8/25/2023 0 Comments Churches in revelation bible study“Because you say, ‘I am rich and have become wealthy and have need of nothing’ – and do not know that you are wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked – I counsel, therefore, you to buy from Me gold refined in the fire, that you may be rich with white garments that you may be clothed, and the shame of your nakedness may not be revealed and anoint your eyes with eye salve that you may see. So then, because you are lukewarm, neither cold nor hot, I will vomit you out of My mouth." Very, very strong. "I know your works," He says to the church, "that you are neither cold nor hot. It's not too high of an estimation however, for Jesus, who was the Faithful and the True Witness, the Beginning of the creation of God. I am it." Sometimes I've heard people refer to other people who have a high opinion of themselves as thinking that they were the great amen, and it's one of those phrases that you might point at somebody to maybe help them see that they think their estimation of themselves is a little bit too much. In this case, these are teachings from God and He says, "I am the Amen. At that moment, directed toward God in a prayer. It has a meaning of finality, a closure, of approval, nothing more need be said. If there is an Amen, the Amen is what is.we say that at the end of our prayers. Now, that pretty well sums up Jesus Christ, the Amen. So, in verse 14 of Revelation 3 (Revelation 3:14), "To the angel of the church of the Laodiceans, write, 'These things says the Amen, the Faithful and True Witness, the Beginning of the creation of God.'" Let's go ahead and we'll read through the passage here from verse 14 through verse 22 to get the full message, and then we'll come back and we'll talk a bit about the history, and then go back through each of the verses and look again at what we can gain from our knowledge of the city, the time and most importantly what is given to us today. And as we look at Chapter 3, beginning in verse 14, we can begin to find out exactly what it said. This church, the seventh one on the circuit and began with Ephesus, wound its way through this section of Asian Minor. There can be people holding doctrinal truths exact as the Scripture teaches as Christ gave to the faith, setting alongside some who may hold opposing teachings and yet have the name of Christian or a member of the Church, and yet as Jesus shows us from the other stories, they are not quite right, and there is this tension that we've already gone through in some of these others. That there can be zealous people alongside people who may not be quite so zealous. How the Church operates in terms of the inner workings of what just goes on within the Church. Every one of them offers a lesson for us to be instructed by, to take personally if necessary, and to apply to our lives, and to help us to understand many aspects of the direction and the flow of the Church, church history. And now, we today read those messages and they are important to us. The Church has never ceased to exist, and the messages from those seven churches, here in Revelation, have always applied to every one of those churches, no matter when they existed. He would be with the Church even unto the end of the age. The gates of the grave would not prevail against it. Christ said that He would build His Church. And regardless of what the message has meant to the churches in that 1st century or the church at any time between the 1st century and today, the 21st century as indeed the Church has always existed. We are the Church of God, these messages apply to us. It's been a very interesting study, it always is, to go in to this topic and look at what the Scriptures tell us and to apply it to us today, to take the message from each of those…of Christ giving to each of those churches, take what we need for us in our lives today, recognizing that at this point in time, we are a part of the Church. We've come to that point in the story now, we have gone through an introduction and six of the church messages here in Revelation 2 and 3. So, let's go ahead and turn in our Bibles to the book of Revelation chapter 3. He is wanting to prepare His Church as a bride, and this particular message seems to be aimed directly at that thought, and for the Church, for all of us, at this time and in this age. Literally, it is Christ knocking at the door of our lives and saying, "Let Me come in and dine with you, and live in you, and let Me do My work in you." That in a nutshell is the message that Christ points to the church at Laodicea. Every one of us turning and reading that message can learn something from this particular message. The message that Christ gives to the church at Laodicea is important to every one of us. ![]() The message to the church at Laodicea, it is one of the most sobering that the Church could hear today.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |