The One Who Conquers

We invite you to take your scriptures out and turn to our scripture reading for this morning.

It should be found in the last book of the Bible, the book of Revelation.

And I've added a little portion from what's listed in your bulletin.

We're going to begin reading in chapter 1, verses 10 through 20, and then chapter 3, 14 to 22.

You don't have a Bible, there's a pew Bible in front of you, page 1028.

You'll find it there.

So Revelation 1, beginning in verse 10, this is the Apostle John speaking.

I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet, saying, Write what you see in a book, and send it to the seven churches, to Ephesus and to Smyrna, and to Pergamum and Thyrotira and Sardis and to Philadelphia unto Laodicea.

Then I turned to see the voice that was speaking to me, and on turning I saw seven golden lampstands, and in the midst of the lampstands was one like a son of man, clothed with a long robe, with a golden sash around his chest.

The hairs of his head were white like wool, as white as snow, his eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined in the furnace, and his voice was like the roar of many waters.

In his right hand he held seven stars, and from his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining in full strength.

When I saw him I fell at his feet as though dead, but he laid his right hand on me, saying, Fear not.

I am the first and the last, and the living one.

I died, and behold, I am alive forever.

I have the keys of death and Hades.

Write therefore the things you have seen, those that are, and those that are to take place after this.

As for the mystery of the seven stars that you saw in my right hand, and the seven golden lampstands, the seven stars are the angels of the seven churches, and the seven lampstands are the seven churches.

Now I'd like to turn over to chapter three, verses fourteen forward.

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 were 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'm rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.

I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by the fire, so that you may be rich, and white garments, so that you may clothe yourselves, and the shame of your nakedness may not be seen, and salve to anoint your eyes, so that you may see.

Those whom I love I reprove and discipline, so be zealous and repent.

Behold, I stand at the door and knock.

If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to 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.

Well, here ends the reading of God's Word.

We live in a world of power struggles.

Power struggles within nations, within political parties, within businesses, institutions, families.

It's everywhere.

And within these various spheres, overcoming or conquering looks very different.

Nations win wars.

Companies overcome or conquer by a takeover, maybe.

Politicians win public support.

Siblings dodge a consequence for themselves and get their brother or sister in trouble.

Well, this morning we're going to look at a book in the Bible that portrays in vivid detail the mother of all power struggles.

It's one that deeply affects each of us.

The book, of course, we're talking about is the book of Revelation.

Within this book, Jesus has some sobering and encouraging words to speak to his church as he exhorts them to intentionally and wisely live their lives so as to come out on the right side of this great power struggle.

He describes this path as conquering.

Conquering.

If you're using an old, older translation, the New American Standard, the word will be overcoming.

I'd like to uh, if we can have the PowerPoint up on the screen.

This morning we're going to focus on chapters two and three in some broad strokes.

These are some really unique words of Jesus because he spoke them after his resurrection and ascension.

How many times have you wondered, wouldn't it be nice to really know what God thought of us as a church?

Wouldn't it be nice to hear from him just a message from the Lord about our church that we have here?

Well, in this portion of Revelation, the Apostle John is given a vision of the risen Lord.

And the risen Lord is pictured among his churches.

That's the opening vision.

Now, of all the places he could have been, it's quite striking that he's pictured walking among his churches, whom he describes as lampstands.

Lampstands.

Institutions meant to shed light.

The words that he's going to give in these seven letters to seven churches are very personal words.

They come from someone who knows.

Someone who knows.

Someone who's intimately acquainted, who lives and dwells in the midst of his churches.

This is not words from someone who's far away and has read a report on the internet.

The Lord Jesus cares deeply about his church.

He cares deeply about the direction we're moving and the kind of witness that we shine in the world.

At the end of each one of these letters, there is this somber exhortation.

It's a refrain.

So if you've read this in the past, I'm sure it's hit your radar.

He keeps repeating it to him who overcomes or to him who conquers.

So if you look at your screen, I'm just going to quickly read through.

These are the letters, these are to each of the seven churches I pulled out just the end of the letters.

