Tonight, I would like us to turn to Revelation 3.
Revelation 3, beginning in verse 1, speaks to the church in Sardis:
To the angel of the church in Sardis write:
He who has the seven Spirits of God, and the seven stars, says this:
I know your deeds, that you have a name that you are alive, but you are dead.
Wake up, and strengthen the things that remain, which were about to die;
for I have not found your deeds completed in the sight of My God.
So remember what you have received and heard; and keep it, and repent.
Therefore if you do not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what hour I will come to you.
But you have a few people in Sardis who have not soiled their garments; and they will walk with Me in white, for they are worthy.
He who overcomes will thus be clothed in white garments; and I will not erase his name from the book of life, and I will confess his name before My Father, and before His angels.
He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.
Let us also turn to Philippians 3, beginning in verse 13:
Brethren, I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it yet; but one thing I do:
forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead,
I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.
Let us therefore, as many as are perfect, have this mind;
and if in anything you have a different mind, God will reveal that also to you.
However, let us keep living by that same standard to which we have attained.
Let us have a word of prayer.
Father, I bring my mind and my heart before You this night, along with my brothers and sisters, for the influence of Your Holy Spirit to quicken us and to give us understanding. If need be, that we may repent; but that in any case, we may treasure the things that You are doing in our lives—those things that enable us to press on toward the goal.
Lord, we pray: encourage every heart here tonight to be faithful to You, Who are altogether worthy of our running after. Lord, we commit ourselves to You. We depend upon You tonight. Lord, help us as we are together in this time.
We pray that You would quicken the mortal bodies that are tired here tonight, that You would refresh the minds that have taken in perhaps more than usual, and especially that You would deal with our hearts, that we might be decisive for You in every way. Lord, we pray in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
I have been talking about remembering. My burden, in part—and one reason that the teenagers are in here—is that it is all well and good for us to talk about running the race and getting to a goal, as Paul says in Philippians 3. Those who are mature will have this same mind.
But those who are younger in the faith, or perhaps not as experienced in understanding what it means to follow after and know the Lord Himself, may wonder, “How do I do this? How am I motivated to pursue this goal?” This upward call of God in Christ Jesus can sound a little mystical to someone who does not realize what the Scriptures are talking about.
If we are going to pursue the goal, which is Christ Himself, then the Lord wants us to see Him as our Lord—not merely as our Lord, but as the Lord of glory.
The Holy Spirit has been given this stewardship to reveal Christ to us. He takes the Word of God. As our brother Lance shared the other night, the Gospel of John is especially wonderful for beginners and new Christians. When I was a new Christian, I also found John’s Gospel so helpful.
Why? Matthew, Mark, and Luke showed me the Jesus Who died on the cross for me. But John wrote his Gospel that we might see the Lord of glory—that we might do what he did, which was to behold His glory.
In other words, we get past merely seeing the Man and come to see the great I AM. We get past the miracles and see that transcendent, large One Who has control not only of wind and waves, but of time and eternity. John wrote knowing that, as we read his Gospel, the Holy Spirit would reveal a living God—huge, the Lord Jesus, Creator of the heavens and earth, the Logos Who began the whole thing.
It is a marvelous revelation, is it not? This revelation is granted to every Christian. Every Christian should be able to say, “Yes, I have seen the Lord of glory.” Surely, if you have studied the Word, you have seen the Lord of glory.
As we are running on this road and pressing toward this mark, if we stumble, become discouraged, or somehow fall out of the way, the Holy Spirit only has to remind us of this Lord of glory. Then we say, “Oh, how did I lose sight of the goal?”
There again, looking unto Jesus, we continue to run the race unto sonship, unto the goal. This is so wonderful, is it not? It is every Christian’s privilege to see the Lord of glory. May you be a student of the Word. May you press in and say, “Lord, I want to know You more.” The Holy Spirit surely will answer that prayer.
So I asked the question: Have you ever taken a first look at the Lord of glory? If you can say yes, then I would say, press on to know Him more. We are only in the foothills. There is a lot more to discover about our wonderful Lord.
But then we also ask the question: Have you ever known first love?
This first love may be hard to describe, but it is easy to identify from the Scriptures. The love of God, when we are saved, has been shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit given to us. However we experience that love, we know that we love because He first loved us.
We find ourselves in relationship to a Lord Who loves us. Some people, at the beginning of their salvation, absolutely have first love in the Lord. It is like a honeymoon with the Lord. Others are saved in circumstances where they do not immediately feel that love, but subsequently the Lord—perhaps in their seeking, praying, worshipping, or studying the Word—floods them with love. They are captured.
Now they know what first love is: “Oh, I would rather have Jesus than anything.” Surely that is how you feel under the influence of first love.
I love that little song, reworked by Fernando Ortega:
In the morning, when I rise,
Give me Jesus.
