Revelation 3:14-22

Ben Linn preaching from Revelation 3:14-22

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:18

Our scripture reading is Revelation 3, verses 14 through 22. To the Church in Laodicea, and to the angel of the church in Laodicea write, The words of the Amen, the faithful and the true witness, the beginning of God's creation. I know your works, you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not releasing that you are wretched, pitable, poor, blind, and naked. I counsel you to buy for me gold refined by fire, so that you may be rich in white garments, so that you may clothe yourself and the shame of your nakedness may not be seen, and solve to anoint your eyes so that you may see. To those whom I love, I reprove and I discipline, so be zealous and repent. Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If any one hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me. The one who conquers, I will grant him to sit with me on my throne, as I also conquered and sat down with my father on his throne. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. And so reads God's Word.

SPEAKER_00 1:43

Today marks the last day of our seven letters in Revelation. And so it's the last day. And it's also the last day in uh screen one, by the way, if you missed that announcement. Um we are maybe like a student, you know, returning home for the summer. We were in screen two for four and a half years there, so we'll be going back there for the months of July and August before we come back in this room in September. So if you're here next week, don't be here next week. Be over in screen number two. So some new stuff coming up there as well because we're going to be going back to our summer psalm series. We've been working through the book of Psalms every summer, and uh we are actually up to Psalm 90, so we'll be starting that off uh next week as well. So this is our seventh and final letter in Revelation, letters to the churches, as uh dictated by the Lord Jesus. And the Church of Laodicea, it's it's a little bit different, isn't it? A little bit different from the others that have come before it. Most of the churches have something that Jesus commends, something that he says is good, and maybe something to correct, so a little bit of commendation, a little bit of correction. The first letter, the one to Ephesus, has something like this. It says, I know your works, your toil, and your patient endurance. Good stuff. And then it says, But I but I have this against you that you've abandoned the love that you had at first. So something good, something to fix, something to turn around and do a little differently. A couple of the churches actually only have commendation. They don't have anything that uh the Lord Jesus uh condemns them or condemns in them. Only commendation, no conviction. But today we are looking at a church that Jesus has nothing good to say about. Doesn't seem to end the series on a very high note, but stick with me here. I look at this uh at this letter here like getting a tough diagnosis. If you go to the doctor and you get a hard meeting with him or her. Maybe you've had this experience, maybe somebody that you love, somebody that you're close to has had this as well. Get a hard, hard diagnosis in the doctor's office, news you didn't want to hear. And while it's hard to take in, the thing we've got to remember there is that the doctor is not giving this news to be cruel or to be unkind. Might be that there's you know an opportunity to look in the mirror. Maybe time to make some changes, maybe start a course of treatment, some prescription. But none of that can come without an honest look at the problem. And so that's what Jesus, the great physician, is offering to the Laodicean church. So we're gonna have a look at this letter through the lens of Jesus, the great physician diagnosing everything. We're gonna start with Jesus' credentials, because that's where he starts. And his credentials are that he is uniquely qualified. Now imagine if you're in that doctor's office and you're about to get some hard news, you're gonna want to know who says? Who says this is my diagnosis? Who's who's given this? You know, you're gonna look around at the wall, maybe there's, you know, up on there there's a diploma, you know, something uh from some great university there, maybe, you know, Trinity College or Royal College of Surgeons, maybe UCC, I don't know. But uh, a license to practice medicine, maybe a board certification, maybe a specialty, maybe a member in good standing, maybe second place in a ballroom dancing competition. We don't know. But all of these things are pointing you to the idea that this doctor who's about to give you this news is uh keeping you in good hands there. You're not coming to some quack being looked after well here. Jesus here does the same. So if you take a look at verse 14, it says, you know, and to the angel of the church in Laodicea write the words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of God's creation. So who's writing this letter? Who who would uh say such things to us? Who's making this diagnosis? They might have said. Let's take a look at three ways that Jesus describes himself. First of all, he says he's the amen. Now, amen is a word that we use a lot in church. I don't know if we know what it necessarily means, but it it's something we say at the end of a prayer. It's something where if we feel particularly encouraged or inspired by something that's being said, you know, you might say an amen. Amen? All right, there you go, thank you. But it means truth. That's what it comes down to. The word amen means truth. You know, in the Gospels, you can read passages where Jesus says, you know, truly I say to you, or truly, truly I say to you. That word truly there in the original Greek is amen.

unknown 6:41

Right?

