, coppersmiths, athletes, entertainers, slave-merchants. Without being unionized as part of the guild, good luck getting by in Thyatira – you might as well throw in the towel. And just as the marzeh societies of Tyre met for their raucous fellowship-meals, so too did the ancient guilds of Thyatira meet for guild dinners, which included sacrifices in honor of their chosen god. And dinners could readily end with sexual entertainment provided by slave-boys and slave-girls. That was simply normal. Pagan worship and sexual libertinism were woven into the vibrant diversity of local industry.

Late in the first century, John took down a letter as Jesus dictated one to the church in Thyatira. And Jesus had some intensely positive things to say about them. “I know your works,” he said: “your love” – that's certainly good – “and faith” – that's good, too – “and service” – that's remarkable – “and patient endurance” – the list keeps going on – “and that your latter works exceed the first” (Revelation 2:19). While most of the churches hearing Revelation are commended for many one or two things, the Thyatiran church is overflowing with great things. They have the patient endurance of Ephesus and Philadelphia, but unlike Ephesus, they aren't forgetting the love. They have the faith of some in Pergamum. They have service, which nobody else is said to have. Yet unlike Ephesus, which had been a church on the decline, the Thyatiran church is actually getting better at all these things – they're like a church in the midst of revival, ascending from grace to grace and glory to glory! It really is looking up for the Thyatiran church, which seems like an astonishing model.

And yet Jesus does bring up one complaint. As it turns out, there's a prominent and prosperous businesswoman in the Thyatiran church – perhaps she's the patroness who sponsors a house church meeting in her home. She's fashionable and trendy and charismatic, and forceful and opinionated and articulate. She's the sort of woman everybody wants to get to know. Not only that, but she seems like she has spiritual gifts – she at least presents herself as a prophetess, standing up on a Sunday to give words she claims to have received, and no one dare bid her sit back down. But she was also, controversially, involved in her business's guild. And in her oracles, she proclaimed a lot about Christian freedom – how those who had real spiritual insight, those who knew the secrets and 'deep things,' could see that there's nothing wrong with participating in guilds and their meals and whatever goes on at those meals. After all, she said, it isn't what the body does that matters, it's what the heart does; and if the heart knows the truth, then the body can insincerely offer incense or pour out bowls of wine, can even take part in the sexual excesses of the drinking parties, and those things have no power over the free believing soul.

An inspiring message, maybe, from the sound of it. But Jesus takes a different view. As John presents us with his message, Jesus labels this woman a new Jezebel. Just as the old one seduced Ahab and Israel into corruption and idolatry and looser living, so does the new one. “I have this against you,” Jesus says to the Thyatirans – “that you tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess and is teaching and seducing my servants to practice sexual immorality and to eat food sacrificed to idols” (Revelation 2:20). It's an influence on the church that's as foreign as a Phoenician princess slipping into the palace to become queen.

Jesus does not at all agree with this new Jezebel's view of the body and the heart. God gave humans the gift of sexuality to allow us to form living parables of the fruitful harmony of Christ and the Church – parables we call marriages. But debased and deformed sexuality, like the frivolously misdirected sort encouraged by Jezebel, can preach only lies and deface the creation of God. It cannot call out with a clear voice to beauty, goodness, and truth. (One Christian sociologist remarks that sex outside the context that God defines as healthy is like stealing the Mona Lisa from the Louvre and taping it to the wall of an unhygienic public restroom: Its beauty is desecrated by its wrong context, so who can still appreciate it for the masterpiece it is?) And for the same reason Jesus disagrees with Jezebel about sex, Jesus also disagrees with Jezebel about conscience and loyalty and liberty and idolatry and table fellowship and witness. And in all such disagreements, Jezebel is wrong, for Jesus is supremely right. Jesus offers so much more than the thin permissiveness of a Jezebel. His ways are good news, even if we sustain some bumps and bruises along the steep and narrow road.

Faced with a 'New Jezebel' in the Thyatiran church, John and other church leaders have tried before to talk to her, to correct her, to teach her rightly. Out of love, they've tried to shepherd her into repentance. But there are always some in a church who refuse to hear any authority besides their own thoughts. And this woman is like that. She's gained followers, swept away some in her house church and the other house churches in the city. She's proud. She's insistent. John's told her that all she'd have to do, all those duped by her would have to do, is repent – just turn around, drop the rationalizations, and come back to the pathway of life, and they'd be restored brand new, any of them, even her! But, as Jesus says, “I gave her time to repent, but she refuses to repent of her sexual immorality” (Revelation 2:21). Her heart is unyielding as stone in the face of correction.

