Lord, I pray that you would give us ears to hear and eyes to see. Lord, may we be caught up in this exaltation and song of praise today. In Jesus' name, amen.
Well, I don't know about you, but I've been catching up with a number of people post-COVID. Has this happened to anybody where you, you were friends with somebody pre-COVID and then you kind of lost touch for a couple years or 3, maybe 3 years, and then you're like, hey, it's so-and-so at the grocery store, let's get together. And you get together and maybe you're having a coffee and you're catching up on life and you remember, imagine this, you remember your friend had a girlfriend but frankly, she was a mess, right? I mean, she had all kinds of crazy stuff in her past. I mean, she, that girl probably had a criminal record of some kind. Like this is a sketchy girl and yet she had been making changes in her life but you're just thinking, dude, it is not, She's not right for my friend. And so you, you know, after you catch up, you kinda say, hey man, I'm so glad that it seems like, you know, that girl's not in your life anymore. Frankly, you know what, I didn't wanna say this at the time, but like, you know, just not a fan, okay? You know, and you get to go through the list of like, she did this and she did that, and I heard she did this in the past, I heard she did that in the past, and your friend is just kinda looking at you and letting you talk and letting you talk, and finally you get to the end and say, so anyway, whatever happened with that? And he says, "She's my wife." In that moment, you're not going to be— you're not going to be a great friend to your friend, are you?
You know, years ago, I read a headline that was summarizing some research on people in America and Christians in particular. And I can't remember if it was Barna or Pew or one of those similar organizations that are polling Christians and non-Christians, and the title of the findings was this: They Like Jesus But Not the Church. And I think what Revelation reminds us is this: you cannot separate Jesus and the church. It's like trying to separate a man and his wife. Hey, you're not going to invite your friend over and say, "Listen, listen, you're welcome at my house anytime, but frankly, don't bring your wife." That ain't going to work. That's not going to work for your friend. It's certainly not going to work for Jesus.
And so what we're going to do today is we're going to pull on this thread of the church and see that these two things are inextricably linked, that the church is dear to Jesus and therefore should be dear to us.
Charles Spurgeon, with one of my favorite quotes, 19th-century preacher, he said this: "Imperfect as it is, it is the dearest place on earth." So Jesus calls the church dear. Is it dear to you? First question today: What is the church to Christ? What is Christ's relationship to the church?
Now, in the context of Revelation, this is a very intentional section. We've just seen Babylon. We've just seen the beautiful, flourishing, wealthy, seductress Babylon, who represents kind of the world and culture opposed to God. And we've seen that she looks great, she's rich, she's in bed with all the rulers of the earth, and yet in the end she comes to nothing. She is bankrupt. All of her beauty fades and falls. And then in contrast to her, another figure is introduced: the bride of Christ. Now, here is the question you might have as you think about, okay, Jesus calls the church his bride, Does he not see her as we do? Because I don't know if you remember Revelation 2 and 3, Alec preached well last week, just some of the faults and failures that Jesus really clearly sees in his church. Across the 7 churches, here's what you've got. Ephesus had abandoned its first love. Jesus sees it. Pergamum and Thyatira had immorality running through the church mixed with false teaching and heresy. Sardis, spiritually asleep. Laodicea, lukewarm, right? I mean, Jesus is not like rose-colored glasses.
6 · Extends the exposition by showing that Jesus's clear-eyed view of the church's sin goes even deeper than Revelation 2-3, drawing on Hosea's marriage to an adulterous wife as a canonical precedent for God's love for a sinful people, demonstrating that Christ's love is not blind but deliberate
Have you ever had a friend who maybe their girlfriend or boyfriend, you're kind of seeing like, dude, every time we get together with your boyfriend, he's like 45 minutes late. And the girl's like, oh, it's just adorable. You know, he's just a little late. You know, it's so quirky. He's so quirky. And you're just like, oh, you know. That's not the case with Jesus. He sees really clearly. These things are obvious to him. In fact, scripture goes even further. In the book of Hosea, for example, God pictures his people as his wife, but his wife that runs away and continues to commit adultery. And God says to his people, look, this is what you've done. I've set my love on you, I've rescued you, I've freed you, and yet you keep running away. And in the book of Hosea, the prophet literally goes and buys back his adulterous wife that sold herself into slavery at the cost of his own money and possessions. And yet Scripture says he still loves her. Christ still calls her his bride.
