Greetings. This is Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church with a moment of truth where we challenge you to think through an important issue of life and faith. And today, as we go through the book of Revelation, continue to go through the book of Revelation, I want to ask you this question about the city of Sardis in Asia. What does the city of Sardis, the somnambulant saints in Sardis, what does the letter to these somnambulant saints in Sardis have to tell us about our own day, about our own church, about our own spiritual condition?

Because the letters to the seven churches of Asia in the book of Revelation were all composed not only for those particular churches, but for the church throughout her history, throughout the remainder of redemptive history. And they do have things to tell us precisely about our own spiritual lives, the life and status of the church throughout her history, not just looking forward to the rapture and the red heifers and the other things that we all speed right by the seven letters to the seven churches by going to get these other things and miss these very important issues that the letters to the seven churches of Asia teach us.

So I'd like to deal with the church in Sardis from Revelation chapter 3 verses 1 through 6 and see what it has to tell us about our own day, our own status as a church. Revelation chapter 3 verses 1 through 6 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.

Well, the church in Sardis, we have seen that every church has both commendation and condemnation and our Lord front loads the condemnation here before us because, indeed, they had been caught by surprise in several instances and had been somnambulant. And a somnambulant is someone who walks in his sleep. And that's precisely what the Sardinians were doing spiritually. And whenever I think of being caught by surprise, I think back in my history learning to the Revolutionary War, the Battle of Trenton in 1776. Well, the Battle of Trenton is one of history's greatest surprise attacks in the chronicles of warfare.

And despite some notable victories up to this point, like Bunker Hill, George Washington's Continental Army was beginning to dwindle as the war dragged down. His militia was composed of citizen soldiers who needed to get back to their farms and families, while the British troops were professionals who had nothing else to do but wage war. So Washington needed a victory, and he needed one badly. With few men and resources, he decided on a desperate move, that is, cross the Delaware River into New Jersey and attack the hired mercenary force of German Hessians at Trenton, who didn't want to be there in the first place.

And he did it, Washington did it, in the early morning hours of December 26, the day after Christmas, when he knew the civilized Germans would be hung over from heavy drinking and partying on Christmas Day before. they would be sleeping and recovering as every decent Christian would be doing. No one fights in the depths of winter, right? Especially on Christmas. Well, despite advancing in a heavy winter storm that slowed them up, Washington's army made it in the wee hours of the morning and took the Hessians completely, utterly by surprise.

And they were in no condition but to surrender in droves. And those that resisted were quickly shot and or captured. General Henry Knox described the situation this way. He said, the hurry, fright, and confusion of the enemy was not unlike that which will be when the last trumpet will sound, unquote. The Battle of Trenton proved to the colonists that they could beat the mightiest army then on the face of the earth.

Volunteers began to swell the ranks again. Well, the element of surprise is always one of the greatest advantages that any army can have over his enemy. It was true of the Americans over the British. It is also true of the Persians, however, over this city, the city of Sardis. It was true of the Persians and then again of the Greeks over Sardis as well.

Twice the city was built on a mountain to begin with and then had a fortress built on a spur of that mountain and it was all but impregnable. At least that's what the Sardinians boasted. Huh. Yet once and then twice. Sardis was taken by surprise and conquered because Sardis had grown careless and lackadaisical over her security.

She was the laughingstock of Asia in this regard and a proverb was in use at the time as safe as Sardis. It meant you were overconfident and in danger of being taken by surprise. As safe as Sardis. Well, many Christians today are as safe as Sardis and our Lord rebukes the saints in Sardis in the first century, one of the churches, of course, in Asia. And our Lord touches this soft spot today to warn them of their spiritual carelessness and lackadaisical attitude, the church in Sardis.

What is their situation? Well, let me cover, first of all, verses one through three. And I have a three-point outline that I'd like to cover with you here today. And point number one in that outline is the city of Sardis. Sardis, in contrast to the somnambulant saints in Sardis, the heavenly hosts are keenly aware of her true spiritual state.

