But I want to share with you all some kind of embarrassing pictures. I looked at these yesterday. But when I was 17, I decided to go with the Boy Scout's to New Mexico. And went backpacking for 20 days.
There was a picture of 17 or 18-year-old Chad coming up. I thought I was a lot cooler than I actually was. I was also skinny. Look at that.
I was skinny. And about halfway through that trip, we decided to take a day trick. And we were going to this is a massive Boy Scout reservation in northeast New Mexico. It encompassed multiple counties.
And we decided that we were going to take a day trek on one of our days off to hike to the highest peak there was on this entire property. I just had a picture of me on that day, hike day. You see, I noticed yesterday that's me on top of when we finally made it. But do you know what a false summit is?
Losing out. Everybody's in. I don't know what that is. So we don't have mountains in a losing out.
Like we have mountain Driscoll. I mean, that's it. I'm pretty certain that the slag pile at some of our minds in this state are actually taller than mountain Driscoll. Like it's like 550 feet elevation.
Like it's nothing. Well, false summits are when because of the terrain or because of the environment or whatever, you get to a place where you feel like you were at a peak and then you realize that you were not. And we've false summited multiple times that day. A bunch of losing out of boys had a very hard time.
I remember this was 1998, 1997. I remember one of our leaders had a bag phone with me. I remember calling my mom from one of these false peaks thinking I was on top of Mount Volley. And lo and behold, we weren't even close to the top.
There's that picture of me making a very grimacing face. When we finally were on Mount Volley. But after that, we stayed up there for about an hour because we weren't making it work. You know, the cloud cover went away and we were able to see just all of these things.
Has anybody else ever been in a place where you were at the tallest place of anywhere around you? Like you see just the clarity that provides. Like all the things that you get to see. It's nothing.
It's not flat anymore. And you get to just to be aware of all of your surroundings in this way. That's very helpful. And today we've been going through these last, almost all the time, going through this seven churches in Revelation, chapters two and three.
We've been talking about this. And today we're going to talk about the sixth church, that second to last church, the church in Philadelphia. And so much of this message to them was about what does it mean to rise above and to find the clarity that we find up high. Let's go back and just think about one of the things we've talked about though, is that there's just these recurring themes in our conversations.
We've been talking about the idea of patient endurance and how much that shows up. We also see this theme of just what does it mean to be resilient, to be steadfast in the midst of stuff. But the bigger part of the conversation that we realized is all three of these chapters are just kind of slowly edging us into an invitation to not see things as far as human time is concerned. You know, with a finite beginning and a finite end.
But instead, accept the invitation to step into God's reality. And what eternity actually looks like, what eternity means no beginning, no end. It's just this thing that's completely outside of our time. And this is a really just big part of the conversation that's going on today.
So let's open our Bible up. You have them, it'll be on the screen behind me as well. If you don't, but Revelation chapter three, we're going to read verse seven through 13. It's the letters of the church in Philadelphia.
That's what it says. The angel of the church in Philadelphia, right? The words of the holy one, the true one who has the key of David, who opens, and no one will shut, who shuts and no one opens. Listen, I know your works, behold, I have set before you an open door, which no one is able to shut.
I know that you have but little power, and yet you have kept my word and not denied my name. Behold, I will make those the synagogue of Satan who say they are Jews and are not, but lie. Behold, I will make them come and bow down before your feet. And they will learn that I have loved you because you have kept your word about patient endurance.
I will keep you from the hour of trial that's coming on the whole world to try those who dwell on the earth. I'm coming soon. Hold fast to what you have so that no one may seize your crown. The one who conquers, I will make him a pillar in the temple of my God, never shall he go out of it.
And I will write on him the name of my God, the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem, which comes down from my God out of heaven in my own new name. He who has an ear to hear, let him hear what I say to the churches. So this is conversation really about just knowing how valuable of a gift that you have. Every one of these churches we have this outline of a you, we have this standard generic one right here on the screen.
Every one of these letters goes through at the top of that you is a stable condition, at the bottom of that you is a disaster to be avoided. And if you can overcome that disaster, you find this new stable condition. Remember how if you were here last week or you watched last week, we talked about the fact that the church last week had no stable condition whatsoever at all. Like it was bad news bears.
What we find in this group today is that they don't have a disaster. Let's go to the next slide, Kim. They have this open door that has been given to them. There is no impending disaster.
