Introduction
Churches are only as strong as their membership. Now, that's a pretty obvious statement. A 2020 survey found that the average congregation size across Christian denominations is less than half what it was in 2000 — down to 65 from 137. As the US adjusts to an increasingly non-religious population, thousands of churches are closing each year in the country.
U.S. church membership was 73% when Gallup first measured it in 1937 and remained near 70% for the next six decades before beginning a steady decline around the turn of the 21st century. The decline in church membership is primarily due to the increasing number of Americans who express no religious preference. Over the past two decades, the percentage of Americans who do not identify with any religion has grown from 8% in 1999 to 13% in 2009 and 21% over the past three years. Clearly, every indicator says the church in America is in trouble.
The Revelation letter addressed to Sardis, called Sardis a “dead” church. Jesus’ words to Ephesus challenge a loveless church; his words to Smyrna encourage a persecuted church; his words to Pergamum address both persecution and compromise; his words to Thyatira challenge the infection of sin. But Jesus’ word to Sardis summons a sleeping church to wake up. Every letter we examine in Revelation is applicable to the church in America. But the letter to Sardis no doubt should echo in our minds and hearts.
Bible Passage
Revelation 3:1-6 (ESV)
1 And to the angel of the church in Sardis write: 'The words of him who has the seven spirits of God and the seven stars. I know your works. You have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead.
2 Wake up, and strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have not found your works complete in the sight of my God.
3 Remember, then, what you received and heard. Keep it, and repent. If you will not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what hour I will come against you.
4 Yet you have still a few names in Sardis, people who have not soiled their garments, and they will walk with me in white, for they are worthy.
5 The one who conquers will be clothed thus in white garments, and I will never blot his name out of the book of life. I will confess his name before my Father and before his angels.
6 He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.'
Scriptural Analysis
Verse 1
Sardis had been one of the most powerful cities in the ancient world due to heavy trade among the Aegean islands. Gold and silver coins were first minted at Sardis. The city also claimed to have discovered the art of dyeing wool. Sardis had declined, however, by the time of the Roman Empire. Sardis had requested the honor of building a temple for Caesar, but they were refused, and the honor went to Smyrna instead. The wealth of the city eventually led to the city becoming lethargic, its past splendor a decaying memory. The city believed it was impregnable because of its cliffs and walls, but twice, the city was taken by invading armies. The church now faced a similar danger because it was “nodding off” instead of remaining awake.
The church in Sardis receives no compliment from Christ, only criticism. Christ breaks his normal pattern of dispensing commendation before condemnation; his message is one of condemnation. The only other church similarly faulted is the seventh church, Laodicea. The complaint Christ lodges against this church is that it is almost spiritually dead. A corpse may be beautiful, but it is still dead. In contemporary terms, the Sardis church was filled with “nominal, casual Christians.”
Jesus knows their works, and those works are completely inadequate. They had a reputation for spiritual life and vitality, but the reputation was undeserved. They were spiritually dead and needed a fresh infusion of life.
Verses 2
Someone who is “dead” in verse 1 cannot logically be told to awake, but this is part of the author’s style. This word should not be understood to mean “awake from sleep”; on the contrary, it means “Become alive again,” “Wake up from death,” or “Begin living as Christians again.” Their wealth and comfort had lulled them to sleep. Their self-satisfaction caused them to die spiritually.
Christ has investigated what the Christians at Sardis have done, and he has discovered that their works do not measure up. The word perfect here translates to mean complete. The implication seems to be that the Christians at Sardis had begun to do things as Christians but had lost their enthusiasm and not finished what they had begun. Another translation model for this clause is “For I have discovered you have not completed anything that you have started.”
Verses 3-4
The urgent command Christ gives lies in a series of five verbs: wake up, strengthen, remember, obey, and repent. Christ commanded the church at Sardis to obey the Christian truth they had heard when they had first believed in Christ. Get back to the basics of the faith and remember what you received and heard. These believers had slipped away from that teaching into compromise with the world, so they would need to obey and repent. Only a change of heart could save them from punishment. That would mean taking God’s Word seriously and purposefully obeying it. If they refused to wake up and see what was happening to them, Christ would come like a thief, unexpectedly, as had the soldiers who had climbed the walls to capture the city.