7 · Extends the exposition into contemporary application by cataloging the visible faults of the modern church—from public scandals to private sins to the mixture of true and false believers—establishing that Jesus sees all of it, grieves it, calls for change, but does not abandon the church
Similarly, today we see the faults and failures of the church, local churches, denominations, leaders, right? Fall. We've seen over the last few years denominations can fail. Podcasts and blogs will pick through the wreckage of churches and their leaders, right? Newspapers that never— I'm not saying newspapers normally trumpet the good things churches are doing— are more than happy to trumpet the bad things the churches have done. Somehow that makes the front page. And outside the eye of the public, in 100 ways and in 1,000 churches, people people can be, Christians can be, church members can be unkind and proud and envious, and there is gossip and slander and hurt. That's the reality. And let's not forget that we ourselves can contribute to some of that hurt and loss and envy and gossip. Look, in the context of Scripture, the church here in Revelation 19 is the true church. We understand that right now there is a mixture. A room this size or a church our size, there's a mixture of people who are true believers in Christ and maybe others that seem as though they are but in the end will be revealed as not. Sadly, as a pastor, I've seen people over the years, they can talk like a Christian and walk like a Christian and say Christian things, and yet in the end, their actions betray that they do not love the Lord at all, perhaps never knew him in the first place. Doesn't Jesus see this? Messed up, mixed up church? Yes, he does. He grieves it. He calls for it to change, right? In Revelation 2 and 3, he doesn't leave the church there. He meets the church where she is, but he does not leave her there. He calls her forward.
8 · Resolves the tension established in previous units by expounding Christ's solution: he washes the church's sins with his own blood, demonstrated through cross-reference to Revelation 7:14 and Ephesians 5, showing how the bride becomes beautiful not by her own merit but by Christ's sacrificial work
And yet in Revelation 19, the court of heaven, as it were, rejoices, and the Lord himself still calls the church his bride. Right? This is, as we'll see in Revelation, Jesus is no reluctant bridegroom at a shotgun wedding. Something went wrong, all of a sudden the dad's like, "You better make this right, boy," and he's all of a sudden walking down the aisle. No, this is not that. Heaven, the host of heaven, rejoices and exalts over this union, as does the bridegroom. Look, the commitment of Christ is so clear toward his church. It's not a fair-weather commitment. It's not a partial commitment. This is an all-in sacrificial, "die for you" commitment to the church. We often read at weddings Ephesians chapter 5 and call the husbands, "Husbands, love your wives even as Christ also loved the church and gave himself for it." Do you wonder how Jesus really feels about the church? He gave Himself for it. There is nothing more He could have given. Body and all, He offered up for the church. He loves the church. So how then can this work, though? How can it be that Christ's bride is, when we see her, not stained and spotted with sin, but clothed with fine white linen? Linen and is beautiful in the sight of heaven? How does that come to me? How do you take what she is and Christ's love for her and make them, you know, come to bring them together for eternity? Well, it is what Christ has done when he gave himself for her. Christ, we've seen earlier in Revelation, washes the sins of his bride with his own blood. Revelation chapter 7, It says this when we see the believers in chapter 7, verse 14, the angel says, "These are the ones coming out of the great tribulation. They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb." Jesus sees the sins and faults and failures of his people. But he has offered himself. And the picture is offered his blood that he might wash their sins, might die for them in their place, that those sins would be washed away.
9 · Illustrates the thoroughness of the washing work of Christ through a personal story of being covered in impossible-to-clean mud, making vivid the reality that the church's stains require more than surface cleaning—they require Christ's sacrificial work
A few years ago, my first job at the church was that Tom Wilkins, the pastor at the time, was trying to bring me on, trying to figure out some way to do that. So he figured out, I can get Ricky a full-time job if at the church, just a third of it is like property maintenance though. And so I didn't know anything about property maintenance, so I remember there were some problems in the backyard at one point with some of our sprinklers, and whose job is that? I guess it's mine. And so I'm in the backyard trying to dig through, you know, dirt, and I don't know if you know this, but in our backyard we have the like mud and clay, a mud and clay mixture designed by Satan himself. Like it is, he spent a lot of time on it, perfected it, and just plopped it in the back. And it is like you stick your hand in it and it like sucks your hand in. Feels almost like quicksand, I'm not joking. We've had kids lose their shoes in the backyard and those shoes are never seen again. The parents are just like, you know what, we're done, we're just gonna leave it. It's not worth it. So I remember being out there one day and I just had to get my whole body, I'm trying to dig this sprinkler part out, replace it, and I remember walking back into the church, you know, trying to wipe my shoes off and I just thought, I need to just get my keys and go home. So I'm walking up and Tom Wilkins, our pastor at the time, looked at me And so I meet him and I am just covered in demon mud. And he looks at me and he goes, "Yeah, I'd probably go home too." Like, I went home and they took me— I'm not kidding. It's not like a little rinse-off. This was like scrubbing this stuff off of me. You know what I did with the shirt? I threw it away. It just— that's it, right? So it is with the bride of Christ. She may be stained. She may be soiled. She may have tried to rub the stains clean herself to no avail, and Christ comes, offers his life, and offers to wash her sins away.
