Revelation: Victory in Doubt - Week 2 - Sermons - Matt Chandler

hi guys pastor matt chandler here pray that this sermon this resource uh be used by god in conjunction with you belonging to a local church uh to grow you and sanctify you in your faith if these resources bless you would you consider giving back to us here at tbc you can do that either through the app or you can go online to tbc resources and give there again pray that this blesses you and grows you in your love for jesus christ there is a battle coming the war has already begun it is raged unseen for millennia and though we often struggle to see the conflict for what it really is all of us can feel its effects we wrestle with the powers of sin and death on a daily basis and sometimes in our darkest moments it can feel like we're losing but the word of the lord tells a different story hope echoes throughout the pages of scripture despite the mystery that surrounds it the book of revelation offers the people of god a clear message fear not tomorrow tomorrow is one hi my name is stacy anderson and my husband and matt and i are members here at the village church we serve with the home groups ministry and also the connections ministry i'm going to be reading from revelation 3 14-22 and to the angel of the church in laodicea write the words of the amen the faithful and true witness the beginning of god's creation 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 i need nothing not realizing that you are wretched pitiable poor blind and naked i counsel you to buy from me gold refined with fire so that you may be rich and white garments so that you may clothe yourself and the shame of your neckiness 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 behold i stand at the door and knock if anyone hears my voice and opens the door i will come into him and eat with him and he with me the one who conquers i will grant him to sit with me on my throne as i also conquered and sat down with my father on his throne he who has an ear let him hear what the spirit says to the churches this is the word of the lord thanks be to god thanks daisy well to say that i am bummed out of my mind that we couldn't be together would be uh understating it like uh and especially on week two here of revelation when we're really going to be talking about some very real dangers for us uh to consider like if you're going to talk about happy things maybe you can just throw it out over the internet but if you want to talk about dangers and and being in danger with one another and keeping your head on a swivel and you want to talk about really the schemes of the enemy and what it's like to look for the schemes of the enemy and get ready to as the passages say over and over and over again conquer the enemy and claim the reward certainly we need to do that face to face but for whatever reason uh in god's providence this is where we find ourselves today now uh i was watching tv i don't know if you watch tv anymore i was let me i was streaming television maybe let's just say it that way i was streaming television and and i had that that crisis that befalls all of us which means i i i have things to watch but there is nothing to watch and so i'm on youtube tv and they're kind of thinking like this is something you might like the algorithm trying to suck me in and i came across a show lauren had already fallen asleep on the couch i don't know what your pattern is at home but my pattern is for my wife to say let's watch something before we go to bed and then five seconds later to be asleep on the couch well meanwhile i get sucked in to whatever uh i'm watching for another hour instead of just heading on to bed and so uh the algorithm's pulling me in knows who i am knows what i like uh and one of the first thing on my little for you to watch bar uh was um world's best apex predators and so i don't know why the algorithm thinks that that's what i want to watch but that is what i want to watch and so i i pull up this show on the world's best apex predators and they're going through you know there's the snow leopard and there's the tiger and i'm trying to guess like well what is like the best what's the world's number one apex predator and they kind of work through this list and then the very last one number one uh the deadliest apex predator on earth is drumroll the killer whale all right and so the the orcas and so now they go all into the orcas and why they're the biggest apex predator turns out nothing on earth hunts them but human beings and they will kill anything in the sea they will attack a great white shark they will attack whales ten times their size they will eat seal they will if they see it they're going to try to kill it and eat it and they were talking about how killer whales how orcas which by the way aren't whales they're actually in the dolphin family all right and so as they're talking about how orcas or killer whales hunt that they kind of unpack that they travel in pods of up to 30 and then what they try to do when they come across something they're going to kill as a pack is they will communicate with one another and several of them will begin to disorient the prey so if they're hunting a great white shark which doesn't that sound crazy they're hunting a great white shark and they're the this group of killer whales is just trying to just trying to disorient the the shark and so they come up from underneath coming from above and they just try to confuse the shark but they will purposefully listen this blew my mind they will purposefully leave a window for the shark the whale the seal whatever to try to get out of and so the plan according to whoever put this together whatever the human studied this and figured it out whoever dialed into the orca language has figured out that they leave that window open on purpose so that