They must repent of their neglect of the Spirit and obey the command to “be filled with the Spirit.” Christ had threatened to judge the unloving Ephesian church by removing its lampstand if it did not repent. Now, he threatens to judge the lifeless church of Sardis by coming against them like a thief at an unexpected time. Christ’s judgment will visit the church of Sardis if it does not change.
In Asia Minor, many temples barred worshipers with soiled garments, whose entry would insult the deity. White robes were worn by priests and purportedly other worshipers, signifying believers who were in the right standing. Is it possible for a “dead” church to change? In the case of Sardis, the answer was “yes” because a few people had remained faithful. They had not soiled their clothes by lethargy. Christ does not ask these faithful few to leave the nominal majority but to maintain their presence as a witness. They may have a difficult time doing so, but Christ commends them as worthy of special praise. They will appear dressed in white one day, revealed as truly righteous.
Verses 5-6
All Greek and Roman cities had official rolls of citizens to which new citizens could be added and from which expelled citizens would be removed. The “Book of Life” appears in the Old Testament and goes back as far as Exodus 32.
Christ promises a threefold reward for these faithful few:
1. They will be clothed in white.
2. I will never erase their names from the Book of Life.
3. I will announce before my Father and his angels that they are mine.
To be “clothed in white” means to be set apart for God, cleansed from sin, and made morally and spiritually pure. All of these symbolize eternal life. In ancient times, all citizens of a city might be listed in the “citizenship registry.” To be erased from such a book would mean one was not (or no longer) a citizen. All those who were citizens had the right to be announced or acknowledged before the king and his court.
Overcomers demonstrate their righteousness in this life by confessing Christ faithfully before a hostile world through the help of the Spirit of God. The letter to Sardis is a searching message to churches today that are full of activity and housed in beautiful buildings but often lack evidence of eternal life.
THE KEY TRUTH
The Church is called to Repent and Remember.
The two churches condemned most harshly belong to the only two cities of the seven that are completely uninhabited in modern times, Sardis and Laodicea. Sardis had a large, powerful, wealthy Jewish community that had long been respected in civic life. Sardis hosted many pagan cults. The mixing of deities was common in antiquity, and paganism permeated almost all the cities of the Roman Empire. Despite the city’s paganism, the Christian community there seems to have experienced no persecution nor spiritual life. This letter addresses Sardis, a “dead” church in the midst of all the cults.
Sardis had a significant and powerful Jewish community. They later built a new synagogue roughly the length of a football field. In contrast to churches in Smyrna and Philadelphia, Jesus’ followers in Sardis seem to have coexisted peacefully with the synagogue community and, therefore, likely coexisted peacefully with the city establishment as a whole. Lacking the world’s opposition, they grew comfortable in their relationship with the world. They were living in ease, not knowing what was to come.
At the time Revelation was written, first and second-century Christians had no idea how bad the persecution was going to be, but it was going to be a fiery and terrible one. How could they possibly face it? The answer is that Jesus gives them something in this book that enabled them to face it and rise to the occasion. He gave them something to make them great. Many people believe the book of Revelation is a kind of code map of the end times, and if you study it, you’ll know what will happen at the very end of the world.
Let me ask you something: How comforting would that have been to these people? They’re in prison. They’re about to be fed to the lions, and the night before, in comes the letter. “Look! This is a message from the Lord Jesus for us. This will help us.” They open it up. What if their minister says, “Let me tell you. This is a detailed account of the events, many of which make little sense to us, that are going to happen right before Jesus comes back thousands of years from now.” What kind of comfort is that? Is that what the book is about? No. You cannot separate the letters to the churches from what follows in the coming chapters. It's one book.
This book is to show you a glorious and exalted picture of Jesus Christ, a Jesus who cannot be marginalized, a Jesus who cannot be trivialized, and a Jesus who can't be ignored. When you meet him in chapter 1, his hair is white to show you he is wise. His eyes are fiery to show you there is nothing he cannot see. Out of his mouth comes a two-edged sword, which shows that his words penetrate and nothing can stop them. His voice is greater than the sound of water to show his power. The book of Revelation is about what every book in the Bible is about Jesus. That's because Jesus is humanity's only hope.
