Revelation 3:1-6
August 3, 2025
1‘And
to the angel of the church in Sardis write: These are the words of him who has
the seven spirits of God and the seven stars:
‘I know your works; you have a name for
being alive, but you are dead. 2Wake up, and strengthen what
remains and is at the point of death, for I have not found your works perfect
in the sight of my God. 3Remember then what you received and
heard; obey it, and repent. If you do not wake up, I will come like a thief,
and you will not know at what hour I will come to you. 4Yet you
have still a few people in Sardis who have not soiled their clothes; they will
walk with me, dressed in white, for they are worthy. 5If you
conquer, you will be clothed like them in white robes, and I will not blot your
name out of the book of life; I will confess your name before my Father and
before his angels. 6Let anyone who has an ear listen to what
the Spirit is saying to the churches.
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I’ve
decided to add a new place to my bucket list.
It’s the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park in California. For the most part, it looks like this:
As gray as it is, you can spot a few yellow dots in
this picture and some pale green. The
website for the park says a few things about rattlesnakes that I skipped over
and then that the park has “92 different plant families, 346 genera and
hundreds of flowering species”.
A lot
of them are going to be cactuses or grasses adapted to a desert environment,
but there will also be species like this desert lily:
That isn’t, strictly speaking, a lily. It is from a similar family, though, and
grows from a bulb. The lily bulbs we are
used to stay underground all winter and wait until it warms up enough in the
spring to emerge and flower. These stay
underground all summer and come out when it is cool enough to appear above
ground.
The
two major factors in this environment are, obviously, the heat and the scarcity
of water. Every so often, though, there
are the torrential rains that southern California gets, the kind that cause
flash floods and mudslides in Los Angeles.
Further out in the desert, if the winds are just right and various
conditions permit, like in 2024, there may be a rare rainstorm and then this
happens:
When
John wrote from exile to the church in Sardis, he sent a word to them on behalf
of Jesus saying that there was a kind of desert dryness to them that could send
them either way. On one hand, they might
look good, but that appearance isn’t everything.
“You have a name for being alive, but you
are dead.” [Revelation 3:1]
Then again, the Lord doesn’t just give up, and neither
should his people. Even a desert can
bloom if the right conditions are met. A
place may have a name for being dead, but come alive.
“Wake up, and strengthen what remains and
is at the point of death, for I have not found your works perfect in the sight
of my God. Remember then what you received and heard; obey it, and repent.” [Revelation
3:2-3]
The challenge of living in a time or place of
spiritual aridity, a time or place that cannot truly gauge the signs of when
real faithfulness and discipleship are present is a time to lean even more on
Jesus’ promises and to trust him more certainly when he says,
“I will not blot your name out of the book
of life; I will confess your name before my Father and before his angels.” [Revelation
3:5]
Since
Revelation sends this message to a church, it’s right to put it into the
context of a church in our day. Thom
Rainer wrote in 2020,
“Western culture has shifted; and it has shifted
largely against churches. …I can only imagine how the first-century Christians
felt as they were trying to reach a world that needed to hear the good news of
the resurrected Savior. I can only
imagine their excitement and their fear.
They knew the path ahead would be both difficult and dangerous. But they also knew their efforts would be
worth the cost.
As we enter this unknown era, we’re uncertain about
the specifics of what will unfold, but we remain certain that the God of all
wisdom and power will be with us every step of the way.”[1]
The
same message applies across the board in all sorts of situations for people who
are doing their best just to be faithful followers of Jesus but who feel
unsupported in that for whatever reason.
One writer, Kenneth Leech, points to and applauds a kind of Christian courage
that is heroic exactly because it recognizes how upside-down the world’s
judgments of success are. His main focus
is on what goes on inside people when they pray and he writes,
“All spirituality must learn to cope with doubt and
confusion, and prayer which is true can never be cosy [sic] and secure. …Yet we
do not pray in order to provide ourselves with defenses against danger, but in
order to face the danger through the power of the God who has been there first,
who has cleansed the waters and harrowed hell.”[2]
Or, as Jesus himself put things:
“In the world you
face persecution, but take courage: I have conquered the world!” [John
16:33]
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