Yes, you hide nothing from God. You hide nothing from the heavenly host. And these sleepwalking saints in Sardis are indeed in danger of losing their place. You may recall that in chapter one, I pointed out that the vision of the son of man in chapter one was determinative for the whole apocalypse for the whole book of Revelation. And that point I made is borne out here because in chapter one, we saw that he, the son of man, our Lord Jesus Christ, had the seven spirits, that is the living presence of the Holy Spirit for power.

That was John's Trinitarian formula for the Holy Spirit, the seven spirits. And he also has the seven stars, that is, which he explains are the angels of the seven churches, which are the heavenly embodiment of the earthly churches on the ground. And we have seen, this is one of the principles of the apocalypse too, is oscillation. We oscillate between heaven and earth, back and forth we go. And the seven stars are the heavenly embodiment of the earthly churches on the ground.

And we're asserting these realities here for the church in Sardis too. Our Lord is saying in this letter that he is mystifying us all with a bit of prophetic mumbo jumble. He wants to impress us with his power and insight. No, no, no, no. These two metaphors come as a warning that Christ is all knowing and ever present with his church.

And there's nothing hidden from his sight. Seven stars, seven spirits. This is further elaborated than as we progress through verses two and three. We see, because he has the indwelling spirit, which inhabits the church and sees them as they are in the heavenlies before him, he can say definitively, I know your works. Our Lord tells the church in Sardis, I know your works.

Have you forgotten the importance of works to the Lord? Or have you gotten a true feel for the importance of works yet to the Lord? Because he says this to almost every church. But someone will say, you have faith and I have works. Show me your faith apart from your works, James says.

Show me your faith apart from your works and I will show you my faith by my works. Faith without works is dead. That's a principle that we see borne out here in the book of Revelation. We have a simple concrete sample of the kinds of works that Jesus loves from Matthew chapter 25. You may remember the separation of the sheep and the goats.

Then the king will say to those on his right, come, you who are blessed by my father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I was naked and you clothed me.

I was sick and you visited me. I was in prison and you came to me. Unquote. Oh, what a great catalog of works that the Christian should practice. If we occupied ourselves with these things, we wouldn't have time to complain.

We wouldn't have time to speculate on the rapture and all these kinds of things. Well, at their best, these works are done sincerely in love and without ostentation. If you do them to be seen by men, then as Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, you have your reward and you shouldn't expect a heavenly reward from the Lord. And one gets the sense that here in Sardis, since Jesus says you have a reputation of being alive, that is, you have a name of being alive, then they may well have been doing their works to maintain their reputation or just going through the motions.

Instead of perpetuating a worthless reputation, our Lord tells them quite bluntly, but you are dead. Oh, but you are dead. From the context, it is obvious that they are not spiritually dead in a lost and reprobate sense. They're going to hell, but in the exercise of their religion, rather, they're not going to hell, but rather they are dead in their exercise of their religion. James also tells us in chapter one, religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this, to visit orphans and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained from the world, unquote.

Oh, sweet and simple definitions. Perhaps the saints in Sardis, the church there had lost its first love like the saints in Ephesus, or maybe they were only doing enough to get by and look good to the outside world. We are not told the exact reason, but their works were incomplete in God's sight, as our Lord says. Their condition was sorry enough that it looked like death to death to the Lord. And our Lord's exhortation then to them is twofold.

Number one, he says, wake up. Or as the King James has it, be watchful. And so often death and sleep are interchangeable in the Bible as it is here, right? And our Lord gives them a metaphorical shake and call to rouse them from their spiritual slumber. There's some nambulance.

They are blissfully unaware of their tenuous state. And secondly, he exhorts them, shore up your sagging defenses. That's the sense of strength in what remains and is about to die. Shore up your sagging defenses. The siege of your church has just about destroyed it all, and not much is left, our Lord is saying virtually.

