Early this week Jack asked me, he says, Jack, what's the big deal with revelation? Why aren't you talking about revelation yet again? We had a conversation about that on the podcast and had about a 20 minute conversation about revelation. But I don't know why, I really thought about that a lot.
I'm trying to figure out why I like this book so much. And really it all just kind of stems back and the fact that this explains things better than anything else does. But it explains things in a very different way. Normally when you get into a church situation and you ask people to say, who is really excited about revelation, how the room raises their hand?
You say, who wants to leave because we're talking about revelation, other half of the church is their hand? Like I'm going to get out of here, I don't want to back. I remember it all, it stems down. I was a kid and Big John, I said, I called the preacher because he was Big John.
And Big John, I don't know what happened, but he talked about the Tim LaHabe book, 88 Reasons the World Will End in 1988. And I was terrified and I slept with a change of clothes in my bed for two years because I thought Jesus would come back at night and I didn't want to go to heaven in my underwear. I mean, like you think we need to see things just kind of shape and shift us. But you know, I last November I realized that this summer I wanted us to talk about these first three chapters in Revelation because I wanted us to ask ourselves the question, what does it mean for us to be the church?
And we realized that it answers it really, really well in there. But also, what does it mean for people to live and call themselves followers of Jesus Christ. And to live in a world that at times just seems utterly foreign to that, not just downright opposite in the way that they believe things work, but also what about this? How do you find grounding in a world that seems to be constantly in flux?
You know, I can almost terrifying things in my life right now is when something comes across my news channel and I see the governor is going to be making an announcement because I'm like, okay, what rules is this changing now? How does this make us read down? I mean, our world, and this is what's so funny is I wrote these questions down in November, thinking about why we need to do this to series, how we find strengths when everything seems to change, what happens when the old grounding points aren't there anymore? That's why I think we read Revelation.
Revelation's just perfect book, not because of the crazy stuff, because the truthful stuff is written by a guy named John, he was a disciple of Jesus Christ, he wrote the Gospel of John, he was the only disciple to not be martyred. Now to try to boil him in oil one time and he lives through that. And then after every kid, we can't kill this guy, so let's send him to this island called Patmos and let's just leave him there by himself. And while he's there, he ends up having this crazy, amazing visionary experience.
And we call it the book of Revelation, that's what it is. But two things are really gonna go on, that we're gonna talk about. One is I want us to understand what does it mean to have God's vision in God's time? That's chapter one's we're gonna talk about today.
But the second thing is chapters two and three are these letters to seven churches, seven specific churches. And I want us to read those this summer, just asking the question, what specific message does God give to his churches in a timeless way through these seven churches? How can we apply that to our life now? Now many times I think we have ambivalence or fear about revelation because we don't know what to do with time.
We try to take God and apply our understanding of time to God. The only problem is you and I have a beginning and an end. I had a birthday a few weeks ago, I turned four, you got a cookie cake, it was awesome. No, I've got a birthday, I'm gonna have a death day one day.
No, every gravestone has two dates on it, right? Beginning and end, but friends, I hate to tell you, but you're going to die one day. We have a fine night beginning, we have a fine night, any good God doesn't. But we have such a hard time wrapping our head around that.
The easier thing for us to do is just to pull God into our world and make those assumptions about that accordingly. Instead of us opening ourselves up to a different understanding. And so we're talking about that, we're talking about time, but we also need to realize that revelation is timeless. And that's the problem we've had with it.
We've had to engage revelation with a broken understanding of time. There's a pendulum that swings and there's three interpretations I want us to kind of think about real quick. And the first two, the pendulum swings way too far to one side. It can't be an honest conversation.
So the first way that people interpret revelation sometimes, the first kind of pendulum swing is a lot of easiest way to call it is the left behind reading. I could call it by the fancy $100 word version of it, we could say this is pre-millennial dispensationalism, but that doesn't make any sense to y'all, does it? And we're just gonna talk about this. This is an idea of a left behind reading is, you see the pendulum swing right there.
That is about a rapture will come, everyone will be taken away from earth, we will escape this horrible place, bad things will happen for seven years, use will come back and then we all get to party. That's the short and sweet part. You might see the movie with Kurt Cameron, you know? Okay, so funny thing is, this is the understanding that most of us have a revelation, right?
