Most of us know what it feels like to start strong in our faith and then quietly fizzle out from that initial strength — and the churches in Revelation 2–3 knew that feeling, too. As Jesus responds to them with a reward for the one who “conquers,” what does conquering look like for ordinary, fizzle-prone people like us?
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Okay, hang on, oops, I’m sorry. We have a problem with our connection here, and it’s funny that we’re talking about victory. You can’t see me if you’re, oh, there we go, hey, yeah! Woo! That was not intended as a part of the sermon, but let’s go with it.
We are trying to get victory over our technology just like that man was trying to get victory over his pest, and it seems to work about as well sometimes, right, because it just doesn’t work how we want. We can’t do it on our own, and the question is, what happens when it blows up? What happens when the lights go out? What happens when the sound doesn’t work? What do we do? We do what? It goes night, night, yeah, it goes night, night, and we say, don’t go night, night yet because it’s not night yet, it’s still sunny outside, wake up, drink coffee, and it won’t do it. And what do we do, what do we do in those times?
Because here’s the thing: as Jesus sends these letters in Revelation chapter two and three to the churches, a lot of them have problems. A lot of them have problems where the things are going night, night, and they shouldn’t. A lot of them are having problems where they threw some gasoline into a hole thinking they’d get rid of some ants and they just blew up their backyard. These sorts of things happen because we think we have it all figured out, but we don’t. And when we think about what Jesus says, that he’s going to give a reward to the one who conquers, then what in the world do we do when we feel like we can’t conquer? We can’t conquer ants in the backyard, we can’t conquer lights or sound or whatever it is that you’re trying to do in your life that you can’t quite get in order. What do we do then?
Let’s come before the one who’s victorious and ask for His guidance, and then we’ll answer that question.
Father, thank you for your word. Thank you for sending your Son, our Savior Jesus, into this world that He might have the true victory. And Lord, as we are called to follow Him, would You direct our thoughts and our minds? Would You help us to do Your work? We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
We need to follow the true conqueror, that’s what we know, and yet we say, well, how does that work? And one of the disturbing things, if you’ve read through these letters or you meditate on them for any length of time, is that out of the seven churches, there are three that seem to have victory—two, I meant to say two—that Jesus says are doing what’s pleasing to Him, that are standing up in the way that He wants them to. But what do we read about these churches? These ones are going to suffer persecution; these ones are going to suffer dearly for their faith. It doesn’t sound very much like victory.
And these are the highlights of these letters. The others are so messed up, they’re busy pouring gasoline in those holes, blowing up their backyards, blowing up the house while they’re blowing up the backyard, everything is going wrong. So what in the world are we supposed to do?
Let’s root ourselves in the promises first. We turn to Revelation chapter 3, verse 21. Jesus says, “…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.”
Take a look later on, we have this theme going throughout Revelation, Revelation chapter 12, “…and they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they love not their lives even unto death.”
Well, it actually gives us a key to think back to those two churches that get things right, because they didn’t even love their lives more than they love victory in Christ. They didn’t even love their lives more than being like Jesus. That’s a very hard thing. That’s what they did.
But what about for the rest of us? Okay, so the saint, the person who is remembered throughout all ages, who went and was martyred and died for the faith, okay, that person has victory, but what about the normal people like me? You put me in that situation, what am I going to do? I’d like to think I’d say the right things. I’d like to say I’d do the right things, but it’s frightening. It’s scary. What about me?
Because here’s the problem: we find ourselves on fire in the moment. God’s working in some part in our lives. We see Him working in our lives and we say, okay, I’m raring and ready to go. I am on fire for Jesus, and we get started, and Jesus is giving us victory. But Jesus gives us victory and then we fizzle out. That’s our first challenge—that we start to let go of part of it. We start to let go of part of what He’s called us to be and to do. We have it all there when we become a Christian or we have it all there after we’ve had a really amazing experience where we just see God working so clearly, and then we fizzle out. But Jesus gives us victory over our fizzling out, and that’s something I think we sometimes miss in these letters. This is something that I felt like God was really pointing me to in these letters this particular time through them, as He’s writing these churches, because normally what do we do? We read about the messed up churches and we say, look at those messed up churches, and hopefully we say, and our church doesn’t look anything like those messed up churches, right? Look at those churches over there, they’re messed up, but not us. But then things start to creep into us and we start to think about the things that aren’t quite right in our own church, in our own lives, and we think, well, okay, what if I am in that category of the messed up? So those are the ones that have God’s judgment. Those are the ones that God is angry at.