the prey might with all their might swim as hard as they can towards freedom only to have the door slammed by a group from the pod a few miles away and then they will begin to devour the prey the other group will catch back up and they will devour the prey and as i watched it that night i thought goodness sakes isn't that exactly how the enemy hunts us and seeks to destroy us to disorient us to get our heads spinning to point us in a direction that looks right like points us in direction where like that makes sense i should head that way only to slam the door and destroy us i think this is what we need to consider today and i think this is partly what's going on as revelation takes a look at the seven churches in asia minor so if you were here last week or you dialed in you watched the sermon last week we said one of the things that this book is is a letter it's written to a specific people at a specific time and a specific place and it cannot say to us what it did not say to them and this is the way if i could stick this in your head for how you read your bible he would be a great little rule it was written to them and for us and so what what happens here in chapters two and chapter three is john begins to write uh the words that he hears from jesus uh towards the seven churches and and he commends them and he rebukes them and here's what's happening in this text if we had time or if i had time in this sermon i'd like to pop up even higher and show you that there are two marks of a christian church in the new testament two marks of of what god is up to of what god wants from a gathering of his people right so so if we think about it's written to them before us and he's written two seven churches individuals made up of local congregations across the ancient world if it's written to them and for us the question is what is he calling us to and what is he calling us away from and so if we had more time we could pop up and i could just lay before you hear the two things that the church of jesus christ has been called to across all time and space number one the church of jesus christ should be marked by faithfulness to the word of god what makes us distinct in the world we are faithful to the word of god if god commands god reveals god shows us something about himself something about life in this book we happily and gladly submit to it so that's mark number one we're faithful to the word of god mark number two we love one another deeply right that the new testament church should be marked by a commitment to the word of god and a deep love for one another now this is the space a commitment to the word of god and a deep love for one another that the the devil our enemy demonic principalities and powers our own sinful compulsions right like to when we hear that we kind of get the weight bearing on us in that we see this opening we jet out towards it and it's in that space that i think we can be destroyed and so there's three big schemes i think of the enemy that we see across revelation two and three in light of the seven letters to the churches and i just wanna walk through those three schemes so let me tell you what they are just right out of the gate scheme number one is a church that is biblically knowledgeable but cold scheme number two is a church that is spiritually aware but indifferent and scheme number three is a church that is spiritually weary and falling away these are the three schemes of the enemy and i want us to take a look at them scheme number one a church that is biblically knowledgeable but cold if i could use other language they are theologically thick but si thin in love they have good doctrine but bad devotion they have good orthodoxy but terrible orthopraxy see you and i live in a world that is full of contempt of condensation and undue suspicion like we we love we love our culture the culture that you and i are steeping in right they love criticism they love doubt they love suspicion they love to condemn and to cancel and to find whatever's wrong with so that i might tear down and wouldn't it be an amazing apologetic if the church could live something opposite of that if we believed the best if we were long-suffering if we loved deeply if we were slow to anger and abounding and steadfast love like our god if we had a church that had both gospel doctrine and gospel culture that as we have been forgiven by jesus we'd be quick to forgive others as jesus has lavished upon us love and the benefit of the doubt that we would lavish upon others love and peace and mercy and a quickness to forgive and yet we look much like the world in our tribes as we attack one another for secondary theological issues rather than loving those made in the image of god i swear i feel like some of us are going to hate heaven we're not going to i mean it's going to blow our mind that these people made it in what shock it should blow your mind that you made it in what should undo us is that we're invited that that the spirit of god has forgiven us that god delights in us that we have been invited to the wedding supper of the lamb that's what should lay us low and i'm just it it breaks my heart to see the tribalism so violent among the christians of our day that we can't show the world the beauty of unity in the gospel because we're too busy fighting over secondary issues although they were gospel issues listen they're this has been defined different ways at different seasons but the best way to think about it is there's the closed hand of theology this is what makes us orthodox this is the creeds this is uh salvation by grace alone through faith alone this is um this is the virgin birth this is the closed hand of theology this makes us distinctively christian and then there's the open hand of theology it's not that they're not important it's just they're not essential