In the days of the prophet Jeremiah, his Judah was a lot like Jezebel's Israel. Those people were devoted to their own “altars and asherim,” just as Jezebel had induced Ahab to build for her (Jeremiah 17:2). Faced with the people's addiction to their fertility rituals under the green trees and on the high hills, and knowing the vastly different outcomes of faith and faithlessness and the way Judah wavered between them, Jeremiah had cried out, “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick – who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). To which God had answered the prophet back: “I, Yahweh, search the heart and test the kidneys, to give to every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds” (Jeremiah 17:10). And now, in a city where Jezebel has claimed to know the 'deep things,' Jesus answers that he knows the real depths – the depths of the murky human heart. Because Jesus is the God of Israel whom the original Jezebel fought. And Jesus, with his “eyes like a flame of fire” (Revelation 2:18), can say, “I am he who searches mind and heart, and I will give to each of you according to your works” (Revelation 2:23). He is the God who spoke to Jeremiah. He is the God who sees and scrutinizes, the God who evaluates from the inside-out, the God who measures out what matches.

The first Jezebel did not meet a good end. The prophet Elijah had warned that it would come, and so Elisha told Jehu to “strike down the house of Ahab your master, so that I may avenge on Jezebel the blood of my servants the prophets and the blood of all the servants of Yahweh, for the whole house of Ahab shall perish, and I will cut off from Ahab every male, bond or free, in Israel. … And the dogs shall eat Jezebel in the territory of Jezreel, and none shall bury her” (2 Kings 9:7-10). And so Jesus promises that, if this woman in Thyatira wants to be a New Jezebel, then he'll be the New Jehu: “I will throw her onto a sickbed, and those who commit adultery with her I will throw into great tribulation (unless they repent of her works), and I will strike her children dead” – that is, those who are hopelessly devoted to being her disciples instead of Christ's (Revelation 2:22-23). Jesus has just one thing to blame the Thyatiran church for, and it's giving her a platform. The believers of Thyatira, on the whole, may be right-thinking and right-doing, but when it comes to this particular woman and what she's saying, they're spineless for tolerating her. If a church meets in her house, they need to move. If a church relies on her offerings, they need to learn to do without. Because she should have been formally disciplined long ago.

See, I'll let you in on a secret. We pastors have a way of talking sometimes, and there's a phrase some of us use when somebody leaves the church after being a hindrance to the church's ministry and harmony for a while. It's what we call a 'blessed subtraction' – the church growing in blessing by the subtraction of someone who just was not helping. And, well, the Thyatiran church needs a big ol' blessed subtraction when it comes to Jezebel and her acolytes, and Jesus warns that he'll do it himself if he has to. Yet most of the Thyatiran church, while they may hesitate to confront Jezebel, nonetheless don't buy what she's selling. “To the rest of you in Thyatira, who do not hold this teaching, who have not learned what some call the 'deep things' (of Satan!) – to you I say: I do not lay on you any other burden. Only hold fast what you have until I come” (Revelation 2:24-25). Just keep on-track yourselves, live in real holiness of faith and love and service and endurance, keep progressing in those things and don't slide back, and Jesus asks them only to stand clear of Jezebel and let him work.

But maybe you're wondering what this passage has to say to us. But it's actually pretty familiar. We live in a world today where authority is accorded, not to those who have qualifications, but to those who can present themselves in a certain way. Self-appointed 'influencers' are heeded because of their personal experiences or their persona. Some have called it “the death of expertise.” All sorts of people are writing books and articles about their version of the Christian faith and what's wrong with the others – and whether people listen to them has little relation to whether they actually know and agree with the Bible. (Who writes the devotionals and books we read and the songs we hear on the radio? Why should we accord them authority?) When we consider what Thyatira and its own self-appointed influencer might have been like, it's familiar.

One might think, for instance, of the late Rachel Held Evans, an ex-Evangelical who became a progressive Episcopalian. She published an assortment of books about her take on Christian life and the Bible, and she celebrated those who thanked her writings for tickling their ears in just the ways they wanted. She regarded the church's teaching about sexuality and marriage to be an injustice, and she vocally favored loosening those teachings – to, among other things, affirm homosexuality. (Other popular influencers like Jen Hatmaker have trod the same path.) Why did people listen to her? Her experiences, her persona, her writing style, and the fact that she tickled their ears. Many of her readers reacted very angrily to her death – for earlier this year, Evans had a bad reaction to medication, was put in an induced coma, and died on the day of my wedding.

