So is anybody else done a lot of cooking over the last few months? OK, so if we look at the internet search, we have made, I think, truckloads of banana bread in our country. That was about hot recipe early on in COVID. Remember that?
When Tiger King was fun? Everybody had anybody had sourdough starters? We did that for a while, all this? For me, I cook a lot no matter what.
I've been cooking a lot for the last five or six months. And what it's done for me is given me the ability to perfect recipes. Not just cook something like one time for fun, but to keep on working and working. My latest fascination, I'm at the point now to where I'll brag about it.
I can make the best barbecue chicken sauce sandwich you have ever had right now. I've had it cook at about 10 or 15 times, but I've got it all figured out. I know what temperature to smoke the chicken wings at. I know what temperature to sear the chicken thighs at.
I know what to season them with. I know how long they have to. I've done the work. If anybody who cooks a lot, you realize there's power of a recipe, right?
Like you realize what one certain thing does. Are you thinking back to my grandfather's barbecue recipe? He's only used hunts ketchup. Like multiple times he wrote in there, only used hunts.
He swore there was a difference. Now, what are the things that you've been cooking so much he's last few? What have you been learning about? You can cook anything?
What have you been cooking? Tons of desserts. Ooh, meats and sweets. But when you make your recipe, you know what needs to go in there.
And sometimes it's also fun to eat something like, man, what is that? What's that thing in there? And you kind of deconstruct it in your head. And today, and we've been going through these seven churchally-filing revelations, chapters two and three.
Today's a little awkward one. It's different. And what I want us to do, and we take this, is just to think about this. The outcome is this food you have ate.
I want us to think about the recipe. I want us to think about what are the things involved to that hopeful outcome that we have. Because it's a different one. Some of the research you've already pointed out, Revelation 3, verses 1 through 6.
This is the message to the church in Sardis. And this is what we read. Write this letter to the angel of the church in Sardis. This is the message from the one who has the sevenfold spirit of God and the seven stars.
I know all the things you do, and you have a reputation for being alive, but you are dead. Wake up, strengthen what little remains, for even what is left is almost dead. I find that your actions do not meet the requirements of my God. Go back to what you heard and believed at first.
Hold it firmly, repent, and turn to me again. If you don't wake up, I will come to you suddenly as expected as a thief. Yet there are some in the church in Sardis who have not soiled their clothes with evil. They will walk with me in white for their words.
And all who are victorious will be clothed in white. I will never erase their names from the book of life, but I will announce before my father and his angels that they are mine. Anyone who's ears to hear must listen to the spirit and understand what he is saying to the churches. We're going to tell this to be a little bit different.
So we're going to pop up our u-dire, and we're going to look at this every single week. And this is the shape that every single one of these letters works. But everyone of these churches has a stable condition at the top of that u. Then there's going to be some disaster at the bottom.
Every church has to find their way to get out of what most of these letters are about. And then at the top of that u is a new stable condition. This is the pattern that every one of these seven letters go through. In many ways, this is the large form recipe for each of these letters.
But let's pop that other u-slide up. This is what we found out. You're not even stable. Like this letter just goes straight to the problem.
He does not come in to them for anything. I mean, even the people that were practicing idolatry and all sorts of unwholesome behavior, they had a stable condition to think about. Like this writer's nothing good going on. You just think something's good going on.
You're asleep. And that's this problem that he gives. The way out of this disaster, this way, they divert themselves from some pretty striking condemnations, right? Like I will take you out of the book of life.
Can you get stronger than that? The way to get out to understand that is to realize the power of being awoken and strong. So Sardis, the city, it's interesting. Like I told you every week, the first thing I do is, what's going on about the city that can help us understand this?
So Sardis was built, and there's two mountaintops, peaks, in this area. And there's a river that runs through the middle of them. It's an old, old, old city. This is not a new city.
And there's the, if you're into, OK, sidebar, we've all been power watching shows about COVID. Like right now, it's season five of Vikings. Like it's gotten that bad. I'm watching that.
But the last couple weeks, I've learned a lot about defensible positions. And Sardis had two great defensible positions. These two peaks, and they had good forts built. Everything you're supposed to be doing is done the right way.
And then they've got this river that runs through the town. And hundreds of years before Rome came and took this town over, Sardis was known that you could literally go to the river, run through the middle of town, and pick gold up out of it. This city has a great reputation. This city is known to be a fancy place.
