Remember how I told y'all when we started off this revelation series that we're not gonna actually get into all the weird like crazy gnarly sounding stuff I'm not told you. We're not that's not really in this part of revelation. I remember that I think I said that but I'm also here to tell you this morning that I lied to you because I forgot about this one I was tempted to call it the sermon of accusations talking donkeys and mouth swords But I realized that would actually probably a little bit more than we could handle But this morning is some of that kind of weird stuff and do you have that friend who? Whenever you're together it just ends up being wilder crazier than everyone else just to get their attention, you know Like that person might tell out of tall tales Just to make sure people can pay attention to them.
You know a lot of times literature like revelation It's called apocalyptic literature the book of Daniel. It's like this We're actually gonna talk about the last half of Daniel in November Just what that means it's kind of the same way as a book of Ezekiel Like it's a way that people communicate things in a couple of ways one They would communicate really really weird things and wild things to get our attention though It also apocalyptic pictures also like when you can't say something you ever been like in scenarios where like you want to say something You can't say something you might get in trouble for it Like when I was I can take the grade we had this whole language worked out with me and my buddies It was based off of Led Zeppelin songs just to keep the teachers away from what we were trying to come up with It's like that's what this this ways to say things to keep people out of trouble That's also going on here, but there's some wild stuff, but maybe this week I hope this we have the opportunity to do something instead of saying this is weird This is confusing I don't know what to do to instead just kind of breathe deeply to take a step back to do a little bit of deep work And to think okay, what might this be communicating to me? That's an irrelevant and it's a completely necessary way for where I'm in life That's what I think that we have the ability to do a revelation is about resistance and across the entire book There's it's telling a story about resistance about resisting the things that are dangerous for us I'm actually this will you diagram a few weeks ago. It's up on here We're talking this kind of a lot today, but all these stories these seven churches follow just this you know that the passage starts off With a stable condition where they are they're kind of getting a high-five The very bottom is disasters like hey listen this is working go south Watch out and then if you come around at the top of the you have a new stable condition This is really really apparent inside of our passage today We also read the last thing just kind of we into this is that this is about God's reality and not human time and the power of living in God's Reality and not just inside of our own time.
I'm gonna read this for you revelation chapter 2 verse 12 through 17 The message to the church and Pergamum write this letter to the angel of the church and Pergamum This is a message from the one with the sharp two-edged sword I know you live in the city where Satan has his throne yet you remain loyal to me You refuse to deny me even when Antipas my faithful witness was martyred among you there in Satan City But I have a few complaints against you. This is that bottom of the you You tolerate some among you his teaching is like that of Balaam who showed back I like how to trip up the people of Israel He taught them to sin by eating food offered to idols and by committing a sexual sin and similar way you follow some Nicolations among you who follow the exact same teaching repent of your sin or I will come to you suddenly and fight again Then with the sword of my mouth anyone with ears to hear must listen to the spirit understand what he's saying to the churches Everyone who is victorious I will give some of the man that has been hidden away in heaven And I will give to each one a white stone and on that stone will be engraved a new name that no one understands except the one who received it So when I popped into this this week the first thing I saw was okay. What's this whole business about Satan City like this place Sounds horrible It's like the entire city is like the east side of Bourbon Street Like what's going on that makes this place so bad? And so I mean okay, what was Pergamum like this place is horrible and I found out it was something very very different We're gonna talk about that in a second But what it really jumps us into is this conversation about Satan And about the way we think about saying y'all heard me talk about before that whenever I was a kid I thought God would talk my great grandmother because she was sweet and the oldest person I knew and that's all chopped It off a chicken put the chicken in the front of her house dress and I realized that maybe that was not what God looked like We think about what do you think Satan looks like?