What happens when that is me? What do I do then? I actually had this down—I wanted to, I was thinking about examples of this, and it seems like what’s happening in our building today might be almost better than anything I can come up with. But one thing that struck me—you’ve seen some of our issues today, and actually our neighbor is now blaring the bass down below us. It’s just got to be one of those days, right? How do you get victory over these things? I can’t even get victory over simple things.
Like let’s say we’re going to read this passage and you probably have noticed I have the clicker. So I generally, we have some—a wonderful team of people running the slides. I usually advance the slides myself when I’m doing a sermon, so I can kind of move it at my own pace. But the first time I tried to do that, I tried to do this: I tried to read out of the Bible while remembering where to advance the slides. And here’s what happened. We went on to slide one, had the text, and I start going, and I get really into this passage. I’m reading along, I get to the end of what I’m intending to read, and I realize there’s three slides I haven’t advanced through, and on screen, looking at the screen, it didn’t move anywhere because I can’t even balance something as simple as reading and advancing slides at the same time.
If I can’t do that, how am I going to advance actually being like Jesus in every way in my life? How am I going to do that? That’s what we see the challenge for these churches. They’re trying to read the Bible and move the slides forward. They’re trying to understand God’s truth, to receive God’s truth, and then to live God’s truth, and they’re struggling to do it. Ephesus, chapter two of Revelation, first letter, we read these words from Jesus:
He says, “I know your works, your toil, and your patient endurance, and how you cannot bear with those who are evil, but have tested those who call themselves apostles are not and found them to be false. I know you are enduring patiently and bearing up for my name’s sake, and you have not grown weary, but I have this against you: that you have abandoned the love you first had.”
What’s happening here? This is, I’d say, perhaps one of the greatest challenges to what we might broadly call the evangelical church today. When we think of those Christians in our country in particular who, we’d be a part of this group, who confess Jesus, confess the truth of scripture, confess that God’s word is true, that it’s applicable, that we can trust it from front cover to back cover. People who would confess these things—that we need to have a personal relationship with Jesus, all these true things.
Here is perhaps, I believe, the biggest challenge for us today, which is that we can hold onto that just like Ephesus. Ephesus was doing a great job of throwing out the heretics. Ephesus was doing a great job of saying, this is what is true. What does Jesus say? They’ve lost their first love. Now, commentators have wrestled with, well, what was their first love? And I think maybe intentionally Jesus doesn’t say, it’s this, because He wants us to wrestle with this for a bit, because there are different ways that we can do this. And perhaps Ephesus is doing multiple variants of this.
And what it probably looks somewhat like is they’ve lost actual love of God and love of their neighbors. They’re very zealous for the truth. They can stand up for what is true, but they actually love people. This is why I say this is the challenge, I believe, for the evangelical church in our country today. Because too often, as I look at our general societal picture of the church today, what would they say? They would say that Christians lack love. And what a terribly, terribly sad thing for people to say that believers in Jesus lack. And yet we get so focused, we need to stand for the truth. There’s threats all over the place. There’s people that are tearing apart the scriptures. There are people that are doing all kinds of wrong things. We need to stand for the truth, and we’re holding onto that, and we’re holding onto the rules, and we’re reading them, and we’re forgetting to click the clicker. Just like so often I do. I do this all the time. I do this sometimes in exactly this way. I get really strong. I’m standing on this truth. I’m going to stand up for it. But am I remembering to love the people right in front of me as I’m doing so? That’s the first challenge.
Sometimes it’s a little different. And we see this in Sardis in Revelation chapter three, verse one: “To the angel of the church of Sardis write the words of him who has seven spirits of God and the seven stars, I know your works. Hear 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.”