When you really love the Lord, that is what you are asking for. With the Lord, of course, He gives us all the other things. If we seek His kingdom, He adds all the other things unto us.
The Lord wants those who remember Him throughout the day. Remembering the Lord in first love, or as the Lord of glory, is not merely a matter of remembering Him in our minds, though of course it begins there. It is a question of living in the spiritual reality of that first love and being in the presence of the Lord of glory.
A remembrancer is somebody able to live in that spiritual reality before the face of the Lord of glory and in first love. These are called, in the book of Revelation, overcomers.
Why? Many times our circumstances are not glorious; they are very difficult. Many times among the saints there is decline. There are people who are lukewarm and unconcerned. But who is he who overcomes? It is he who lives in the spiritual reality of Who Jesus is—who lives in the good of it, as some people say; who knows the Lord, praises Him, and lives for Him day by day.
These are the ones whom I am saying the Lord would set on the wall as remembrancers: remembering the Lord, and through their testimony enabling others to see the Lord in their lives.
Tonight we come to the third question: Do you remember that first corporate life—that first flush of being in something larger than yourself, even the body of Christ? Have you ever experienced body life?
Of course, I know that all of you here would probably say, “Yes, of course I have.” Indeed, the spiritual reality is that, as soon as we are saved, the Holy Spirit baptizes us into this body of Christ, and we are no longer our own. We have two new dimensions to deal with.
Unfortunately, this third aspect of our spiritual reality is very little taught, so many people do not really understand. Paul emphasizes in Philippians the personal race that he was on. Yet, as we realize, our spiritual race toward the mark is a corporate race. After all, the mark is a corporate goal.
We are not running out there for personal perfection. We are running that we might be a bride together, that we may be the Lord’s city together. It is a very corporate thing. That puts us in another dimension altogether.
It is not simply about us—our running, “Fill my tank, Lord,” and “Show me what to do, Lord.” We are somehow involved in a three-dimensional grid in this race. We are not merely running individually; there is a whole batch of people to whom we are connected and with whom we are running.
I never did win a three-legged race. No matter who was next to me, my legs were powerful, so the other person just fell down and I dragged them along.
Can you imagine a twelve-legged race? That is exactly what the Lord tells us to run.
There is a whole new dimension of understanding. When it comes to remembrancers whom the Lord can trust to bring in a reality of body life, there are few who really understand how to fit into the body of Christ.
Many Christians have a wonderful personal life. They hear the Lord, pray to the Lord, and receive words from the Lord. Their Christian life is an overcoming life, and praise God for that.
But when you get together with all the rest of the rapscallions, the whole process slows down a bit. If you happen to be a fast runner, you have to lock in step with those who are still walking and huffing and puffing.
The first thing we have to do, if we are to understand how we fit into the body of Christ, is to hear the Lord together. That is quite a twelve-legged race.
With Christians, if you have three people saying, “Oh, we are all seeking the Lord,” you can end up with three different answers. The Lord begins a process of discipline in our lives so that we may know, in wisdom, how to live and even build up the body of Christ.
Paul does not make an emphasis at this moment concerning the body of Christ, but here he is running a race. After he mentions this race, he says, in effect, “You understand what I am saying. I want you to run this same race too.” First, there is a personal testimony; then, a word of encouragement.
Then he says, in effect, “If you disagree with me, it is all right. Pray about it and see. I think the Lord will give you understanding of what I am trying to say.”
Paul realizes it is not just for him to reach the goal while everybody else is left behind. The Lord is bringing many sons to glory. So He has put us together with some very unglorious sons and said, “I am going to wrap you all up in a twelve-legged race, and I am going to say, ‘Go,’ and let us see what happens.”
What a disciplined life this turns out to be.
When I was twenty years old, I did not have Bible knowledge or anything like that. After college, I went to seminary, and I came out as a preacher who knew everything. By then I had been a Christian for less than five years.
Seminary taught me all I needed to know—or so I thought—because, after all, any preacher knows what is best for the body of Christ. The deal was that you got called to a church and then told the church what to do. If they did not like it, they could go. Or, if they did not like you, you went.
The Lord stunned me with the sense that I was part of something bigger. He put me in a small fellowship, and it was as though the Lord said, “We are not going to move until we all agree about things.”
It hurt not to be the head honcho. Not only was I not the head honcho; they did not even trust me to be the least honcho. I was stuck in a tough position. But I am very thankful for this process of the cross, where I began to learn that it is not what I think that really counts.
We all lay down our opinions before the Lord, and we seek to find His headship. This is a slow process. It is not an easy process, especially for bullheaded men. I am not sure women are any better at it, but I know bullheaded men always think they know what is right.
The Lord puts us all together and says, “Lay it down, lay it down. I am not moving until you all lay it down.” Somebody in the group may actually be right, and it may be the least one. We do not know until we all lay it down.
There is an excruciating bottleneck in the race. That is all part of this matter. It is discouraging, and it is much easier to follow other models of the body of Christ.