What do you think is this thing? We probably have the whole pitch works idea and some of you were thinking of a little niki right now That's all right. I mean we've got these ideas But really what's going on and what's interesting is if we kind of throw ourselves off into and I did this week I found out that there's a really weird obscure part of like religious studies or people called Satanologists That sounds kind of weird too But really what it is about looking at just the history of religion and what is the role that Satan plays in things You know as much as we talk about him or think about him We don't know that much about him now The best picture really comes from the book of Joe and we see Satan come out and always ask Hey, listen You have to go mess with this guy because he seems to be perfect And I can see if I can trick him up like the best thing we understand about how Satan operates is that story of Joe? And in Revelation this especially in this place right here It's one of the few times where Satan is like formal name is used and Hebrew it's cosatine It's a formal title and in the Bible.
It's all visible person that none of us would ever want to deal with right? Second Corinthians to 11 head up on the screen here This is what it says so the Satan will not outsmart us for we are familiar with his evil schemes This is actually kind of talking about That we can toe the line with him. He's not as big as we thought he was That and if we look at early church writings are kind of saying the same thing It's like this guy is out there to accuse you to trip you up if we really look at how the New Testament Especially like Paul and the letters of John when it talks about Satan. It's really about how he distorts the truth and Make to make us feel like we're more importantly actually are and then by creating dissatisfaction in our lives now Let's be honest those two things when you say that can trip up a person they think they're more important than they actually are and They become dissatisfied with everything Decideside up themselves to satisfy with others you know those what the scripture tells those two things are demonic actions And that we can toe the line with Satan there You know Satan is a rival contender for the loyalty of our hearts In Revelation is actually going to stretch out this image across the rest of the book now Pergamum Why is Pergamum the house of Satan or the throne of Satan like what's what's making this city like that?
And I hate to tell you it's not like Burban Street that made it easy But we see a couple of things are going on number one Pergamum was a really really old city it only been part of the Roman Empire for about 150 200 years And this book was written but previous to that it was known in the entire Greek world as the place where Zeus's main temple was So if you wanted to worship Zeus you went to Pergamum and that was the place where Zeus was The second thing is in Rome that people actually worshiped the emperor Now he was seen to be a god and Pergamum was the capital of the Roman Empire in all of Asia Therefore in Pergamum they had a temple to the emperor If anything you went to Pergamum to worship all the gods Like a person would take a trip to Pergamum to like make sure they could worship all the gods in one trip It'd be the easy thing to do and for the people who lived in a city that was devoted to worshiping other gods The Christian church in Pergamum was in a very very dangerous place At the top of their you what this John is telling them with angel saying this mess Hey, listen you're doing great on the outside There are some really bad things going on around your community and you're not participating in them You're holding fast you're staying strong. You're not falling into this temptation that Pergamum is useful But there's some other stuff that's going on that when you talk about my pop-it second you diagram up And this is kind of more specific and so this message starts off saying hey, you're deep in enemy territory You're doing really good, but you're you're you're in deep when I was in college Me on this I led worship all over the world and one summer we got hired to go to Amsterdam and uh that alone Going through customs when you're a dirty college student and your visa says musician and your hair is down to here That's gonna be interesting But uh we were there for six weeks and uh a missionary they rented out a brand new hostel And they had kids from all over Europe who were stationed in american army bases And they were coming in to do like american style youth camps there and we went worship for this thing for weeks But every saturday we would go and have dinner and have prayer at this 40 It was a 40 50 year old prayer base and mission center in uh Amsterdam. It was in the middle of the red light district You know the people who lived there year round it was it was only it was a house of prayers All it was was was a place to pray they've been there for for almost 50 years You know living in that city with what that city is known for and living in the worst place of that city They're deep in enemy territory. I tell you what I mean That was learning to get into that place and go to that place with a very very difficult thing It touched you tremendously And you said hey you're deep in enemy territory, but you're holding fast the bottom is you though You're saying you're losing your distinctiveness and we're about to talk about that But this is where you're hitting the danger zone because you're losing your distinctness the top of you back It says i'm gonna give you manna from heaven and a new name written on a white stone It's it's a new identity We're not gonna get that much into that this morning But just I want you to see the path of how this works And so there's lots of distinction what's going on here.