Among the other trendy influencers in her orbit is Nadia Bolz-Weber, a foul-mouthed Lutheran ex-pastor of a church in Colorado. Her latest book is the first since her divorce, and in it she attacks what she calls the “stale and oppressive sexual ethic” of the church. She calls the church to “reach for a new Christian sexual ethic” that would affirm people as “sexual beings in endless variety” and would make allowance for things like “ethically sourced porn[ography].” Her summons is one to what she describes as “shamelessness.” How does she deal with the Bible? In her book, she tells the story of a friend who ripped a Bible apart, kept the Gospels, and threw every other page into a fire. Approving of the story, Bolz-Weber remarks that “we can decide for ourselves what is sacred in the Bible and what is not.” And from there, Bolz-Weber frees herself up to teach what our passage labels “the deep things of Satan.” Self-appointed influencers in today's church teach the same things that were seducing Christians in Thyatira, and they have their avid defenders today, too, like Jezebel's children.

Maybe we're tempted to think that, well, of course we'll hear about that from the mainline churches – everyone knows what they're like, you might say. But can anyone honestly say that we Evangelicals haven't also been seduced? After all, we hear last week how 12% of Evangelical Christians refuse the notion that the Bible has any authority to tell them what they must do. One sociologist reports the results of assorted recent surveys, and the figures are dire. He observes that up to 41% of Evangelical adults say they see nothing wrong with sex outside of marriage; that 86% of never-married Evangelical adult women have had at least one sexual partner since age 18, while a full 57% have had three or more. And if we focus on the younger crowd, it gets worse, as emerging adults – even professing Christian ones – tend to believe that moral authority comes from the heart.

The sociologist found that among unmarried Evangelical teens ages 15-17, more than four in ten had already been sexually active – and of those four in ten, about a third had had four or more sexual partners. In the older set, aged 18-22, 74% had been sexually active, and of those who'd had sex, a little less than half had four or more sexual partners. And while it's true that weekly church attenders did better, between a quarter and a third of young Evangelicals hardly ever gather with the church. And even among young Evangelicals who are in church on a Sunday each week, the figures aren't good: among 18- to 22-year-old never-married Evangelical youth who attend at least weekly, a little over half have had sex outside of marriage already. Even of those Evangelical youth who do remain abstinent, when asked their reason, only about half mention God or morality.

Those are kids like your grandkids. That is the rising generation of the Evangelical church. They will be discipled, but are they being discipled for Jesus or for Jezebel? It's a symptom of a problem that touches every generation in the Evangelical movement today. With figures like these, it's no wonder there should be many among us searching for a Jezebel to tickle our ears about what's already tempting. Because we can't forget that, in Thyatira, those who let the New Jezebel dupe them were mostly responding to very natural temptations. They wanted to keep their social roles, and stay in business, and keep their friends, and unwind at parties, and cut loose a little. It wasn't all depraved lust. They were complex motivations not so much different from what motivates you or I daily, perhaps. They just wanted to keep their standard of living and enjoy themselves, and so any twisted theology that showed them how to rationalize what they felt – well, it was a bestseller straight out of the box. They did not want following Jesus to seem like being stifled.

But what they and we have to know is that the Jesus who stands, arisen from the tomb, on “feet like burnished bronze,” is the Jesus whose “eyes like a flame of fire” surveyed every sinful mind and heart from the cross and said, “Send it over here; pin it to me; I'll carry it and show you a better way.” This is the Jesus whom God gloriously claims as his own Son, and to whom God has given all authority in heaven and on earth (cf. Matthew 28:18). This Jesus is the king to whom God offers the nations as a heritage and the ends of earth as a possession (Psalm 2:8), the Jesus whom God has enthroned on his holy hill – from Calvary to the heavenly Zion (Psalm 2:6). This Jesus is a star and a scepter, exercising dominion and issuing edicts of life (Numbers 24:17-19). He says what things must be. Purity is what Jesus says it is. Holiness is what Jesus says it is. He speaks it by his apostles and his prophets. And they do not mean the lies that Jezebels new and old may teach.

Following this Jesus may well cost us our sexual autonomy. Following this Jesus may well cost us our political preferences. Following this Jesus may well cost us our economic lifestyle. Following this Jesus may well cost us our vacations or our extra vehicles or our pet projects. Following this Jesus may well cost us our popularity. Following this Jesus will be freeing but may feel stifling in the hour of temptation. For following this Jesus must surely cost us our sin. Some look at the universality of sin and say, “We're all sinners, so it must not really be a big deal.” But authentic Christian faith looks at the universality of sin and cries out desperately for Jesus and his deep holiness. Oh, how the church needs Jesus! How we each need Jesus, each and every day! For the Jesus who spoke to the Thyatirans is the Jesus who paces amidst the lampstands of American churches today, inspecting us all with burning eyes that penetrate the innermost guts of all things and cast light on the darkest nooks and crannies hidden in the heart. He knows what we tolerate and why – what sins we'll make excuses for, what sins we'll rationalize. Our motives, impermanent as putty, melt before the heat of Jesus' gaze. Jesus sees.