SPEAKER_00 6:41

Amen, amen. I say it to you. It's true. Or in 2 Corinthians, where the apostle Paul writes that Jesus is the yes to all the promises of God, and so we say our amen to him, because the promises are true. So Jesus is truth. It's not just that he speaks truth, it's not just that he knows truth, it's that he himself is the truth. He's the fulfillment of all the promises of God. And he is the last word. Not just that he has the last word, he is the last word. Secondly, it says that he is the faithful and true witness. Now, the idea of faithful and true goes along with the amen. This is actual, genuine count on it. But it also has the idea of a witness, and a witness is someone who testifies, someone who speaks forth. John's Gospel, John, same John who's writing the book of Revelation here. John's Gospel says that Jesus came to explain the Father to mankind. And really, who else could be this kind of witness? Someone who is one with the Father, fully God, but also fully human. Someone who can provide testimony that we, as people, can relate to. Third, it says that he's the beginning of God's creation. This isn't saying that Jesus was the first thing or person that God created. This is saying that Jesus was the beginning of it. He's the one that kicked off the whole process, the source, the cause, the agent by which all of it was done. He came before everything we can see. So, what does this point us to? Well, Jesus, the Amen, the truth, the fulfillment of promises, the final word, the faithful and true, the unwavering and steadfast witness. The one who was there before it all began, the one who brought it all into being, none could be more eminently qualified. There's no second opinion. Can't go for a second opinion here. Jesus is uniquely positioned both to know what's wrong and how to fix it. So we better listen to this one. Now, of course, independent of this letter, we can we can take this and apply it to all of Scripture. The same credentials that Jesus has here applies to his whole word. I had a pastor once who said, you know, there's areas of scripture that I disagree with. But he says, God says this, I say this, one of us is wrong. And since we're talking about the Amen, the faithful witness, the beginning of God's creation, we can be pretty confident that it wasn't uh my friend the pastor who was who was uh right in that. It was it was not Jesus who was wrong. The more we look at Scripture through this lens, the more we'll be able to live the life that He's called us to. So that's the credentials. Next we're gonna look at the diagnosis. And the diagnosis that uh Jesus gives them here is you are vomit inducingly lukewarm. Okay? Hard words. But take it up from verse 15 here. What does it say here? It says, I know your works. You're neither cold nor hot. Would that you were cold or hot? So because you are lukewarm and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. Now the medical wisdom of this time, look this up here, was that lukewarm water was an emetic, right? It was something that would make you throw up, make you vomit. And there are quite a few uh English versions of scripture where it doesn't say I'll spit you out, it says I'll vomit you out. So hard words. But what does he mean? What is this idea of being lukewarm? What is he actually getting at here? Because, you know, a diagnosis isn't particularly helpful if you don't understand what it's about. I remember there was a film I saw when I was a kid where the doctor said, Oh, the patient has immediate postprandial upper abdominal distension, which sounds just catastrophic. But I think it just means that you're a little bloated after you eat. So, what can lukewarm mean in this sense? Instinctively, I think we might have an idea. We might say, oh, you know, lukewarm, you're you're you're phoning it in, right? You're going through the motions, you're drifting. Imagine if you got if you got called into your boss's office, or maybe an academic supervisor, or you sat down with a significant other, and they're saying, you know, you've been a bit lukewarm lately. Not a good thing. Now, it stands to mention that lukewarm is the way of the world. Everything's kind of heading in this direction. Sam is