Uh, john says two things to him they're all about tolerance He says you know, uh, you've got baelem It's from the book of numbers. We find baelem He was a prophet hired by the balick the king of moab to come and to curse the jewish people Is there on their way to the promise land and all three times he went to go try to do it He ended up blessing god's people that the fun part of the baelem story is at one point time his donkey started talking back to him And the donkey would not go any further and then baelem it gets into this interchange conversation with his donkey first of all Weird your donkey is talking Second your donkey donkey's talking back to you My 13 pound dachson bit me a couple days ago because I would not let her go outside to kill a bird The donkey is talking back to you. That's weird, right? But later on in numbers we find baelem participating again and and he is killed He dies because they're trying to get the israelites to do things that they're not supposed to do to begin participating worshiping And not worshiping idols and begin participating in sexual immorality and that the whole immorality piece goes through out scripture Especially revelation, but primarily it's a type to talk about what does it look like when you bow into things willfully that you know you shouldn't be doing There's a lot more powerful conversation right there Than just like oh the uber super bad thing.
I don't do that. I'm good. I'm cool Well, there's other stuff you willfully do wrong and it's fitting into the same thing The nicoleations we don't know that much about in fact I only show up here in a couple of places in revelation What we see is the nicoleations are a group of people inside the church that say you know what it's all right for us to kind of Do those extra things this is God's asking a little bit too much of us You know we have our own ability to go to the first of last week We talked about the tree the knowledge of good and evil from Genesis But what does it mean to want all the power and not have any responsibility? The nicoleations are pretty much telling the church hey It's all right to do these things doesn't matter that much you're making kind of a big deal But all the best we see this whole thing about eating food sacrifice to idols is anybody curious how that might actually happen Does that sound super weird?
You know the thing to me is like well if your christians are not supposed to eat food sacrifice to idols I guess that means you don't go to the barbecue to set like the statue of the idol But that's not how it worked And in in in Roman times there are these things called gills And whatever you did for a living you typically belong to a guild of some sort and these guilds were like a combination social club Union and insurance company So like if you were um german company for a second, okay There's an hvac guild german would go pay his money to the hvac guild and they would make sure that like when he dies He has a really good funeral. There's a feast for him That if he uh, I hurt himself and can't work for a few months the insurance guild would that hvac deal would give german some money to Make sure he can make into it kind of make sure things in me But then also once a month we're gonna have a big dinner together anyway And that's not gonna cost you anything you can bring your family and we'll have a big huge feast because nobody can afford to do this on their own But if we all pull our money together we can do it when I was a kid My parents have an Have a life insurance policy through modern woodman of america Like it's old school insurance anybody ever heard modern It's like old school insurance company the only thing I knew about modern woodman I was like eight years old was once a month we got to bj's pizza and have nine pizza buffet for a dollar a person Y'all I could not remember anything in my life when I was that age except what night was one dollar pizza that bj's with insurance company Like I thought insurance companies jobs were to give you one dollar pizza buffet But these what these gills would do is this was a way that you could make sure that you could have a funeral with your funeral would be a feast If you got a hurt you be provided for work by money and food and then once a month you had a big a big nice party together But to kind of keep this inside the pizza buffet theme How many are familiar with pizza buffets y'all know how they work right have you ever noticed that the pizza the buffet pizza is not as good as ordered pizza It's a cheaper like a johnny say they cut it into normal pizza triangles to save some money and like there's not as much cheese on there Like no buffet pizza is always cheaper than I ordered pizza Well the way these gills would be able to afford having these parties for your funerals and having these bringing food to your family's home If you get hurt and by having your once a month feast together is they would buy food from the pagan temples At a cheaper price It was kind of a racket that these temples and these false priests had is that people will bring them animals to sacrifice And then they would sell the animals to other people At a cut rate and so if you wanted to get like the sam's club of bible times was go buy meat