05 Sardis: Wanted Alive Not Dead

Copyright © 2019 by Michael A. Brown

Reviving the Church

To the angel of the church in Sardis write:

“These are the words of him who holds the seven spirits of God and the seven stars.  I know your deeds; you have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead.  Wake up!  Strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have not found your deeds complete in the sight of my God.  Remember, therefore, what you have received and heard; obey it, and repent.  But if you do not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what time I will come to you.

Yet you have a few people in Sardis who have not soiled their clothes.  They will walk with me, dressed in white, for they are worthy.  He who overcomes will, like them, be dressed in white.  I will never blot out his name from the book of life, but will acknowledge his name before my Father and his angels.  He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.”

(Rev. 3:1-6)

TO have developed a reputation is to have been known and observed repeatedly at close quarters over a period of time by different people.  Having a good reputation means that we have proven ourselves in some way and that we are not simply mediocre or run-of-the-mill.  We have a name and people speak well of us.

This church in Sardis had a good reputation.  It had a past in which it had flourished and been successful in its work and ministry, and, because of this reputation, it would no doubt have been frequented from time to time by believers from other places.  Indeed, it was still considered by others to be a successful church; they did not consider it to be dead.

We are not told exactly why it had such a good reputation. Perhaps because of the size of its congregation or the preaching of its leaders, or because of the worship and prayer that went on there, or because of the exemplary lives of its believers, or the power of its gospel preaching and miracles that had happened there.  Whatever, its reputation was of being a church that was alive, so the blessing, presence and power of God had truly been there in the past in some marked way.

Losing our spiritual vitality through complacency

One of the dangers that success can bring in church life is that we become secure and satisfied in our church’s inward life, so we plateau and begin to rest on our laurels.  We slacken off in the race and begin to take it easy.  We go off the boil, often without realising it or admitting it to ourselves.  Yet, even so, we can still maintain our good reputation before others, even for a while.

However, when we are no longer walking with the Lord in close fellowship in the today of our experience, then we can survive on our reputation only for so long before the success of the past slowly fades and becomes nothing but a façade, simply a glistening surface covering up the uncomfortable truth of an inner heart and spiritual life which in reality are decaying, dying off or even altogether dead.

We are not told that this church was being persecuted, so we can assume that, as can happen with any group of believers anywhere, it had become complacent (3:2, cf. Amos 6:1).  And as so often happens when things get like this, believers lose their spiritual fire and freshness, and begin to settle down and live comfortable lives in the surrounding society.  Our spiritual vitality dies off and we begin to slumber and fall asleep.  We avoid hardship, embracing convenience and self-centred comfort, rather than pursuing the call of God with whole-hearted zeal.  We justify our present state by appealing to the success of the past.

To use an analogy from the game of chess, we can start well, but we can fail in the middle part of the game.  This is the easiest part of the game in which to lose it, the part that is most complex and which demands focused concentration.  This church in Sardis was in the middle part of its game, and the believers there were losing it.  To have started well in our lives as believers is no guarantee that we will finish well.

We build monuments and put up plaques to honour the lives and ministries of those whom God greatly used to raise up our church movements, but, as someone once rightly said, we are careful not to imitate their example of surrender, self-sacrifice and zeal.  It so often seems to be the case that the generation following a founding pioneer generation settles down and does not measure up to the calibre and quality of their spiritual forebears, so they cannot take the work forward in the same way.  Ask Joshua, he knows…

As this state of affairs goes on unchecked, we develop a mentality of living on past glory, trapped in the memories of the blessings of the past, rightly honouring those whom God used but without experiencing any fresh movement of God’s Spirit in the present.  We become religious and formal.  Our Christianity slowly becomes churchianity.

In our hearts, we backslide and we stop bearing fruit.  We lose our zeal for the gospel.  We keep quiet about our faith and we stop offering non-believers the simplicity of the gospel message that can save and transform their lives (cf. 3:5, Mark 8:38).  We are no longer a challenge to the powers of darkness.  The word of God, the sharp double-edged sword of the Spirit, becomes blunt and starts rusting away in our hands.  It lacks freshness and anointing, and so it loses its life-changing power and we slowly stop believing in its absolute relevance to people’s lives.  We preach messages that pander to people’s desire for comfort, and avoid teaching on things that might make people feel uncomfortable or convicted by God’s truth.