gonna tell us uh later uh in a lecture upstairs, right, uh, about uh the second law of thermodynamics and the law of entropy and the heat death of the universe. But everything kind of going from order to mixed up, lukewarm. Are you gonna do that, Sam? Can you do that? Thank you. Thank you. All right, very good. But we all know this. If I take a glass of water and I set it on the counter, what's gonna happen to it? In a short space of time, it's gonna assume room temperature. It's gonna be the same. Doesn't matter if it's boiling hot when I set it down or if it's ice cold, eventually, it's gonna match the temperature of the room around it. It's gonna be lukewarm. If I want water that's hot, I have to heat it up. If I want water that's cold, I have to chill it, I have to refrigerate it, I have to put ice in it, I have to do something. But what do I have to do to make it lukewarm? Nothing. And it's that way for us in a lot of different ways. I think that we don't really drift towards anything positive, right? We don't drift towards better health, we don't drift towards better relationships, and we certainly don't drift towards holiness. We don't drift towards a better relationship with Jesus. We can be lukewarm in so many different ways, and it's not something that we have to even think about how we're doing. It's easy to live out that doobie brother song, Jesus is just all right with me. But it's easy to come to church, not really get involved. Easy to be a Christian on Sunday, but not the rest of the week. Easy to deflect when colleagues or classmates ask about our faith or our background or what we're doing on a Sunday morning. I've done it. Doesn't take any action, doesn't require any hard decisions. You just go with the flow. Path of least resistance. Kind of a coming up to room temperature, making you gag. Now Jesus gives not only his diagnosis, but he but he nails down the cause as well. Verse 17, he says, For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing. Not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. Seems that uh Laodicea was a prosperous city. They made their made their money selling high-quality wool. So you can picture the church, and I like to picture them walking around head-to-toe, Dunegal tweed. But uh you can picture them comfortable in their own resources, not recognizing their absolute need of Jesus. Not living out of a sense of thankfulness or dependence. Living not for Jesus and his coming kingdom, but for the here and now. Maybe their faith started off active and engaged, but it's it's assumed room temperature. It's just one thing among many for them, maybe. Not the one thing that sits over and above everything else. Lukewarm, and they don't even know it. Now I'll give you, I'll give you an illustration from my illustrious baseball career. Maybe infamous is a better term for it there. And I know not everybody is familiar with baseball, but this this will make sense. I was playing baseball, this was last last summer. I was playing on the defensive side of the game, so I was out in the field, I was playing third base, and one of my teammates went to throw me the ball so I could get another, get the opposing player out. It's a very exciting time. And I lined up to get the throw, and I recognized, as soon as it left his hand, it's not gonna make it to me. It's not gonna get there. It's gonna bounce before it comes to me, and moreover, it's gonna bounce maybe about right there, maybe like one or two meters away from me. And in my experience, when you have that, you're just kind of guessing where it's gonna bounce because you don't have time to react. And so we could call that the in-between hop, that's what we call it in baseball terms, but we might just as easily call it the lukewarm hop. What I did in that particular case is I had to run up and I had to field it on the bounce so that it hit the ground. You can't see me down here, but I promise it's here. It hit the ground and then immediately hit my glove, right? And if you listen to somebody doing a short hop like that, it's just like right into. And it doesn't matter which way the ball bounces because you're smothering it, you're catching it, you're getting it. It's not going anyplace.