He says, shore it up before you lose it. And this is military language too. This is martial talk. Our Lord is needling them. He's provoking them, likening their spiritual situation to their twice previous military situation in which they were taken by surprise and overcome.

Don't let the church suffer the same fate as the city did, our Lord is saying. You're too much like true Sardinians. Wake up. Hear the call to action. Yes.

And for me, this is so appropriate to our age. One of my colleagues the other day, and he does listen to our radio program. One of my brothers in the ministry, he asked me why I was so aggressive in this series on the received view of Revelation today and eschatology in general. That's the Revelation red heifer rapture rants that so many dispensationalists go on, right, and occupy all of Revelation with it. Well, it's precisely the reason I'm so hard on dispensationalism is precisely because dispensational premillennialism casts everything in Revelation as coming in the future.

And dispensational premillennialism has an obsession with things like the great tribulation, or the beast, or 666, or Israel, and temples, and renewed animal sacrifices, and the rapture. Meanwhile, meanwhile, while the contemporary church is obsessed with these things, the church today, right now, is enduring great tribulation and suffering. The church across the world, across the globe, is unwittingly, and the church in America in particular, is unwittingly serving the very beast it anticipates will come in the future.

And this same evangelical contemporary church puts its faith in a rapture that will not come to supposedly deliver us from a tribulation which cannot be avoided, dear listener. Dispensational premillennialism serves the beast it anticipates will come in the future, serves it now in the present. And the same church puts its faith in a rapture that will not come to supposedly deliver from a tribulation which cannot be avoided.

If the devil himself had wanted to create an eschatology to confuse and put the evangelical church to sleep so that the beast could operate unimpeded, he could not have done better than John Nelson Darby and dispensational premillennialism. The evangelical church by its eschatology will be taken by surprise and spiritually defeated, even as Sardis was militarily defeated by the Persians and Greeks. This analogy with their past, our Lord sustains in his threat. He says, if you will not wake up, I will come like a thief and you will not know at what hour I will come against you.

He says, our Lord promises them indeed that he will come surreptitiously, clandestinely, catching the church in Sardis unawares. Just as Sardis was twice surprised and defeated by its enemies. Well, so Jesus will come and take away the church in Sardis's lampstand. That is, he'll destroy its presence there and the Sardinians will not know what hit them. That is why it is so crucial for the contemporary church of today to respond in the manner exhorted by the Lord.

He says, remember what you received and heard. Remember what you received and heard. Now we know that in the Bible, the exhortation to remember is to not just recall from memory. No, it is to recall from memory so as to do. That's the biblical idea of remembering.

Remember what you received and heard. At one point, they had heard the gospel and they had believed and lived it. And our Lord is exhorting them, saints and Sardis, return to those days. And then remember what you received and heard. And then remember and keep it.

Don't just get emotionally nostalgic over the good old days. Do what is commanded and obey. That's the essence of keep. Keep. Keep what you have received and heard.

Remember and keep it. And then thirdly, repent is the other exhortation. Make sure and repent. Now, repentance is, in part, a turning from what you were doing and turning 180 degrees in the other direction to the things of God. He urges them to repent as well.

Now, if we were to remember what the church has taught on these things in the past, we could receive it too. We could receive and embrace sound biblical teaching on the worship of the church, taking dominion of Christ's inheritance. The earth, right? And the nature of the enemy of the church faces this in every generation, not just the last one. The church of today needs to remember the things then that we heard at first and then do them.

If we were to remember what the church has taught on these things, and we have, we've seen this in the past, read a church history book, see what the history of doctrine has been through the centuries, because we could receive and embrace sound biblical teaching on the worship of the church. The church has taught a great deal on what worship is, and revelation is a great source, as we'll see, a great source and resource for structuring our own worship. That's one of the motifs all through revelation, is that we conquer in our worship.