10 · Expounds the double work of Christ—washing and clothing—by tracing the Isaiah 61 reference and addressing the apparent tension in Revelation 19:8 about whether the bride's fine linen is given or earned, resolving it through Beale's commentary to show that Christ both imputes righteousness and produces righteousness in his bride
And not only that, not only that, he washes her sins, then clothes her. Isaiah 61 says it like this: I will rejoice 'In the Lord my soul shall exult, in my God, for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation.' The picture is this: he has covered me with the robe of righteousness. As a bridegroom decks himself like a priest with a beautiful headdress, as a bride adorns herself with jewels, so it is with Christ and the church. He offers to not only wash her but then clothe her. In his own righteousness. So on the cross, he pays for our sins, and his righteousness comes to us, and we wear clothes that we did not and could not earn before him. Now, look, this is where the pictures overlap, because it says, well, wait, these are the righteous deeds of the saints. So are they clothes that the Lamb gives her, or are these her own clothes? All right, G.K. Beale sums it up better than I can, so I'll let him talk here. He says, the phrase righteous deeds of the saints is probably intentionally ambiguous, expressing two different ideas. These pictures can overlap in Revelation. First, righteous acts performed by the saints, and two, righteous acts for the saints, such as God's final just acquitting and vindicating judgments, meaning that the pictures overlap. These are robes of righteousness Christ gives the church. These were given to her. But then here's the beauty. Christ begins to work in her in such a way that that she actually begins to act rightly and justly with righteousness. So the clothes are given, but also the clothes are beautified in a sense by the righteous deeds of the saints, showing the dramatic salvific, heart-changing work of Christ himself. Who did— who made possible the righteous deeds of the saints in the first place? The work of Jesus Christ. From start to finish, from her washing to her clothing, it is all done by Christ.
11 · Brings the exposition to its climax by reading forward to Revelation 21, showing the completion of Christ's work in the bride—she is not only washed and clothed but perfected and dwelling with God forever
And in the end, in the end, in Revelation 21, when we behold the gathered people of God, this is what we read. Revelation 21, verse 9: Then came one of the 7 angels who had the 7 bowls full of the 7 last plagues, spoke to me, saying, 'Come, I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb. Earlier, just earlier, 21:3 says this: Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. Oh, church, in the end, Christ's work is perfected. He washes His bride, He clothes His bride, He perfects His bride till she is radiant.
12 · Pivots from the first major section (what the church is to Christ) to the second (what the church is to the Christian), maintaining structural clarity in the sermon's three-part argument
So, Section 2 then: What is the church to the Christian? If the church is Christ's bride, if that's what the church is to Christ Himself, what is the church to the Christian?