You can take the Bible and whip up a model that works for you, with you at the head. There is even a model of eldership where you take several men, set them together, have them fight one another, but always retain a senior elder in the end.
We set up many different machinations in many different ways. This becomes one of our great problems in the church today. That is why it is difficult to see an assembly that truly manifests the life of Christ in fullness, where members function in priesthood, different ones take different roles, and there is responsibility and accountability.
We are so independent. Americans—this is the basis of our country: “Do not you tell me.” That is basically the Texas Constitution.
But, in any language, we are all independent. We have honed the craft of doing our own thing. Then the Lord puts us together and says, “You are no longer free. I am the Boss, and here are your brothers and sisters. Do not let them go.”
Most brothers and sisters cannot stay together too long on that basis. Why? “I cannot do my ministry. God has called me and given me this gift, and you are making me sit down. I am going to go somewhere else where they appreciate me.”
Unfortunately, we have so many other places to go that the Lord cannot deal with us. Yet it is only as He deals with us that we become remembrancers.
Oh, if we only had a few remembrancers on the wall of Zion—people who have tasted Zion, know what Zion is like, understand the beauty of Zion, understand Who the King of Zion is, and understand Zion. It would help us so much.
We have a lot of independent people. Even when we say, “Let us all intercede in prayer,” there can be a lot of independent activity. “This is what the Lord told me. That is what the Lord told me.” So we go, and the body remains weak.
In the end, even if we are personally growing spiritually in our lives, the body of Christ has to reach the goal. The Lord Jesus is looking for the bride, and that is not you. It is us.
We are in this race, and the Lord is looking for those willing to lay down their lives and live for one another under the headship of the Lord Jesus. This is a great challenge before us.
In order to help us, the Lord gives us a taste of what body life is like. He gives us a taste here and there of what it would be like to be in the true unity of the body of Christ. Oh, what a wonderful taste.
When we come to a conference—if it is a good conference; not every conference I have been to has been good, because sometimes I am speaking—there are times when we taste, as it were, a unity as the Spirit leads us.
Somebody came up to me after my first message and said, “Do you remember when we broke bread at Harvey Cedars last fall? I felt like heaven opened up.”
Now, we touch reality at times like that, do we not? Have you ever been in a time of worship when you actually got lost out of yourself before the presence of the Lord? It could have gone on for two hours and it would have made no difference. You were lost in it.
Between the weeping, the shouting, the praising, the singing, and the praying, I want to say amen to every bit of it. How wonderful it is to have a touch like that.
Sometimes people come to a conference and testify, “The men who spoke in the main meetings were okay, but do you know what I liked best? The times of fellowship. We got to talk, and I saw what the body of Christ was saying.”
For some people, in that fellowship they see something of the body of Christ. Sometimes, when you gather with people in prayer, you actually touch something of the heavenlies. You know what I mean? It is a wonderful touch.
Sometimes, by the grace of God, there is a ministry of the Word that just sinks home to your heart by the Holy Spirit. In that, you also touch this wonderful life into which the Lord has called us together.
It is a wonderful experience. I like the mystical side of it, but it is practical as well. We really are built into the Lord through the Word of God.
One reason I have never been much of a fan of tapes—and I am glad they are getting rid of them—is that people can get the attitude: “I am not going to go to the meeting. I will get the tape.”
There is a certain building done by the Holy Spirit when we are together in one accord, in the same place, and the Word comes upon us. That building cannot be accomplished if you are somewhere else merely listening to a tape.
Over there, it is just a message. But here, something special happens. That something special occurs when we are together and the Word is upon us, bearing its influence. This is an experience of the spiritual reality of the body of Christ.
We receive these little tastes when we are together at a conference. But the Lord needs people to have more than just a taste.
We can taste being all together. “Wasn’t it wonderful? We were worshipping in one accord.” Then, after six days, we may say, “I am glad it only lasted six days, because I could not have taken another one. Now I can go back to my own space, my own bed, my own thinking, and to the church where I boss people around.”
We love a little taste. But to live day by day with the people you have to go home to—well, that is another matter.
Have you tasted the reality of first life at home? Oh, boy, now the complaints come rolling out. The grass is always greener somewhere else. If I were just in that church down there, where all the saints are ready to be raptured, that would be great. But if you are there, you may wish you were somewhere else.
The Lord has to bring us into something more than just a taste. The experience of first life is more costly. We have to go through something together. But it is more beautiful.
It is the experience of the life of Christ corporately, under an open heaven, that keeps you running the race even when there is declension and failure in the body of Christ.
There is a reality, and it is not merely the church as a group of people. The spiritual reality is a relationship that you can uniquely experience when Christ is among you and you are together—two or three.
To see the glory of the Lord is one of our great delights and motivators. If you have seen the Lord of glory, you are spoiled; you want Him, and you pursue after Him.