Every time you go to a worship service on Sunday morning, you take a little bit more ground from the evil one. You help to conquer a little bit more. We are commanded to conquer. Dominion is our destiny, and worship is one of those means by which we take dominion. We don't do it by the ballot box.

We don't do it with guns. We don't do it through politics. We don't do it by building big factories or tall buildings. No, we take dominion in the kingdom of God through our prayers, through our worship, through our blood and sacrifice, through our being persistent, through persecution. But worship is one of those means by which we take dominion.

And the book of Revelation is just chock full of suggestions and guidance on how we are to worship. That's one of those things that's skipped over by most evangelicals, the happy clappy worship service, the rock concert writ small worship service. Well, worship is far more than that, brothers and sisters. And Revelation is key to us understanding what New Testament worship should look like. So if we were to remember and then do as our Lord exhorts the church in Sardis, then we would be taking dominion of Christ's inheritance.

We'll see in the future that the seven-sealed scroll is indeed a last will and testament. And that last will and testament is bequeathed to our Lord. And what he has bequeathed by his Father, what he has earned by the shedding of his blood by ransoming many saints from every tongue and tribe, people and nation, what he has earned then is the entire universe, is the entire world. And he takes dominion of that inheritance all through the book of Revelation. And we take dominion with him because we are his army.

Joshua is the new model. The conquest is the new paradigm for the book of Revelation, taking dominion of Christ's inheritance we do. And if we remembered what the church has taught us on these things in the past, we could receive it and live it then as well. And we would also then learn of the nature of the enemy that the church faces in every generation and not just the last generation. You think there's a beast coming?

There's been beasts already all through depth of history and there's a beast right now. And if you continue looking for the one in the future, you're going to miss the one in the present and you will be his servant as well. We would know the nature of the enemy that we face if indeed we were to remember what the church has taught on these things in the past. And we need to recall them, those things that were taught in the past. And so we issue the call to the modern contemporary church to repent of their slumber and the lullaby of last things.

There is indeed a lullaby of last things. Dispensational premillennialism is indeed a lullaby that has put the church to sleep looking for things in the future. It is the lullaby of last things. While the rest of us out here resist the beast, we endure tribulation. The church all over the globe is suffering under persecution.

It is enduring great tribulation. They don't have to wait for the great tribulation. The church is already under it in the struggle then to take dominion of the earth in the Lord's name. Lay down then your eyeglasses looking for the last things, the lullaby of last things. And wake up from your somnambulance, O Evangelical.

All of you, Revelation red heifer rapture ranters, wake up, join the contest with the rest of the church because it is indeed our destiny. Yet there were a few things to be commended in the church in Sardis. And our Lord details those then in verse 4. And we will take those up then that next week. We'll see the remainder of this letter and put it under scrutiny and apply it then to our own lives.

But in the meantime, there is something here for all of us, is there not? We need to wake up from our somnambulance to stop sleepwalking and wake up and engage in the warfare at hand and not wait for it to come in the future and not expect to be miraculously delivered out of it with a fictional rapture. This has been Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church exhorting you to the struggle, exhorting you then to the conquest that we have before us. Indeed, dominion is our destiny. It's time for us to start taking dominion.

And if indeed worship services are one of the tools that the Lord has given us to take dominion, then New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church takes a little more dominion every week at 10 a.m. on Sunday mornings in our worship services. I'm preaching through the book of Revelation, enjoying every minute of it, and our people have been edified by it. And if you'd like to participate with us in taking dominion in our worship services, I exhort you to cross our threshold. You can do that on Sunday mornings at 10 a.m. We meet for holy worship at 101 4th Street on the corner of 4th and Boulevard.

And you can call us then for further information, give me some feedback. Perhaps you like what you've heard. Perhaps you're curious about it. Or perhaps you'd like to maybe say, no, Pastor, I don't agree with you on this. And that's good.

That's okay. That's fine. But you can call us for more information at area code 208-523-0196. That's area code 208-523-0196.