to be a christian and our posture should always be one of love towards other christians even christians that bother you yeah that's right i'm not saying you can't have christians that bother you in fact you can have christians that you love and hate what they believe while you love them still i know that's hard for us so let me let me try to let me just give you a quote here this is spurgeon where the spirit of god is there must be love and if i have once known and recognized any man to be my brother in christ jesus the love of christ constraineth me no more to think of him as a stranger and foreigner but as a fellow citizen with the saints listen to this now i hate high churchism as my soul hates satan but i love george herbert although george herbert is a desperately high churchman i hate his high churchism but i love george herbert from my very soul and i have a warm corner in my heart for every man who is like him let me find a man who loves the lord jesus christ as george herbert did and i do not ask myself whether i can love him or not there is no room for that question for i cannot help myself unless i can leave off loving christ i cannot cease loving those who love him so i i don't want to spend a lot of time high churchism is is a series of rituals and ecclesiological church practices uh that that that many churches did that were resisting modernity in spurgeon's day and trying to stay ritualistic in the approach uh to jesus christ in a relationship with jesus christ and i don't know if you remember the quote we've already a few minutes pastor but he said i hate high churchism as i hate satan now i'm guessing that on a scale of things that spurge and hated uh satan's at the top of the list now maybe not you know maybe it's like beats or something like that but i i'm gonna guess it might just be satan is at the top of the list i hate satan more than i hate anything else and i hate high churchism like it and yet spurgeon here is modeling for us the call of god on the church of jesus christ to love one another to be known by our love and not use doctrine as a weapon to wage war one against each other i think we see this most often uh in the pharisees who hold so rigid to their doctrine that they lack the capacity to love show empathy be kind or gracious towards in fact one of the things you see jesus confronting them most frequently is their lack of love and this is one of the things that we're seeing in the seven churches here they've got good doctrine but they no longer love anyone they've got good doctrine they're just fighting each other it's not that their doctrine's wrong they're actually their doctrines right if we if we have time to walk through some of these churches like some are actually commended for their doctrine they can spot false teaching they know who a true apostle is and yet he says even in their brilliant doctrine they've forgotten the thing they've forgotten the thing that makes them the people of god namely their love for one another and their love for jesus doctrine is not an end in itself doctrine is meant to be embodied and where we do not embody doctrine but rather just know some things in our minds we will be condescending to others we will lack empathy for others and we will do that most evil of things where we're able to just throw somebody in a in a drawer and not have to love them and not have to pray for them and not have to be kind to them simply because they're a heretic or that they believe this or they believe that see these categories although helpful can be weaponized and we can therefore brutalize our brothers and sisters and this is one of the best schemes of the enemy across the ages let me make you hyper focus on doctrine to the point that you don't care about people at all you would rather be right than when your brother and sister you would rather uh be the one that has the the correct doctrine nailed down than to see that doctrine work its way out in your life and into the lives of others listen i am a happily reformed brother and i have found in the tribe that i am in this to be particularly true there can be and i don't know if it's theological puberty i don't know exactly what it is but there's a kind of bullying and anger and fear that can pop up in this and then man i'm i'm a baptocostal and so i get to kind of dance in these other worlds and then i find among my my costals on the baptiside uh and i i find them to be horrifically judgy kind of putting everybody here and kind of they're cold and dead and they just want to know doctrine these things are not at odds no doctrine and body should fan the flame of great passion for jesus christ the scheme of the enemy is to disembody doctrine to take us out of doctrine in a way that we just leverage it for our own self-esteem rather than be transformed by it in such a way that we actually embody it this is a great scheme of the enemy and he seeks to destroy us with it now i want to be clear here doctrine is not the issue or the enemy we cannot respond to this danger this scheme of the enemy by not caring about doctrine in fact one of the things that makes local church membership such such a beautiful thing is that these secondary and tertiary issues of doctrine that they do matter play themselves out in a local body that the village church we have uh theological distinctives doctrinal distinctives or say hey here's where we land on this here's where we land on this here's where we land on this not to condemn anyone outside of here but to clearly inform you inside of here this is what we believe this is what we find beautiful come with us if you can come with us if you can and i love that throughout all of these warnings here in these three verses these two chapters there's this invitation to repent and and so let me slow down for a moment this is why i wish we