And instead what's promising if they continue just a steadfast is a pillar of something that cannot be moved, but also a crown in the ancient Near East. And this point in time, this was what you would win and those original Olympic games, or if you were a champion or a conqueror, it's that crown. You would win these things if you just remain steadfast. There's not an impending disaster that you need to be aware of.
And so today I wanted to talk about the reality. What really that reality means to them. But then also why we might have a unique space to really try to hold on to this right now in our world that we have going on. The first thing is we want to read verse 10 for you again.
And we're just going to talk about that a little bit because there's a couple of things that are going on that are important that are interesting in there. This is what says, because you have kept my word about patient endurance. I will keep you from the hour of trial that's coming to the whole world. To try those who dwell on the...
Does anybody else just kind of curious what hardship looks like? Like why hardship happens? For the last six months I've got a list going in the back of my Bible of passages that helped me try to understand that. But what's the purpose of testing?
What's the purpose of trial? And we see as we talked about this a lot these last few weeks and it's showing up inside of our passage now. But really true what testing is, what trial is regardless of where it comes from or who is directing it. It's about proving who you are when pressure is exerted.
Let's just think about that. Who do you turn into when you get stressed? Who do you turn into when you get angry? What type of clarity does that actually reveal about your own personal character?
I've learned a lot about myself in the last few weeks from that. When you were put to the test what comes out. Testing is desired. It's there for us to show who we are that truth comes.
Peter, in his letter in 1 Peter he says that whenever the Christian is tested, whenever the Christian is suffering, whenever trials come, we should grieve those as a way for us to participate in the life of Christ. Regardless of what is happening, what is going on, that we willfully just become comfortable in the middle of these situations because Christ was comfortable in the middle of testing and trial. It's a piece of Christian resistance almost. And so we see that Jesus said to people, hey listen I'm going to take care of you all while you're in the middle of all of this because what you're proving to be true is proving to be good and is proving to be truthful.
But he also says I will keep you. This is interesting. It says in verse 11, hold fast, but to keep something means to watch over it, to keep guard, to protect, to defend, to see the inherent value that is in place and to realize that that's something that I must protect. And then there's also this interesting piece of Jesus saying, hey because you have kept me, I will keep you.
It's a little uncomfortable for us to think about reciprocity maybe that functions between us and Jesus. But Jesus is saying, hey because you've kept me, I will keep you, I can kind of point it's in there. It makes us just take on our own responsibility maybe a little bit more seriously. But what I love about this and where this really kind of begins to transition into not just something that's okay, just a revelation, this is kind of weird, there's words to repeat, this is the weird creep book of the Bible, what's going on, this doesn't matter or I hope this doesn't matter because bad stuff happens in a revelation.
What does this whole open door thing mean that Jesus is asking? At the very beginning of this passage, he says, I'm the one who has the door and no one can close it and no one can close the door and no one can open it. In verse 8, he tells them this, I know your works. Remember what we're talking about works, these are the things that you create.
This is the kind of truthful outcome of who you are. So I know your works, behold I've said before you an open door which no one is able to shut. This is a picture that we see all throughout the book of Revelation. We talked the very first week, chapters 1, 2, and 3 really are preparing us, that idea of human time and God's reality.
It's really preparing us to understand every single thing else that will happen. In Revelation 4, verse 1, John says, this is after this I looked him behold, a door standing open in the heaven. These doors are places of transition in Revelation, chapter 9, it speaks about throwing Satan into the pit and locking the door behind him. The doors are places where we are able to see new things, to step through, to experience new realities.
And here Jesus is telling these people because of your actions, because of the things that you have kept, because of your patient endurance, because of your willingness to live in my reality of the world, I am opening a door that will not be shut for you. Because of your steadfastness, but mainly because of your holiness, the key to my reality is fully yours. He's not saying this just now in the eternal, but he's also speaking this in a way that says, hey, this is the truth for who you are right now, for all of the crazy stuff that you're about to have to deal with. I'm giving you this, the resource, because you can handle it, that you have the spiritual capacity to step into just a new level of who I am, of who you are, and of where we are both now active in this world.
This is a reward for them. He's giving them a higher view of things because they have earned it, but also they have earned it because they have spiritually invested so much where they can handle it. Let's just think about that. Think about what that might mean.
