Good morning. Y'all are about as enthusiastic about this as I am, it would seem. Very wise of you. My name is Thomas Ritchie. I'm an elder here at Redeemer, and it is my privilege to open God's word this morning.
Speaker 1:So if you would, open your Bibles to Revelation chapter 3. I think it's also printed in the worship guide. We're gonna read Jesus's words to the church at Sardis. It appears in verse 1 through 6 of chapter 3. Read with me and, listen carefully.
Speaker 1:These are the most important words that you will hear all day. And to the angel of the church in Sardis, write the words of him who has the 7 spirits of God and the 7 stars. I know your works. You have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead. Wake up and strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have not found your works complete in the sight of my God.
Speaker 1:Remember then what you received and heard. Keep it and repent. 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, yet you still have a few names in Sardis. People who have not soiled their garments, and they will walk with me in white, for they are worthy. The one who conquers will be clothed thus in white garments and I will never blot his name out of the book of life.
Speaker 1:I will confess his name before my father and before his angels. He who has an ear, let him hear what the spirit says to the churches. This is the word of the Lord. Amen. Please pray with me.
Speaker 1:God, to know your word is, itself a grace. To be able to read it and hear it, and to understand it. God, understanding comes from your spirit, not from me. Life comes from your words, not from mine. God, as we turn our thoughts to this text, into the words that you have for us, may we all adopt a posture of listening and humility.
Speaker 1:Might we receive with gladness that which sounds stern, but that produces, righteous living, and faith and endurance when we've been trained by it. God, we know that you love us. So might we turn to this text eagerly. Open our ears to receive it. Open my mouth to speak it well.
Speaker 1:In Christ's name. Amen. All right. So the letter to Sardis is the harshest of the seven letters that we've been going through in the book of revelation. So I have written Joel a thank you note to, tell him how glad I am to get to talk about this one.
Speaker 1:From beginning to end, Jesus has not one good thing to say about the church at Sardis. And that's particularly bad, because I think this letter has a special application for us here at Redeemer. It's generally a mistake to think that the Bible is written about us. It's not. It's written about God.
Speaker 1:It's written to a lot of different people. Of course, all of it is useful, but not all of it is directed at us. This, I'm afraid, is directed at us. Let's consider the church at Sardis. It had a good reputation.
Speaker 1:Like the church at Ephesus, it was a place that people were right now. People say good things about us. And yet Jesus had these incredibly harsh words to say. And I don't wanna hear him say the same thing to us. As I've been studying and going through this, I've been filled with this desire, to repent and to live differently, as a result of, what's in these words.
Speaker 1:So I want to provide a little bit of background about the church at Sardis, and about the city of Sardis that predates the church. Because it's a really fascinating story, that I think informs a lot of the words that Jesus uses here. The Sardis is situated in modern day Turkey, and it was built up on a hill and it had this powerful wall around it. So it was a nearly impossible city to conquer by force. But it was conquered many times, but always by a sneak attack.
Speaker 1:It was never stormed in daylight, but several times it was able to be conquered by people who could sneak in. In particular, kind of the, the golden age of Sardis happened way back in the 6th century BC. When it was ruled by this man named Croesus, this Greek guy, who was, the richest man of his day. He was extremely self confident. He was proud of all of his possessions.
Speaker 1:And he, he picked a fight with the Persian empire, which was the strongest empire, and he lost miserably. His army was destroyed, and the Persians came and surrounded his city. But they couldn't conquer it because of its high walls. So they laid siege to Sardis, and they waited. And one day, they observed this, Greek soldier who was kind of marching along the top of the wall, and he was just messing around and fiddling and not paying attention, and he dropped his helmet.