unknown 15:59

Okay?

SPEAKER_00 15:59

The other thing that I could have done is I could have created some distance between myself and the hop so that it you know bounced and came up and started to come at. This way I have time to read it, right? I can see, is it here, is it here? And I could have could have kept it. Either way of those is fine, right? If we if we think of this as you know being hot, right, think of this over here as being maybe cold. The one thing I can't do is be in the middle. One thing I can't do is stay here and be lukewarm. Because nine times out of ten, or maybe ninety-nine out of a hundred, that's gonna bounce and it's gonna go past me. And that runner's gonna round third and and he's gonna score. Not a good thing. So I just told you about a time on the field where I did it right, ladies and gentlemen. So thank you for letting me share that. Because I could tell you about a lot more times in the field where I didn't get it right. I've been playing baseball a long time, but I only really figured that out within the last few seasons here. I could tell you about times where trying to play an in-between hop and the ball came up and hit me in the face. I can tell you about many, many times where I didn't touch it, didn't come anywhere close to it, and it got past me. Because I didn't know. I didn't know about this lukewarm hop, I didn't know about the in-between. I was lacking awareness. Thing about it is though, awareness only gets you so far. I have to also be alert. Right? I have to recognize that in any situation, any ball that's batted to me, any ball that's thrown to me, it might bounce. I have to be ready to read the hop and figure out which way do I need to go. Do I need to go in? Do I need to come out? Aware and alert, and all the awareness and all the alertness won't happen if I'm not on my toes and ready to actually make a move. Okay? I have to be active. And it seems to me that's what we need in our walk with the Lord, to keep from being lukewarm in any situation. Imagine you're having a conversation with an unbelieving coworker. It's not enough just to be aware that, you know, an opportunity to talk about the things of Christ might come up. It's not even enough to be alerted and watchful for it. We've got to be ready to spring into action, to take that opportunity, to have that conversation and take it there.

unknown 18:18

Right?