The way you get to see Christ like that is through repentance. The book of Revelation is here to show you an exalted Christ. Yet in every one of these letters to these churches that are about to suffer, Jesus comes to them and says, “Repent!” Why? Because the only way you actually see Jesus as great and glorious is to humble yourself and repent. John the Baptist, at one point, said, “He must increase, and I must decrease.”
The only way you can see Christ as powerful and glorious in the book of Revelation is if you repent. That’s why Jesus is trying here to get every one of these churches he loves so much ready to meet the challenge and face the coming foes. What does he do? Again and again and again, what does he say? “Wake up!… what you have received and heard; remember it, and repent.” Christ criticizes the majority of Sardian Christians for being spiritually asleep, so they must get some R&R: Repent and Remember their earlier spiritual liveliness.
The Church is called to Repent and Remember.
Conclusion
You don’t tell a dead person to wake up; dead people need to be resurrected. Sleeping people need to be wakened. The question is, are the people in Sardis dead or asleep spiritually? Are they dead as a doornail, or are they believers who have forgotten who they are? Jesus says, “Wake up! Strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have not found your deeds complete … Remember, therefore, what you have received …” Jesus is talking to people who received something and who look like they’re dying, but they’re not dead; they’re asleep.
We must say, “Is it possible a church could be sound in teaching with a great reputation, with a reputation of being functional, and yet falling asleep spiritually?” The answer is, “Absolutely!” In fact, I submit to you that all churches naturally go to sleep unless they’re continually rousing themselves. I suggest to you that the only churches that are not asleep are the churches that are constantly concerned about their falling asleep.
The Church is called to Repent and Remember.
You have to assume the church is going to go to sleep. You’re going to have to assume we’re going to forget what we first received. You have to assume that at the corporate level, a church has to continually repent as a body and say, “We’re forgetting what we were put here originally to do,” because we always will.
Any organization starts out with this great, fiery burst because we’re serving a cause and we have a mission. But over the years, they become institutions. The next thing you know, instead of serving a cause, you’re simply serving the needs of the people who are in the positions in the institution. It becomes institutionalized. You forget what you were built for. Churches are like that, too, but it’s especially bad for churches that do this because the original mission, of course, is Jesus. The book of Revelation says churches are lampstands. What is a lampstand? A lampstand is something that holds up a lamp. We’re not the lamp; Jesus is the lamp, but we’re lampstands. We’re supposed to be supporting the mission.
Unless the church is constantly assuming it’s falling asleep, assuming it’s losing that original sense of what we were here for, unless a church is continually going back to corporate repentance and remembering what its primary mission is, a church will fall asleep. It doesn’t matter. A church can be falling asleep long before its reputation begins to erode. Churches do fall asleep, and not until years later does it start to catch up. For years beyond that, it has been known as a great church. All churches will fall asleep. Every two or three years, at least, a church needs to rouse itself.
We have to listen to what Jesus is saying here at both the individual and the church levels. Here’s what he’s saying. To fall asleep means to be controlled by an allusion. If I’m asleep and I’m dreaming about being in some idyllic, comfortable place, but my house is on fire, I need to wake up. I’m being controlled by my dreams, not by the reality. When I wake up, I’m being controlled by the reality, not the dreams. Do you understand? It's almost impossible to tell the illusion of dreams from reality when you're asleep. We must wake up to the reality that we, the church in America, are failing on our mission.
The Church is called to Repent and Remember.
It’s only the healthy church that says, “We’re losing our first love,” that ever keeps their first love. It’s only the healthy Christians and the church that say, “We’re not being what we ought to be,” that ever becomes what they ought to be. That’s the beauty of it. That’s the irony. It’s in repentance and remembering that Jesus gets more real. Repentance does not make you feel worse about yourself. Repentance does not make you feel depressed. Jesus says, “Go back to what I first gave you, what you first received, and repent,” and then what will happen? “You’ll walk in white robes.” What does all that mean? “I’ll give you a crown.” What does all that mean? “I’ll give you the morning star.” What does all that mean?
I don’t know what that completely means, but it’s a wonderful promise from Jesus. It’s just Jesus’ way of saying, “You have no idea. When you repent, my love and power explode into your life. Repentance and remembrance release my love and power into your life". And Repentance and remembrance will release His love and power in our churches. And from there, our community.
The Church is called to Repent and Remember.