You could almost say, though, that the citizens of Sardis were known to be pretentious, that they were a little snobbish. Like they knew what they had. And they lived as that was the case, that Sardis was kind of a brunt of jokes about the people's behavior, about the way they felt exclusive, and the way they had this sense of self-assuredness. But what's also so interesting about Sardis is in spite of their having two textbook examples of defending themselves as a city, that not once, but twice in their history, were they able to be invaded and overthrown by a conquering army due to their laziness.
Like they just thought that they wouldn't have to worry about this because we have these two big forts. We don't have to think or focus that much on being safe. That's the history of Sardis. Jesus comes in and says, I know your works.
And last week, we really talked about what that phrase shows up every one of the seven times, but we picked it apart last week. It works or things that come into truth by your action. And we can read this as though, Jesus is saying, hey, listen, I know your works, the things that you're supposed to be creating by your action. And you might think they look great, but I hate to tell you, you aren't doing anything.
They're not actually there. I'm 40 years old. I grew up in the early and mid 90s. One of the biggest ways you could insult somebody in 1994 in Alexandria, Louisiana, was to be called them a poser.
Like you're got a fist fight. It's going to break out. You might get called a poser. Like, oh, yeah, you're wearing the JCP, not the real ones.
Like, Jesus can say, you're posing. Like, you're fake. You think you have this. You think that knows control, but you're not doing anything.
And I find it how ironic is it that the church that has no good current reality, that the spirit of the Lord speaks to the strongest are not the ones who are practicing idolatry. It's not the ones who are allowing unwholesome behavior to come in their midst. It's not the ones who have forgotten how to love. It's the ones who are being lazy.
That's the strongest condemnation that we find in these seven letters. It's to the lazy ones. So I want us just to think about these two, this admonition that Jesus gave them of how to get out of it, how do we turn up from the bottom of the U. Now, one interesting thing about Revelation is the way that it uses scripture.
There's no other book in the New Testament that has more Old Testament illusions than Revelation, but at one point does John actually ever quote the Old Testament. There's also tons of stuff here at the Gospels and Paul's letters that are woven inside. So what we find out is that John, he had a masterful use of scripture because he completely had absorbed it, that he had allowed the words of scripture really to be the vocabulary. They were that bullet point list of ingredients, all the things that you need before you create something.
I think it's fancy people call it the Miesen Ploths. I can't pronounce that correctly. Like all the onions and carrots and so are you chopping before you get into cooking. Like that scripture was that John, he completely absorbed himself inside of that.
And so both this idea of wake up and then also strengthen yourself, come with just this multiple layers of scriptural death inside of it. Book of Isaiah, the prophet Isaiah, the idea of wake up shows up five times inside. We're gonna read it from chapter 52 verse one through two. This morning, this is what it says, wake up, wake up, O Zion, clothe yourself with strength.
Put on your beautiful clothes, a holy city of Jerusalem for unclean and Godless people will enter your gates no longer. Rise from the dust of Jerusalem, sit in a place of honor, remove the chains of slavery from your neck, O captive daughter of Zion, wake up, wake up. When I read this passage this week, the first thing I thought about was Ephes chapter five. This is what it says, awake, awake, awake, the ghost sleeper, rise up from the dead and Christ will give you light.
To wake up in scripture, and there's just multiple, multiple illusions. Every week, if you go to myfoundi.life when there's a message notes piece, one of the discipleship actions this week is just to go in the back of your Bible and your Bible should have a concordance in the back up. It's a place where you can just look up words and where the words show up in your Bible. But just to look up awake or woken, you don't google and do the search in so many places, but when we find this in scripture, to wake up it means to be alert, to make yourselves ready.
To be a people who know they are called something they're supposed to be somewhere. But being awake, it also talks about the way for us to be, it's the peacefulness and the sense of assurance that comes over us when we know that we are doing what we're supposed to be doing. When we know that we are doing the right thing. That's what happens when we are awake.
When we have a plan and we know the outcome that plan is going to bring to us and that we begin practicing the diligence necessary to get to that intended outcome. To use business language, it means we're part of systems thinking. Like we know what the outcome is going to be as long as we stick to these certain things, to be awake, to be ready, to be aware for what's going on. Awakeness is paying attention to what's important and ignoring what's not important.
And if we think about this, there's a couple of ways that we see these false practices going on inside of the church and start. It's like help us understand stuff, but also help us to kind of put ourselves inside of this. We're doing the series this summer because we realize in every one of these seven churches that there's a message to us now, a message to who we are. So I think there's a couple ways that we can examine ourselves thinking about this idea of wake up.
Now the first one is this, is that you're being too busy because you don't trust me. You know what says to artists is doing all the outward things, all the things they were supposed to do. What if they have busy themselves so much because they've not done the tough work to trust God yet? How can we might be doing that?