Now this is kind of what we wrote with. What's interesting is though, this has only been a reading of the church for the last 150 years. It's almost entirely unique to America. And most religious sociologists will say that if the civil war hadn't have happened, this would have probably kind of buzzed out after 10 or 15 years, but when things seem hopeless, when people are trying to understand destruction and death and all these horrible things, it's a lot easier to have an understanding that, well, that's all right.
One day things will be taken away from me and I don't have to worry about these bad things anymore. Like I said, this is only a reading for one, for a relatively short amount of time. And this is the kind of problematic with it. You know, it's think about our vitals, how we read our vitals and our scripture.
You know, we want to say all this applies to all of us, right? All this applies for all time, right? You know, this reading of revelation, it has a low view of God's actions. It pretty much means only one group of people living in one group of time will apply to this.
Everybody else just kind of reads it and you don't really able to engage with it. The second one though is this is a swing, this is a reading of metaphor. So when you don't want to do tough work, we don't want to have tough conversations or think tough thoughts or learn things or be stretched. So you always say, oh, it's just all metaphor.
None of it's true, it doesn't matter. It's all just metaphor. No metaphor is easy, right? Metaphor doesn't ask us to change.
Metaphor doesn't confront us with things that we have done that aren't right. No metaphor doesn't challenge us. So what was this metaphor? It's all right, this is the pendulum swing in this regard.
It has a low view of God's time. It doesn't accept reality. These are kind of two ways that we could typically do it. So what I want to ask you this morning though, is just one thing, you know, God's action is always acting in our time.
We can agree to that, right? We believe God's active in our world. We believe God's active in our life. Then why would we read this book differently when you read any other book of scripture?
So what I want to present to you is a spirit field reading. You know, it's a reading of revelation that has all people are involved, all people out are inside of this. No matter where you live, when you live. But it's also all reality.
God's reality matters. This is about God's reality, not just about our time. A spirit field reading has a high view of time and a high view of God's action. So we read Revelation chapter one verse one, three, three, four, you, this is what it says.
This is a revelation from Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants the events that must soon take place. He sent an angel to present this revelation to his servant John who faithfully reported everything he saw. And this is the report of the word of God in the testimony of Jesus Christ. And God blesses the one who reads the words of this prophecy to the church and he blesses all who listen to its message and obey what it says for the time is near.
No God's actions always acting in our time but that last verse right there for the time is near. We jump over to first Peter chapter four, verse seven. And this is what we read, it's the most carrier. The end of the world is coming soon.
Therefore be earnest and disciplined in your prayers. Now here's the problem, this was written 2000 years ago. Scripture said Revelation one three, the time is coming soon. First Peter four said at the end of the world as soon, like that, that's either a lie because that was 2000 years ago.
Or we realize that our conception of the truth just simply isn't big enough. What does it mean for us to see this as near is coming soon 2000 years ago? Now this is about us understanding that truth requires us to stretch ourselves into God's world. Not to stretch God's world into ours.
What does it mean for us to prayerfully open up our eyes and see the reality of God? That's what happened with John. And Jesus Christ is not bound or defined by time. Revelation one four says this.
This letter from John to the seven churches in the province of Asia, grace and peace to you from the one who is, who always was and who is still to come from the sevenfold spirit before his thrones and in verse one eight says this. I'm the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end says the Lord God, I am the one who is, who always was and who is still to come the almighty one. Jesus Christ is a bound or defined by our time. Now when we try to press God's eternity into our time, we get this just janky understanding of who God is.
And we then try to interpret this amazing and beautiful work by placing our confines and our boundaries around. We start saying can'ts and we start saying won'ts. We start trying to press it into something that we fit it into. But when we do that we break our ability to coexist with the presence and the spirit of God in our lives.
But John understands that he's in a time bound place when he's telling us about this. And he realizes that he's in a specific location and he communicates that to us. Revelation one, nine three, ten, John kind of sets a tone of where he is. And this is what we read there.
John and your brother and your partner in suffering and in God's kingdom and the patient endurance to which Jesus calls us. I was exiled to the island of Patness for my preaching of the word of God and for my testimony about Jesus. It was the Lord's day and I was worshiping in the spirit. Suddenly I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet blast.
He tells me I'm here on Patness. This is why it was a Sunday I am worshiping in the spirit and in the presence of God overwhelms my world. He tells us where he was. He tells us what he was doing.
And he starts telling us what is happening. He has a visionary experience with God. From all Holland, freshman and seminary, he really taught me a love revelation. He says this about this visionary experience.