Speaker 1:And it goes clattering down the wall, and it rolls down the cliff outside the city, and comes to rest at the bottom. And like any good soldier, he just climbs down the wall and then scampers down the cliff by this hidden path, picks up his helmet, climbs right back up again, and keeps going on patrol. It never occurred to him that the Persians were watching. And that very night, they walked up that same cliff path, and climbed up the same place in the wall, and found the city completely undefended, and captured it while the city of Sardis slept. You see, the city wasn't vulnerable because it lacked strength.
Speaker 1:It was really strong. It was vulnerable because it trusted so much in its strength, in the appearance of its strength, that it never considered the possibility that it would be tested or captured. Its danger came not from weakness, but from pride and trust in its own strength. It slept in false security. My friends, that could so easily be us, right now.
Speaker 1:Think of all the advantages that we have. You know, the, this church, all of our education, all of our wealth, all of our friends, our positions, our network of people around us, our jobs, our careers. Isn't it easy to think that all of those things are, give us a wall against the consequences of life, against struggles, against temptations? Isn't it easy to think that those things are somehow signs of God's favor? And that we live secure because we have lots of this stuff?
Speaker 1:We have the risk of being just like Sardis. That we would be caught unawares. And that we would know what it means for Jesus to come against us like a thief. We don't know the hour. So this sermon is going to proceed in 3 parts.
Speaker 1:I want to look first at the sin of Sardis, in particular. Kind of unpack what it is that was going on there. Then I want to look at how it is that we repent from that sin. How do we turn from it? And then lastly, I want to look at the root of repentance, which is Jesus Christ himself.
Speaker 1:So sin, repenting from that sin, and the root of repentance, Jesus Christ. So let's start with sin. The people of Sardis, the church, looked good. They had a good reputation. And let's not apply a hindsight bias here.
Speaker 1:Right? It's easy for us to say, oh, they just look good, but they were really bad. Now, you don't get a good reputation by doing nothing. These people were doing good works. Acts of obedience.
Speaker 1:This is like the church at Ephesus. Worse than the church at Ephesus, but the same outward appearance. Had we been in that church, we would have found it healthy, more than likely. And if we had just heard of that church, we may have been a little envious of all the good things that were going on there. Jesus has a profoundly different opinion.
Speaker 1:He doesn't say it's a church that's in danger. He doesn't say it's a church that's sick or drowsy. He says, you are dead. You stink. You're covered in filth.
Speaker 1:You're soiled. I have nothing good to say about you. And not just that, things are so bad that you have to be told that you're dead. I mean, think about how low you have to have fallen and how self deluded you have to be if someone has to say, hey, by the way, you're dead. That's a condition that people should be able to self diagnose.
Speaker 1:But they were so blinded to their spiritual condition that they had to be told and reminded of where they were. They were profoundly deceived. But how? Like what were they doing, that was getting them in this awful circumstance? And the text gives us 2 clues.
Speaker 1:Well, it gives us more than that. We're gonna look at 2. The first is in what it says. The second is in what it doesn't say. Those two things work together to give us a pretty good idea of what's happening in Sardis.
Speaker 1:First, what it says. The text says that the the works of the church at Sardis were found not complete in the eyes of God. If we think about works having an outward component and an inward component, we know that the outward component was complete. That Sardis appeared to be doing great. But we know that then the inward component was lacking.
Speaker 1:So the church at Sardis was going through the motions. The phrase incomplete in the sight of God suggests that people were, that the people thought they were doing well. They didn't look like they were doing well, but they were rotten at the core. This is what we might call today, nominal Christianity. People that looked and would call themselves Christians, but weren't living out of a of the joy of salvation.
Speaker 1:They didn't love the Lord. They weren't living out of obedience. This is rote behavior, or this is doing things to impress people, or to advance in their job, or in their city, or to have people think well of them, and think that they're good and spiritual people. And that that clue in the text is confirmed in what the text doesn't say. Wherever in Revelation we see the church is persecuted, Jesus always calls it out.
Speaker 1:Jesus talks about persecution. And this is a time in history when the church was being persecuted left and right. You could say there was no stick too crooked to beat the Christians with. They were accused of everything. Persecuted for everything.