from the other temple And so you see it's actually pretty easy for these christians to take part in this We're gonna talk more about kind of where the danger lies inside of that But so much of this was about them having a loss of distinction And if we read these seven churches in Revelation There's a lot more about cautioning against conformity than there is about like outright downward persecution In fact, there's the martyrdom of this person on Antipas is the only actual like legit Like what's persecute christians and have a good time part that we find in Revelation everything else about cautioning us against conformity It's about saying hey, there is this there's this animated we've been fighting since the very beginning He's trying to sneak into our lives and think oh, it's not it's not that I go to my guild and I have my dinner It's free once a month Like trying to sneak in all of these things and but ultimately this was an attempt to To try to make follow to turn following Jesus into something that was just more cultural palatable It's like hey, you don't have to go and do all these things you don't have to make it so severe You don't have to make it hard Just you don't have to have the responsibility But that's this message of the nicoleations that they found to be just so troublesome Just resist you can do this and and the best way to apply this and I thought about this a lot this week And I was making this a lot more complicated than I thought it was gonna be and I was trying to talk about this explain this to Meredith And she I had this long trails going on she said stop. She said, you know what you're actually talking about right now So you're just talking about the mighty ducks I want to use that as a metaphor for us to think about what does it mean to not fall into the sin of the church in Pergamum You know, there's one enemy we've been fighting our entire life The Satan's evil he has he has a game and he's good at it. He's he's good at it by simply trying to distract us To distract us saying he's not working at these things.
He's not actually doing this a whispering or you're saying hey, listen This isn't that bad you can bend the rules It's the game. He's been playing just the beginning of time He's a pox Mighty ducks. He's the rich kid. You can't beat him.
They have all the best equipment They're better than everybody else. They cheat they steal they do all these sorts of things We think of the story of mighty ducks how how you're able to defeat the big huge insurmountable Unapposable force that's against you The first thing that you know immediately oh that's just a second best role ever versus young guns Second best role ever is that he fundamentals. It's like you've got to know your fundamentals. What's so interesting is If we look in the book of acts when paul has been ministering to the Gentiles and they're they're becoming filled with the holy spirit And people didn't believe it was possible.
He comes back to the Jerusalem church kind of the mother church and he's expecting to get like chewed out for doing all these things You're not supposed to be doing a deliberated and they talked and all these sorts of things and they came back to him and said listen Everything you're doing is okay. We're not gonna ask him to do a lot of this other Jewish stuff We're just gonna ask you two things that you have to be aware of just two things are fundamental to who we are and actually read some book of acts Those two things were donate food sacrifice to idols and stay away from sexual immorality That's the fundamentals of what does it mean to be the church? You know we realize our fundamentals. What does it mean?
We look at the bigger picture the metaphors are being told here You know, what does it mean for us to try to water down the message or Jesus and make it easier? And what does it mean for us to know that we absolutely have to avoid willful sin It's the fun of those what we are the second thing the way you actually win is you innovate You do the things that nobody else is doing you do things that the enemy is not expecting you do things They're completely different in the way that he's trying to come at you You know, I think mighty does innovate the flying V I mean every one of my friends. I feel like we ruined rollerblades and almost broke collarbones with our way Our rollerblades trying to pull that move off, you know You go at it in a way that nobody expects You know the early church following the ways of Jesus the way that they counteract it just these narratives of evil that were being forced against him Was to follow the path of Jesus to not try to outright resist and fight and I think you know Peter Try to chop up the guys ear when they came to take Jesus across. No, Jesus did not go Jesus did not he wasn't puny He did not fight back, but he also did not allow violence to that third option It's a completely different way for us We look in the history and the story of the church resistance and the way of Jesus It's always happened by us following the pattern of Jesus and that shuts down Just accusations of us watering down things But also realizing the power of of Jesus and these habits as we we were reforming our sense and our idea of self-control of what does it mean?
