The open door is a narrow gate. There’s only one door and only one way through it. It's so narrow that to squeeze through it can only be done one way - by faith. Faith in the Door. Jesus not only opens the Door, he IS the Door (John 10).

That picture frames the question I asked in yesterday’s message, the one on this Monday morning that still begs for out clear answer: What makes a church great?

Jesus says, "You have the name that you are alive, but you are dead" (3:1). All hat, no cowboy. A reputation resting on an empty condition. Notice what he does not say. He does not accuse Sardis of open scandal or heresy. He says, "I have not found your works complete" (3:2). The problem is unfinished love and unfinished obedience, slowly settled into complacency.

That is the most dangerous kind of death, because it never announces itself. Complacency does not feel like danger from the inside. It feels like safety. That false sense of security is exactly what undoes a church, whether it is hiding behind a cliff or behind a long and honorable history.

One of the greatest graces we’ve been given is that our Savior is the One who was dead but, behold, he is alive forevermore. If a congregation is dead, there’s no better head of that church than Jesus, the dead-raiser, the life-giver, the grace-robbing Savior who brought back Lazarus from the tomb and restored him to life and service and witness. 

Tolerance is a danger when intolerance is the only solution. “Morality, like art, consists in drawing a line somewhere!” - Mark Twain. 

Every generation of the church faces some version of the same question Thyatira faced: how do we relate to a world we live inside but don't belong to? And every generation is tempted toward the same three wrong answers.

Smyrna’s Christians are headed into a great trial of their faith, a faith that’s already been severely tested. As in all great trials, the witnesses' testimony will be crucial. Let’s look at the Testimony of Jesus, the Testimony of the Church in Smyrna as they take the stand, and the Testimony of Eternity - of heaven and hell - to the fidelity of God and his people. 

A city named for death's own perfume, addressed by the one who died and is alive forever - you couldn't invent a better opening line if you tried.

Look, this is an easy pathology to be infected by. Jesus said, when lawlessness is increased, the love of many grows cold (Matthew 24). The lawlessness around us can produce a lovelessness within us, and that rots a church from the inside-out. Eventually, the flame of witness is extinguished, and the lampstand is taken away.

There’s only one antibiotic that can heal this dread infection -

• “I’m not the one who moved.”

If our beginning is chance and our ending is pointless, then why does the middle matter? Many demand of us that we care - about the economy, the planet, wars and injustice… why? If we exist by mere chance and we move to oblivion, and our lives are not valuable or meaningful in any absolute sense, then “who cares”???!!! 

"I wake up sometimes way in the night and I know as certain as death that there aint nothin short of the second comin of Christ that can slow this train.” - Sheriff Bell, No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy

Because make no mistake, this is a suffering people's book, and it always has been. Christ's own victory came through apparent defeat, not around it — the cross before the crown, the Lion who reigns turning out to be the Lamb who was slain. One older theologian described the church's whole existence this way: hemmed in by hostile power from without and false teaching from within, and yet never abandoned — her fellowship in the coming kingdom is, itself, a fellowship of suffering and patient endurance.

The word itself is a giveaway. Apocalypse — the Greek word behind our English "revelation" — means unveiling. Something that was hidden is being pulled into the light.

Welcome to the Book of Revelation. The title alone should tell you what to expect from this book: not a code to crack, but a curtain being pulled back. And once the curtain moves, don't expect everything on the other side to sit easy with you.

This book was written to turn your sense of what's real inside out. It's going to unsettle some assumptions. It's going to plow up soil in you that's gotten hard and settled, so that something truer can take root. That's not a flaw in the book — that's the book doing exactly what it was written to do.

How can we study this amazing book?

Keep two realities in view - the Alpha and Omega, if you will, of the big picture Revelation unfolds. At the beginning of this apocalypse/prophecy/letter/book, Christ stands with his imperfect, threatened Church. At the end, Christ stands with his perfected, glorious Church, a spotless bride. Between those two realities, the scroll is opened, the seals are broken, the trumpets sound, the bowls are poured out, the dragon is thrown into the lake of fire, and Christ the Risen, Reigning, Returning Savior is seen by all.

We began this book in a moment of loss. A city fallen. A temple plundered. A teenager standing in the court of the world's most powerful empire, being given a new name by an official who assumed the old one no longer mattered.

We end it with stars.

There is a bell in Philadelphia that has not rung since 1846. It sits behind glass, cracked and silent, visited by millions who come not to hear it but to read it. Encircling its crown is an inscription from the book of Leviticus: Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.

The roots of American liberty run deeper, and stranger, and more theological than the standard account allows. They pass through a burned book, a Scottish castle prison, a seventy-foot drop on a rope of knotted blankets, and a Princeton classroom. And at every point along the way, they are watered not by abstract Enlightenment philosophy but by a conviction older and tougher than that, the conviction that there is a law above the law of kings, and that its Author is the God of Scripture.

That is the story worth telling on the republic's 250th anniversary.

Daniel is finishing his course here in chapter 12: an unexpected life, begun in exile as a teenager, sustained through three empires, altered by visions he could not fully contain, and marked throughout by the faithfulness of a God who never once let go of him. One of the most remarkable figures in human history. And at the end of it all, he leaves us three gifts to open.

The powers invented the cross. The powers perfected the cross. The powers wielded the cross against the Lord of glory. And in that single act — the most catastrophic miscalculation in the history of the universe — they triggered the instrument of their own destruction. They did not know. The wisdom of God was hidden from them. They played the role appointed for them before the ages: the unwitting executioners of the sacrifice that would end their power forever.