Speaker 1:But not here. No persecution mentioned. And you get the distinct impression that the people of Sardis were living this kind of inoffensive, inauthentic Christianity. That even the the practices that are normal practices, that were practiced all across the church, that offended so many other cities, offended the Romans, offended the Jews, weren't happening here. This is some kind of lowest common denominator faith.
Speaker 1:It's designed to be consumed by outsiders. It's designed not to rub anybody the wrong way. Lacking in passion. Lacking in trust in Christ. And make no mistake, Jesus hates that religion.
Speaker 1:He despises this outward faith. He never has anything good to say about it. We can read all through And, I picked just a couple examples, apparently because this text wasn't fun enough to read, but let's look at Matthew chapter 23, beginning in verse 5. You don't have to turn there, but Jesus is talking about the Pharisees, and how, all of their religious acts are designed to be observed, and they're not directed towards the Lord. He says this, they do all their deeds to be seen by others, for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long, and they love the place of honor at feasts and the best seats in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplace.
Speaker 1:And in verse 27, he comes back and says, woe to you scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites. For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people's bones and all uncleanness. So you outwardly appear righteous to others. But within, you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. That's the church at Sardis.
Speaker 1:Or again, in that same chapter in Matthew, he talks about the Pharisees being people that wash the outside of the cup, the part that's seen by others. But on the inside of the cup, the part that they actually eat and drink from. If they're making a choice, they're going to say, I could either clean the outside or clean the inside. What matters to me is the importance of people's opinion of me. I'm gonna look outside, even if it means that I'm gonna live by eating and drinking filth.
Speaker 1:And not just Jesus. Paul picks up on this same idea in Galatians 6. He writes this, for the one who sows in his own flesh, will from the flesh, reap corruption. But the one who sows to the spirit, will from the spirit reap eternal life. If we sow in the flesh, this outward con this outward religion, we get death.
Speaker 1:We get what the people at Sardis were told they had already found. But if we sow inwardly, then we can reap eternal life. The aim of our heart matters, not just our outward actions. And then the aim of our heart matters so much, that we are dead, if we're not aimed at Christ. I don't want you to hear me, pointing the finger.
Speaker 1:It's a hard thing to call out the risk of hypocrisy in other people, because how could anyone ever point the finger and say you are a hypocrite? I mean, Jesus can say it, but I am most certainly not him. And so there's an element in this sermon of confession. I struggle with this. I don't know if you do.
Speaker 1:I suspect you do. But I, I struggle. I want, I want to do good so that people will like me and approve of me. I mean, in writing a sermon to preach to you about this, I found myself trying to craft a line that would make you find me clever, As if your opinion of me is what matters. To you or to me.
Speaker 1:And not just in that way, in several other ways too. I mean, I have a hard time confessing sin and temptation. Because I think if I did, that other people would have a low opinion of me. I imagine that they think that I'm perfect in some way, and so I don't wanna tell them what's really going on in my heart. I lie to them.
Speaker 1:And that lie is particularly dangerous. It's bad to lie to people. That's wrong. But this lie is pernicious. Because it's not just a lie that you tell.
Speaker 1:It's a lie that we start to believe about ourselves. We say, hey, you know what? I'm doing fine. I'll tell the world I'm doing fine. Yeah.
Speaker 1:There's things going on, but we don't have to focus on that. That becomes something that we internalize. We start to say to ourselves, you know, I really am doing okay. I'll look at other people. I'm not doing as bad as they are and really these temptations are not that bad.
Speaker 1:My I minimize sin. We minimize temptation. We minimize the consequences, and we start to believe that we don't need grace. When we get there, we find ourselves squarely within the walls of Sardis, waiting for Jesus to come over the top of the wall in our sleep, and take us where we're not looking. I mean, think about it.
