Sermon Tone Analysis

Exegetical Purpose: Jesus writes to encourage, chastise and warn his churches as representatives of the Church universal.

Homiletic Purpose: To encourage, chastise and warn the church at Eastgate.

Introduction

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We can’t touch on every minor detail, but you may have a burning question!

If we can’t get to them during the service today, then I will respond over the next couple days.

Have you ever had an employee review?

You know, maybe when your probation ends or some employers do them every year or 6-months?

It’s meant to be an opportunity to get some clear feedback on how you’re performing at work, sharing areas of improvement, and areas where you’re doing well.

It helps you know as an employee that the boss is aware of your work, appreciates the good stuff and needs you to pick up the work in some areas.

When it comes time for the performance review, it’s both exciting and scary.

You want to know what you’re doing well, but you can also be afraid that you’re going to be told something you don’t want to hear.

Maybe where you think you’re excelling is actually not good enough.

Maybe you might be made aware of something where you dropped the ball.

Maybe you already know where you’ve messed up but you know the boss is going to have some hard things to say about that.

In the end though, a performance review is a good thing because knowing whats great and what’s not-so-great in your work helps you do better in the coming months, keeping you on track and focused on what’s important.

Essentially today what we’re looking at in Revelation 2-3 is Jesus’ performance reviews of 7 Churches in modern day Turkey.

He gives them an honest assessment of where they’re up to, but it’s ultimately for their good, so they make course corrections and focused on what’s important.

These Churches were planted in the few decades after Jesus had risen to heaven and sat down at the Father’s side.

Many of them would have been planted by the Apostles, or people closely associated with the Apostles and they had been serving Jesus for a few decades now.

They had experienced the emotional highs of receiving the Gospel and being joined together as a church, potentially seeing signs and miracles that testified to the authenticity of the Gospel message.

But now, when Jesus is sending these letters to the church they have had a few years experience as Christians.

They’re into the day-to-day, year-to-year reality of following Jesus.

Things have adjusted to the new normal, many of the church members will be children who have grown up in the Church and don’t know anything different.

On top of this many of them are facing persecution by the world.

The Christians are a minority group who are in many places disliked or hated by the Jews and the majority pagan-Roman population.

And, like all people, they have to deal with their own sinfulness that rises up from within us to oppose Jesus and his control on our life.

These Churches are blessed by God in the way he addresses them specifically with these letters, and indeed with the whole book.

As we shall see over the coming weeks, these letters are a key part of the book’s structure, it’s not as though chapters 2-3 are somehow isolated from everything else that’s happening in the book.

All the words and curious language that gets used in these 7 letters gets explained or illustrated somewhere else in the book, not to mention that the chain of seven letters is the first in the pattern of 7-cycles that we will see later in the book with seven scrolls, seven trumpets and seven bowls.

That’s for a later week.

Right now however we’re in Rev 2-3 with the individual addresses to individual churches.

If you’ve had a chance to read the whole two chapters you will have noticed that they all follow a similar format, even though each is distinct, each has a pattern, and it is through the pattern that we will be investigating the text today.

What we see through the pattern is seven ways that Jesus the conqueror speaks to his people, which in turn means there are seven things that we need to see in the passage for the good of our own church.

The repeating refrains, or the obvious absence of something, press home the massage that Jesus has for his church.

1.

The Conqueror speaks to his people

Firstly, the Conquering Jesus speaks to his people.

So as we have already seen over the last couple weeks, Jesus, meets with John on the Island of Patmos to deliver a message to these Church.

This book of revelation is addressed specifically to these seven churches, but just like the letters of Romans or Galatians or Corinthians, they are for the benefit of the whole church.

That is plainly obvious by the way that there are 7 recipients.

They’re were much more than seven churches in the area, but Jesus chooses 7 (the number of completeness) who were in various stages of health and faithfulness to be representative of the whole church in that day and the whole church through time.