So to the church in Ephesus, to the one who conquers, I will grant to eat of the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God.

To the church in Smyrna, he says, the one who conquers will not be hurt by the second death.

Turn on.

On the side.

Okay.

Okay, we've advanced already.

Good.

To the church in Pergamum.

To the one who conquers, I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone with a new name written on it that no one knows except the one who receives it.

To the church in Thyrachyra, Jesus says, The one who conquers and who keeps my works until the end.

To him I will give authority over the nations.

To the church in Sardis, the one who conquers will be clothed thus in white garments, and I will never blot his name out from the book of life.

I will confess his name before my father and before his angels.

To the church in Philadelphia, the one who conquers, I will make him a pillar in the temple of my God.

Never shall he go out of it, and I will write on him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem, which comes down from my God out of heaven in my own new name.

And then finally, the one we've read today, the one who conquers, I will grant him to sit with me on my throne, as I also conquered, and sit down with my Father on his throne.

It's interesting that as you read these expressions, the promise that Jesus gives to those who overcome, to those who conquer, are really the blessings of the age to come.

They're the blessings of salvation spoken in different ways.

And so really, Jesus is saying the one who overcomes is really one of mine.

Now, what I'd like to do at this point is I'd like to ask us uh three questions.

Three questions.

The first question is this didn't Jesus do all of the conquering for me?

Pat, I think you know the words, the songs that you pick out each week, it's really, I don't know that the congregation would just really catch this like the one who's speaking does, but you really do a great job of capturing the theme of the week.

And we sang today about he overcame.

He overcame.

And every time we sing those words, I think as a congregation, I think, isn't there just a sense of just wanting to just shout as we're gripped with what he's done for us?

The book of Revelation is in fact about confrontation of powers.

There are two powers in the book of Revelation that are at war with each other in a sense.

They are not equal powers by any means.

The first power is the Lord Almighty and the Lamb of God.

The Lord Almighty is pictured on his throne in the most exalted terms.

In a scene in chapters four and five, I really wished I had time to read it this morning, but we don't.

You have a great sea of people surrounding the throne and beings, angelic beings.

And for two chapters, there is this worship that goes on, first of the Lord Almighty, the Father, on his throne, the one who created all things, but then of the Lion of Judah.

The Lion of Judah who conquered and who triumphed at the cross.

And who's wearing a blood-stained garment.

And when John turns to see, he's pictured as a lamb that was slain, a slaughtered lamb.

And Jesus is receiving the praise and the adoration due to the Father, because he is one with him, and he has redeemed and overcome the plan in the plan of redemption.

And so throughout this book, the author wants to make it really clear, and even in the text we read this morning, that Jesus overcame, as he brought the sins of his people, as he brought them before his father, and suffered the wrath that was their due, it was our due.

And as he atoned for sin, and as he was victorious over the grave and rose and was vindicated, he conquered sin and the grave.

He has the keys of death and Hades.

And he conquered Satan.

And the victory is just now awaiting the fullness of the day.

What's left is just the mopping up operation.

And so, did Jesus do all of the conquering for me?

Scripture would say that Jesus did the foundational conquering for us.

He did the foundational conquering.

The victory of Jesus over sin, death, and Satan is foundation to all of our conquering.

We know these verses.

We say them a lot.

Romans 8, 35, and following is a great one.

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?

Shall trouble or hardships or persecution, famine, nakedness, danger, or sword, as it's written, for your sake we face death all day long.

No, we're considered as sheep to be slaughtered.

Knowing all these things we are more than conquerors.

We are super exalted conquerors and overcomers through him who loved us and gave himself for us.

So Jesus has the foundational conquering.

And any words we hear from the risen Lord bring that right to the table.

When Jesus calls us to overcome, he's calling us as one who himself did the fundamental overcoming and makes it possible for other kinds of overcoming.

So that brings us to a second question.

What is left for us to conquer?

Clearly, there is a work of conquering for us to do.

What is that work?

Well, again, the book of Revelation gives us some hints, and even these letters give us some hints about what this is.

There is, in fact, a great power struggle described in this book.