Speaker 1:Talking about temptation makes it less likely that we will sin. If I tell somebody that I'm about to lose my temper, it makes it less likely that I will actually lose my temper. By acknowledging weakness and sinfulness, I can actually become less sinful. But I don't do that. Instead, me and I imagine a bunch of other people, we hide our temptation to sinfulness.
Speaker 1:We don't talk about it. And as a result, we sin more frequently. We are not willing to be thought sinners, so instead we become greater sinners in our actions. We care more about the outside and less about the substance of what's inside. I think we all know that's wrong.
Speaker 1:We don't need to be told. I think we all know that we should be living for God's approval, not the approval of man. There's no one that raises their hand and says, you know, my hypocrisy is fine. That's really not that big a deal. I'm fine with it.
Speaker 1:But how do we get at it? How do we, how do we live this authentic Christian life? How do we stop being hypocrites? Or maybe, maybe you are like that. Maybe you say, look, it really doesn't matter what's going on in my heart.
Speaker 1:As long as outwardly I'm doing okay, that's what matters. My heart will catch up one day or maybe it won't, but as long as I'm doing okay in my outward actions, what goes on inside my own head and my own heart, that really doesn't matter. I would caution you against that thought. I think Jesus says that that's not true. I think Jesus says that we need to take hold of that inner man and see change inside, lest we die.
Speaker 1:So how? How do we repent? How do we turn from pride and hypocrisy? Jesus does not hide the ball here. He had gives us 4 very practical things.
Speaker 1:States them in nice simple words that even I can understand. Wake up. Strengthen what remains. Remember and repent. I'm gonna take these a little bit out of order.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna save the idea of waking up for the end. I'm gonna start now by talking about remembering, because I think that's where this starts. Remember, it says in the text, remember what you received and heard. Jesus is talking about the gospel. Remember the story that you heard by which you found salvation.
Speaker 1:Remember that God loves you. Not because of your works, but in spite of them. He loves you because of the perfect work of Christ. Remember that we have no righteousness of our own, but that we have been made fully righteous in Christ. Remember that we are saved completely, but saved by grace, not by works.
Speaker 1:Remember that our sin was so bad that it required the blood of Jesus to pay for it. But remember that Jesus joyfully and gladly laid down his life and took it up again, that he might have us. Constantly remembering that that gospel story, remembering it in all of its implications, in all of its manifestations, That's strong medicine for our souls. When we know that God loves us completely, That he's not blind to our sins, but he sees all of them. Even the ones that we hide our eyes from.
Speaker 1:But that that has not dissuaded his love towards us. That he has lavished love and grace on us, in spite of our sin. That helps us to set down this silly game of trying to impress other people by pretending to be just this much better than our neighbors. The gospel is full of difficult news about our condition, But it is crowned by the great news that we are lifted all the way up out of hell and into heaven. On a related point, when Jesus says remember, I think he's also talking about remembering the scriptures.
Speaker 1:And we can't really separate the gospel from the scriptures. We find that gospel in the scriptures. And so, practically, if we find ourselves when I find myself struggling to remember the gospel, practically in my everyday life, that's a prompt for me to turn back to God's word. If I fill myself with it, if we fill ourselves with God's word, if we read it, if we think on it, if we memorize it, we will remember the gospel that's contained in it. But if we fill ourselves with other things, we'll be empty.
Speaker 1:If we decide we just don't want God's word, we'll be empty. And we will forget that thing, that we must not forget. If you want some homework, I would direct you to go back and read Deuteronomy 89. Sort of Moses is talking to the people of Israel, as they're nearing the end of their time in the wilderness. And they're, they've received the law and they've seen all these great works that God has done, bringing them out of Egypt, and feeding them, and taking them across the Red Sea, and all these miracles that are performed in the desert.
Speaker 1:And he says, look. There's gonna come a day when you're living in these big houses in this promised land. And on that day, you need to remember all that I've told you. All that God has done. It's a really useful passage, to study what it means to remember, and how God's covenant keeps us.