But I would testify to you that the most beautiful Christ you will ever see is the corporate Christ. Once you have touched, tasted, and seen the Lord flowing in a wonderful way, it spoils you.
How do you describe a moment where there is a recovery of reality? Assemblies where you can touch the Lord manifestly are too few and far between. There will never be an assembly on the face of this earth that is perfect, but there may be assemblies that are gaining—gaining even as 2 Peter tells us individually to be attaining and gaining.
Oh, how church reality needs to be recovered among us. So much of what we do is routine. So much of what we do is something we have heard about—doctrines and practices. But we need spiritual reality behind those things.
If the Lord tells us to break bread, we should not simply get past the bread and say, “Yes, remember the Lord. I remember. Here we go.” It can be reduced to that.
Then we decide to do it once a month, then once a quarter, and eventually we may simply say, “Lord, You are the Bread of Life,” and not do it anymore.
But if we do not have the spiritual reality of it, why are we doing it? “Well, the Lord told us to.” That is good enough. But to live in the spiritual reality of it—to gather and find ourselves one before the Lord’s table, humbled before the Lord’s table, and examining our reality before the Lord’s table—that is something else.
Can I really remember the Lord this morning? Is He real to me this morning? So often we have to live by faith. It is not as though we have some unveiled image over our heads every time we close our eyes. Yet the Lord wants spiritual reality in all the aspects of church life.
When I read the history of revivals and recoveries, I love to read the histories, but I realize they are only the bones of the story. You cannot really express the spirit that is going on behind a recovery—the reality of it.
History generally exalts a particular leader of a movement or recovery. That has to be done, because many times the Lord has a leading light—somebody who has really seen something and whom He uses as a vessel to bring recovery to others.
But the reality that can never be fully expressed is that sense of the Word of God among the saints. Whenever there is true recovery, it is not merely one man preaching and everybody else listening. The Lord is revealing something to all of us together.
Somebody gets one part, another person gets another part, and somebody else gets another part. You put it together and say, “Wow, we just saw something tonight.”
I remember reading a testimony concerning the brethren in the 1830s and 1840s, when there was a manifest presence of the Lord recovering the body of Christ in reality.
They had something called Bible readings. We may say we have Bible studies, but they had Bible readings. They would gather together around a Scripture, perhaps Romans 1. There would be a leader who expressed some thoughts and raised some questions, and others would add in.
That may sound like a Bible study to you and me, but let me tell you what it was: it was the Lord revealing Himself from one brother to another as they gathered on Thursday nights or Sunday afternoons.
I remember the testimony of an Anglican priest, experienced in the Anglican Church, who was invited into one of these Bible readings in a plain meeting hall in London. He walked in, heard the Bible reading, and his whole life was undone.
Simple men—tailors and men of various professions, not professional preachers—were sharing light from the Word of God and revelation concerning the church and the Lord Jesus. This Anglican minister was undone. He had to leave the Anglican Church. He saw things as clear as anything.
That is body Bible study. You cannot explain it by saying merely, “They had Bible readings.” It was so much more than that.
Whenever history tries to explain what occurred in a time of recovery among the Moravians or elsewhere, it tends to paint a picture of uniformity. Usually, that is not the real case. There is actually great diversity, but the people are all under a revelation of the glory of God.
Because the Spirit is upon them, they sense a unity of the Spirit rising above their differences. So they come together, and they love fellowship with others as well. There is a largeness. Whenever God is recovering something, there is a largeness that transcends boundaries of titles, names, and denominations.
It is because the unity of the Spirit is so rich upon them. But you cannot describe that adequately when you write a history of the thing.
Neither can you describe the spiritual intensity of a time when the Lord is recovering His spiritual reality.
I have read different things concerning the Welsh revival. I read an article by a minister who was a contemporary of those days. He described his visits to Welsh churches under the influence of that revival, and I almost caught the spirit of what was going on.
He described an intensity that, as it were, disrobed you when you walked into the meeting. Suddenly, there was such a bright light upon your life that things considered casual sins made you feel you would die if you did not confess and repent of them.
It was emotionally draining, but people could not stand not going. You would not think of missing what might happen that night.
Whenever the Lord recovers spiritual reality, people gather five times a week at least—and every day, if they can. They do not want to be left out, because the Lord is moving, the Lord is speaking, the Lord is leading, people are seeing more of the Lord, people are being saved, and things are happening.
Why would you want to be anywhere else? Why would you want to see Indiana Jones? “Whoa, I am going to the meeting.”
During the Welsh revival, the bars closed down, the jails closed down, and there was nothing to do but go to the meeting. It was not a legalistic requirement. It was the desire of hearts compelled by life.
There is nothing easier than obeying Acts 2:42 when spiritual reality is upon us:
And they continued steadfastly in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread and the prayers.
No problem. Yet some of us have five meetings a week, and it is five nails in the coffin. The only question is which meeting will be deader.