were in the room together if you find in yourself if you find in your heart contempt towards brothers and sisters in christ if you find in yourself that you are spring-loaded to critique and judge and find what is wrong before you celebrate what we most have in common jesus here says repent do those things that you did at first when doctrine was laid at the feet of jesus because this is how you started before your heart was hardened before the schemes of the enemy in your own pride and compulsions took over what you did is everything was ordered by your love for jesus christ like you loved jesus and all doctrine makes sense and is rightly ordered in a love for jesus christ that overflows into a love for one another so where we have contempt where we're overly critical where we're um spring ready to find the air in what somebody is saying or doing or gosh if they're even hanging out with those who do have error then i'm that you the jesus not not me jesus says that you need to repent to turn to stop and and then i love this refrain in in all seven churches he who has an ear let him hear so scheme number one a church that's biblically knowledgeable but cold scheme number two a church that is spiritually aware but indifferent so it's funny as you well people when you read the seven churches they're like oh i see our church here oh man this is the day that we lived in and there's all these ways that people have read them over uh time and space and the reality is that we're all of these things and none of the i mean this is uh how the devil has tried to undermine and deceive the people of god uh since uh the spirit of god has gathered us and and here's scheme number two indifference apathy just thinking it's no big deal this thing that we're caught up in one of the reasons why i'm so excited about revelation is kind of the curtain of reality is pulled back and you get to see what's actually going on right so so if you were here last week remember we just read revelation 12 1 through 4 and it was silent night holy night all is calm all is bright we pull back the curtain and actually it's war in heaven it's a dragon and a baby and and blood and death and writing and we're just kind of lighting candles and seeing it but beyond like you pull back the the curtain and you see what's actually happening and what we're gonna see starting next week window one is ultimate reality and you and i rolled to sleep by a lot of netflix by a lot of apps can no longer see what's going on right in front of us and when it comes to spiritual realities we are indifferent and we are apathetic as though what god is up to in the world is no big deal we are guilty of this when we no longer care about the truth of doctrine so watch what's happening here because it can't be that we don't care about doctrine because god has made himself knowable all right the god of the universe is noble we don't have to guess like we can know he has revealed himself to us in his word and one of the ways you can see that you have fallen prey to your own pride to your own apathy and indifference that you've given in to this scheme of the enemy is when you just don't care to know any more about the creator god of the universe and the one who has saved your soul to be biblically illiterate is to have fallen into this scheme to know nothing about the nature and character of god and just make stuff up as you go you know the bible says that there's a way that seems right to man and in the end everybody dies listen we can't afford to be people that say well i don't think god would or i think god would just pull it out of the air that's a scheme that's meant to destroy the people of god no no we are to know because he is knowable this is why i say over and over again we're to be a biblically serious people that i want the spirit of god to with the word of god shape my entire life how do i love lauren i want the word of god the spirit of god with the word of god to shape how i approach my wife how do i parent my children with the spirit of god through the word of god to help me understand how to love my children as best i can with where i am how do i spend my money glad you asked that i want the spirit of god to use the word of god to shape and mold me what is god like in his love i want the spirit of god through the word of god to show me what the love of god is like how does salvation work i want the spirit of god through the word of god to help me understand how salvation works and i want it to confront me and shape me and mold me into who god would have me be right so this is the first way we are guilty of this the second way i think we can be guilty of participating in the second scheme spiritually aware but indifferent is that we tolerate sin in our lives and in our congregation now uh it's important to note that if you read through this this week before we were um digitally gathered uh one of the things that comes up quite consistently in chapter two and three is sexual perversion it's said in multiple different ways and and he comes at it in several different angles but the reality was uh these churches were spread across the ancient world in key port cities and in key cities uh that had temples and and were very metropolitan and so what would happen is that both in the temples and in certain feasts or think national holidays uh there was a kind of um illicit behavior that was promoted in each of those places and so uh the temples a lot of the fertility temples sexual promiscuity and adultery and and prostitution were just so normative in the culture that you wouldn't think much about participating it was just part of what everyone did in that culture it'd be hard to even spot it and then there were feasts there were these places you would go where there would be feasts and the feasts would almost always devolve