13 · Expounds the corporate nature of the church from Revelation 19:6-7, establishing that the proper response to Christ's bride is rejoicing and exaltation, not indifference
Well, I think we see what our response to the church should be in this text. It says this: Then I heard what seemed to be the voice of a great multitude, like the roar of many waters, like the sound of mighty peals of thunder, crying out, "Hallelujah! For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns!" And listen to this: "Let us rejoice and exalt and give him the glory!" Meaning this: the church today, us here now, we are called to no indifferent response. Response to the bride, like, "Yeah, I guess it's cool if you're into that." No! If that is true that Jesus has made the church his bride, our response is, "Yes!" We rejoice in the church. We exult in what God is doing in and through the church. There is no passivity. There's no, like, "Yeah, if you're into that." No! Here's what I want you to see: if you love Jesus, You gotta love what Jesus loves. There's no loving what Jesus— there's no loving Jesus and not loving what he loves. There is no option to, like, would you like to accept Christ's gift of salvation? Check yes. Also, would you like to hear more about his project, the church? She is an absolute mess, and we can find you a place to serve in screaming kids ministry. I'm gonna say no. I'm gonna take Jesus, not that part. No, they're bound together for all eternity. You will never get Christ apart from the church. Therefore, the church is called to rejoice and exalt and give glory to God for what he is doing. Look, here's the one critical point I want you to get in this image. This is a corporate image. Over and over in Revelation, the text is emphasizing the corporate nature of the church, right? The gathered multitude, the big group, The bride, right? The metaphors in Scripture, the body, the temple, all of them, they are corporate pictures meaning this: you cannot have an individual Christian theologically that is not connected to the corporate body, corporate bride of Jesus. You can't pick one and not the other. Look, remember back in the day, I think there's a new version of it, there was The Addams Family. Love The Addams Family. If you're into weird old black and white, somehow horror comedies were big at that time with The Munsters, The Addams Family. But one of the characters, somebody— I didn't even know the name of the character. There's a character in The Addams Family called Thing. You guys remember Thing? What's Thing? The hand, right? The hand just walks around, right? And the hand is kind of funny and charming, and they do quirky things with it, and you're like, oh, that's kind of cute, right? Nobody wants to see a disembodied hand walking down the aisle, right? We're not opening the big doors, ba-ba-da, you know, and then the bride comes in and it's a hand wearing a little, like, headdress. That's not happening. And yet, and yet, hear me, so many Christians think that's exactly what they're going to do. They're going to be an individual Christian existing apart from and outside of the corporate identity of the church. And here's the thing: in the New Testament, local Christians are always connected to local churches. You only need a local church if you're a local Christian. If you're just a universal Christian, meaning like you're not a real person, you're just an ethereal idea, yeah, you probably don't need a local church. But if you are a flesh-and-blood Christian, you need a flesh-and-blood church. I love the way our statement of faith says it. I think the guys served us well in crafting a new statement of faith. And many statements of faith don't have a section on the local church. And so this is what they crafted. And I love this sentence. It says this: As an expression of Christ's universal church, the local church is the focal point of God's plan to mature his people and save sinners. As an expression of Christ's universal church, the local church is the focal point of God's plan to mature his people and save sinners. Can you believe that? That seems unbelievable to me, that the mundane of what we have on Sunday morning with the donuts and coffee and the chairs that don't exactly match because we got them cheap at one point. We used to have purple chairs, and slowly we're getting better chairs, right? And John had to break a string on his guitar and worship, and just the mundane, like, this is what we do. We get together, and maybe a kids ministry worker called in sick, and we're going through the emergency exit. All of that, that mundanity is theologically the focal point of God's plan to mature his people and save sinners. That's insane to me. And yet that's what God is saying in his Word, that today we here are an expression of the bride of Jesus Christ.
14 · Expounds the practical necessity of the corporate church by surveying Revelation's eschatological warfare imagery, arguing that the book itself demonstrates the folly of isolated Christianity in the face of Satan's attacks
Oh, and here's one other point I want to make here. One of the things you see in Revelation, I don't know if you noticed this, but it is nuts in the end times, of which Jesus says we are in right now. It is nuts. There's beasts coming out attacking people. There's false prophets running around deceiving people. There's Babylon seducing people. The dragon is roaring through them all. And Scripture says that Satan walks around like a roaring lion seeking people to devour. I don't know about you, but I don't like your chances by yourself against that, right? In a horror movie, scary movie, somebody always says, "I'm going to go check that out by myself," you know? And you're like, "No, you stupid guy, stay with the group," right? That's Revelation, okay? Revelation is an argument for staying with the group, not only because theologically it's right, but practically it gives you a place to stand. That you're not alone even when you feel alone. Even when we face the slings and arrows of the world around us, even though the storms rage and the seas are choppy, we stand in Christ together. That's what we see in Revelation.
15 · Pivots from the second major section to the third, maintaining structural clarity by transitioning from the church's relationship to believers to the church's relationship to the world
Now, what is then the church to the world? So the church is dear to Christ, the church should be dear to the believer, we should rejoice and exalt, that should be our posture. What is the church to the world?
