We have now entered the season of Advent, a time of preparation and aniticipation, where we remember Christ's birth, anticipate his imminent return and prepare ourselves for something amazing to happen. In our series on Revelation, we began the messages given to the seven churches, with the second chapter of Revelation. The letters to the seven churches are words of encouragement, as well as instruction to each individual church. Some people read the letters as symbolic of different time periods throughout the history of Christianity as a whole, while others see each message as representative of different types of people, but I suggested that these letters can be understood to be different states that we all experience throughout our lives.
First we dealt with the words to the church in Smyrna, where the people were encouraged to continue in the way they were living, even in the face of persecution and death. This church was not told to change anything, but rather to stay the course. I said that this is like each one of us when we are not actively engaged in sin. When we are living holy lives. When this is the case for us (even if it only lasts mere minutes) the advice given here, is to keep up the good work!
Second we dealt with the churches of Pergamum and Thyatira. These two churches, we dealt with together, because they were being instructed about the same basic problem. In Pergamum the problem was with negative influences from without, while in Thyatira it was negative influences from within. The following story seemed to apply to both situations:
While still in high school, I had the privilege of attending Annual Conference at the University of Scranton in Scranton, PA. The final night of the conference, some friends and I decided to sneak out of our dorm late at night and see what kind of mischief we could get into. To make a long story short, we found a bench not chained down and decided to move it. In the midst of moving the bench, we were caught by a campus security guard, who instructed us to "stop right there." Naturally, I ran away. An ensuing chase followed in which the Scranton city police were involved, and several police and security vehicles. Once finally apprehended, I was threatened with jail but ultimately allowed to go back to my dorm (with some direction from the police, since I was completely lost). The whole story is very funny now, but at the time it was quite frightening.
Throughout, I was continually faced with negative influences from my friends as well as from myself. It started when we were told to "stop" and someone yelled "cops! run!" and continued everytime I found myself running without direction, knowing I was in the wrong, and yet hearing a voice within my head telling me to "keep running." That night I was my own worst enemy, and my friends certainly didn't help much. The same can be said for the churches of Pergamum and Thyatira. They were both being led astray by people whose advice and leadership were taking the churches away from God. It is for this reason that they were both instructed to repent. As an aside, to repent simply means to say your sorry and to stop doing that which you are sorry for. The same advice holds true in our own lives. When we find ourselves following bad influences and walking away from God, we merely need to repent (say we're sorry, and stop following those bad influences). God longs to forgive us when we make mistakes. God wants to be in relationship with us and have us following his lead.
The final church we dealt with was the church of Ephesus, who had lost their passion. The Ephesian Christians had resisted the teaching of false teachers, had avoided all those negative and misleading influences, but had somehow lost their passion along the way. The people in the Ephesian church were merely going through the motions. I have another story that seems to fit here:
In highschool I wrestled. My senior year I had to lose a good deal of weight (20 lbs) in order to wrestle at a weight class that I could be competitive. I ended up losing this weight in one week. That week happened to be the week of Thanksgiving. Needless to say, it wasn't the best week of my life. It was hard for me to keep the weight off, and I began to find myself hating wrestling, wishing I could just quite the team. I would go to practice, and I would compete, but my heart wasn't really in it. It seemed that somewhere along the line, wrestling had become all about winning (and therefore wrestling nearly 30 pounds below my normal weight). I went to my father and spoke with him about wanting to quit the team. After telling me about commitment and what it means to be a man of my word, he asked me why I wanted to quit. I told him my story about not enjoying it anymore, and he asked me if I ever enjoyed it. I told him "yes" and then he encouraged me to try and remember why I enjoyed it before, and to recapture that joy that I had lost.
God's advice to the church in Ephesus is the same as my father's advice to me. God points out that they no longer have passion for their faith, and then instructs them to remember their first love and repent. Again we have repentance (saying your sorry and stopping what your sorry for), but first the people are called to remember what it was that made them so passionate before. Again this instruction is not just for Christians nearly 2,000 years ago, but also for you and I. If we find ourselves losing our passion, just going through the motions, we too are encouraged to remember what it was that gave us that passion originally and to recapture it.
In all of the above churches, we should all be able to see ourselves at different times in our lives. Sometimes we are doing well, and so then we are called to keep on keepin on. Sometimes we are following bad influences, and so then we are called to repent, to turn back to God. Sometimes we find ourselves having lost our passion, merely going through the motions, and so then we are called to remember why we were passionate in the first place and to repent of our poor attitude. Next Sunday we'll continue looking at the final 3 churches and further learn how we can prepare during this season of Advent.
Grace & Peace,
Pastor John
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