We can go out of obligation, but our level of life is so dim that we cannot even see it until the Lord comes and stands over us, as He did with the church in Sardis, and says, “Remember.”
Some people who have tasted this reality remember and repent in a nanosecond. It does not take two weeks of weeping. It is as though your compass is recalibrated on the spot, and you are back—remembering, enjoying, and experiencing the spiritual reality that the Lord would have for us day by day.
How does it all begin? It begins in a very sovereign way, as something totally out of our hands. The Lord gathers some people together.
This is simply my opinion, and of course the Lord is sovereign, so you can disregard it. But I believe a person has perhaps two experiences in a Christian lifetime where the Lord sovereignly gathers them together with certain people.
You may move from place to place because of your job. You may go to various churches, teach Sunday school, become involved, and be blessed by the Word of God and by the preciousness of the saints. But you do not get many opportunities to be in something that God Himself has formed and wants to bring to birth.
There are many manufactured churches today. In my old seminary, they do not call people apostles anymore; they call them church planters. People get the demographics of a city, determine how many people are there and what kinds of people they are, decide to put a church there, gather some money, secure a worship team, and start something.
Then they say, “Now, Lord, build Your church.” Maybe by the grace of God, He will do something there. But eventually, if it is going to become something genuinely born of Him, He will bring it all to the cross.
God is gracious when people gather sincerely. But He leads them through the same kind of pursuit that individuals experience. He brings them to the cross of their self-life, and He does it through body life.
He brings a group to the place where they have to dismantle what they have set up, perhaps remove the name they have carried, change their way of giving, their way of leading, and their way of doing things. As the Lord leads them into reality, it becomes a transforming process—but basically it is death and then resurrection, death and then resurrection.
Since the day of Pentecost, the Lord has brought His church to birth by gathering people together, having them seek Him together, bringing them into one accord through fellowship and prayer, and then, in His good time, bringing down the Holy Spirit upon them in a baptism that fuses them into a living, organic entity called the church.
Have you ever felt that you were being gathered together by the Lord? One signal that a gathering may be from God is that the group is very diverse.
The men who are leading are not necessarily your golf buddies. They are different. The Lord does not gather us merely by natural inclination—our friends, buddies, and pals.
He takes a strong man, a mystic, a man with a big heart, and a tough fellow who seems to have no heart. He puts together an unusual concoction of brothers who seem quite diverse. You say, “I do not see how they are ever going to get along very well,” and the Lord says, “Ah, now we are getting somewhere.”
That may be the beginning of something that could become a living expression of the body of Christ. Then you watch all those brothers and sisters learn to die—in personal conflicts, in times when decisions must be made, among strong-willed people and quieter people with even stronger opinions.
It is excruciating. People may ask, “Were you not in that fellowship two years ago? The grace of God was upon you, the gifts of the Spirit were flowing, miracles happened, people were preaching, and God was showing up. Where is that group now?”
You may have to say, “Well, it is still meeting. It is about a third the size it used to be. We are meeting in somebody’s house, and not much is going on. We are all dying. Come join us.”
Everybody says, “Oh, that is terrible. They used to do the will of God. They used to reach out. Now they are just dying.”
But any group that goes through into an assembly ends up without much reputation. If you can get His life in the middle, then He begins to lead us—showing us how to witness, preach the gospel, love one another, teach, build up the body of Christ, and care for the children.
If the Lord has time—though we often want it done in a New York minute—He will take His time putting us together.
One of the benefits of traveling is that I occasionally go to an assembly and touch some aspect of church life. If a group has gone on long enough, there is usually some aroma of Christ that they have developed. They have found some reality that is their treasure.
I have been to places where, perhaps, the group is very small and does not advertise anything great, but their prayer meeting is in the heavenlies.
Have you ever been with a group that has discovered how to sit with Christ in the heavenly places? Through years of waiting and praying, they have learned how to hear the Lord in the prayer meeting.
That is extraordinary and exceptional. Sometimes ordinary people—simple people, self-conscious people, shy people—take the keys the Lord has given and bind and loose things in amazing ways. You leave and say, “Was I in the body or out of the body?”
Such a group may be only seven strong, but they can shake something on this earth by faith. If you touch that, then you go home to your own prayer meeting—and that is when I usually hit the depression. “Oh, Lord, please help us.”
Some assemblies have been wonderfully touched by being together for a long time, and they are truly a family. They share their lives, cares, prayers, and children together. They are just a family.
When you join them, you become part of the family. There is an openness. It is not simply old people and young people who have to be silent. The young people speak, the older people speak, and they have a wonderful meeting. You see the family of God.
That is the spiritual reality of the church—so little experienced.
Many churches in which I was involved in the early days could not wait until noon came. By 12:06, everybody was gone, unless I was shaking somebody’s hand at the door and detained them for a minute. People came to church merely to get their gas tank filled.