But to those who avoid the influencers and who resist the sexual and economic temptations, those who cultivate hearts to pass Jesus' inspection, he offers a share in his rule. Just as the Father says to Jesus in Psalm 2, “You shall rule [the nations] with a rod of iron and dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel” (Psalm 2:9), Jesus offers the persistently pure believer “authority over the nations, and he will shepherd them with a rod of iron as when earthen pots are broken in pieces … And I will give him the morning star” (Revelation 2:26-28). Keep to Jesus, not to Jezebel. In a world broken by seduction and temptation, a world riven by idolatries and impurities, Jesus is good news enough. His grace is costly, but the cost is grace. “Only hold fast what you have” – the way Jesus taught you to love, the purity and holiness he lavished upon you. “Let goods and kindred go,” desires and possessions, middle-class American comfort and conformity. Only hold fast to Jesus, the Holy Son of God.

The Challenge of Pergamum: Sermon on Revelation 2:12-17

Tension filled the air as the diviner and the king faced off. The diviner had not been working out according to the king's lofty expectations. And the king was frustrated and furious. Because the king was scared. Balak of Moab had seen the large and prosperous camp of the children of Israel parked in his backyard, pitching their tents on his turf. And rather than send armies on a futile mission – for he'd heard what had happened to all the other challengers – Balak and his friends, the five chieftains of Midian – had gotten an idea. What they needed was to break Israel's invincibility from the other end. And so Balak had sent messengers to hire him a spiritual hit-man. They'd had to travel a great distance to Pethor. But they got hold of the famed diviner and visionary Balaam, son of Beor. With sufficient inducement, Balaam had been convinced to make the trip, riding his trusty donkey. But after a frightening encounter he and the donkey had with a heavenly power along the way, he'd come insisting that he might not be able to bend Israel's God to his will – might have to say no more and no less than Israel's God was willing for him to say (Numbers 22:1-38).

Still, Balak had taken Balaam to assorted mountain peaks, to view the camp of Israel and utter curses to bring Israel down. They'd sacrificed at Bamoth-baal, but Israel's God had refused to be bribed, and Balaam could give no curse (Numbers 22:41—23:10). They sacrificed atop Mount Pisgah, but again Balaam's words twisted into a blessing on Israel (Numbers 23:13-24). Balak tried again by taking Balaam elsewhere, to the top of Peor to make more sacrifices – and Balaam blessed Israel even more fervently (Numbers 23:27—24:9)! Oh, Balak was furious – he threatened to rip up the contract, warned Balaam he was forfeiting his hefty fee (Numbers 24:11). Balaam spoke a fourth oracle, warning Balak that Israel would indeed produce a star and scepter that could one day “crush the forehead of Moab” (Numbers 24:17).

But Balaam, crafty Balaam, hatched a wicked plan. Sacrifice and bribery could not sever Israel and her God from one another, but Israel's God had given them a Law, a Law that called for their faith and obedience. And if Israel could be induced into breaking that faith and obedience, surely Israel would be crippled and become easy prey. So Balaam advised Balak and the chieftains to send beautiful women to tempt the youthful Israelites with food and sensual delights and entice them to sacrifice to local gods. Then Balaam left, having done his work. Balak took it to heart. He sent out the women. “These invited the people to the sacrifices of their gods, and the people ate and bowed down to their gods, so Israel yoked himself to Baal of Peor. And the anger of Yahweh was kindled against Israel” (Numbers 25:2-3). A disease epidemic began spreading through the camp, and 24,000 Israelites got sick and died. It was all due to the influence of Balaam's teaching from afar, as Moses learned: “These women, on Balaam's advice, caused the people of Israel to act treacherously against Yahweh in the incident of Peor, and so the plague came among the congregation of Yahweh” (Numbers 31:16).