And we had three different units. The shopping open up in the middle and then every five or six years, the boss would get enough money to add on another one of the storefronts. And so at no place where any of these stores just open each other, we had a doorway to go to this suite and a doorway to go to this suite. And it was at that job, I learned this phrase.
I think many of us learned in our high school jobs. It was this, if you have time to lean, you have time to clean. You remember that? Like I lived, sing along music with a big chamois that used to polish guitars.
We all had one in our back pocket at all times because we ever saw the boss come through one of those doors. You instantly began polishing whatever was closest to you. Because if he, oh, he would get mad if he saw you just sitting there. Like at one point I would carry around a guitar cable with me and just always be rolling it and unrolling it.
And then eventually he put up security cameras and not for customers. He put up security cameras for the employees. And not because he thought we were stealing from him because he thought we weren't working hard enough. And so we ended up, there was a work culture at that place.
I worked there four different times. I worked there two times. Most of the high school and then I come back from like three weeks of college. I worked there for three weeks.
I kind of drifted in and out of that guitar store for my entire late adolescent life. And you were always faking cleaning. Because you were terrified. You was going to get mad at you.
How do we do that in our life? How do we fake having the right things? Because we're simply too busy to commit ourself to the most important work to do. And we talked about last week, nobody ever intends on getting to a place of evil.
They accidentally find themselves there by not doing the right thing. The second thing the church in Sartis, kind of I thought about this week, might be going on as this, is she's saying, your works are off because you are still living in your own time. We talked the very first week of how so much of revelation, almost all of chapter one, is an invitation to live in God's reality and not human time. That human time has a distinct beginning and a distinct end that God's reality is truly eternal and is truly timeless.
It's different than forever. But it has no beginning point, no ending point. I shared it with y'all during our mission time. The reason I have found a tremendous amount of relief with what we have going on in the church right now, is that God's time is very different than ours.
He says, in eternal reality, he knows what's going to be happening the whole time. This church in Sartis is just stuck in living in their own, we'll be all right. We don't need to worry about this too much. We've got it together.
Instead of seeing this invitation that comes through the power of the Holy Spirit to live into the truthful and permanent reality and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, which kind of leads us right in to the second thing is to be strong. To strengthen yourself. We've got the first passage talk about this in the book of Romans. It's the very, very end of the whole book of Romans.
The last chapter, this is what it says. Now all glory to God who is able to make you strong, just as my good news says, this message about Jesus Christ is revealed as planned for you Gentiles, a plan kept secret from the beginning of time. And from 1 Thessalonians it says this, may he as a result make your heart strong, blameless, and holy as you stand before God our Father when our Lord Jesus comes again with all his holy people, Amen. Friends, we don't make ourselves strong.
The Holy Spirit does. God makes us strong. Have you ever had to learn what it's like to rely on your own strength? Ladies and gentlemen, speak to the guys here for a second.
You're probably gonna be very glad I say this. You know, men were hard-headed. Have you ever found yourself in a pickle, thinking you're strong enough to do something that you weren't? And just think of the funny situations we can tell about the things we have to do to say we don't need help.
Now, I've gotten myself into a variety of sketchy scenarios in my life because I think I'm strong enough to do something on my own. And we don't do that just physically. We do that spiritually. We think that we self-generate the strength that instead comes from Jesus Christ.
All honor and glory and power in yours forever is this admonition that occurs multiple times in the book of Revelation. We have true strength that is accessed, that we've already given access to us. It's by the power of the Holy Spirit. And he does it by making us holy.
You know, when we are relying on our own strength in these scenarios, no matter how strong you might think you are, it's going to fail at one point in time. First thing with the strength of God is an eternal concept. It does not run out. It does not get tired.
It does not begin. It does not end all those things or ours. Let's first let's look back up there, Kim. Say, make he is a result, make your heart strong, blameless and holy as you stand before God, our Father.
When our Lord Jesus comes again with all his holy people. Let's strength is accessed by us beginning to understand what holiness looks like. It's holiness as a gift. You know, for a long time in our culture, in the last 150 years, we practice what I call passive holiness.
No, passive holiness is defined by our actions. Usually passive holiness is defined by the things that we don't do. I don't do this, or I don't do this, or I don't do this, I'm kind of familiar by church language for some of you. It's passive holiness, passive holiness is defined by action.
Active holiness, the things that we do, the things that we will do, the things we plan to do, active holiness is defined by intention. Passive holiness is simply action. Active holiness is intention. It's intentional because we realize that, hey, the only way I can get to this next point is by relying on the strength and power that Jesus Christ has already given me and has put inside of me.