Satan has wanted to destroy the Messiah.

He's not able to do it.

The Messiah is victorious over him.

We're told in chapter 12 that the devil is enraged.

And now, if he can't have the Messiah, he's going to seek to kill those who hold to the testimony of the Messiah and who are commissioned and called by the Messiah to be a light and a lampstand in this world that is overtaking and taking new ground away from him.

There is a battle for the souls of people in this world going on.

I'm not sure we're even aware of this battle, oftentimes.

You know, maybe we're like the people of Germany before the Third Reich rose.

And things were changing quickly, and things were coming into place.

A great evil was arising.

And apparently a lot of a lot of people never even saw it.

Like the frog in the boiling water.

They were just ignorant of what was happening around them.

What would it look like to be living an ignorant life of a great battle that is going on around us?

So believers are caught in a crossfire.

That's a phrase that Stephen Homsey used, and I'm very indebted to him and his essay on this passage today.

We're caught in a crossfire.

And not only that, we're called to bear light.

We're not called to hunker down like North Dakotans in a blizzard.

Batten down the hatches, get to the basement under the covers, turn up the heat.

We're called to be a lampstand.

A lampstand in a world that is hostile to God.

And in a world that is the tool of the great arch enemy of God.

And whose goal is to mar and smear the bride of Christ.

And to destroy and ruin sinners.

That is his stated goal.

And so, what is left for me to conquer?

The first stage in understanding this is to realize we're left in a crossfire and we are called to.

Bear light.

And that is going to be a very difficult task.

It's going to bring us great challenges.

So this brings us now to our third and final question.

How do I live a life of conquering?

What does that really look like?

Thankfully, we don't have to come up with this on our own.

The Lord gives us hints all through this passage and through the book and through other portions of Scripture.

One of the first things we need to live a life of conquering, the Laodiceans needed repentance.

They were prone to wander.

And the church in Laodicea, instead of seeing the battle they were in, and instead of being a light to an opposing to God culture, just began to merge into the culture.

Not so they could better be a better light.

They just began to merge in it because they lost vision of what the goal of life was and of the calling that God had on them.

Jesus tells them to repent.

It means to turn away.

Turn away from sin and turn toward God.

Jesus wants them to repent of all teaching.

So there's a doctrinal component here.

We see this in the seven letters.

There are groups that have arisen that have heresy, that have false teachings, that lead people into immorality and into idolatry and into a wrong view of the living God.

But Jesus also wants his people to repent from works that in any way connect them with the adversary of God and that promote this deceiver.

Those works can be as simple as complacency, just a cold complacency.

The letters go on, and on a positive side, that would be the negative, would be repenting and turning away from.

Positively, Jesus exhorts his churches to love and trust and be a faithful witness that cannot be uprooted from their testimony, even under the threat of death.

They're to stay right in the thick of the battle and in the crossfire and to bear light and to keep their eyes fixed on him, their overcomer.

A life of loyal love.

One that hears the voice of the Son of God knocking at the door, who's astute to that, and who opens and who invites in and sits down and eats with.

There's a loving loyalty pictured there.

And there's a loving loyalty in all of these commands that Jesus gives to turn away from sin and promoting the works of the evil one, of restoring our first love, of trusting and of being a faithful witness even unto death.

There's a loving loyalty that's in view.

I don't know about you, but over the years I've read this passage and others like it many times.

And I always feel a kind of anxiety arising in me.

I start to feel anxiety rising.

And I start to feel energy within me percolating.

Energy to get going, to get doing, to do something that would be pleasing to God, to do something that would show that I'm good with God, that we're okay.

Energy that begins to question, is God big enough to really keep me?

He's promised that he would lose none of his sheep.

Am I doing enough for God to be in that number?

Is my witness strong enough?

Have I given it enough times?

Is my love, my first love, has it grown too cold?

Or have I been there enough?

Am I trusting him enough?

I wonder how many of you, when you read passages like this, begin to move in those kinds of directions.

I don't think they're meant to lead us there.

I think they are meant to lead us into some deep self-reflection.