What’s happening there? They have the truth. They understand what God has had to say to them. They’ve lost holding on to actually letting it soak into their hearts. Maybe they have some knowledge, but they’re not living it. They’ve forgotten that there’s more than knowing the truth. There’s responding to the truth.
Sometimes you start to respond though, and then you let go. And that’s what we see in Laodicea. We see the different phases of what we go through as those seeking to follow Jesus in these letters.
Revelation chapter three, verse 15: “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 realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire so that you may be rich, and white garments 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. Those whom I love I reprove and discipline, so be zealous and repent.”
So notice here, we see three phases. We see the church that’s zealous but has forgotten to love. We see the church that has heard the truth but not done anything with it. And then we see the church that has received the truth, presumably responded to it such that it even has a reputation of being alive, but then sort of gone weaker and weaker until it isn’t really doing anything with it anymore; it’s dead.
What do we see there? We see different parts of what many of us go through in the Christian life. It’s not even something that this is true of one person and this is true of a different person. Sometimes it’s just true of us on different days or different weeks or different years.
But each of these problems is a real problem. If we’re holding on to the truth but we’re not loving, that’s a huge problem. If we’re knowing the truth but we’re not doing anything with it, that’s a real problem. And if we’re all on fire but we’re not running the long-term race, we’re just going to go full-fledged in, we’re all for Jesus, and then we burn ourselves out and we say, oh, well, that was nice for a while. It’s not good enough.
Sometimes we do that in a weekly cycle, right? We come into church and we feel so good. We see our friends and our family. We see that we’re all together praising God, and we feel like, oh boy, I can take on anything. And then we go out and we get in our car, people around us driving around us annoy us. We go on to Monday and the people at work annoy us. The people in the building that are blaring the subwoofer at the moment—I’m talking about loving people—and I’m thinking, ah, come on, let’s see if I can pound on the floor or something.
We’re constantly being pulled away from being faithful. We’re constantly being pulled away from it. Question is, what are we going to do about that? Because it’s not enough to do part of it. It’s not enough to read the Bible when you have the slides on screen but not advance the clicker. I try that sometimes. It’s really challenging. Or maybe it’s just challenging for my head.
But anyway, we need to hold it all together. Here’s the question we need to ask ourselves. How do I in my life bring Sunday into Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday and Friday and Saturday? How do I make sure that what I learn about Jesus, what I learn about the Father and the Holy Spirit, what I seek to live out when I’m at church, how do I make sure that doesn’t stop when I leave church or shortly thereafter?
Because sometimes it looks really good in the moment, but it’s horrible. I was thinking back to Jehu, one of the kings of the northern kingdom in the kingdom known as Israel after the split of the kingdom after Solomon, and he seems very zealous. He goes and he fights all the idolatry in the nation. He actually sets on fire a building full of all the worshipers of the false gods. And he, you know, here is someone literally, you might say, on fire for the Lord, right? He’s burning up the idolaters. He’s on fire for the Lord.
And yet what does he not do? He doesn’t actually stop the people of Israel from worshiping false gods. He goes along with it because then he says, but there’s… let’s mix a little false religion in because if I do, I can protect my kingdom. So he starts off really good, but then he fizzles out.
Sometimes we start off really good and we fizzle out. How do we, how do we bring Sunday into Monday? How do we stay on fire? We turn to Jesus. We need a lasting love of God and of our neighbor, and that’s so challenging because as we try to hold on to Jesus, oftentimes what causes us to fizzle out is that we meet opposition, that people don’t like us when we’re standing up for Jesus, that it’s just really hard to be really faithful for very long because when it gets tough, then we think, well, maybe I can fizzle a little, or we just feel our enthusiasm going out.
It’s like when people oppose us loving Jesus, they unscrew the cap of a brand new soda and just set it out in the sun for a few hours, right? It’s going to be awful. Oftentimes that’s how we are. But Jesus is challenging us to hold on to Him because when we’re holding on to how we feel, when we hold on to what we know, we’re going to lose part of it. We need to hold on to Him. Jesus gives us victory even when we’re opposed, but to do that, we have to turn to Him.