In the end, after Aaron's grandson Phinehas had ended the plague with his righteous zeal and loyalty (Numbers 25:10), Israel bided their time, learned more instructions from their God through Moses, whose age led him to appoint Joshua as his successor. Meanwhile, word came to Balaam about how successful his dangerous counsel had been. Yearning for his payment from Balak, he made the long trip back to Midian – just at the time when Israel declared war. Not only did Israel bring down the five chieftains, but “they also killed Balaam the son of Beor with the sword” (Numbers 31:8). And so ended the sordid career of the gifted diviner Balaam, whom Israel would forever remember as the prototype of all false teachers who lead the people astray and invite the wrath of God against the assembly. In his last speech to Israel, Moses warned them about prophets, dreamers, and teachers who might entice them to falsehood, and how they dare not listen to those who teach rebellion and seek to draw them away from the God who liberated them from Egyptian chains (Deuteronomy 13:1-18). If a city of Israel were to give in and be drawn away, the whole city was to be “devoted to destruction … with the edge of the sword,” just as Balaam was (Deuteronomy 13:15). Having taught them these things, Moses climbed up Mount Pisgah, to the very spot where Balaam had blessed them against his will – and there Moses took his final breath, still in the desert and not quite reaching the Promised Land (Deuteronomy 34:1-5).

Over a thousand years later, the spiritual heirs of the children of Israel found themselves living in a desert of a city called Pergamum. And Pergamum might seem like an odd place to compare to the plains of Moab. It was a northerly city in Asia Minor, and a prosperous and populous one – a fifth of a million people, or thereabouts, and it had massive temples, a truly impressive library (among the largest in the world), a grand theater, lavish healthcare facilities with a great spa, and more. And a church, meeting in the homes of believers, was nestled in the neighborhoods of that big city. No city could seem less, geographically, like the desert plains of Moab.

And yet it was a lot like the plains of Moab. For that city had a deep devotion to the serpent-loving Greek god of healing, Asklepios – the spa was his. And that city had a great fervor for Zeus, to whom they built a gargantuan altar shaped like a giant throne. The people of Pergamum called both those gods their 'saviors.' Not only that, but with temples to the emperors, Pergamum was the city from which conformity with the imperial cult was enforced. It was the headquarters of official government worship for the province. There was a fair deal of pressure, from time to time, just as Balak had sought to put pressure on Israel. Pergamum hosted civic dinners where the gods would receive sacrifice. And the church had learned the painful way what can happen to dissenters – they'd watched a believer named Antipas put to death one dark day for his faithful witness.

So when Jesus dictates a letter to the church in Pergamum, he gives credit where credit is due. Jesus is fully appreciative of their difficult position, right in the heart of paganism, with that massive altar looming over them on a regular basis, with the pressure and the threat and the memory of Antipas' death ever-present to the church as they meet. Jesus tells the Pergamene church that they “dwell where Satan's throne is.” They might as well be pitched within the doorway to hell, plunged in darkness. Because that's how pernicious the imperial cult and the other pagan cults are. And somehow, this little church is getting by right under Satan's nose, and it is not easy. “Yet you hold fast my name,” Jesus tells them, “and you did not deny my faith even in the days of Antipas my faithful witness, who was killed among you where Satan dwells” (Revelation 2:13). With all the suspicion attached to the word 'Christian,' a partisan of the Messiah Jesus, still the Pergamene church clings to that word and the name of Jesus. They have not outright denied him, even when the pressure was really on. That much is good. The church there is capable of producing daring faithfulness. And that shouldn't be overlooked. Jesus is ready to commend us just for being willing to openly identify with him when the world denounces his name.

So the Pergamene church gets extra credit for a simple thing – clinging to Jesus' name – because they've started at such a disadvantage due to their proximity to the heart of pagan worship, which Jesus calls “Satan's throne.” The church has continued to identify themselves with Christ's name, even when that was deeply unpopular with their neighbors. To us here, that poses no threat. It might not be particularly commendable. Because we aren't dwelling where Satan sets up his throne. But in extraordinary circumstances, even the most basic expressions of faith become exemplary in Jesus' sight. Credit where credit is due, and the disadvantage is taken into account when Jesus evaluates the churches. Jesus takes into account our circumstances. He knows where we dwell.

But for all that, Jesus is not happy with the church in Pergamum. The Pergamene church has a problem that has to be faced and owned. And that problem is a lot like Israel's in the plains of Moab. Remember, Balak knew better than to send his army to fight a faithful Israel from the outside through external pressures. Now Satan has relearned that lesson as applied to the Pergamene church: just sending the power of the state to fight them might not break them after all. But just like Balak hired a spiritual hit-man, now Satan is turning to that approach in Pergamum, too. Satan has introduced false teachers like Balaam to corrupt the church from the inside by letting their beliefs get mingled and mangled. The result will be a hamstrung church out-of-sync with their Savior.