The movement that God is calling us to here, and this life of conquering is first and foremost a life of heart activity.

It begins on the inside.

You can be someone who's doing all kinds of things.

Do you know that you could give your body to the flames for Christ?

And if your heart wasn't right, in terms of 1 Corinthians 13, 1, if you didn't have love, it'd be worthless.

It's worthless.

It's just an outward act.

It's just religion.

But where there is movement of the heart, where this loving loyalty that's in the heart begins to grow and develop and open to God and seek his strength and depend on him, there you find movement of the limbs.

Movement of the limbs that repent and that trust and that love and that take great risks and that say, I will stand on the testimony of Jesus, even if it costs me my life.

Not every heart that hears the word of God falling on it, take it in deep and produce a deep fruit.

There will be many hearts, Jesus said, which the word of God will lie on the surface, or which will the word of God will be overcome with thorns, or which the word of God will begin to come up, but die out because the soil's too shallow.

So a lot of times the Lord is asking us, who are you?

Have you heard my voice knocking?

Do you have loyalty to me?

That's really what the word trust means, by the way.

There's a deep semantic connection between loyalty and trust.

Well, a picture's worth a thousand words.

I would like to show a video here.

It's a metaphor.

A similar video was in the paper this weekend.

And really, I'm taking my cue from the Old Testament, in which God has described Himself there as a hen who takes care of her chicks, or an eagle who garnishes her young chicks on wings while he teaches them to fly.

So without further ado, can we show can we show the video?

I really think the mother duck was on the side saying, Honey, I told you under the freeway was clear.

I love that video.

These ducklings are so weak in themselves.

They find themselves being ushered onto a theater of confrontation and danger.

Their strength is in their shepherd who leads them through the valley of the shadow of death.

We are so weak and prone to wander.

But the risen Lord, who stands amongst his churches, is powerful.

That's the point of the opening vision.

And he is able to give us the strength we need to overcome.

But they have to keep their eyes on him.

How easy it would have been for those chicks to go off on their own, to not keep their eyes on him.

If they had no instinct of loyalty, they would have been doomed to be destroyed.

They wouldn't have appreciated the danger that was around them.

There's at least two ways in which this picture is not completely analogous to how I'm using it.

You know, we see the good shepherd in front of us by faith.

Oh, how we wish sometimes he were here in person to tell us what to do and to move us forward.

But he's with us nonetheless.

And his words are every bit as good as if he were here in person, physically, in bodily form.

You can trust his words to follow him.

Another component of this is in real life, our spiritual enemies aren't trying to dodge us, they are gunning for us.

And oh the dangers that are there.

Listen to Jude verse 17.

But you must remember, beloved, the predictions of the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ.

They said to you, In the last time there will be scoffers following their own ungodly passions.

It is these who cause divisions, worldly people devoid of the Spirit.

But you, beloved, build yourselves up in your most holy faith.

Pray in the Holy Spirit.

Keep yourselves in the love of God.

Keep your eye on the Savior and His love for you, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life.

And have mercy on those who doubt.

Save others by snatching them out of the fire.

To others show mercy and fear, hating even the garment stained by the flesh.

Now to him who is able to keep you from falling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority before all time, now and forevermore.

The church is ever in danger of embracing and being distracted and discouraged by the current culture.

We're ever in danger of betraying our true role as lamps to the world around us.

But Christ, the Lion of Judah, the lamb who was slain, is on the throne and he's at the door.

Will we be amongst the overcomers who trust him, look to him, open ourselves to him in loyal love, repent of our wayward hearts, and walk with him in this life.

Or will we be overcome by a defeated foe?

Rejoin me as I close us in prayer.

Our Father, open our heart to see the real state of what's going on deep inside.

Are we loyal to you, Lord?

Do we trust you?

Is your victory our everything, even if it fades and comes again strong?

Lord, give us the grace to keep us from falling.

Keep us safe.

Present us before your throne on that day as overcomers who sit with you on your throne, and we will give you the glory for it all.

For you would have done it.

In Christ's name we pray.

Amen.