That's what I'm going to trust. And you know, the deliberateness of the Father is a characteristic that is still given to us in spite of sin. And it should be part of our formation. It should also be part of our mission activity.
The issue of the church and Sardis is they're passive. They're doing all the right things. So shouldn't I get the right results? That's their issue.
They're being passive. They're saying, I've got this under control. And the scary thing about it is Jesus comes in and says, I would really hate to lose you because you're lazy. Let that sink in.
It's just shortening up about four verses. It's pretty much saying that I would hate to lose you because you're lazy. I think we said earlier, how ironic is it that this church with the strongest words against them are not the ones that are practicing idolatry or immorality or all those typical bad church things. It's the ones that are simply being lazy.
Psalm 119, that's kind of close things up. Psalm's been the prayer book of God's people for thousands of years. And earlier this week, I'm doing a reading plan with a couple of people that does about 20 chapters of the Bible a day. And we got to Psalm 119 this week.
If you know this or not, in this Bible, Psalm 119 takes four pages. It's kind of a big chapter. And I was thinking that surely we're not going to read our normal 20, 25 chapters a day for this. I know we were, so it was a lot more.
But I sat down in Psalm 119 a lot more than I have at a long time. And I want to read just a couple of verses through this because I believe that if we look at the opposite of the church in Sardis, if we want to look at what does that recipe look like, I think that we find that ingredient list in Psalm 119. I'm actually kind of excited to take a couple of weeks and just jump more into it personally. But I'm going to read you all four verses from Psalm 119.
This is the opposite of the Sardis church. In verse one and two, joyful are people of integrity who follow the instructions of the Lord. Joyful are those who obey his laws and search for him with all their hearts. Verse 30, I have chosen to be faithful.
I have determined to live by your regulations. Verse 37. So turn my eyes from worthless things and give me life through your word. So I think if we look at what does it mean to be opposite of Sardis, we take those words in advice.
I think that it draws us doing a few things this week. You just want to kind of leave this with you. Like I said, if you go to myfrenity.life, there's a message note singing there. Every week we put discipleship prompts and prayer prompts for the message in there.
And so all these scriptures are there. But also, I encourage you, so go think about those. I mean, this is a very, very practical message for us to take in. And it's one of the things that's incredibly applicable right now to the cultural moment that we are in.
But just think about this. Where are we asleep in our life? And I think for us to investigate that means we have to look at not what's dangerous in our life, but what if we convince ourselves not that dangerous? Or what if we convince ourselves that it's permissible?
Where are we just not paying attention right now? Where do we have that in our life? Not just spiritually, but physically, emotionally, and our work life or school life. Where are we just not paying attention right now?
Where are we maybe shipping it in? It's like, ah, that's going to be all right. That's good enough. That's close enough.
Do we live a life where we say that's close enough more often than not? What does that mean to have a standard? Really, where do we need to begin diverting things in our life? Where are those places that we, under a spirit of conviction, realize, wow, I've just not been paying attention that I've been lazy there.
And I realize that that is not a value of living in God's kingdom and being a disciple of Jesus Christ. Let's pray this morning. Father, this morning we're saying how deep the Father's love for us. And God, I think back to a situation where somebody who I cared for and I looked up too tremendously said one time and said, I'm just disappointed.
And God, that was heavy because I love this person. This person loved me. And I counted on them. And they counted on me as all sorts of things.
And God, we come together this morning and say how deep the Father's love is for us. Or we realize that this is not just a casual relationship coming from you. Lord, and we realize where those places in life where we might have just thought that we could ease up. God, and we don't have this conversation, this thought, or this prayer out of judgment, or out of anger, or out of those things.
God, we come to this space willingly because we know that we want to have that relationship with you. God, no matter where we are and who we are, there are places in our life where we need the activating power of the Holy Spirit. God, and that happens through being awake, through relying on your strength, through turning back to the things that got us to our relationship with you in the first place. And so, Lord Jesus, as we come to this time and worship, we simply just ask for our hearts to be made aware of the places where we need to open ourselves up more to you in this regard.
God, but for us to be willing to do these things because we realize that we have been given a great gift, a tremendous gift. And God, we want to be able to accept just an obedience of mission with open arms. God, nobody who calls himself a Christian says, I kind of want a crappy relationship with God. And all things have been offered to us.
God, help us realize just what it means to take responsibility for the intentionality and the deliberateness of this relationship you've given us. God's for the things that we put together do lead to outcomes of celebration and outcomes of mission and outcomes of all the wonderful things that our heart truly desires. God, we just want to be part of making that happen.