Jesus says outright to the Pergamene church, “You have some there who hold to the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to put a stumbling block before the sons of Israel, so that they might eat food sacrificed to idols and practice sexual immorality. So also you have some who hold the teaching of the Nicolaitans” (Revelation 2:14-15). The Nicolaitans are the group whose misleading ideas are beginning to infect the Pergamene church. Most likely, they argued that, since idols are really powerless, there's no harm with making some empty gestures in their direction, mouthing the sentiments of the pagans as long as you don't really mean it. And in that way, they'd have more flexibility when confronted with the demands of the imperial cult. They may have had more ideas than that, but that's one key thing they seem to have been teaching.

Essentially, the Nicolaitans were introducing an alternative teaching into the church, a more liberal-minded take on Christianity. They illustrated to the people how they could rationalize holding more loosely to this belief or that belief. They went soft on certain things. They scoffed at those who clung to the fundamentals. Certainly they badmouthed the Ephesian church, which had tested them and kicked them to the curb (Revelation 2:6). So they crept into the Pergamene church and gained a hearing. They did not sway the entire church. Jesus merely says that “some there … hold the teaching of the Nicolaitans” (Revelation 2:15). Just like some Israelites on the plains of Moab caught the plague. Its end is death. And it's infectious. And the problem is, the church in Pergamum has not been awake to the extreme action necessary, a la Phinehas, to put a halt to its spread. Jesus, through John, compares the Nicolaitans to Balaam, that earlier false teacher (Revelation 2:14). The church in Pergamum didn't view the Nicolaitans as worth making a fuss about. Jesus strongly disagrees. Pointing back to Balaam, he says the Nicolaitans and all other false teachers are just as dangerous and just as deadly. And the Pergamene church needs a Phinehas, needs to be a Phinehas. They need to stand up and publicly denounce the false teaching. Jesus calls on the church to “repent” (Revelation 2:16) – to repent as Phinehas led Israel to repent in the plains of Moab. Yet, no doubt, many 'right-thinking' Christians in Pergamum don't see the crisis.

Maybe that's where we find ourselves. We know – or we should know – the gospel. Before the beginning, God existed eternally, a Trinity of three persons we know as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, all sharing the life of the one true God. For his overflowing love, God created a good world and crowned it with his representatives on earth, human beings, who were made in his image to reflect his authority and character in the world. But due to the intrusion of a fallen spirit, human beings began missing the mark, sinning, failing to reflect God. Soon our world had spiraled out of control. But God had planned all along to bless the world, so he chose the family of Abraham, which produced the nation of Israel. God rescued them from their slavery and appointed them to be his nation of blessing. But as we know, they were infected with the same darkness as the other nations, and the Law given through Moses could not dispel their darkness. So God worked with them, and with a faithful remnant within them, until the burden of their mission fell to one man, the Messiah, to carry the weight of Adam's work and Israel's purpose. God sent his own co-eternal Son to be the Messiah, taking the name Jesus. He taught truly, he worked wonders, he began to restore God's kingdom to the earth. To drain our sins away, he died on the cross, allowing all those who trust him to be united to him and have our sins flow into his death. He buried the power of sin in his grave and left it behind when he rose bodily from the dead on the third day, thus breaking the power of death. He then rose to heaven, from which he poured out the Holy Spirit, the third co-eternal person of the Trinity, to dwell in the church like a temple and fill us with the power we need to reflect God like Adam should have. Jesus pledged that he would one day return to bring the mission to completion, fully restoring God's kingdom to the earth. In the meantime, with Jesus as the Lord of everything, we are sent out to announce the good news of his accession, and to teach the nations how to be filled with his power and live according to this Savior's royal wisdom. Jesus' first followers wrote all these things down, just as Israel's prophets had, and together they form a book against which we test all our beliefs and practices, because in this book, the Bible, the wisdom of Jesus shines forth. Relying on this wisdom, we announce to the nations that there's no one else: that Jesus our Lord is the only Savior and only King, that Jesus is good news for everyone and everything.

We know that gospel. But we also know that there are entire denominations in our country where it's rejected and denied. We know, sadly, that there are denominations where Balaam has won. Because there are churches in this country, even entire networks of churches, that deviate from the gospel far more seriously than even the Nicolaitans of Pergamum did. They may mouth the words to all the creeds. They may insist they keep to the faith, like the Christians in Pergamum did. They may cling to the name of Jesus, however tenuously. But when it comes to really accepting the implications of that confession, they twist it, privileging their experiences and opinions above the authority of Jesus as taught through his prophets and apostles. I'm sure one or two of those denominations has occurred to your mind as I've said this. Maybe some of you have been to 'liberal-minded' churches, or churches embedded in denominations like that. They may seem innocuous. So did the Nicolaitans. But Jesus calls down from heaven, “Don't be fooled – remember Balaam! Don't be fooled – believe the whole gospel, and live it!” Many of those denominations are in far worse shape than Pergamum.