Revelation chapter two, verse 10: “Do not fear what you are about to suffer. Behold, the devil is about to throw some of you into prison that you may be tested, and for 10 days you will have tribulation. Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. The one who conquers will not be hurt by the second death.”
Now, if you’re like me about this, when I think about Jesus helping me in opposition, what I’m really hoping, if I’m being opposed, what I’m really praying is, Jesus, would You take this away? Would You make things all right? Would You make things smooth and comfortable? What does He really do? Quite frequently what He does is He gives us the strength to endure even the things that we fear most, and that’s what He says here.
You won’t face the second death. He doesn’t say you won’t face the first death. Someone may actually kill you, He says to these churches. Here are the faithful churches, the two most faithful ones, they’re both facing the possibility of death. He doesn’t say I’m going to take that away, I’m going to make sure that you’re safe. Some of them were going to die. Some of them, the way they were going to testify to who Jesus was and who Jesus is, is they were going to lay down their lives for Him as He’d lay down His life for them. But what was He going to do as He looked to them? He was going to give them the faith to endure, to hang on, to experience His victory.
Too often it feels like every time things start to go right in our lives, opposition comes up, and the question is, where am I looking for strength? Am I looking for it in myself? Looking for it in myself is going to get too hard. I’m going to fail.
I mentioned last week our plants outside in our garden. It’s been growing. Here’s some of the seedlings. You should stop if you’re here in person. Stop on the way out, take a look. Here’s some of the seedlings growing outside. They’re sprouting up. Here’s some more. See those ones in the middle there? They’re really sprouting up now. The garden is growing. It’s so exciting.
And yet, you know, one of the challenges to getting this garden growing this summer has been the weather. Because it seems like it’s never right for these seeds. We just got through a week where we were hitting triple digits regularly, and you think about we have this big asphalt parking lot with a little bitty bit of dirt that these plants are planted in. So they’re getting baked severely. And then if it’s not that, we’re getting monsoons, right? We got this giant torrential downpour yesterday, and we’ve had several of these over the summer that are just raining like cats and dogs, and it’s sort of, I’m thinking, don’t wash away the seeds. They’re going to wash away.
And if they’re rooted in just my hopes and my desire to protect them, guess what? They’re going to wash away. They need to be rooted in something that doesn’t move. And of course, if you’re a plant, you stick your roots down in the ground and you hold on. Well, as God waters us, as He strengthens us, what’s He doing? He’s giving us roots that are rooted down into the only thing that truly doesn’t move, and that’s Jesus. Doesn’t take away all the suffering.
To the church at Smyrna, what does He say? He says that they’re going to endure 10 days of suffering. And we think about that for a moment, and it doesn’t sound so bad until we realize what He’s doing here. He’s referring back to Daniel and the way that Daniel divides up time. And oftentimes as we look at what we find in Daniel, what do we see? We see that days actually can represent very long periods of time. And oftentimes the suffering in Daniel is three and a half days long. Ten days, well, that’s a lot longer than three and a half days.
In other words, what Jesus is saying here, you might suffer for a very long time, but you’re going to endure. I’m not going to let go of you. You might suffer for way longer than what we think of as biblical proportions of suffering. The rain may keep pouring down and trying to wash you away, but I’m going to give you roots that won’t let you be washed away.
Same thing is happening in Philadelphia, the other best example of a faithful church in these letters. He says, “I know your works. Behold, I’ve set before you an open door, which no one is able to shut. I know that you have but little power, and yet you have kept my word. You have not denied my name.”
By earthly standards, you’re not doing so well. People don’t respect you. You’re just this little bitty speck in the society, and one hated by many of the people in the society. But you don’t need to fear, because what you do fear, what you fear is death. What you fear is people not liking you and bringing the force of the world against you. But here’s the thing that you need to know: you’re going to avoid something much worse, which is the second death. You might physically die. You might physically suffer, but I’m with you, and you’re not going to die ultimately. You’re not going to die eternal death. You’re going to experience eternal life, which I can give and they can’t. That’s what Jesus is saying to them.
And so what we see here, and I believe the reason we have these two letters is our second need that we face in the Christian life is the need for patience in dark times. I’m impatient in dark times. I was referring to that a bit last week. And when we’re waiting, and we’re waiting for things to somehow fit, and we’re wondering why God aren’t you fixing this, and it’s really easy to become impatient, and yet what Jesus says is endure it. Hold on to me. I’m going to be with you.