16 · Expounds the missionary purpose of the church by tracing the biblical-theological arc from Abraham through Isaiah to Acts, showing that God's plan to gather the nations into the bride has always been mediated through his people, establishing the church as the instrument of invitation to the marriage supper of the Lamb
I want to argue that the church is just as dear, if you could say that, say it that way, to the world as it should be to us, in a sense. Here's what I mean. How do you get from Jesus' ministry to the gathering of the bride who's made up of every people from every tribe, tongue, language, and people? How do you get from Jesus' ascension to this bride gathered at the end of history in Revelation? How do you get there? Through the ministry of the church, meaning this: that the church, as it exists, calls people, invites people. "Blessed is the one who is invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb." Through the church, the invitation to the marriage supper, the invitation to the people of God, is made known openly to all that will hear. This is God's design from the very beginning. Briefly, when God calls Abraham, the purpose of Abraham was for the nations. God says, "Through you all the nations will be blessed," Genesis 22. In Isaiah 49, God tells his people, "I will make you a light to the Gentiles, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth." In Acts 2, Peter stands up and preaches and says, "For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him." itself. How is this going to get done? How do we get from ascension to the gathered bride of Christ at the end of history? Through the ministry of the church.
17 · Asserts the staggering theological claim that the ordinary local church is God's chosen instrument for world mission, expressing wonder at God's design while affirming its reality
That's insane. Why would God do that? I don't know. That is what he has done and is doing and will do. The focal point of God's plan to save sinners is right here. An average, ordinary unspectacular gatherings without smoke and light and mirrors, lasers, etc. Ordinary believers following Jesus, making his appeal through them that they might be reconciled to God.
18 · Applies the invitation to the marriage supper directly to unbelievers present in the service, using a personal wedding story to illustrate the radical inclusiveness of the gospel call
Look, if you're here today and you're not a Christian, this invitation is for you. Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb. If you're waiting for an invitation, here it is, right here. Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved. It's not an exclusive event. We had our— Jenna and I, at our wedding, we had some wedding crashers. I thought that was just, like, a thing that happened in movies, but apparently, like, some high school friends told some other high school friends, and we had a group of semi-drunk, rowdy high school people from high school that she didn't really know come and crash our wedding. And we were kind of like, well, okay, I guess, whatever, maybe they'll meet somebody and hear about Jesus. Wedding crashers are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb, all who are far off.
19 · Directly addresses a specific population carrying the weight of abortion-related guilt, applying Christ's washing and clothing work to this particular stain with unusual pastoral specificity prompted by a sense of the Spirit's leading in the moment
Look, I— this is offered humbly. I don't know if this is the Lord, or this is just my sense today. I felt the Lord just stop me earlier as we were in worship and say, at this point, with the recent ruling on abortion, I want to make super clear, and I believe the Lord would want to make super clear to you, If you had an abortion and regret it and feel yourself stained, or maybe you participated, that you pressured a girlfriend into it, hear the word of the Lord today. He offers redemption. There is no stain that cannot be washed away. There is no one who does not also receive the gift of the robe of his righteousness. Listen, if that is you, hear the voice of the Lord today. This is for you. The invitation is for you. Washed, clean, justified, sanctified. Oh, won't you come to Christ today? There's nothing you can do or could have done that will keep you from him if you will believe and be saved.
20 · Momentarily steps back from exposition to remind the congregation that every believer has a personal redemption story that mirrors the corporate reality—the church is a gathering of individually redeemed sinners who share the same wonder at God's grace
Look, for all of us, as we talk about the corporate church, we also want to bring the individual church into it. Here's the reality: God has not just washed and clothed and is working in us, On a corporate level, each one of us has a story where God, like the prophet Hosea, went to us in adultery, in stain and sin, and he saw it and he didn't turn away, and he came and he stopped us, and he saved us, and he gathered us to himself. And as we gather in the bride of Christ, we look around and we're like, "You too? You too? I can't believe it. You too?" That's what the Church of Jesus Christ is.