into kind of these wildly perverse sexual deviant um gatherings and remember it was written to them but it was written for us see man if i'm looking around i would say there's a kind of sexual perversion that has been normalized around us that so the air that we breathe that we no longer think much about it when we think about the pervasiveness of pornography the consistency of promiscuity the the regular acts of adultery across our culture we think about the normalization of homosexuality and other sorts of deviant sexual behavior and i'd like to just stop there and just go everyone in this room everyone watching this is broken sexually and in need of the love and mercy of jesus christ whether you uh have same-sex attraction or you or you're a heterosexual like we all have brokenness that we're in desperate need of jesus christ but these things have been normalized in 2021 and the pull on us to be indifferent towards is unbelievably powerful and it's a scheme of the enemy meant to destroy the church so what happens is we get disoriented by a thousand different lies we get twisted we start to run in a certain direction the enemy's happy to do that as he slams the door and has us agreeing with what the world agrees with because it's no big deal because everybody does it because it's so normal and there's no outrage over it anymore then we just kind of just kind of slide into kind of a lukewarm indifference towards sin but sin destroys god is never lukewarm towards sin sin destroys the people of god god hates sin so we must first and foremost hate sin in ourselves and long to be a family of faith marked by deep holiness and a commitment to hold one another accountable to that end and so brother sister here's if you would have the courage there are about three or four men in my life who i have said watch everything i do and where you see any inconsistency please come and let me know i would just ask you you probably need to be more serious about your sin than you maybe are maybe not i mean i don't know i certainly don't know everybody watching this but i would just realize how prone you can be to wonder and how easy it would be for you to get picked off by the enemy simply because of what seems normal to you but the word of god would confront as sinful and wicked scheme number two a church that is spiritually aware but indifferent remember that means we don't care about the truth of doctrine we don't care to learn or grow into a knowledge of who he is and it also means that we are guilty of tolerating sin in our lives and in the congregations and yet here's this invitation again that jesus is giving to repent to turn to come and then he ends it again he who has an ear let him hear and then the last one scheme three is a church that is spiritually weary and falling away again i said this last week i want to remind you again it it would be hard for us to imagine how powerful the pull on these little bitty churches would have been to simply participate in the pleasures and wealth of rome i mean at least here we can look around and we can see giant churches in dallas and and most of us know a lot of christians and there's you know millions of us here in the western world if not tens of millions of us if not hundreds of millions of us globally that this was tiny tiny i mean this was i mean a few thousand across the empire and they're being murdered and fed to animals and caught on fire and thrown in prison what was the pull like in these days and yet i i think even in our day everywhere we look from social media to mainstream media there are stories of deconversion the world loves championing the brother or sister who says no no i was a christian and i no longer am and then listen if you're on social media if you're in places like that the the number of of things that i have seen just as i've watched my kids online uh life and i've got my own online knife that the number of things i've seen on instagram and places like that that pop up and just go hey i've got an mdiv people told me my whole life that the bible said this actually what it says is this and they try to undermine the authority of the word of god with nonsensical like what does you having an mdip have with being an expert on that right it's this way of undermining what uh the church's belief that this is the authority of god that god has spoken to us and that we should be formed and shaped by this word and and yet if the enemy can wear us out make us feel overwhelmingly weary simply by constantly painting the picture that we are losing and that the world is winning we might lose heart and give up we might isolate and grow embittered we might look at all the faults of the church and none of his beauties while none of her beauties while simultaneously ignoring all the faults in us and only recognizing the beauty in us see i don't listen the church hurt is a very real thing to have put your trust and hope in people and to be betrayed by them to to put your hope in a in a gathering of people in a local context that's trying to make much of jesus and to find out there was some hypocrisy there or maybe some abuse there that wounded you deeply i never want to take anything away from that i would just acknowledge it happens god help us it happens and i wish that it would be eradicated among the the people of god and yet one of the best schemes of the enemy here is to isolate and embitter so one of the things that was true that night about apex predators is to the one they're looking for something that's isolated and weak so whether it was the snow leopard or the tiger uh or what whatever apex predator was being covered it was always simple find the one that's fallen away from the pack find the one that's wounded or old or tired or weary and attack it and one of the ways that the enemy does this to us is by isolating