I think when we think about victory, and when we hear people say you’re going to have a victorious Christian life—we’ll hear certain types of preachers use that phrasing a lot—and what we often get the picture of, and what they often are presenting is victory in this moment. You’re going to have worldly success. You’re going to have worldly ease. But that’s not at all what Jesus is promising here.
Jesus is promising a much greater victory, the very victory He achieved in His death: victory over death. Not a promise to immediate escape, but it’s a promise to something much better.
And yet as we try to withstand the pressures of difficulties in life, what do we find? We find that we start to find alternative paths. Things that seem to maybe offer an easier way. In the church, we often see this: Here’s a shortcut. We can make life easier. We can adopt a few of the ways of the world, and if we do that, we won’t be opposed so much. So we see these misdirections slip in, and as they do, and as we embrace them, what happens? We start to turn away from what God has called us to be and to do.
Take a look at Pergamum in Revelation chapter 2, verse 14: “I have a few things against you. You have some there who hold the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to put a stumbling block before the sons of Israel so they might eat food sacrificed to idols and practice sexual immorality. So also you have some who hold the teachings of the Nicolaitans. Therefore repent. If not, I will come to you soon and war against them with the sword of my mouth.”
This is a message to the church. He’s saying what has happened? We’re enduring those who teach falsely and live falsely. It’s in some sense the opposite problem that we see in Ephesus. Ephesus could hold on to the truth. They could throw out the evildoers. They could throw out the people who had false teaching, but they didn’t love people.
What do we see here? We see those who aren’t really holding firmly enough to what God has commanded them to do. Instead, presumably what they’re seeing is if we just ease into society a little bit, we won’t be like those churches that are going to face death. We don’t want to face the first death or the second death. We don’t want to face death at all.
Anyone here want to face death? Jim wants to face death. Okay. Yeah. That’s true. You do get to go to heaven. Yeah. Yeah. Shame on you. Shame on you.
Yeah. I don’t want to face people causing trouble during the middle of a sermon. That’s what I don’t want to face. No, that’s actually where we should be. Jim is speaking what we should do.
But what do we do over and over again? We try to avoid facing it. And I’m not saying we should embrace death and have a culture of death. We shouldn’t end our lives before they should end. We shouldn’t allow people to take what they love. You should embrace it. We should oppose the loss of human life, whether that person isn’t born yet or that person is at the very end of life. We should hold to the preciousness of life from the very beginning to the very end. That is what we are called to do as Christians.
And yet, what do we do? What do we do? We see that for ourselves. We don’t really want to get involved in others because it’s difficult. It’s messy.
In the churches that are wavering here, what do we see? We see that, as I say, well, maybe we can ease in so that we don’t have to face death for ourselves. You know, Jesus called us to be holy. He called us to care about worshiping God. But if we get mixed in with a little bit of the idolatrous worship of the town but people don’t hate us, does it really do any harm? If we don’t stand for moral purity quite as much as we should, is that really going to do any harm? We say, we can make life so much easier this way.
It’s funny. If you think about Balaam, we did a series a while back on him. He’s the one, if you recall, you’re thinking, who’s Balaam? He’s the one, you may remember the story of the donkey, his donkey talks to him. And Balaam is not an Israelite, but Balaam is a prophet for hire, and he’s been hired to curse Israel.
And he goes and tries to curse Israel, and he tries three different times to curse Israel. God won’t let him curse Israel, he can’t come at Israel directly because God is protecting the Israelites. So what does he come up with that works? He persuades them to do unrighteous acts. He persuades them to intermarry with those who don’t worship the Lord, and he persuades them to act in a way that will tarnish their reputation, tarnish their testimony, tarnish their purity before God. And he persuades them to do this because as long as he comes at them just with spiritual things, as long as he comes at them in a very direct way, God’s protecting them; they’re maybe even holding on a little bit to the truth. But if he comes at them indirectly and just says, you know, life would be so much easier if you just soften the rules that God’s given you a little bit, they say, oh, okay.