Speaker 1:So that's remembering. Next, is repenting. And repenting isn't a complicated idea. Repent just means turn from. We turn from sin.
Speaker 1:We turn towards Christ. Or in terms of this text, we might say that remembering is repentance in action. If remembering is what takes place inside of our mind and heart, then repentance is the consequence of that changed mind and changed heart. We apply the gospel to our lives. And repenting is easy with outward sin.
Speaker 1:You know, the, the great new testament sin of eating food sacrificed to idols. It It almost seems like it was designed to be easy to repent from. Well, if you're doing that, should you stop? Yes. How do you repent from that?
Speaker 1:You stop eating food sacrificed to idols. It's really basic. How do you repent from hypocrisy? How do you repent from pride? It's inward.
Speaker 1:How do you repent from that desire for people to think you good, when you do good works. That's much more subtle. That sin, I think, is much deeper in our hearts. It's harder to root out. It's harder to repent from.
Speaker 1:But Jesus says that we must. We need to repent. We need to repent from this pride that underlies our very best actions. That doesn't mean that we stop doing good. But we have to repent of the desire to be seen doing good.
Speaker 1:If I could put it in modern terms, I don't mean to be flippant, but we have to repent of this, this kind of Instagram faith, where everything about our lives is designed and presented as this, fully completed whole, that's designed for consumption by our neighbors. So they'll think that our lives are interesting, or they'll think that our faith is beautiful, or we think that we always have, you know, a fancy breakfast when we're having our quiet time, from all the pictures that we put out there. This kind of presentation that we make, of course not just in social media, but we do that all throughout our lives. That denies the fundamental reality that we have problems. We haven't arrived yet.
Speaker 1:That we're still in the middle of seeing our lives perfected in Christ. We need to repent from hiding all this stuff. We need to be okay with people knowing where we're weak. Because church, the gospel is for sinners. If we want to be qualified to receive the gospel, the only qualification is that we have to be sinners.
Speaker 1:The church is a hospital. If we want the blessing that comes from the work of God's spirit within his church, We need to be willing to acknowledge that we got here by being sick, and not pretend that we showed up with just a little cold and, you know, it's really not that big a deal. There's great healing in the work of the church by God's spirit. But it's for it's for the great sinners of the world. We wanna skip right to the end result.
Speaker 1:We wanna skip to that day that everything is right, and deny the process by which God gets us there. We do that, we downplay our need for grace now. You know, I'm I'm guilty of this. I've told people, you know, people ask, well, what's, you know, what's going on in your life right now? And I'll say, well, you know, this week I'm doing great.
Speaker 1:Last week was tough. Last week was really hard. And then the following week people say, well, how are you doing? I'm like, hey, you know, I'm doing pretty good right now. But man, last week, I was in a dark place last week.
Speaker 1:And so on and so forth. Today is the sun's always shining and yesterday it was always stormy. It's like that forever. We do that. We become like the people at Sardis.
Speaker 1:We have to repent from it. We have to be willing to own our flaws. Not so we can wallow in them and, you know, hold up our sins and be all glad about how broken we are, but so that we can receive and show grace. That we can honestly show God's work to one another. So remember, repent.
Speaker 1:And then 3rd is strengthen what remains. This text says very little about strengthening. And I think that's because we intuitively understand what it takes to get stronger at something. It's not complicated. You want to get stronger?
Speaker 1:You practice. You perform the same motion over and over and over again, and you will get stronger. There's no shortcut to it, but there's also no secret. If you want to get stronger, you pick up a weight, and you pick it up again, and you pick it up again, and you're consistent. You cultivate discipline.
Speaker 1:Same is true for our hearts. If we want to, see the fruits of repentance in our lives, we have to work at it. It takes time. And when we get to failure, we start over again. We keep after it.
