OTY: Revealing Jesus (Revelation4) –Chuck Smith
Hey, He is here. He is here to touch you tonight. He is here to minister to your needs tonight. Wherever the church assembles in His name, He has promised His presence to be there with them. And He is always there to minister to the needs of the people. That is the purpose of His being here tonight, to touch you and to minister to the needs in your life. He said, "Behold I am with you always even to the end of the age"(Matthew 28:20).
Now, we come to the messages of Jesus to these churches. There are patterns in the messages. First of all, the messages to each of the churches begin with an address of Jesus naming the church that He is writing to. And then a description of Himself, and the description is usually taken from the first chapter here, and the description of Himself usually is correlated in the body of the message.
So it is Jesus becoming all things to all people, no matter what your need may be. He becomes all things to all men. Even as the name of God, the Yahweh, or Jehovah, or however it may be pronounced, is the thought of the becoming One. "I am the becoming One", where God sought to reveal himself as the One who becomes whatever you may need. So this name Yahweh is used in conjunction with other words. So we have Jehovah Rophi, the Lord our healer. If you need healing, he becomes your healer. He becomes your provider, Jehovah Jireh. He becomes your righteousness, Jehovah Tsidkenu. He becomes your Savior, Joshua or Jehovah Shua.
So, Jesus in the description of Himself, as He writes to the churches again, takes that adaptive form where He adapts to what you might be needing. He becomes all that you might need, so the description of Himself. Then in each of the churches there is the acknowledgment that I know what you are going through. I know your condition. I know what is happening. To five of the churches, there is the call to repentance.
Now, remember the church is less than one hundred years old. We so often hear quoted, "The early church fathers this and the early church fathers that." Well, according to Jesus, the early church fathers became corrupted pretty early. Corrupt systems began to invade the church extremely early, as we will see when we get to the church of Pergamus and Thyatira. These corrupt systems had entrenched themselves within the church before the end of the first century.
So you have some of the renown church fathers' origin and some of the others, who are espousing child and infant baptism, and some of the other things that were borrowed from the pagans. You have an early development of the priesthood. It began before the death of John in Thyatira and in Pergamus.
So you cannot really look back at church history to find the model or the pattern. You have to look right back to the book of Acts to find out God's true pattern. And the true pattern is one of great simplicity. People just being brought to a faith in Jesus Christ and a living relationship to Him, no fancy organizations, no great structures, no seminaries; just a simple trust and faith in the Lord shared from person to person and friend to friend.
In each of the churches there is a group who are victorious, who are overcoming, and they are recognized by the Lord. And there are special promises to those who do overcome and they exist in every church. So no matter how corrupt the church system may become, the Lord always has His true witness within that church. And in each of the churches there is that call of Jesus to pay attention. "He that hath an ear to hear, let him hear what the Spirit is saying to the church"(Revelation 2:7).
So seven times we are going to be commanded by the Lord to hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches. So, let us now as we enter into this very awesome solemn territory of the messages of Jesus, Jesus' epistles to the church, and may God by His Holy Spirit give us ears to hear what He is seeking to say to the church, for He is going to tell us that as many as He loves He chastens and He rebukes. Let's not try to defend ourselves or justify our positions, but let's be open to hear what the Spirit would say to us, His church.
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