And we think, how can you be so stupid, Israelites? How can you be so stupid, Christian churches in the early church? You’re not even that removed from Jesus. How could you be so stupid? But here’s the thing: we all fall into this trap. We all find the place to cut a corner. We all find a place where it feels easy to be angry, where it feels easy to gossip, where it feels easy to judge, where it feels easy to do things in an unrighteous way, to think unrighteous things because it feels like it will make it so that people will like us more, our career path will go smoother, our work at school will go smoother, whatever it might be. And so we do this.
I think it’s really telling as we look at these letters here, as Jesus tells them, here is what conquering looks like. On the one hand, it looks like manna. That’s kind of an interesting image. What’s manna? Manna is food provided by God. How do we conquer evil? How do we hold on to what is true? We look to what God provides. Because when we’re looking to ourselves and our own provision, when we’re looking to how we can do things, it looks like we need those shortcuts because we’re not going to make it. But when we look to the fact that our heavenly Father provides for our needs, has provided the very breath in our bodies, we realize, I don’t need to do this. I don’t need these shortcuts. I don’t need to have the world appreciate me or give me success because God is the one who gives true success.
And then the second thing He talks about when He speaks of conquering in terms of opposing these sorts of evil is to see the morning star. And commentators again have wrestled with this. Is this referring directly to Jesus? Is it more nuanced than that? But here’s what it seems to be very clearly pointing to, which is it clearly points to Jesus’ future rule.
So what do we look at when we’re struggling? Well, for one, we look at God’s provision right now. We already are being provided for by God. And then when we look to the fact that someday Jesus will truly conquer all evil and all death, we know that He will.
We say, but it’s so hard. I try to do this and then I sin again and then I fall again. And then I do things that I know were unrighteous again. And look at these.
Let’s go to the end of Revelation here…
Well, it’d be nice if we were going to the end of Revelation. We’re going to do that. I’m going to just flip over here. Ah, yes, yes, yes.
Revelation 21, verse 8: “But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for the murderers, the sexually immoral, the sorcerers, the idolaters, all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.”
You think about what Jesus is saying to these churches that have fallen short morally. They’ve fallen short on the truth. Well, if we look at Revelation 21, it sounds like they’re done for, doesn’t it? What could possibly come of them now? They’re done. They’re going to be thrown into the fire.
And if we think about this for a moment, we should say, we’re done for. We’re going to be thrown into the fire.
Maybe we don’t check off all these boxes. I don’t know of anyone, for example, who’s a sorcerer. I don’t know a single sorcerer in my life. I’m not going to ask for a show of hands if you do, but I don’t know a single sorcerer.
But as we think about these different things that are listed here, I believe it’s designed to make sure it catches every single one of us.
And notice how it starts the list with the cowardly. Am I cowardly at times? Oh yes, I’m definitely cowardly at times.
Where does it end? No liars. I’m going to go ahead and assume everyone in this room has never told a lie in their lives. Everyone agree with that? We all agree? Yeah? Go ahead and put your hand up. Totally. Yeah, totally? Yeah.
Okay, guess what? We’ve just violated that once again, right? Yeah. We all are going to get… There isn’t a single person who has managed to avoid telling a lie at some point in life. So we just start at those two ends and move in. We already see we can’t even get to some of the bigger things in there before we already find ourselves condemned to the lake of fire, the second death.
So then how can Jesus talk about any of the churches standing up? How can He talk about a single church that will not face the second death?
Verse seven of chapter 21: “The one who conquers will have this heritage, the heritage of the new heavens and the new earth, and I will be his God, and he will be my son.” The one who conquers. The one, in other words, who looks to Jesus’ victory. Because what we see time and again, what we saw earlier when we started, is that the one who conquers is the one who holds on to Jesus, who keeps his or her focus on Jesus.
And if you’re doing that, friends, you may fall into sin. We all will fall into sin. We’re not going to be perfect this side of eternity. And yet what do we see? Jesus offers us victory.
The key here, the key to every error that we see in these churches, and the key to those churches holding on faithfully, it’s the same—it’s holding on to Jesus. That’s where it all is.