We continue singing our ageing songs, worshipping comfortably in the security of our church citadel, far from the daily world of non-believers.  Our daily lives do not impinge in any meaningful way upon theirs, so we no longer make any impact on them or on the community around us.  The kingdom of darkness maintains its grip on their lives, while the church itself slowly dies off from within.  We become nothing more than simply irrelevant.

      As believers and as a church, we cannot survive on what we experienced yesterday or yesteryear.  Our God is a God of the present, not simply a God of the past, and he actively wants to incorporate us into co-working with him in the present, having the privilege of seeing him working powerfully today.  The church was never meant by God to be a monument to the past, or to be a place in which believers talk only about what God did in by-gone days.  No, he is a God of the up-to-date, of the present, of today; he has not changed.  The church is intended by God to be the living bearer of his life-giving presence in this world.  A church which is surviving on its past reputation is a church which is not fulfilling God’s purpose for it in the present, and it has no future.

      So, even though this church in Sardis had a reputation in the eyes of others, yet God saw right down into the heart of its life.  He has eyes that see and he cuts to the quick (cf. Heb. 4:12).  Our external reputation in the eyes of others is not enough to save us before God. He declared plainly and simply to these believers that they had lost contact with his life-giving presence and therefore they were, in fact, dead.  They were no longer abiding in the Vine (cf. John ch.15).  True spiritual life in Sardis had withered and was dying off.  They had the outward trappings of a successful church, but many of their hearts within were spiritually lifeless.

      Although there remained a few believers in the church who still walked closely and intimately with God and whose lives were unstained (3:4), yet the majority of them were backslidden and their hearts had gone cold.  They had no life in themselves and they had no life to offer and give to others.  Their meetings were an outward shell of religious finery, but they were devoid of the real life-giving presence of God.  The well of living water within this church had largely dried up.  Complacency blinds us to our true spiritual state and we can deceive ourselves into thinking that we are still something that we were, but that in reality we no longer are.  Many of these believers were now living very ordinary lives which were compromised with the world around them (cf. 3:4).

Renewal through the life-giving presence of the Holy Spirit

      The theme that runs through this brief letter to the church in Sardis is that of contrasting spiritual life with spiritual death.  When spiritual life begins to wane and dry up in this way, we need a new and fresh move of God in our midst, to feel the wind of his Spirit in our sails once again.  A church which has lost touch with the life-giving presence of the Holy Spirit is a church that may well be able to maintain a good-looking, respectable outward shell of regular religious activity even for many years, but it is sure to die off sooner or later and slowly dwindle in numbers until eventually there is hardly anyone left.  The heart-beat of God’s life-giving presence is not there.  Such a church needs awakening and reviving.  The key to reviving a dead and dying church is to seek the living, ascended Christ who presents himself here as the One who has and gives the seven-fold Spirit of God, and to seek him with all our hearts until we find him.

      The secret of spiritual awakening lies in being filled with the Holy Spirit and in determining to embrace and honour him, by giving him the freedom he needs to work in church life, ministry and witness, rather than quenching him (1 Thess. 5:19).  The Spirit of Yahweh gives us life:

‘The Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of power, the Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the LORD.’

(Isa. 11:2)

‘It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh counts for nothing.’

(John 6:63, cf. Rom. 8:2)

      The Holy Spirit awakens us from our lethargy, sleepiness and deadness.  He opens our eyes and renews our strength, and the power and presence of God begin to work once again in our lives and in our midst.

      When the Holy Spirit is freely working in a church environment, there is new life: there are streams in the desert and the wilderness becomes a garden; instead of thorns and weeds, flowers begin to sprout and bloom; the wilderness rejoices and blossoms; the eyes of the blind are opened; fresh, living water gushes forth and feeds and waters every living thing; there is holiness and purity, and sin is cleansed away (cf. Isa. 32:15-17, ch.35).

      God’s life-giving presence dwells amongst us and is real and active again (Eph. 2:22, 2 Cor. 6:16).  The hunger of people’s souls is satisfied, and new, fresh testimonies are created as he works in their lives.  There is a new song on our lips.  And we soon discover that his purposes for us and the works he wants to do through us are not finished yet; our deeds are not complete (3:2).  There is still more to do and more fruit to come.  So God becomes once again a God of the now.  Then we do not need to rely any longer on the reputation of our past, because we are experiencing God working anew and this builds a new reputation for our church in the eyes of others.  People talk about what God is doing now in this place, rather than focusing only on what he did in the past.