Speaker 1:If you want to get stronger, you feed your body well. If you want to get stronger in your spirit, if you want to grow in repentance, you feast on God's word. If you want to get stronger in your body, you hire a coach or a trainer, or you find a workout buddy. If you wanna get stronger in your spirit, you don't try to do this alone. Find a mentor.
Speaker 1:Find someone who disciples you. Come to church. Cultivate authentic confessional relationships with believers. The people that love you. People that love you enough to rebuke you.
Speaker 1:People that know you well enough, to see that slow rot that sets in. Doesn't show on the outside, but goes from the inside out. We need those kinds of friendships, if we're going to get stronger. And don't miss the kind of theological truth that sits underneath this idea that we need to be strengthened. If repentance were a one time thing, if we repented once and we were good, we wouldn't need to be strengthened in it.
Speaker 1:But it's not. We don't ever get past our need for the gospel. We keep coming back to it again and again. And so we need to develop these habits. We need to strengthen our ability to turn from sin.
Speaker 1:Hopefully, over time, as we cultivate remembering and repenting, we start to see success. We see fruit of repentance. We sin less. We're more loving. We're more generous.
Speaker 1:But it takes time. God works through a process. Very seldom does he just snap his fingers and fix things. There's an element of discipline that can't be read out of this text. But it's also not where I'm comfortable ending.
Speaker 1:Now, which is why I save this idea of waking up for the back end. Cause if I were to leave you today saying, what I need to do is, like, work harder, and you just squint my eyes and remember and repent, and I left you with the idea that it depended on you, that would be a grave misunderstanding. Do you notice the paradox in this text when Jesus says, you have a reputation for being alive, but you're dead. Not asleep, not drowsy, not sick, dead. But his next words to them are, wake up, as if they're not dead, as if it's not the end.
Speaker 1:Hear those words, oh church. Jesus says, wake up. Jesus says, arise. He's talking about resurrection. When the God who made the world by the word of his power speaks, Things happen.
Speaker 1:His word brings life. His word is life. We sang earlier, that song, at your touch, my sleeping spirit was awakened. On my darkened heart, the light of Christ has shown. That's what those words wake up mean.
Speaker 1:When Jesus speaks them, they they bring life. We see this again and again in Luke 8, when there's this small girl who has died and her family is weeping, and Jesus comes among them and he says, she's not dead. She's just asleep. Arise, my child. And she does.
Speaker 1:Or with Lazarus, who's sitting there in the grave for days, and his sisters are worrying, like, Jesus, it's gonna stink in there. And Jesus says, Lazarus, come out. And he does. Yes. There's a need for repentance here.
Speaker 1:Yes. There's a need for correction. Yes. We can and should try harder. It's critically important.
Speaker 1:But that's not where this begins, and it's not where it ends. We cannot trust in our self sufficiency, to overcome our sin of self sufficiency. We can't trust in our wakefulness, to rise us, and to raise us up from the dead. We can't do that. It will never work.
Speaker 1:Our hope is in the one who calls us into wakefulness. Our hope is the one who gives us life. Listen to the triumphant way that Jesus talks about these people that he closed in righteousness. From, Revelation 3, he says, yet you still have a few names in Sardis. People who have not soiled their garments.
Speaker 1:And they will walk with me in white, for they are worthy. They're not worthy because they're really good people. They're worthy because Christ has made them worthy. They're worthy because his righteousness has been imputed to them. He goes on, the one who conquers will be clothed us in white garments.
Speaker 1:And I will never blot his name out of the book of life. I will confess his name before my father and before his angels. Remember this scene, church. Jesus is removing our soiled rags, our unrighteousness, our sin, he takes away, and in place, he gives us clean white clothes. His righteousness.
Speaker 1:He writes our name down in the book of life, never to be blotted out. Guaranteed by his own blood. He stands before us as our advocate, confessing not our righteousness, but his righteousness before God, the judge. He says our name. He speaks for us.