The normal human consciousness is discerned to be partial and incomplete in light of the fullness and the wholeness of the experience. A visionary experience with Jesus is the opening of normal human experience to a deeper dimension of its own reality and God will always be the subject. So quick graphic, we have human time and God's reality. This is what we're used to.
No human time beginning and end. God's reality has no beginning, has no end. It's completely there. Boethius was this, trying to say Boethius.
Like I would say, Bosefus, like Hank Jr. That'd be a lot cooler, wouldn't it? Boethius was a sixth century Christian scholar and this is what he says. A timeless being possesses its entire life at once.
Hebrews 13, 8 tells us that, we have this one here. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever. Jesus doesn't change. He has no beginning, but he has always been who he is.
He has no ending, but he is always who he is. The reality and the truthfulness of Jesus are eternal. And who he is doesn't need unfolding. He never begins, he never ends his totality from the start.
What we see happening in this vision is John has moved. John's vision brings him out of human time. And for a moment, he is able to just be to poke into God's reality. He was in worship and the power of the Spirit.
And Jesus allows for some reason this veil to be opened for him to be able to see this eternal reality of who God is. The only way he can explain it is kind of like a linear, because we're humans and we like things to be linear. But what we see, and we don't know how long this took, you know it might have just been just this instant. You hear that phrase people say, my whole life flashed before my eyes.
They tell us all times that we're dreaming that dreams only take seconds and we feel like they take all night long. For some length of time, John in worship in the power of the Holy Spirit was allowed to just glimpse the reality of who God was. And he's telling us these things. He's moved from time boundedness to timelessness.
And that's how he starts off this journey with us. Really the place where we need to be today to think about taking this into our 21st century reality is just ask ourselves, how can we have the same posture that John did? How can we seek to enact the same things? How can we seek to have this kind of life?
You know, what does that look like for us to have? And entering into revelation is to accept the invitation to step into a space that isn't bound by time. But it's instead to step into the reality of who God is. For us to realize the Holy Spirit's been offered us for that reason and that's what our call is to be.
It's a call to be a people who live with an end in mind that drives us not towards escape, but towards urgency. What does it mean for us to say, Jesus is coming again? And that's how I want to live my life with that truth in reality. You know, why we need to be talking about these conversations today is because the church needs revelation now because our culture and our world has dismantled its story.
Robert Jensen says that we want a universal story without a universal storyteller. I think the events of the last few weeks in our country show us that we want to have all these things that are promised and not have anyone telling us what to do or how to do it by. In regards to where you are and what you believe, we see this in our world now. We want a universal story without a universal storyteller.
In the church, sadly, has fallen into a false story about revelation, a story of escape, a story of ruin, a story of finger pointing. We've lost this beautiful story that God has given us. We've retreated into our own world and secular culture has taken over. But instead, revelation, it grounds us as the body of Christ in the story of the eternal reality of who God is.
It's a story of an ever-increasing, redeeming God and the people that he calls his children. That's what we're invited into. It's a story where we recognize that there is a struggle between good and evil. We have to talk about that.
When we remove evil from the equation, we make the story of Jesus to be flat and one-dimensional. It has no purpose at that point. It's like my grandmother had sweet Bible verses cross-stitched in her bathroom. Or it's maybe a modern generation, like a really great Bible image on Instagram with a beautiful mountain skate behind it.
They never put the awkward verses from Jeremiah on this pictures, do they? They don't put the ones like your children will hang on meat hooks, Jeremiah 38, it's in there. But we don't put that on Instagram, do we? We talk when we remove eternity, when we remove evil, when we remove justice, when we remove these conversations about this world, we make the story flat and one-dimensional.
We can't do that. We need eternity in our minds and in our hearts. In Revelation 1, 3, 1 Peter 4, 7, we talked earlier. It says, blessed are the one who hears and who keeps these things.
1 Peter 4, 7 says, end the world's coming soon. Be diligent. Be earnest and disciplined in your prayers. We're called to be aware of this.
We're called to have this in our front of our mind. We're called to live and to shape our lives around that is the truth of who we are. When I was in high school, I think I was in middle school, my parents sent me to a sleepaway camp that lasted like three weeks. And there's the whole point, and there's one of the things you're excited about at camp was one night was mission and possible night.
And it was like, everybody got a camp at some point in time when they were a kid. Every camp there's going to be one night where you play some wild version of hide and seek and capture the flag and hold aim of the game and say, not get caught. That's how that works. Mission and possible, they wouldn't tell you when it was coming.
