Carnage lay strewn along the roadway: bodies and personal effects littered the scene. Lives would be changed forever.
It was April 26, 2006, when the driver of a semi traveling along I-69 in northern Indiana fell asleep at the wheel, sending his driverless truck careening into a van transporting young people from Taylor University. Among the dead was Whitney Cerak, identified by the personal belongings found close to her lifeless body. As her mourning family held her funeral, a schoolmate, Laura Van Ryn, desperately clung to life in a local hospital.
For weeks the Cerak family grieved while the VanRyn family prayed. Slowly Laura began to improve, until one day when, as part of her therapy, she was asked to write her name, and she deliberately scrawled “Whitney.” It was Whitney, rather than Laura, who survived the crash. Two families then were forced to grapple with unimaginable emotions: one, realizing a daughter was dead; the other, realizing a deceased daughter was, in fact, alive.
The shock of the revelation stunned both families. We don’t expect the dead to be alive, and we don’t expect the living to be dead.
In the book of Revelation, we find a similar predicament, except it involves a whole church.
The church in Sardis had quite a name. It was THE church. The one that everyone tried to emulate. The church that hosted the conferences. The church whose pastor graced the billboards and wrote the books. If you were a member of the church in Sardis, you were really something. The church was alive and growing.
Or so it seemed. To Jesus, it was dead. And all those works that everyone admired? Jesus held nothing back: “I have not found your works perfect before God.” Perfect before people, yes. Perfect before God, no.
How could this be? Apparently, all their brilliantly organized programs and dazzling promotions were nothing more than external actions. The internal passion was missing, leaving God unamused. Their goal had shifted from pleasing God to impressing men.
I think this should make us pause for a moment and consider our own churches: what makes us think that we are “alive?” Maybe we think a church is “alive” because it has a certain number of worship services, uses a (my) preferred version of the Bible, sings only hymns, only contemporary music, or the “perfect” blend of the two, has stellar youth programs…you get the idea. We each keep a mental list of all the external characteristics that we assume contributes to the life of a church. Yet we often carry out these activities with passionless routine, basking in the glow of human admiration rather than the approval of God.
So, while everyone else talks about the “life” of our church, Jesus schedules the funeral.
How do we fix this problem? Jesus gives us the answer: remember, retain, repent (Rev. 3:3). Remember why you should be doing what you are doing, hold fast to it, and repent of your misdirected motives.
Forget what other people think of your church. Forget about their accolades. What does God, who knows the motives of our heart, think? After all, His opinion is the only one that matters.
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