21 · Delivers rapid-fire concrete applications organized around decision-making questions: defining normalcy by Revelation's standards, building life around non-negotiable priorities, and making major life decisions through the lens of ministry rather than personal advancement or comfort
All right, some brief application then. If all this is true, how does it shape how we live? I'm gonna go through these quickly. Maybe we'll put them on the blog or something so you could walk through them if you want to. First, how do you decide what is normal in life? There are two visions of life offered in Revelation: the vision of Babylon and the way that she operates, and the vision of Christ's bride in the way that she lives, right? To the world, it is bizarre that we as Christians try to reconcile instead of just cancel each other. To the world, it is bizarre that we give money that doesn't benefit us directly. It is bizarre that we spend time trying to disciple immature people who don't always listen to our advice. It is offensive to them that we seek to proselytize and tell other people about Jesus and invite them to the marriage supper of the Lamb. All that is bizarre, but the Bible says, no, that is normal. It's normal to give generously and sacrificially. Normal to care for high-maintenance people like me and you. Normal to disciple people who need help and haven't a clue what to do in their marriage and family. Normal to reconcile through many tears, through many meetings. Normal to witness to those who don't know Christ. That is normal. Second question, how do you decide what to build your life around? I've seen the illustration used where, you know, you have a guy on stage. I'm not going to recreate it, but there's a guy on stage with a big jar, and he has a pile of big rocks, a pile of pebbles, and a pile of sand. And he's like, how do we fit all this in here? Well, obviously you put the big rocks in first, then you put the pebbles in, and they kind of filter into the crevices of the rocks. And then you pour the sand in, and it kind of goes through, and then the jar is filled, right? All of us have lives. That's our life. We have a few big things that we put in first and we say, "This is a non-negotiable, not changing for anything. This is non-negotiable." And I believe in light of Revelation 19, the church should be one of those things. It must be one of those things. Look, I remember growing up, my dad in melon season, which is the big season for his business where he made most of the money for the year growing up, and he would get home dead tired after work and as soon after a super long day, and then he would, I think, hide in a side room and eat his dinner in like 5 minutes and then come out and lead a small group meeting. And as a kid, as like a 10-year-old, I was like, why are we doing this? This is bizarre. These people come, they stomp chips into my carpet, and then I have to clean them up tomorrow, and my mom and dad are like, yay, let's do it again next week. Like, what in the world? Because early on, my mom and dad decided they're gonna build their life around One of the things you're going to build a life around is the church. Now, I want to say this: as you build your family, sometimes in Christian circles I almost see it pitted against one another, like, well, we need to have family time, we need to do things for our family, and/or we need to have church time, we're always going to be at church. Those can be two extremes. Here's what I think. I think in light of the command for parents to disciple their kids and Christians to disciple one another and be discipled, your family and the church should be linked. Meaning this: your family's going to be healthier with other people around you. Your marriage is going to be healthier if you've got a friend that notices you speak to your wife harshly and takes you aside and says, "Hey, bud, what's going on?" Isn't that going to be better for your marriage? Isn't that going to be better for your kids when you're around other parents who are helping, trying to disciple their kids and learning from them? But also, as you build your family, man, that is the work of building the church in many ways. Right? This is discipling the next generation that they might arise and tell others. So how do you decide what to build your life around? Use Scripture. Third, how do you make your major life decisions? Oh, I could spend a lot longer on this, but I'm going to be brief. The purposes of God being bound up in the church make life— turn life decisions into ministry decisions. What career should you pursue? That's a ministry decision. What city should you live in? Where in the city should you live? Ministry decision. Singles, who should you marry? Oh, you got to be attracted to them, lots of things, etc., etc. That's also a ministry decision. Look, read 1 Corinthians 7 where Paul says, you're trying to decide whether you should get married or not, here's a simple rule. I'm summarizing 1 Corinthians 7, paraphrase, the Alcantara paraphrase, okay. The paraphrase is this: do you serve Jesus better together? Then get married. If you don't constantly distract one another, nope, don't do it. All right? Listen, and I just want to encourage those who are in the Army or federal workers that their job moves them around. Let me just encourage you, do not see places you go as places to endure or places to enjoy alone, but places to minister. How do you decide where you live when you get PCS somewhere? Ministry decision. And let me just, oh man, I could spend so long on this. Let me just say this. I have this conversation all the time, even like people outside the Army that are like, hey, we've decided where we're gonna move and it's good for housing values, the schools are good, I can make decent money, you know, and we'll end up having great quality of life. And then they're like, hey pastor, do you know any churches in this area within about 10 minutes? I'm like, well, no. Because here's what I would urge you to think. If you move somewhere and your housing value goes up $100,000, and your kids have a great education, and their SAT scores are banging, but your family withers without fellowship, it is not a net win. So think about where you go. Think about your life decisions.