Think about the power of that. Now think about what does it mean to have an above view, to have a summit view of things. If we look at God's reality, that idea of eternity, it means that we see fully around us what's going on in the way that God does. You might have heard that now, let's sit back and take a 30,000 foot view.
You've heard that term used. It's when you're able to see all the things around you, the good things, the bad things, the things that might happen, the things that have happened, just the clarity that just a top down view of things provides. One of our core values at Foundry is that we believe God's vision for this world is better than our vision for this world. To take this invitation that Jesus has given this church is to fully step into allowing God's reality, not just be a thing that we know that functions in our head, but to be this thing that this is how I'm going to choose to live my life.
This is where I'm going to find stability, and this is where I'm going to do things. In this elevation, we think about this, the ability to view things from this height. It gives us a couple of different things. The first thing is just tremendous clarity of where we have been, but also where we are going.
You've heard the phrase hindsight's 2020, right? We speak about that and we realize, well, we would have been a better decision back then. We tell you, there's also something about Holy Spirit, clarity in the past, is when maybe you step back and realize the situation was very, very different from what you assumed it to be at that moment. It might be a place where you have assigned tremendous blame in the past at others, and you're far enough away from it now to say, you know what actually out is a lot more complicit in that I expected to be.
The ability to learn from our past, but also the ability to take that learning to put into our present, also to apply to our future. She's, I believe that you give me, we spent three weeks earlier this summer talking about the clarity the presence of God provides us as believers. You know, from this high ground, we have tremendous clarity. The second thing we learned from this though is, you know, from this high ground, we see the benefit of holiness.
I don't think there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a thread throughout scripture of people meeting God in high places. We look at Moses and where he got the Ten Commandments. We look at Elijah and where he went to in moments of anxiety and depression, went to God because he felt threatened by Ahab and Jezebel and found compassion. And then God began providing rain to just back up Elijah and who he was.
We look at Jesus on the sermon on the Mount. We look at the transfiguration. You know, there's just something about the clarity that these high places, these moments with God, both physically and scripture, but also metaphorically when we say we've had a, a mountaintop moment or something, they, they give us. But then also we talk about this last week, you know, high places give us defensible ground.
High places give us the ability to see what's coming into prepare. High places give us the ability to shore ourselves up and get ready for when things might be rough for a little while. Let me ask you a question. The things, the things seem off to anyone else right now for the last few months, last six months.
Does this seem often anybody else? You know why it seems off? Because it's off. It is off.
Like it's jacked up out there. You know, and for so long we've tried to, I was going to get better. It's going to get better. Things are off because they are off.
It is followers of Jesus for us to deny that our greatest, and I don't want to, I hate using military language to describe the Kingdom of God, but for us to not see that our greatest spiritual and supernatural weapon is the presence of the Holy Spirit in our life, is to deny ourselves the thing that can and will help us, regardless of anything else. That for us to step into this high view of God's reality really and truly the best way for us to understand and for us to pull this conversation into the present day inside of our lives right now, and not in a non, in a non threatening and a non weird in a way that allows us to be part of the incarnation of Jesus Christ in our communities is for us to realize the role that prayer plays in situations like this. John Piper, pastor of North, he said this. Prayer is primarily a wartime walkie talkie for the church is in advances against the powers of darkness and unbelief.
It isn't an intercom for a small bit of domestic comfort in the living room until you know that life is war, you cannot know what prayer is for. You know, a lot of times we, I think we live in this view where we look at God's sovereign, God knows everything, God's going to do everything. God doesn't need my help. So I'm just going to pray a little bit because I know I'm supposed to do this.
I'm just going to say it once and get that out of the way and just ride this out and see what happens. I hate to speak to our own internal dialogue right now, but sadly that's what many of us do, right? For honest with ourselves. We check the box because we feel like we need to check the box.
We don't live in a way that checking the box does anything. If we go into scripture, if we go into develop a biblical theology of prayer, it will make us uncomfortable because there's this fine line that for people who don't spend that much time in prayer, we interpret as though God is changing his mind. But instead what we see is that in scripture people commend themselves completely and totally to prayer that they have the ability to change things because they are shifting the realities of the world. Instead of Jesus being the one to break God's reality in human time through their devotion to Christ, through their holiness, through their attachment to the supernatural, they begin breaking God's reality into their own moments of time.
