Reflection from my message today at NRN - Sardis: The Church of the Living Dead

This morning we continued in the teaching series:

Part 5    Sardis:  The Church of the Living Dead

 Ephesus: The insensitive church

Smyrna: The faithful church

Pergamum: The compromising church

Thyatira: The tolerant church

Sardis: The dead Church

I closed with this illustration:

There is a legendary story of an event that is said to have taken place near the end of World War I. You may have used this illustration in a sermon. I read an account of this story in Christianity Today. It had to do with a famous warrior we commonly known of as Lawrence of Arabia.

During the war, Lawrence formed close friendships with many of the sheiks of Arabia. After the war, he brought some of these sheiks back to England to show his appreciation for their support against the Turkish domination. They had a wonderful visit. They appeared before the Joint House of Commons and Parliament, and had an audience with the Queen.

On the last night of their visit, Lawrence offered them anything they wanted to take back with them to their desert homes. They led him up to the hotel room, into the bathroom, and pointed to the faucets in the bathtub and said that they wanted to take faucets with them that would provide them with running water in the deserts. To them, this was water on demand. They didn’t realize that the faucets were superficial. That behind them was plumbing, a hot water heater, an energy source that heated the water, a city main that supplied the water, and from the city main went a line to an outside source of water!

He had to explain to them that the magic is not in the faucet! It is what is behind the faucet that produces the water! Things that are not visible to the human eye but are there nonetheless! The faucet can be 24 carat gold, but if it’s not attached to a water supply, it’s useless! If the supply were to ever diminish, the faucet would be useless! It’s what’s behind the faucet that gives it its power!

At Home Depot there is a whole aisle where a wall is covered with faucets. All shapes and sizes can be found there. But if you were to go and turn the knobs to the “on” position you would get no water because the faucets are not connected to a source. An individual, a preacher, a church that is not connected to the source is like the faucets at Home Depot. They look good but they accomplish nothing. In order to be effective they must be attached to a flow so that they can dispense the blessing of the source. The source of water can be a well, a lake, a reservoir. The source of revival is the church today is going to the Lord in prayer.

The church is the only enterprise that exists for those who are not yet a part of it.