Vance Havner used to say, “When the clock struck twelve, the church gave up its dead.” Everybody went home. That is not the reality of family.
Some brothers and sisters have had the privilege of going to other countries. I was not prepared for Chile when I got there. Those saints had been meeting together and learning body life for a number of years, and one thing they were full of was love for one another.
The first thing you noticed about the six brothers who helped lead that assembly of 1,500 people was that they truly loved one another. They hugged one another, cared for one another, deferred to one another, and let another brother pray first.
When you came in as a visitor, you got chapped cheeks from all the hugging and kissing going on. But it was a reality: saints loving one another.
Sometimes you touch assemblies that have learned how to worship. There is much emphasis on worship today, and in many churches worship is done by professional worship teams. No doubt they choose good songs, and some have an anointing.
But I am talking about an assembly of people. Maybe they do not even have a musician—or they have one musician who cannot quite tune the guitar properly, but he is trying.
Yet they have learned, musician or no musician, to hear the trumpet sound as the meeting begins. They begin to worship, and they get deeper into that worship. Everybody in the assembly prays, asks for a song, and worships. Everybody is on board. There are no hangers-back.
As they worship, sing songs, read Scripture, and pray, you are blessed because you realize this has been symphonically orchestrated by the Holy Spirit. That is the only explanation for such precious worship.
Other places have found the door that the Lord has opened. They are faithful to witness, preach the gospel, and gather people in. Any fellowship involved in harvest is a living, vibrant, wonderful place to be.
They have not merely gone out on their own. They have discovered a door that the Lord has opened and that no one can shut. They are using it. They go in and out, and a harvest is taking place—big or small, it makes no difference. There is life there. You can touch it.
Other humble assemblies seem to have taken on the desire of the Philippian church simply to be a joint of supply. They are hospitable, giving, faithful, and concerned for people.
Imagine an assembly being a shepherd assembly—finding out the welfare of workers, being faithful in giving, being sacrificial, and pouring out their lives as they see need. What a wonderful place to be.
When you see the magnanimity of Christ expressed through people who are sometimes in poverty yet overabundant in giving, you see a wonderful body of Christ. We touch it in this way and in that way.
But in the end, the Lord wants us to be together in such a way, and for long enough, that there is not merely one aspect. He gains another aspect, and then another. Slowly but surely, someone may visit and say, “I do not know what is going on there. It is confusing. They do not have a preacher, and they meet in this place. But I will tell you what: Jesus is there.”
There can be no greater commendation to your fellowship than for someone to come and go away saying, “Jesus was there.”
In Revelation, we see the church of Sardis. The seven Spirits of God indicate that the Lord is looking by His Spirit. He is looking for spiritual activity and spiritual reality in the Sardis assembly.
As the Lord looks at this assembly, He does not see spiritual reality and life. He sees a reputation, an outward thing, death, sleepiness, and projects and ministries only partially fulfilled.
The Lord calls them to remember:
Remember what you have received and heard, and keep it.
Here again we come to the matter of what remembering means. Surely, the church in Sardis had heard the rich ministries of apostles and teachers. Surely they remembered what they had received and heard.
But would it not be sad if we had attended twenty conferences and could not remember what the Lord said? If you get out your notes, you may find a letter. But do you remember what the Spirit said to the churches?
Sardis had heard rich ministry. They were in Asia Minor, in the orbit of Paul and the brothers who traveled and helped the churches, as well as the Apostle John later on. Surely they received rich ministry. They heard, and they received. Yet they could not remember.
There is a twofold problem. First, if we receive things and do not ask the Lord to keep them for us, and do not watch over those things we have received, we lose them. Precious things the Lord teaches us can slip through our fingers.
Second, we can receive all kinds of marvelous revealed teaching, but if we do not walk in the spiritual reality of it, we lose it.
The Lord comes to the church to remind them. The remembrancers are those overcomers who continue to live in a spiritual reality that others have forgotten.
The Lord is not content with an outward reputation. He wants spiritual reality. The seven Spirits look to see whether there is spiritual reality, spiritual wisdom, spiritual vitality, and spiritual progress in the church of Sardis.
Historically, the seven churches were seven real churches alive when John was alive and when Jesus spoke to them. But prophetically, they also represent different phases in church history. Sardis represents the time of the Reformation.
What a tremendous recovery the Reformation was. The Lord opened the Word of God. The Bible became alive again. Luther began to preach justification by faith. Calvin began to reveal and teach the doctrines of God and salvation. Then Zwingli and other reformers came along.
Sardis received so much. They heard so much.
But there was still more to be recovered. The problem with the Reformation was that it saw salvation, justification by faith, and these kinds of truths and doctrines, but it did not live in the spiritual reality of those doctrines—even the priesthood of believers.
Though they taught wonderful truths, they retained, as far as the church was concerned, the old wineskin. Reformation churches were structured much like the Catholic Church had been structured, perhaps with furniture rearranged and the pulpit placed in front of the table.