SPEAKER_00 18:18

Just like the Apostle Peter wrote, always being ready to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that's in you. Yet do it with gentleness and respect. Now, sharing our faith is only one way that we as Christians can be lukewarm. And believe me, I know that firsthand. But these ideas come in when it comes to facing temptation. I need to be aware that it needs to be avoided, I need to be alert that it may present itself in certain situations, and I need to be active to avoid it by the strength of the Holy Spirit. Or when we need to be reconciled to one another, right? There's been an offense, there's been something that needs to be forgiven. It's not enough to just be aware that we're called to forgive and to seek forgiveness. You know, it's not it's not enough to be alert that, you know, maybe now is the time, but I have to be active. I have to step in and I have to have to do it there. That is that is what it is to be not lukewarm, to be hot or cold. Really anything that we're trying to apply from Scripture to our lives, aware, alert, and active. Now, I don't want us to get thinking that the Christian walk is just like this whole thing of doing more, you know, being busy, justifying ourselves by what we're doing. Because the church of the church at Laodicea may have been self-satisfied. They may have been resting on their laurels a bit. But it's very easy. We could just as quickly take this into some legalistic expression of faith, where you know, we're just more concerned about how much we're doing, how effective we are, that sort of thing. You know what we're also called to in scripture? We're called to rest. We're called to be still and know that He is God. We're called to entrust ourselves to Him in every situation. But we can be lukewarm in these things as well, can't we? The thing for us all to pick up on here is to be intentional, to be alert and aware, ready for action wherever the situation demands. Going against the natural order, fighting that second law of thermodynamics, fighting our natural inclinations in his strength for his glory. Alright, so we've seen the diagnosis was being lukewarm. Now we come to the prescription. What does the Lord Jesus say that they need to do? Well, prescription here is fix your hope on the things of Christ. You can look at the end of verse 17. Jesus says the church is poor, blind, and naked. Alright, three things. Even though they think they have it all together, so this this prescription makes a lot of sense given the assessment. You're poor, so get some wealth. You are blind, so heal up your eyes. You're naked, so put some clothes on. But not just any wealth, not just any healing, and not just any clothes. Jesus is very specific. Verse 18, he says, I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, that you may be rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourself, and the shame of your nakedness may not be seen, and salve to anoint your eyes so that you may see. There's a couple of words that are very important there. From me. Right? Buy from me gold, buy from me white garments, buy from me salve for your eyes. These goods aren't something that you can just go to any pharmacy and collect. They're not as the world gives. They're from Jesus and from Him alone. Remember, this church is relying too much on their own. Material comfort. They're lukewarm because they've forgotten that the one who supplies their needs is Jesus. He's making it clear they put their hope in the wrong place. They're going around thinking they have the finest of everything. But in spiritual terms, in eternal terms, in terms of the things that really matter, there as an acid is the day they were born. Now, growing up in the U.S., there used to be these ads on the radio and on television to buy gold. You should buy gold, they said. Because stocks, they're just paper. If those companies go down, your retirement is nothing. You should buy gold. Because gold is always valuable. Dump all your stocks and bonds. And you should, of course, buy that gold from us, right? Because we're just here to help. Now, this is obviously scammy and profiteering, whatever else. Not like the Lord Jesus has given us here, but the message is similar, isn't it? Jesus is saying, hey, you've put your hope in the wrong things. You've put it in stuff that's not going to last, stuff that's not going to endure, stuff that's not going to see you through. So walk away from the worthless investment in the things of the world and instead invest in the eternal. Now, let me be clear. Jesus is not against wealth here. He's not saying you should take a vow of poverty. But he's saying, you know, you should be careful about living for it. You should be careful about building your life upon it. We are called to use whatever resources he entrusts to us as stewards for his purposes. And it's not that we're buying our way into the kingdom. I can't stand up here and say, you know, give me a donation and I'll get you a better seat. It's not how that works. It's about the heart. It's ordering that love, ordering that hope correctly. What I have today, I thank God for. What I have today, I seek to honor Him with. What I have today, I may not have tomorrow. And guess what? God will still be good. Now, if this aspect of the Laodicean church sounds familiar, it's because it's us, isn't it? It's the way of the Western world. What keeps people out of churches? A lot of times it's their sense of having what they need. What keeps Christians lukewarm? Same thing. So the best thing for us to reflect upon is where we've placed our hope. Are we living for wealth and comfort? Are we compromising our values to get it? Are we prioritizing the work of our company over the work of the kingdom? Are we trying to hold on to what can't last? Are our account activity and our diary in conflict with what we say we believe? If the answer to any of these questions starts to creep towards yes, well, we know what the prescription is. Fix your hope on the things of Christ. Finally, it's time for the prognosis. Prognosis is great, and it uh prognosis here is fellowship, unity, and victory. And I'll bring you back to what I said at the beginning. Just like your doctor doesn't share hard news with you to be unkind, neither does the Lord Jesus. This is called out explicitly in verse 19. If you look at it there, it says, Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline. So be zealous and repent. And really, this idea is all over Scripture. You can see it in Hebrews 12 and Deuteronomy 8 and 2 Samuel 7, all over the place. And if you want to look beyond what's explicitly called out there, basically everything that's