Yet it would be too easy to point the finger at the more 'liberal-minded' denominations in our country and say, “There's the problem, over there.” Oh, it is, to be sure. Those professedly 'liberal-minded' denominations and congregations do stand under Jesus' warning in this passage. But as easy as it'd be to outsource the problem to those denominations and those movements, well, we can't. Because the problem comes home with us, too, to the Evangelical movement – that bastion of self-described “Bible-believing Christians.”

Five years ago, a reputable survey assessed the religious landscape of this country, and though they weren't too focused on singling out Evangelicals, they did turn up two troubling things. What they found was that 12% of Evangelical Christians could not honestly say that they believed that heaven is real. In fact, 5% of Evangelical Christians outright said they don't believe there's a heaven. That's one in twenty of people like us who outright reject heaven, and another one who isn't sure. The same survey found the figures even worse when it comes to hell – 11% of Evangelicals, eleven out of every hundred filling the pews of churches like ours, said they are very sure there's no such thing as hell, and another 7% said they weren't sure. As plainly as Jesus taught about heaven and hell, a significant minority even of Evangelicals were expressing doubt or disbelief.

Those troubling figures came out five years ago, in 2014. So surely we took them to heart, right? Surely our good, God-fearing churches in the Evangelical movement started prioritizing sound teaching, and making sure to insist on it? Well, a study came out last year after asking even more questions. And here's what it found. Remember that the gospel is rooted in God's eternal love within the life of the Trinity. Yet 4% of Evangelicals outright reject the doctrine of the Trinity, and another 3% aren't sure. That's 7%. In fact, a whopping 71% of Evangelicals are so confused that they think Jesus is a created being, rather than the eternal Creator God! That is a majority of Evangelicals, having scarcely a clue who Jesus even is. A similarly whopping 59% said they do not believe that the Holy Spirit is a person, and another 8% on top of that said they weren't sure. Moreover, 5% of Evangelicals – one out of every twenty – could not honestly say they believed that Jesus had risen bodily from the dead. The very thing that Paul said, if it didn't happen, then Christians are the dumbest, most foolish people who've ever lived – and one in every twenty Evangelicals is not solid on that bedrock cornerstone of the Christian faith! The same percentage, by the way, openly deny that Jesus is ever coming back, and an extra 3% aren't sure if he is or not. That's almost one in every ten Evangelicals with no hope in the Second Coming.

This survey found that a majority of Evangelicals – 57% – do not believe that sin is serious enough to send us to hell – or, at least, that so-called 'small sins' aren't so bad. Friends, that is catastrophic. We know that falling short of God's glory is just that – falling short of light and life. But the majority of Evangelical Christians do not take sin seriously enough. So it's no wonder that a substantial proportion – 12%, again more than one in every ten – believe that “the free gift of eternal salvation” can be gained without having faith in Jesus Christ, and 10% say that Jesus didn't have to die on the cross for us to be saved. All that stuff about the Way, the Truth, the Life, and how no one comes to the Father except through him? A tenth of Evangelical Christians think Jesus didn't know what he was talking about, apparently. More shocking, 37% – over a third of Evangelicals – said that “religious belief is a matter of personal opinion..., not about objective truth.” An extra 8% weren't sure. And 53% – over half of Evangelical Christians like us – said that “God accepts the worship of all religions.”

The survey found that 8% of Evangelicals admit the Bible is not the highest authority for what they believe, and 12% of Evangelicals outright rejected the statement that “the Bible has the authority to tell us what we must do” – that's more than a tenth of Evangelicals denying the authority of God over their lives! Unsurprising, when a full quarter of Evangelicals are at least open to the idea that the Holy Spirit will tell them to do something that goes against the Bible's teaching. So, naturally, 15% of Evangelicals think there's nothing sinful in abortion, while another 5% aren't sure, adding up to one in every five. Naturally, 17% of Evangelicals see nothing sinful in sex outside of marriage, while another 4% aren't sure – that adds up to 23%, more than one in every five. And then 16% of Evangelicals said they do not believe that evangelism is personally important for them to do – in spite of Evangelicals supposedly being so passionate about the Great Commission, almost one in every five Evangelicals does not think Jesus was talking to them. Finally, 46% of Evangelicals said they do not think the church is necessary, and since another 4% said they were unsure, that adds up to one out of every two Evangelicals in the country who think they can worship Jesus while living cut off from his Body wherein dwells his Spirit – worship Jesus while rebelling against his command. Statistics like these are crisis figures!