      To stay spiritually alive, and so to be able to walk with God and be relevant to the world in which we live, a church must become and remain Spirit-filled.  In fact, the church only really has a future if it is Spirit-filled.  It is only the power of the life of God that can change the lives of believers and non-believers alike, and it is only Spirit-filled believers who can make a real and lasting impact on the lives of those around them.  So as believers, both individually and corporately, we must keep on being filled with the Spirit (Eph. 5:18) and we must learn to be sensitive and obedient to his voice and leading (3:6).

      God’s design and purpose for the church from its very inception has always been that it should be a community of believers deeply permeated and animated with the tangible, life-giving presence and power of the Holy Spirit.  The church is meant to be a well of living water to which thirsty people can come, drink at and be satisfied (Isa. 12:3, 32:2, 55:1, 57:11; cf. Rev. 22:17).  It is this that makes the church distinct from all other social communities in the world.

      When we leave off walking closely with God (for whatever reason), we stop abiding and living in the life-giving Vine (John 15:1-16) and we soon lose our spiritual vitality and freshness.  We begin to wilt and die off (3:1).  We are told that much of the remaining spiritual life of this church in Sardis was about to die off (3:2).  To maintain the freshness of our life in Christ and to keep bearing fruit, we need to abide consistently in him and to live close to him.  Only then can the life-giving sap of the Vine keep flowing into us as branches.  It is the Spirit of life dwelling and alive within us who revitalizes and energizes our spiritual life and keeps us from dying off (3:1, Rom. 8:2).

      So from time to time we need to hear and heed his prophetic call to us as a church to wake up and repent in order that we might be kept in freshness and life, so that we do not wither away and die (3:6).  We are not called to be a monument to the past; we are called to be a Spirit-filled and life-giving community that oozes the freshness of God’s presence and power in the present, bearing fruit in a world living in spiritual darkness.  If we want to experience spiritual refreshing, then we cannot afford to live as others live.  For a church to stay consistently in a revived condition, believers cannot afford to lose this vital, living connection with the Holy Spirit.

      These believers in Sardis were called to wake up, to repent and to strengthen what remained.  They needed to shake off the dust of their complacency, to free themselves from the chains that bound them, and to put on once again their garments of splendour in Christ and to walk in close fellowship with him (3:2-5, cf. Isa. 52:1-2).

      It was a call to take their eyes off the past and to re-focus themselves on getting right with God in the present and then to look to what lay ahead, on what God intended to do amongst them and through them in the future.  The Lord wanted to give them hope and a future (Jer. 29:11), not just a blessed past.  He exhorted them to remember how they had received and heard in the past, and to return to that: pro-actively seeking God’s face until they were once again filled with the Holy Spirit and his fire was re-kindled within their seeking and surrendered hearts.

      Then they would walk again in his life, presence and power, enjoying renewed spiritual life and vitality, and their faith would be strong and zealous for Christ.  Being renewed by his Spirit in this way, they would walk in preparedness and expectation of seeing God work in and through them, and they would not miss the day of his visitation (3:3, Luke 19:44; cf. Matt. 24:42-44, 25:1-13).

      For the church and the faith to survive, believers and churches need regular times of refreshing.  We cannot depend by default on the blessings of a previous generation or on their walk with God.  We need to be willing to take up the baton for ourselves and learn to walk in the same paths as Spirit-filled men and women of previous generations.  Each generation needs a new move of the Spirit, and to learn the crucial lessons of surrender and obedience to him that others have learned before them, so that they can live truly Spirit-filled lives and walk in his power, if they are to responsibly take up and build on the legacy that has been passed down to them by their forebears.  Otherwise, the new generation simply becomes nominal, traditional and religious, and they do not walk in the power of God.  Spiritual decay and death set in, the well dries up and the legacy of their forebears is left to go to waste.  How many old, neglected church buildings and empty rows of seats bear testimony to this!  Old wineskins which are monuments to a glorious past, but which are now incapable of nurturing and bearing a new move of the Spirit, forcing him to move through others elsewhere who will indeed receive him.

      It is one thing to know that God has worked in the past and to honour those whom he used, but it is another thing entirely to appreciate the underlying spiritual dynamics of surrender, obedience, self-sacrifice, prayer and faith which were operating in the lives of those whom God used to produce the fruit, blessing and success that he did through them.  If we are to see God reviving his work and working in our own generation, then we need to be ready to learn the same kind of lessons and walk similar paths to those who went before us.  Generations and cultures may change, but God’s ways don’t!  God uses people who are filled with his Spirit and who have resolved within themselves that they will walk consistently and closely with him in intimate and empowered relationship (Jer. 30:21, Acts 1:8).

Copyright Notice

THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.