You see those jokes go around, you had one job, right? If you are the person taking the photos for driver’s licenses, you have one job to get really nasty photos of people, right? That’s the job, right? You wait until they have one eye open, ah, perfect, right? Yeah, I mean, you have one job.
But the goal, all kidding aside, is to get a picture of the person so that even though it looks terrible, that when they get pulled over or when they go and open a bank account or whatever it might be, you can take the driver’s license and look at the person and say, just make the worst face you possibly can, oh yeah, it is you.
Well, Jane Dodd went a few years ago to the License Bureau during the pandemic, I think it apparently was one of her first outings back out, and she needed a driver’s license. She goes in, and going into the DMV usually isn’t a wonderful experience for people, but she goes in and is just happy that everyone’s trying to make the best of it. They take the picture, she gets the driver’s license a few days later, and here it is. Notice anything missing?
Yeah, she’s a chairwoman, yeah, yeah, chairperson. Yeah, so this person had one job, get a picture. It doesn’t even have to be a good picture, one job, but yeah, picture of a chair.
She said the next week she went into work, her boss had heard about this, and he walked into her office and said, oh, I thought you were out there, and he points to the chair outside her office door.
She didn’t finally get it remade, but she had to convince the person at the DMV to actually look at the file on the computer, because the DMV person couldn’t believe anyone would actually print a driver’s license card with just a chair.
How could you lose focus enough to not even realize that you’re just posting a picture of a chair? And yet the camera must have fired one extra time, it took the picture, and the person putting together the card has just slapped it together.
Oftentimes that’s how we lose focus, too. We’re just slapping things together, and we don’t even realize that we’re not looking to Jesus, that we’re not looking to the one who provides.
But we’ve talked about different needs tonight, and here is the need, it’s Jesus. Because faith in Jesus is what leads to victory. Faith in Jesus is what allows us to conquer.
Nothing else—not my strength, not your strength, not my knowledge, not your knowledge, not reading the Bible every day, not never reading the Bible, not praying for 10 hours, not praying for one second.
Conqueror, it is what it is all going to come out of, it’s out of Jesus.
Should we pray a lot? Yes, but if you don’t trust in Jesus, it’s not going to do you any good. Should we read the Bible a lot? Yes, but if you don’t trust in Jesus, it’s not going to do you any good. Should we live a righteous life? Yes, but it’s not going to do you any good unless you trust in Jesus.
Here’s the question we need to ask ourselves: Am I with or without Jesus? Here’s the question those churches need to ask themselves: Are we with or without Jesus? Are we looking to Jesus right now, or are we looking to our own provision? Are we looking to Jesus, or are we looking to all the threats in the world? What causes us to fizzle? What causes us to buckle under opposition? What causes us to endure falsehood and misdirection? All that comes down to focusing on things other than Jesus.
I like what Robert Wall says: He says, the faithful congregation is comforted not by a future of orchestrated and preplanned events, what we often look at Revelation for, right? But by the eminent expectation of an actual person, Jesus.
Here is how we endure this life: we expect that Jesus is going to return. We believe that Jesus is going to return. We will preach for as long as it’s possible. May this always be what this church preaches. May this always be what every church preaches: that Jesus is the victorious King who will return, that He is with us now, and that He will be with us always. And if that is where we hold, if that is what we hold on to, we will have victory not because of our own strength but because of Him.
Jesus is here. Jesus is victorious. And Jesus will come again.
Will you pray with me, please?
Lord, too often we do lose focus. We turn to everything other than You. And yet, Lord, would You help us to turn only to You? We fizzle out; we burn hot for a moment, excited for You, and then we cool off. Sometimes we’re this unrecognizable lukewarm temperature. Sometimes we’re mixed in with the poison of false teaching and false morality. Sometimes it just seems like the world is opposing us too much, and we can’t even think straight to do what You’ve called us to do.
But here’s what we know: that You are faithful. Would You help us not to look to what we can accomplish but what You have accomplished? And as You call us then to follow You, would You help us to do so by the power of Your Holy Spirit, by Your strength and Yours alone? We pray, in the precious name of our Savior, Jesus. Amen.
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