in the Bible has a redemptive purpose. Everything that the Lord reveals to us has a redemptive purpose. Sometimes those are hard words, but the purpose of those hard words is correction. It's repentance, it's restoration. It's like a loving parent, you know, like your hand is getting pretty close to that stove there. Be careful. You get yourself hurt. Take a look at verse 20. It says, Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anybody hears my voice and opens the door, I will come into him and eat with him, and he with me. Now, obviously, this is not the call of a vengeful, wrathful, condemning God. It's more like, you've been struggling. You've been having a hard go here. Going your own way. Let me come and share a meal with you. It's pretty encouraging already. Makes me think of, you know, when I was younger, Doreen and I were first married, and we'd have a hard week, struggling financially, small children, whatever else. To be able to sit down with family, just feel like, okay, we're accepted, we're included, we're part of something. Maybe things aren't quite as bad as we think they are. But you realize this is even before we get to the promise for the one who conquers. Verse 21 says, To the one who conquers, I will grant him to sit with me on my throne as I also conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne. And this is a remarkable image. Pretty intense because he's saying that ordinary Christians, ordinary people like you and me, will be sharing directly in the victory that Jesus has won. We, his people, are united to him. Now I suppose a prognosis is given so that you know whether or not the treatment is worth having. A few years ago, I was having some pain in my shoulder. Went and talked to a surgeon. Because it was a surgeon, you know, he recommended surgery, right? That's what they do. But he started talking me through the procedure, prognosis, all of this stuff. And what I got from it was, you know, sometimes makes everything great. Sometimes there's minor improvements, and sometimes, rarely, probably, it makes it ten times worse, and there's nothing you can do to fix it at that point. I didn't do the surgery, guys. It turns out that a little digging and found out there's another way to go about this: a cortisone shot, some physio, a little strengthening, and it doesn't bother me anymore. So that's great. But you can understand why I didn't go forward with the surgery. Surgical option there. I found something else that worked better. Something that didn't carry the risk, something that didn't mean six weeks in a sling and possibly a lifetime of pain. I found a good viable alternative. But Jesus doesn't come here. His prognosis doesn't have a whole list of side effects and potential complications. He doesn't come to the Laodiceans with what their chances of recovery are. He puts it quite simply: if you accept my credentials, if you trust my diagnosis, if you undertake my prescription, this is the prognosis. No two ways about it. And the upside on this is so incredibly positive that we'd honestly even struggle to understand how beautiful it is. But that, of course, we can still get this wrong, can't we? We can still feel like this prognosis feels far off and abstract. Feel like it's a long way from our daily experience. So our challenge as Christians is to make sure we're not getting things the wrong way around. Are we looking at our experiences to help us understand who God is? Or are we looking to God to help us understand our experiences? These are two very different lenses to view the world. One of them shifts and changes. One of them stays constant. One of them provides nothing for the hard moments of life. And the other points us to a greater hope beyond all this. Have you ever wondered why the Bible is so full of instructions to remember? It's because we're very quick to forget sometimes. William Osler, one of the co-founders of Johns Hopkins, is quoted as saying: the good physician treats the disease, the great physician treats the patient. What's on display in this letter is truly a great physician, looking with care to his patients in the Laodicean church, and by extension to us as well. So maybe you've been listening this morning and you can see some ways in your walk that you've become lukewarm. And let's remember that's not a call to shame and anguish. The prescription here is to repent. And repent isn't some big thing. Repent just means I'm going this way. I need to go this way. We talk about the Christian walk. If you've ever walked across Dublin and gotten lost or gone the wrong way, it's not a big deal. Find out I'm going the wrong way. I'm going to turn and I'm going to go the right way. So if we find that we are going the wrong way in our walk with the Lord, let's go to Him. Let's turn around and go the right way. Maybe you're listening this morning and it's not as clear where you might need to apply this prescription, if that's you. Might need to go in for some further examination. Can ask the Lord to search and reveal the last couple of verses of the 139th Psalm, which we'll get to in a few summers. Search me, O God, and know my heart. Try me and know my thoughts. See if there be any grievous way, maybe any lukewarm way. Lead me in the way everlasting. Maybe you've been listening this morning and you haven't yet met this Jesus. And if that's you, thank you for being here. There will be at least some elders down front. There'll be a prayer team, people who'd be happy to talk with you, pray with you, answer questions, all of that sort of thing. But I'd encourage you to reflect on this, Jesus. Reflect on this amen, this faithful and true witness, this one offering so much to his people. Will today be the day you follow him as Lord. Church, let's be hot or cold. Let's live out the call of our great physician, the Lord Jesus, and see what he does.

unknown 32:54

Come on.

SPEAKER_00 32:55

Let me pray. Father, thank you for uh this passage. Thank you for the reminder that we need to come to you with thankfulness, dependence. But you give us your spirit and you give us the ability to be hot or cold and to live out the life that you've called us to. Lord, I pray that you would help us to see in practical ways, in day-to-day times. How do we need to look at our lives differently? How do we need to come to you differently? And how do we need to see differently? Thank you for this uh this series, Lord. Thank you for the encouragement that it's been. We pray for all of us. In Jesus' name.

unknown 33:49

Amen.

SPEAKER_00 33:52

Now we'll come over here to the Lord's table. Get to do this.

SPEAKER_02 34:06

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