22 · Applies the theology of the bride to the question of how to respond when the church fails, contrasting cancel culture's abandonment instinct with the call to dogged commitment, while acknowledging legitimate reasons to leave a church and seek healing elsewhere
Fourth, briefly, how do you respond to the faults and failures of the church? If we do not have the bride of Christ in view in Revelation 19, this is the way we respond to those who wrong us, who are wrong. We cancel them. I've seen over and over and over the last few days, "If you think this, unfriend me. If you do this, unfriend me. If you don't support this, unfriend me." And we can bring that same mindset into the church. "Oh, somebody was mean to me, somebody gossiped about me." Done, unfriend. I'm not saying you can never leave a church, and you shouldn't go and try to reconcile or even confront somebody who's in sin. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that you shouldn't see the faults and failures of the church here or broadly. I'm not saying that. But what I am saying is this: there should be behind all of those a dogged commitment to the church through it all. Look, if you have a bad surgery and a surgeon accidentally leaves a scalpel inside of you, the solution is not to never go in a hospital again. The solution is find a better hospital, get the scalpel out, okay? So if you've been hurt by the church, please let me urge you, brother and sister, go to a church that loves the Lord and let them help.
23 · Delivers a direct exhortation to church membership, providing both positive instruction on how to join and leave well and a resource list to make compliance immediately actionable, addressing specifically the attender who never commits
All right, fifth, how do you decide to join or leave a church? Well, first of all, I think you always join, period. Always, wherever you are. That means loving, serving, giving, helping, praying, caring, all the one anothers. You should be careful, theological, clear-eyed about the church you join. And if at some point you need to leave, make the process—do the process in reverse. Be careful, theological, slow, have conversations, bless the church as you go. And let me just plead with you. Look, if you're here today, this is not your church, you don't have a home church, you're not a member of a church, let me just plead with you biblically: stop attending churches. Join a church. Be a member. Look, if you're hearing that you're in that case and you're like, well, I don't know. I don't know if this is the right place for me. Let me just urge you, be part of this church or find another church you can be part of. And to make it easy for you, Becky helped me make a list that's available on the back table of other churches you can go to if you're not going to come here. And these are just churches where I happen to know the pastors. So there's other good churches in El Paso. Get the list. Find a church. Join one, please.
24 · Applies the eschatological vision of Revelation 19-22 to the question of vocational priorities, affirming the value of all work done unto the Lord while establishing that only investment in the people of God endures into eternity
Last, what will your lasting legacy be? Look, you can and should glorify God with vocational work, whether you're a teacher or a businessperson or a nurse or a restaurant server. That matters to God. We're going to preach on vocation at some point, and it will encourage you. Work hard at your job as unto the Lord. That glorifies God, right? Get out there, doctors, and cure diseases. Go farm well, go research well, open new branches of your business to the glory of God. But notice this, in Revelation 19 to 22, your small business will not endure forever. All the doctors will be out of a job because cancers will be cured, right? The work we do while glorifying God right now will not last fully into eternity in that sense. There will be one thing in eternity, the people of God and the bride of Jesus Christ. So let me encourage you, leave a legacy. In Revelation 22, Amazon ain't there anymore. Apple ain't there anymore. America ain't there anymore. The bride of Christ and Christ himself are what's there.
25 · Brings the sermon to its close by returning to the opening question—Is the church dear to you?—summarizing the sermon's arc and calling the congregation to stand for closing prayer
So let me just close with this question. Is the church dear to you? The church is dear to Christ. It is dear to you. Would you stand and let's pray.
26 · Closing prayer asking God to secure the sermon's effect in the congregation's hearts, lifting the main theological movements of the sermon (inclusion, family, sanctification, mission) into doxology as the congregation prepares to respond in worship
Lord, I do pray that as we end, we would see your Word clearly. Lord, I pray that this text would call for the right response from us. And in just a minute, God, we're going to try to put this into practice, and we're going to try to rejoice and exalt in the bride and in the bridegroom. Lord, may we, as we see Revelation 19, find ourselves in awe and wonder that we would even be included in the people of God in the first place. Oh Lord, what immeasurable grace! And not only included, but then given a family, and not just given a family, but worked in and sanctified and not just given— worked in and sanctified, given a mission to tell others about Christ and invite them into the family of God. Lord, these are all graces we do not deserve. So I pray we would feel it as we end. In Jesus' name, amen.