Now, count up how many of us Evangelical Christians are here this morning. Note how many of these crisis conditions apply to one in two, three, four, five, ten, twenty Evangelicals in America. If there are more than ten or twenty of us here, then either we're beating the statistical norm here, or else some of us may be off-track from the gospel, too. The crisis is not just for 'liberal-minded' mainline denominations – we Evangelicals are finding ourselves in the same crisis as Pergamum. And we won't even have the excuse that Satan's throne is so close we couldn't focus! No, Balaam has a foothold in Evangelical Christianity, and just like the church in Pergamum, we yawn and shrug and say it's no big deal. But then Jesus turns to us and says we are dead wrong – deadly.

Jesus says to us, as much as to Pergamum: “Therefore, repent” (Revelation 2:16). He isn't just talking to the minority in the Pergamene church who've actually accepted the Nicolaitan teaching. He's talking to the whole church there. The entire church needs to repent for the false beliefs of a few of them. And maybe they can do that by recommitting themselves to sound teaching, and by correcting those who've fallen for the Nicolaitans, and bringing them back to the truth that way. Or maybe their repentance is going to involve church discipline, where the seduced and deluded members who've fallen for Balaam's tricks are written off the membership rolls after all warnings fail, and so the church will be purified in its faith either way, newly zealous for the gospel.

But if the infection spreads, the whole church is in great danger. John shows the Pergamene church a Jesus who comes with a sword at the ready – a broadsword, the sword you'll see William Wallace swinging in Braveheart (Revelation 2:12). This is a no-nonsense Judge Jesus, ready to split souls. And just like Balaam had to be struck down by Israel with the sword, and just like any Israelite city that goes astray after false teaching was to be destroyed with the sword, so Jesus warns them that if this church doesn't repent, “I will come to you soon and wage war against them with the sword of my mouth” (Revelation 2:16). Jesus looks at the confused state of Pergamene Christianity and says that if no one else will be a Phinehas, he'll come do it himself, and it won't be gentle, and it won't be pretty. What might Jesus say, then, to those proud 'liberal-minded' churches – but oh, what might Jesus say to the Evangelical churches of America today? In our own deep crisis of confusion, what room have we to boast?

But Jesus also comes with promises for those who “overcome” or “conquer.” In this context, to overcome is to resist and rebuke false teaching, to work to ensure that everyone in the church is on board with the whole gospel and its implications, to reduce those crisis figures down to 0% as far as is in our reach, and to certainly make sure that we ourselves are not part of that problem. And to those who overcome this way, Jesus promises the blessings that Israel was to have for staying faithful: “To the one who overcomes, I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, with a new name written on the stone that no one knows except the one who receives it” (Revelation 2:17). Some of the manna Israel ate in the plains of Moab was stored in a jar, 'hidden' away in the ark, saved for the righteous (cf. Exodus 16:33; Hebrews 9:4). A 'white stone' was used as a vote of acquittal in a courtroom and as a token of admission to a dinner party. And God always promised that Israel would be “called by a new name that the mouth of the LORD will give” (Isaiah 62:2) – a name like “My-Delight-is-in-Her” (Isaiah 62:4). If we are faithful to Jesus with what we believe, then he delights in us; if we're careless about what we believe, then we run the risk of a declaration of war. On the one hand, food and fellowship and acceptance with Christ; on the other, excommunication with the sword of his mouth.

That's the choice that faces Christianity, in America as much as Pergamum. And it doesn't only face the 'liberal-minded' churches we love to posture against. It faces the Evangelical Christian movement, of which our own denomination is a part, of which our own church is a part. The choice is before us: keep ignoring the crisis, or else repent from our all-too-Pergamene situation. But the path of repentance is the only one that leads to food and fellowship and acceptance with Christ, riches more dear than we can fathom, treasures that will far outweigh all the pressures that Satan's throne could ever set up against us. And this path of repentance calls us to become fully and robustly Christian in what we believe, always subject to the ultimate test of the scriptures and the historic wisdom of the church. It calls us to drive the crisis figures down to 0%. As he called Pergamum to, let's repent and strive instead for hidden manna and a new name, that God's delight may be in us and that we may be filled with all the blessings of his gospel. May we not only bear the name, but may we live it in our minds, our hearts, and our hands! For Christ calls us beyond his sword to the garden wherein grows his tree of life. Amen.