Just think about how powerful is it in our culture for us to tell somebody I don't do that When was the last time you heard somebody say I don't do that Think about it We do everything now When was the last time we just simply said hey, no, I don't do that That's just a pretty just a basic easy step forward But the last thing I think this is the most important is that they did not try to do this on their own That the early church resisted and with the power of who Jesus was in the midst of them by doing it in community Another little catch phrase. My ducks was ducks fly together No, we can't do these things on our own We can't we can't we're not designed to do these without other people We also have a new you know, Madeline and Jack and I've been talking about this a lot the last month We've got a new reality is there are as many people watching on that camera right there as they're sitting inside of this room Like we don't know what to do when worship is kind of split across these two different things that feels really weird and you probably get tired of hearing Madeline me talking to the camera and the people that are watching probably I really wish I was able to be in that room right now You know if anything what's going on inside of this pandemic reality now is us having to learn and us having to move forward and us having to innovate What does it mean for us to be the body of Christ to be in community with each other as we are spread across? We're spread across physical places. We're spread across emotional spaces.
We're spread across all of these spaces different I think the first thing to do is just to name it to realize it to talk about it, but we cannot do anything Without the power of me. We can't do it on our own. I'm more and more and more I'm realizing like that is the lesson that we need to be learning right now because we're People are comfortable. You're going to the grocery stores I mean most folks are kind of out and about a lot more than we were several months ago We're still not talking to people Like I'm tired of running into people I know in public and I don't know who they are.
They don't know who I am But these masks were happening. Wherever but my name on the front of And we we are going to slide into patterns of individualism which was already incredibly dangerous to our culture And we're gonna slide deeper into those patterns the church to get the slide. Hey, I don't have to come there I can watch it on TV But we can slide easily and this means we have to innovate through these realities and do this together We can't not do these together We have to do this in communities the way that we are wired So I think this message to a church in program. I had to practice saying that a bunch While at first it sounds really weird and really like let's just forget about that and don't know about it I think this might be the most practical one we've had so far it might be the most practical one we've had the whole time Because I believe it speaks to our situation tremendously What does it mean for us to know that as followers of Jesus that we have to culturally be resistant But we have to admit a lot of resistance going on in our culture right now.
It's unattractive I told you a few weeks back. I've been reading the last six months so much about the early church early church early church And how oddly enough the one thing that they never did was evangelize The time of the church grew more rapidly than anything else they never evangelized But instead their habits formed them into the way of Jesus in a way that they lived out life in public It caused more stability. It caused more comfort. It caused more encouragement.
It made things better That's the question I'm asking myself right now. How do we as a church here the north side of watch top here How do we even though we're disjointed and we're spread out across the place right now How do we follow Jesus in a way that's completely applicable and appropriate to where we live right now But in a way that simply makes life better not just for us But for others I think that is this call that this passage makes us think about and talk about So let's pray God make us to be people who see these things God make us be people who who claim that new identity that you gave us God make us to be people who Can resist things God and and we're not talking about just a low-level morality God we're not talking about do's and don'ts but Or send us the Holy Spirit so that we can resist the places that lead us to despair that lead us into having an unhealthy witness that lead us into falling just deeper into the lies that the evil One just whispers in our ear God as much as we say we just not a temptation we say God we just not in the depression God we pray for you to give us a life that we can stand firm on the speaks of your faithfulness and your trustworthiness and your truth God a life that can be lived in public is an answer to the woes of our day God we need that But more than we needing that this world needs that So we're just pray for those things today for those things for us to seek God for us to know that that we can completely resist What would seek to destroy us? God and with that we step into a new reality one where you are eternally providing for us God where you are eternally identifying with us and God where you are eternally giving us a purpose Is beyond our own sense of comprehension and understanding It's gonna be pray amen. So we stand we stand together just to remind you all that we still kind of exit a little bit different now We're not gonna have a hard close good bossy next week But we just offer up this space just a time of prayer is kind of a reflection When you and your crew are ready to leave you can leave let's not bottle neck up inside you can hang out outside But it's just take this time to reflect what God might be saying to us