Other than that, it was largely an audience, a few professionals, and a ritualistic service. Transubstantiation was changed to consubstantiation, but much of it remained merely a playing with words.
Though they preached the priesthood of believers and justification by faith, and people were caught in the truth of Christian doctrine, the spiritual reality died after one or two hundred years. They became a church with a reputation for knowledge and faith.
But where was sanctification? Where were holy lives? Where was church vitality? Where was the spiritual reality? It was missing.
But there were overcomers—those who stood on the wall, those who stood in the gap, those who prayed. Recovery came.
I would like to end by speaking briefly about our dear brother Zinzendorf.
Martin Luther and the Reformation began around 1520. But by 1700—roughly two hundred years later—the Reformation churches were not experiencing spiritual reality.
In Germany, at the turn of the eighteenth century, there was a movement within Lutheranism called Pietism. People decided it was not enough simply to have doctrines; they wanted a heart reality.
The Pietists began emphasizing personal experience in the Christian life. They met in homes, studied the Bible, and had wonderful times of fellowship. It was a reaction to the coldness and deadness in the Reformation churches, and God brought revival through them.
The saints continued to attend their Lutheran church, which was the state church and often the only church they were permitted to attend. But they loved those little meetings in the homes, where they shared the Word of God.
Zinzendorf’s grandmother, who raised him, was a real Pietist—an outstanding woman. Out of her interest in the Word of God, she learned to read the Bible in Hebrew and Greek, just for starters.
Zinzendorf grew up in a Pietist atmosphere. From his earliest days, he heard that the most important thing in life was to love Jesus with all your heart. He was a lover of Jesus from childhood—singing about Jesus, writing notes to Jesus, praying to Jesus, and believing in Jesus.
When he was twenty-two years old, in 1722, he married and acquired an estate in Germany. He heard about Moravian brethren—brethren from Moravia—who were fleeing persecution and had no place to live.
Somebody asked whether he could give ten Moravian families a small place on his property. Zinzendorf had such a heart that he agreed. A little plot of land was set apart in the woods, and the place became known as Herrnhut, meaning “the Lord’s watchtower.”
Ten couples came, then others came. Within fifty-five years, three hundred people had come to live there. The Moravian brethren were the core, but there were also Lutherans, Anabaptists, Waldensians, Catholics, and all kinds of people.
Within five years, in 1727, a great bruhaha erupted. They were fighting with one another.
Zinzendorf said, “I have to do something about this.” So he established forty-two rules for those who lived there. They were essentially rules drawn from the Sermon on the Mount: turn the other cheek, forgive your brother, and so forth.
One of the rules was particularly interesting: no religious arguments. He forbade them. Twelve elders oversaw the community. Any religious argument was to be stopped immediately, and the disputants were made to wash one another’s feet.
During the summer of 1727, Zinzendorf traveled to Poland. While there, he went into a library and found writings by John Comenius, the last bishop of a failing church called the United Brethren.
First, he found a book concerning rules for living together, remarkably similar to the rules he had established at Herrnhut. Then he discovered something that deeply affected him.
Comenius had watched the town where the United Brethren had been granted asylum destroyed. Their church, school, and people were devastated. He saw the United Brethren dying out. As he left the country, he stood on a mountain and prayed one simple prayer: “God, would You please preserve the seed of these people?”
That was who was in Zinzendorf’s Herrnhut.
When Zinzendorf saw the continuity of history into which the Lord had unknowingly brought him, he fell flat on his face. “What am I involved in? God has used me to preserve these people who had been persecuted since the 1400s and finally had a place of refuge.”
God had answered Comenius’s prayer through his life.
Zinzendorf returned from Poland and shared what he had discovered. He saw the preciousness of these United Brethren, who had been reviled for their practices—because they were more holy, studied the Bible more, and had a hymnbook they preferred.
They gathered for communion. In the midst of that communion, the Holy Spirit fell upon the people. All three hundred began weeping and asking forgiveness for their differences.
They said, in effect, “How could I hold something against my Lutheran brother? How could I hold something against my Waldensian brother? No more those names. No more. We are Christians. That is it.”
The whole thing was precipitated when Count Zinzendorf himself fell on his knees, weeping and repenting for treating them so casually—for treating them as a patron rather than as a brother.
The Spirit fell, and that was their day of Pentecost. I believe it was August 14, 1727. One of the men who became a leader among the Moravians said, “This is the day we became Christ’s body.”
They had a life in harmony together that has scarcely been matched in history. They rose in the morning to read and pray together, went to work, returned at night to read and pray together, and went to bed. They sang songs throughout the night.
Within two or three years, they had memorized five hundred German hymns. They sang them night and day. They preached to one another, helped one another, prayed together, and broke into groups: young married people, young single people, older brothers, and older sisters.
They met in groups every day and prayed. They lived life together, shared all things together, worked together, and helped one another.