So this passage is directed to those churches specifically, but to the universal church generally.

As we read through the letters we will find ourselves asking: “Is our church like that?”

It’s a good question to ask, because there’s serious consequences for failing to heed the warnings of the Conquering Christ.

Let’s take a closer look at the letters.

You will see that each of the seven starts something like this:

So each letter is addressed to “the Angel of the Church in XYZ.” It’s a bit of an odd designation.

Why the “angel of the church”?

In chapter 1 :20 we’re told that in the vision of Jesus he is holding seven stars in his hand:

So in this symbology the stars are the angels of the churches, the ones to whom the letters are addressed.

And the Lamp stands are the churches themselves, to whom the book is written.

So the whole language of the angels of the churches is a little confusing.

Who are these angels?

There are a couple options of who these angels are.

I will put them before you now, and let you have a think about it, but which ever of the options you think is best fit, it doesn’t change the meaning of the text.

Remember: Angel is just a Greek word for messenger.

It’s a simple word, but most often in the Bible is is referring to spiritual beings who are messengers of God.

So that’s option 1:

The Angels of the church are spiritual beings that God has sent as messengers, and maybe protectors of these churches.

Kind of like guardian angels.

In other parts of the bible we get glimpses of this kind of thing, where God sets angels courier tasks, or puts them in a position of authority over something, so it’s not far fetched.

But, it does seem a little odd, and redundant, seeing as John is the one who is delivering the message to other humans.

But the angels are described as stars, which has a strong correlation in the Bible to divine beings.

Secondly, it could be that the messengers here are the leaders of the churches (pastors/ministers/overseers).

They are the mouth-pieces of God to the church so it makes sense that Jesus would address the letter to the leader as the one who would share the message and then act on the contents of the letter.

But nowhere else are church leaders described as “angels”.

That doesn’t mean it’s wrong, it just means it’s not normal in the Bible.

Third option is that the angels are a kind of symbol for the whole local church.

The local church is a light in the midst of the darkness (like a star) and a messenger of God to the world with the Gospel.

In essence the local church can be called an angel of God in such&such a place.

But this too would be out of the ordinary for the use of the language in the bible.

And it would also seem odd that in the one sentence by Jesus the same churches would simultaneously be described as the lamp stands and the stars, but then again it would not be far fetched for the apocalyptic genre to do something like this..

Options for the “angels” in Rev 2-3:

Spiritual Beings

Church Leaders

Symbol for the Whole Church

Whatever the case, which ever floats your boat, the point is that Jesus delivers his message through his light-bearing-star-messengers to his light-bearing-lampstand-churches.

They need to hear what he has to say and he sends his messengers to bring the communique.

Each letter is separately addressed to a local church in ancient Turkey.

The conquering Jesus speaks to his people.

Back then he sent them letters, and now he has preserved this letter to speak to us!

The Conqueror of Satan, Sin and Death speaks to his people in the past, and even now!

You who have an ear, hear what the Spirit says to the churches!

2. Meet The Conqueror

Next we see that each letter opens with a little description of Jesus.

Here we get to meat the Conqueror in some of his revealed glory.

Each letter we get a small facet of what Jesus is like, so that when we put them together like a puzzle, we can see an overall picture of what he’s like.

Lets look at them in turn, one after the other and lets see what our conquering Christ is like:

‘The words of him who holds the seven stars in his right hand, who walks among the seven golden lampstands.

The words of the first and the last, who died and came to life.

‘The words of him who has the sharp two-edged sword.

‘The words of the Son of God, who has eyes like a flame of fire, and whose feet are like burnished bronze.

‘The words of him who has the seven spirits of God and the seven stars.

‘The words of the holy one, the true one, who has the key of David, who opens and no one will shut, who shuts and no one opens.

‘The words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of God’s creation.

These snippets paint a picture of the glory and beauty of Christ.

This awesome figure who is

ruling and

in control and

eternal and