We've talked about the fact that Jesus gives us kingdom, dominion over where we are. So people claim that and push that into reality. The book of Acts, there's a story that the Roman authorities in Jerusalem are fed up with the church. They are fed up with what they are doing and they capture James who is one of the disciples, the brother of John.
They also capture Peter. They have them in prison. They execute James. All of the Jews start going crazy and the Romans like the Jews to be happy.
So they realize, hey, let's go kill Peter next. Peter is in prison. He's chained up between two guards. He's in a cell.
The church is just in prayer and deep, deep, deep prayer for Peter. Let's talk about what does it mean to live with power and purpose and prayer in this moment now? So we can go into this doorway that God has promised us and is offered to us. The first thing is this prayer pushes us into God's reality.
purpose and prayer in this moment now so we can go into this doorway that God has promised us and has offered to us. The first thing is this prayer pushes us into God's reality. Prayer is not this sweet thing or this action of sentimentality. Prayer is powerful.
Prayer is far reaching. And prayer pushes into the things that change our world. Prayer is our greatest possibility. He imbounds a messist pastor in the 19th century.
He said this about prayer. We're going to talk about it a couple of times today. Prayer is the lungs through which holiness breathes. Our prayers are what puts us into this reality.
Our prayers are the life that we willfully take to say, God, I'm stepping out of my time and I want to step into your world. This is what we want about prayer. Second thing about prayer. Next slide.
Prayer assumes one thing, the direct intervention of God. We pray because we want him to move. We pray because we want him to act. Prayer is that door opening that we have.
Matthew chapter 7, verse 7, it says this to us. It will be given to you seeking. You will find knocking. It will be open to you for everyone who asks, receives.
And the one who seeks finds and to the one who knocks, it will be opened. So many times we don't want to engage with prayer because it frightens us. We've not seen it working away. We see it do things in this that we don't see in life around us.
And so we step back from it. Perhaps the reason we might not see it do things we read about here is because we've not prayed around us. We're not brought up in that situation. There's another quote from Ian Bounds for us to think about.
Prayer is always driven directly in an object and seeks to secure a desire to end. What does it mean to commend ourselves to prayer for the sake of things changing? Prayer is always about direct intervention with God. So I say, God, this is a place where we need you to be.
And so many times in order for us to create that space means we need to find out what of our own junk do we have filling up that room that we need to get out of there first. The last thing about prayer is this. Prayer conforms us to the image of God. You know, every one of us is as full of the Holy Spirit as we want to be.
Might not be as much as we wish to be, but it's as much as we want to be. As much as we have been willful at committing ourselves to pushing into the presence of God, committing ourselves to what we are actually asking for. And are we willing to yield over the space for it to allow him to come in and do these things that he's promised us? Richard Roor, a Catholic writer, says this, we cannot attain the presence of God because we're already totally in the presence of God.
What's absent is awareness. Now, what are the spaces where we just simply haven't allowed him to exist? What are the spaces in our life that we still want to be in our image? And not his.
No, prayer is powerful because prayer means giving up ground. It means giving things to him. It means realizing that we've false summited and we're willing to admit that and we're willing to step into that space and to go that way. Prayer means we realize that we are in a spiritual war, that we do not have the tools to win ourselves, that we want to be made in the image of God and thereby doing the things of God.
And we realize that that is what has the greatest change dynamics of the world around us. This summer, just my own reading, and I've talked about this a couple of times. I've been fascinated with early church history and I've been reading so much of where people are looking back now and to understand the behavioral patterns of the church in those first few centuries. And I realize that's mainly because there's so many just like echoes of similarity between where we are now and where things were back then.
I've been reading this book the last week from a guy named Rodney Stark. It's called the Triumpf of Christianity and it looks at the sociological reasons that Christianity grew in the first few seasons. And I was reading a couple of days ago. What's so interesting is that when they go into cemeteries or ossuaries or places where remains are kept, that starting at about the middle of the first century, Christians lived longer.
And so they dug into, okay, why are they living longer? And this book kind of is very much of, there's data there's charts in it. If you're nerdy, you'll love it like I do. They don't, he doesn't apply some spiritual or supernatural reason to this.
What he says is, if you look at the stories of the early church, if you look at Romans and records, if you look at writings, all these sorts of things, by about 150 AD, the Christians were living longer because in seasons of tremendous distress, they were merciful. They actually provided a better quality of life in the middle of what was destroying life. They lived longer. And that not only was this a testament to who they were, not only was it a point of attraction because people realized, wow, if I go over there, I'll be taken care of if I get sick.