Speaker 1:Our great hope, our only hope, is not in the quality and frequency of our repentance. The earnestness of our desire to change. No. Our hope is in Jesus who loves us and remembers us. As we repent and turn from sin, we have hope because he turned from perfection towards us to pursue us.
Speaker 1:Our works may be incomplete. They are. They probably always will be. But when he bows his head on the cross and dies, and when he takes his life up again, and he says, it is finished, It's accomplished. It is completed.
Speaker 1:That's our hope. In his finished and completed work, We conquer not through our will, but through his. Hear his voice today. Hear him call you to wake up, have that life in you. I want to close as we transition out of looking at revelation, and as we turn towards responding in song.
Jeffrey Heine:It's a
Speaker 1:bit of a curve ball, but I want us to look at a passage in the old testament, Ezekiel 37. That's the valley of the dry bones. I think this passage, I'm not gonna explain it very much at all. I think it speaks for itself. And it provides a really helpful lens for viewing what was going on at the church at Sardis.
Speaker 1:Because this passage will look at what it means to be alive, versus merely having the appearance of life. It'll look at God's power to create life out of death. And it will help us see God's purpose and his preeminence in resurrection. So hear with me these words from Ezekiel 37. The hand of the Lord was upon me, and he brought me out in the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of the valley.
Speaker 1:It was full of bones. He led me around among them and behold, there were very many on the surface of the valley and behold, they were very dry. And he said to me, son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, oh, Lord God, you know. And he said to me, prophecy over the bones and say to them, oh, dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.
Speaker 1:Thus says the Lord God, to these bones, behold, I will cause breath to enter you and you shall live. And I will lay sinews upon you and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the Lord. So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I prophesied, there was a sound and behold a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. And I looked and behold, there were sinews on them and flesh had come upon them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them.
Speaker 1:Then he said to me, prophesy to the breath. Prophesy son of man, and say to the breath, thus says the Lord God, come from the 4 winds, oh breath, and breathe on these slain, that they may live. So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived and stood on their feet, an exceedingly great army. Then he said to me, son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. Behold, they say our bones are dried up.
Speaker 1:Our hope is lost. We are indeed cut off. Therefore, prophesy and say to them, thus says the Lord God, behold, I will open your graves and raise you from your graves, oh my people, and I will bring you into the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves and raise you from your graves, oh my people. And I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you in your own land.
Speaker 1:Then you shall know that I am the Lord. I have spoken, and I will do it, declares the Lord. Please pray with me. Oh God, our bones are dry. Bones are dry.
Speaker 1:We are a, we are a sinful people. It's hard to own it. It's not comfortable. And God, your scriptures testify to it. We are in need of, not just a little help, but that we are dead and we need to be made alive.
Speaker 1:And God, our great hope, indeed our only hope, but our sure hope, is that you give us that life in your son, Christ, who was fully fully alive, fully fully God, and yet became fully man to take on our death. And having defeated it, took up life again. We desire the shortcut. We wanna go straight from life to life without going down in the dirt of repentance. Without being made like Christ in weakness and suffering and in death.
Speaker 1:But you promise us a different path. You promise us resurrection. May our hearts long for it. Cling to it. Even in the midst of suffering.
Speaker 1:Even when it means that we do not look as beautiful to the world around us. May we be like our great savior, who did not cling to his rights, to his beauty in heaven, but appeared on earth in a form that no one would take notice of. Made himself nothing. Emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, humbled himself. And therefore, you have bestowed upon him the name that is above every name.
Speaker 1:And God, you give us the same instruction, that we should make ourselves servants. That we should humble ourselves, and let you raise us up. We don't trust that often. We try to raise ourselves up, and in doing so, we go back to the old man. We go back to how we were.
Speaker 1:Maybe we live in new life. Maybe we live in the power of the resurrection, not cling to that life, which is fleeting and passes away. God stir in us the right response. Remembrance, repentance, and strength. And God, give us life.
Speaker 1:Wake us up. In Christ's name. Amen.