And you would know when it was time for mission and possible, when over the loudspeakers that were across the whole camp, they start playing that theme song. Look at that dunk, dunk, dunk, dunk. Let me tell you, well, you brought special clothes for mission and possible night. Like, you had all black, you had like, like, black handkerchiefs.
I mean, like, you were ready. Your step might be strewn across the entire cabin. You've not seen your toothbrush in four days. Like, nobody has matching shoes anymore.
Like, if you look in the waistband of your underwear, it has other kids' name in it, but you know exactly what your mission and possible clothes are. Like, you were ready for mission and possible. And there's always, like, the kid who brings a boom box to camp and has the CD, he's going to try to trick you into it. Like, sorry, random times of the days, we start playing the music and there's going to try to trick you into it.
And remember, it was like, one o'clock, and then a friend of mine worked at camp there later on in our life. And he said, yeah, the rule is you can't do mission and possible until the last five days of camp. Because if you do it early, it's just going to not be fun. And I remember it was like, you go across, like, during the day, I think mission probably would hide, so you get to find it.
And I remember, during the day, you'd see, oh, that's a good place to hide something. You got to make sure I get here in the dark. There's no, like, dropping a pin in 1994. But it's like, we're only stuff set.
We're one o'clock in the morning. We've been in bed for a couple of hours. Like, it's still hot. And all of a sudden, you hear the music go on.
And every single cabin's lights turn on. And like, you pull out your special bag and your special mission and possible clothes. You put them all in. You're ready.
It's 30 minutes. It's actually going to play the game. But we've been waiting for it all for like two and a half weeks. We kept stuff ready.
We knew where things were. We didn't lose things. The way we moved around camp during the day was getting us ready for a level of urgency because we knew it was coming. And as I called it, scripture says, hey, there will be an end.
And you need to be ready because the fact that there's an end is going to redirect the way you do things. Now, it's important. It matters. I don't think that this book and us reading Revelation is a call to some sort of fearful paranoia.
But instead, it's just to realize that one day, eternity will break into our world. Not us breaking into God. Revelation 21, 4, God says, I am making all things new. And my home will be here with my people.
There will be a point in time where God's reality will break into our world with us. And we live with that in mind. We plead for that. We pray for that.
And while we are here on this earth right now, we do as much as we can to create small eternities of love, small eternities of forgiveness, small eternities of justice, small eternities of redemption, of care, and of love, and of reconciliation, and of healing. That's our call is just to, through the power of the Holy Spirit, and our willful lives of the living of God that small eternities can happen around us. That's what God is asking us to do. Now, do we want to be the type of person that receives these blessings, that this blessing of hearing these words and obeying and listening?
Do we want to be that person who receives and hears this and allows us to reshape our current lifestyle and our actions on his word? You know, I want personally in my life, I want for that to break into my world. I want for that to break into my heart. I want that to break into your world, and you're going to want that to break into our church and break into our communities through us and through our openness and our willingness and our choice of living like that with Jesus.
I want to be a group of people that are attentive to the promise of God. In the next seven weeks, we're going to look at the churches. And at the end of every single one of these sections, there's a phrase for those who have ears to hear, let is in here. We found one of our core values as a church.
We want to have ears to hear in eyes to see as part of the prophetic call of awareness. It's all throughout scripture. But Jesus asked his churches to say, listen, for those who have ears to hear with me, for those people who are willing to let their lives be open to the awareness of the Holy Spirit, to those people who are willing to say, I see a different goal in mind. I want to hear these things of Jesus.
I don't want to have urgency to run away from the things of this world. I want to have urgency to run toward this world with the reality of the presence of God in mind. I want to have ears to hear. I don't want to be able to obey and follow and do these things.
So let's go to the Lord in prayer, Father. Now this is a call to live a very different life. God in a call to live is the, there are specific things that we are called to do and that you're asking us to do, specific ways to interact and to feel. God's specific ways to hope.
God in one half of us want to do those things. But Jesus, we just want to follow that posture that John lays out for us to be in worship in the power of the Spirit, God trusting that you are engaging and interacting with us. God in our time might be frustrating and small, brief moments, God, when breakers are popping, when they've never popped before, God let us have eternity in mind. God not an eternity that's just beneficial to us, but eternity that's beneficial to this world.
An eternity that's not based off of our time, an eternity that's based off of your reality. God knows people who live with that in mind. Let us have these years to hear.