That these early churches took on just this call to mercy that we find in the gospels and displayed that and made that prevalent in the places that they were given, the places where they lived, the places where they dwell. You know, if we ask ourselves that question, why does things seem to be off because they actually are off? What are we doing right now to make them on? If we're given this high view, if we're allowed into God's reality, see the power and the truth fulness of that is, then we would be just operating in a deficit if we did not start working on actualizing that things among us because they're given to us for that reason.
And that first step really is to realize we're in a spiritual war and so we're going to fight this doing spiritual things. We've learned this lesson that we have learned spiritually how to win wars because we know that one day God will win with peace. I'm going to read verse 12, the last verse of our passage this morning in the reading of passage 2, verse 12, said this, the one who conquers will make him a pillar in the temple of my God and never shall he go out of it and I will write on him the name of my God, the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem which comes down from my God out of heaven, my own new name. Now, if this is the beginning of this drumbeat that finds its rhythm and finds its full volume in Revelation chapter 21 verses 1 through 4.
And then I saw a new heaven and a new earth for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem coming down out of the heaven from God prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them and they will be his people and God himself will be with them as their God.
And he will wipe away every tear from their eyes and death shall be no more, neither shall be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore for the former things have passed away. All the things that can seem off about our life have not just stopped but have gone away, have been destroyed, but the possibility is no longer present. And this open door to this new permanent reality of God was given to the Philadelphia church, not just for eternity, but for their use in the life now. And friends, that same door has been opened to us.
The biggest thing that we can do is to step into the battle of this life spiritually and supernaturally and begin to understand, you know, these things might be happening in a way that I have a different tool set to overcome. And that door has been opened and that door has been promised to us. And so we're going to close today. A little bit different than normal.
And what we're going to do is this, you know, Madeline, the bench, there's still coming to sing in a second. But I want us just to begin taking ground back. I want us to think about that most immediate need that is in front of us right now is we look at some of our schools started going back last week, teachers started going back a couple of weeks before that. We've got students starting kind of staggered spread out across the next few weeks.
But I want us to close this morning and just do a couple of things. I want us to close by praying for school and for us to pray for just all of the realities that that opens up in our lives and in our world now. And so let's pray together. Father, we come to you.
God exercising a power that we might not know what to do with you. God, I think of God as opening scenes and back to the future when Marty plugs that guitar into that giant wall of amplifiers. And there's that sign that says, be careful. God, we are standing before that wall that says, be careful.
God, and we are willfully turning up that knob. You got to think of the words that you have given us over these last few months to understand what does it mean to be people of influence, to be people of space. God, to be people that are full of power and authority. Lord, and so we take on that mantle this morning.
God, I realize that for some of us, we might be watching online doing this, sitting in here. God, I realize that for some of us, there's some people who are like, yes, let's do this right now. God also, as the might of people saying, Brooks has gone off his rocker. God, that we are all of those spaces in between.
But Lord, if what we all agree on right now is this world needs something that we have not been able to provide. And so Jesus at the level that we are comfortable with doing so, God, we place these things before you, God, that we are carving out space and our own life for you to dwell in new ways. But God, we are specifically asking for you to watch over education right now. God, in our town and our cities and our parish.
We think back, we've got kids who started school back at OCS already. We've got college students who've gone back at U.L.M. We've got teachers who've been back for a couple of weeks in the public school system. And we've got kids that are super excited about getting back in school.
God, we're about halfway into this game. What we are praying for this morning is for safety. God is for patience. What I think of the teachers I've already had phone calls with, they're trying to figure out just how their technology works during this time, God.
We pray for those irons to be smoothed out. God, we come into this space wanting to view it in a light of your reality. God, as every one of these passages has closed out for the last six weeks, let us have eyes to see and ears to hear. God, we pray that you grow our spiritual capacity, not for our sake, but for the sake of others, for the sake of our communities and neighborhoods.
God, we pray for you to move and to protect our schools right now, to protect the teachers and staff and administration, God to protect our students. What we see stories across the country of places that reopen and have to shut down almost immediately again. God, we pray for that. We pray for protection.
We pray for you to be part of this with us. We pick this up because we know that your vision for the world is bigger than ours. We give this to you. We pray.
Amen.