Then they began to pray, and that prayer meeting lasted one hundred years—nonstop, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week—for one hundred years, praying for a lost world.
God saw the decline in the midst of the Reformers. But tucked away in the church of Sardis was an overcomer who had not soiled his garments: this brother with a pure heart, Zinzendorf. God raised him up.
He became a link to the Moravian revival, which recovered to the church, if nothing else, the love of God among the brethren and the desire to reach out to the lost world.
Zinzendorf also became a link to John Wesley and to the evangelical awakening in England during the eighteenth century. The story continues: link to link to link.
But here is the point: Zinzendorf stood on the wall in the midst of darkness with some understanding in his heart of how much God loved His people. At the right time, he became someone who could bring people together. He had an understanding of what God wanted, and God could move forward in His purpose.
So I press home again tonight this simple question: Have you ever tasted the life of the church under an open heaven?
Second question: not merely tasted—have you been part of an assembly under an open heaven?
Then perhaps you are the Lord’s remembrancer. We need to pray for that reality for the church, for our own assemblies, and beyond.
There are two verses that have been in my heart. I have been praying for myself, and I am praying very much now concerning revival among God’s people. I want to be on the wall and faithful to the Lord in this matter.
Zion is so beautiful, and I fear that few people have ever tasted the beauty of Zion. They know little of the beauty of holiness—how precious it is for saints to dwell together, the anointing upon the unity of believers, and all the precious parts of the body of Christ.
I do not confess that I know all of that. But when I read in the Word of God concerning the reality of the church as it was in the New Testament, my heart burns for this reality.
The first Scripture is Habakkuk 3:2:
O Lord, I have heard the report of Thee, and am afraid:
O Lord, revive Thy work in the midst of the years;
In the midst of the years make it known;
In wrath remember mercy.
Our utter unfaithfulness in the matter of church responsibility—of building, encouraging, and being part—is deserving of the wrath of God. Our independence, our unwillingness to walk together, work together, be built together, and lay down our lives together have brought us to this state.
We might as well not blame somebody else. It is us.
We deserve wrath. Even as the Lord warned the church in Sardis: “Repent. Repent. Wake up. Repent.” If I am not touching spiritual reality, repent.
Oh, that we might know that and pray:
Lord, revive Thy work in the midst of the years;
In the midst of the years make it known;
In wrath remember mercy.
How we need the mercy of God. Would you stand on the wall for God’s church in spiritual reality?
The second verse is Isaiah 58:12. Perhaps because my stewardship has been with young people for a number of years, I have this burden in my heart. I pray that the Lord would raise up in this generation people who would be laid hold of by God for this glorious purpose of learning to walk together in spiritual reality in the church.
Isaiah 58:12 says:
And they that shall be of thee shall build the old waste places:
Thou shalt raise up the foundations of generations of generations;
And thou shalt be called the repairer of the breach,
The restorer of paths to dwell in.
How pitiful our estate is—that it is going to take the young people to repair the breach. But I do believe that.
They that shall be of thee—out of our children—shall build the old waste places. Oh, may it be, Lord. May it be.
Thou shalt raise up the foundations of generations of generations;
Thou shalt be called the repairer of the breach,
The restorer of paths to dwell in.
Dear brothers and sisters, the Lord is looking for such remembrancers: those with a heart, those with remembrance, those with some wisdom and some experience.
The Lord is waiting to remember His people, revive us, and recover His church. May the Lord have His way.
Lord, we gather together, and I am so glad I am here and can be personal with Your dear children, because I know many have tasted and even experienced something of the spiritual reality that You desire to recover in glory.
I thank You that I have been called together with my dear brothers and sisters, that we must learn how to run and walk together in this recovery, and that there are those who truly remember and even live in some measure in the spiritual reality of the church, though the things around them seem so dark.
Lord, do recover us. Lord, recover Your church. I am not trying to be cruel, Lord, but in my heart I am not satisfied. I am just not satisfied with the normal, subnormal life we experience.
Oh, Lord, by Your mercy we have occasional touches of life, but Lord, we want life. Grant us those willing to pay a price to see it come.
Lord, You have raised up a generation with pure hearts—young people who love the Lord and who have been in the environment, as it were. Oh, God, grant that some of them would be raised up, even as we were raised up years ago, in a recovery work that touches and recovers something more of Your reality for the New Jerusalem.
Oh, Lord, we would stand upon the walls, our knees shaking, as we sense what must lie ahead for the church. We are so obtuse, so self-centered, so weak. The things we have had, we have let go of, and they are about to die.
Lord, we would repent before You as those who have experienced and say, “Lord, revive Thy work in the midst of the years.” At the same time, we pray for our dear young people, that they would come into something fresh, clean, new, and full of the Lord Jesus.
Lord, these kinds of things only You can do. So we call out unto Your name: Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy on Your people. Remember us, Lord, for Jesus’ sake.
Amen.