and then letting us grow bitter and angry and that becomes really really great ground to destroy to destroy and so this is a scheme of the enemy to make us look around and go oh my gosh we're losing look at how many people are leaving the churches look at how many people are deconverting look at look at how society is now looking at the church surely we're outdated surely this is a yesteryear religion that has lost its luster surely this no longer this belief system no longer works in the modern world meanwhile the modern world burns to the ground and their ideology is producing nothing but the desperate need for medicine and here we are with the truth of god's word and the really the the power of the holy spirit to live out a life marked by victory and joy and yet what happens is that the scheme is to distract us with weariness to look around and go look all is locked look how many people are weary look how many people are falling away and yet jesus again is is calling us to wake up and and to see ultimate reality and and to see that that when all things are said and done that our victory is secure that that the victory of god's people regardless of what it looks like we're seeing has been purchased by his blood it's already been and then to root ourselves in that confidence and so here we here it is again an invitation to repent i don't know if you ever thought about repentance like that but repentance is always an invitation back into the fullness of life when the word of god asks us to repent it's not that you're being punished it's that you're being invited in to life so if you feel any kind of conviction across the message today we should always rejoice that we're feeling convicted conviction and the need to repent actually a sign that the spirit of god is actually dwelling inside of us now how are we trying to combat this here so if we're saying these are three schemes that consistently have been launched against the people of god namely those churches gatherings of people across uh the two millennia then then how are we going to combat those well let me show you what we're trying to do so this is what we believe is necessary if you're going to be a fully formed disciple of jesus christ we think that you've got to have a knowledge of god himself this is what we mean by doctrine right you've got to understand who god is and then rightly understanding who god is you will rightly understand who you are you can't get this backwards you don't rightly understand you so that you might rightly understand god we behold god we look at the beauty of god and that informs how we see and understand ourself but you can't just have that all by itself you have knowledge of god and self in community so that we do that together and then that third circle is that we are on mission with each other as we're growing in a knowledge of god himself and so here at the village you can see in this venn diagram we're aiming dead at the middle where these three things combined we want to do doctrine in community and on mission we've already covered it embodied doctrine we want to live out what we say we believe we want our community formed and shaped by doctrine and mission we don't want to just eat nachos together love me some nachos but that's not christian community christian community is informed by the word of god and it is on mission with one another it is deep it blows past facebook friends we are fully known we we don't live in the dark christian community informed by the word of god on mission with one another doesn't hide brokenness doesn't hide doubts and fears doesn't hide in the the dark wrestles with sin secret patterns of rebellion we step into the light and and cut the wires of the enemy's plan to blow up our lives we want our mission doctrinally informed and done together we're not interested in putting band-aids on soul-level wounds so every environment at the village church whether they be classes groups the training program our next gen ministries our young adult ministries our recovery ministries has all three of these components in it if you've ever wondered why almost everything ends up around a round table or ends up in a small group it's because we think you don't do doctrine on your own you do it together on the mission with god and if you've ever wondered why there's always some kind of teaching and togetherness in our missional things uh then man that this is why we're aiming at this center point not always easy but we believe always necessary and we think organizationally that this guards us at least some point you've got to participate but but this guards us at least in some way from these three schemes of the enemy now let me let me invite you into this um i i think maybe some of you are watching today and you are isolated and you have some legitimate wounds from some experience you've had in church or some minister that betrayed you or some church that protected this and didn't do this and didn't do what was right before god and or you and and i want to just invite you in to do some work with that to not allow that bitterness to take root in your heart and destroy you i know it can be hard to trust again i know it can be difficult to to even think that it might be possible again and yet i would love to just encourage you to do some work maybe start here at recovery uh on on our weeknight program that the lord might be able to soften some of that heal some of that slowly but surely help you trust again and move in i want to invite you if you have um man you've got secret sin in your life like this is a very real deal and i think um a very consistent deal where so many of us you have this projected image of having your stuff together in all reality you simply don't gosh even this week as as man news broke a very well-known very famous evangelical leader that after his death we we find out all of these things this double life that that he was living just what a heartbreaking or not don't let that be you don't let that be you you can step into the light right now i'm not saying that there wouldn't be cost but i'm saying there would be mercy do you hear me i'm not saying there won't be like you've got a secret life some sort of secret addiction and you're like it's got to be eating you up from the inside out and the invitation that we find in this text is to repent to step into the line so i want to encourage you step into the light be fully known i've said this a lot to be 99 known is to be unknown like even if you got this one percent that you're holding you just rob yourself i want to invite you the the refrain in all seven churches is that you might conquer and receive a reward conquer and receive a reward so you see the scheme of being fat-headed and tiny heart you see the scheme of being overly critical and angry and all you ever see is heresy you see the impulse to condemn other christians to attack them because they don't align up where you line up here it is conquer that and receive a reward you see the apathy that's taking root in your life the indifference the kind of i mean i'll i'll do just enough or i don't really care about that i don't really want to know like i'm i'm saying you got the invitation to conquer and receive your reward maybe that's not it at all maybe you just you're looking around and you're like gosh we all is lost this doesn't work anymore nobody wants to hear this anymore our sexual ethics are they're backwards our understanding of money is bad our understanding of the self is backwards i can't do this anymore i want to just hey eat breathe for a second come in the the ethics of the word of god are working all over the world all that thou shalt and thou shalt nots in the bible are about your joy not about taking anything from you the commands of god are meant to be led to life and life to the full and this is the invitation that lays before you conquer and receive your reward so next week we open remember i said last week that revelation is not linear but it's a series of windows that we open up and we peer into and so that what what is most important in revelation is not what did john see next or not what does john say next but what does john see next well our our letter to this churches is going to turn hard next week and we're going to look into window one the throne room of god it is weird and a little crazy and flipping awesome and we head that way with the collective watchfulness as a family of faith we want to watch our family here we want to love doctrine because we want to love what's true but we want to embody that doctrine so that when people come across us they don't so much go well this is what they believe on this secondary issue but man they ooze the love of christ when people come across men and women from our family of faith we want them to be blown away not by simply what we know or not just because we go to church on this day or this day but they were marked by not indifference but a radical zeal for the name of jesus we're going to be the annoying christian that are marked by optimism that aren't nervous about the times that we're in but rather confident in the god of our times let me pray for us father what a strange thing to i know there are people watching now but just to preach to a predominantly empty room father would you speak to our hearts just right now spirit of the living god for those of us who have fallen into some of these schemes right now there are those watching who whose whole life is is is about condemning others about critiquing others they're they're spring-loaded to be condescending they they walk in a great deal of pride in their theological knowledge and yet as you say in corinthians they've become a clanging symbol spirit of the living god would you reveal that to them where we're guilty reveal that to me where i'm guilty father we don't want to give in to these schemes and spirit of the living god where we have been apathetic we have been indifferent we have not pursued you we have not made war against our sin we have just it's normal so we just haven't done anything about it where my brothers and sisters were my friends in here are trapped in cycles of secret sin where they they have participated in the cultural normalization of perversion i asked for a deep conviction a desire to be free a seriousness about making war strengthen our spines here and father where we began to feel weary like we're not sure how much longer we can hang in there or we look around and all we see is defeat all we see is other people's mistakes all we see is losses will you encourage our hearts will you show us ultimate reality will you empower us to conquer and receive our reward fathers we look to look through window one to give us a sense of collective watchfulness collective responsibility yes for ourselves but also for our family here that we care deeply for one another that more than we would attend an event with one another we would do life richly with one another that you would grant us the gift of love for one another compassion for one another patience for one another that we might embody gospel culture and not just gospel doctrine help us we need you you're so faithful to us you're so good to us you're so kind even in this you're inviting back into life you're encouraging that there is more for us that there is life for us freedom for us joy for us sustaining grace for us help us it's for your beautiful name i pray amen

Channel: The Village Church Resources

Views: 64,120

Rating: 4.9026651 out of 5

Keywords: Matt Chandler, The Village Church

Id: NSfaWaKU2Dk

Length: 46min 24sec (2784 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 15 2021