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We have made our way to Revelation
chapter 3 verse 7. The church in view here in this
letter is the church in Philadelphia. We have this letter and then
the final one will be in Laodicea. Today our focus again is the
letter that the Lord had sent to the church in Philadelphia. Another church that has one of
only two, Smyrna I believe the other, where there was no chastisement,
no condemnation, no correction from the Lord but an encouragement
and I believe much that is relevant for us and many churches certainly
in the world today. Verse 7, Revelation chapter 3,
and to the angel of the church in Philadelphia write, the words
of the Holy One, the true one, who has the key of David, who
opens and no one will shut, who shuts and no one opens. I know your works. Behold, I
have set before you an open door, which no one is able to shut.
I know that you have but little power, and yet you have kept
my word and have not denied my name. Behold, I will make those
of the synagogue of Satan who say that they are Jews and are
who lie, behold, I will make them come and bow down before
your feet, and they will learn that I have loved you. Because
you have kept my word about patient endurance, I will keep you from
the hour of trial that is coming on the whole world. To try those
who dwell on the earth, I am coming soon. Hold fast what you
have, so that no one may seize your crown. The one who conquers,
I will make him a pillar in the temple of my God. Never shall
he go out of it, and I will write on him the name of my God and
the name of the city of my God, the New Jerusalem, which comes
down from God, from my God, out of heaven, and my own new name. He who has an ear, let him hear
what the Spirit says to the churches. The church in Philadelphia was
by most understanding, I think, a small church. It's a little
church. Jesus says to them that he knows
that they have but little power. Not that they merely thought
that they did, but he understood that in them there was only a
little power. Today, maybe this is how it's
always been, men seek comfort in size, in many, in great numbers
of people. They look and they estimate their
strength based on their numbers. And I think that that translates
and that also is applicable to the way men think about a church. We tend to think that a large
congregation of people maps to a powerful church, one with lots
of capability and power. And contrary-wise, we can think
of a small church as one with little power, and perhaps that
is true in its own sense. But what I want to present to
you today, and if there was a title for our thought today, it would
be Open Doors for Little Churches. There's much that can be brought
out from this letter, but I think that's the thrust of the idea
that the Lord has placed on my heart for us today, open doors
for little churches. And as the world looks upon the
size of a church and estimates its relative strength, we know
that God doesn't measure the same way that man does. To me,
there is neither a certainty of strength in the size of a
church, and by the way, there's no certainty of weakness in the
size of a church either. We cannot look at a large church
and assume strength, and we cannot look at a small church and assume
weakness, or correlate opportunity, because we're going to find out,
again, that it is the Lord who opens doors. He opens doors to
all kinds of people, all kinds and all shapes, all sizes, all
circumstances that churches find themselves in. We know that the
Lord often uses the weak things of the world to confound the
mighty. That's what He told us when Paul wrote to the Corinthians.
I came across this about J. Hudson Taylor, the famous missionary
to China. Someone complimented him on the
work in the China Inland Mission, and great things had been done.
Incredible work of the Lord seemed to have taken shape and taken
place at the leadership and the work of Hudson Taylor in that
land, and someone one day complimented him. And he said, Taylor did,
it seemed to me that God had looked over the whole world to
find a man who was weak enough to do his work. And when he at
last found me, he said, he is weak enough, he'll do. He goes on to say, all giants,
all of God's giants in our eyes have been weak men who did great
things for God because they reckoned that he was going to be with
them. But when he set out, no doubt
he had no idea of the extent to which his work would last,
not only or to reach in his day and to last even to our time,
but he himself knew that it was the Lord who looked and saw a
weak man, not a strong one. The Lord is writing to this church
in Philadelphia and he's going to tell them a great opportunity
is before them. We'll talk more about this in
a moment, but he's basically is telling them, I have opened
a door for you. I have. Who has opened this door? There's more self-description
in this letter to Philadelphia than in the others, as Jesus
writes to this church in Philadelphia, this small church apparently.
Certainly one that seemed to be small and insignificant even
in their own eyes and certainly the eyes of the world, but Jesus
provides a great deal of self-description We don't know fully why he did
that, but we want to look at what he said about himself. He
said to them, to the angel of the church in Philadelphia, write
the words first of the Holy One. God repeatedly declares in scripture
his holiness. He says it again and again. You
can't read the book of Leviticus and every other chapter or so,
read God saying to Israel and to us, I am holy. In Isaiah 43, verse three, for
I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. Leviticus 11 44, for I am the
Lord your God, consecrate yourselves therefore and be holy for I am
holy. The scriptures are clear on this
point and it is essential for us to know God rightly, to think
of Him correctly, we must understand His holiness. And often we confuse righteousness
and trustworthiness and goodness with holiness, but what is holiness
itself? Charles Spurgeon said that in
holiness, God is more clearly seen than in anything else, save
the person of Jesus Christ, of which his life was holiness in
repetition. God has many qualities and attributes,
but holiness is not just a quality of God, it is an essence of God. He is holy. But holy, what does
that mean? It means not just righteous.
It doesn't mean just true. He's not being repetitive, the
Lord is, when He says, thus says the Holy One, the True One. It's not just repetitive. It
is saying two different things. For something to be said as being
holy, it means that it is unique. It is separate. It is unlike
other things. God in His essence is unlike
anything else in the world. You and I are alike in many ways. There are certainly differences.
All of creation is alike in the sense that it has been created
by God, and thus we all share everything in creation. You and
me, the mountains, the streams, the sun, the moon, the stars,
the galaxy, all of us share something in common and makes us not holy
from one another, not distinct from one another, in the sense
that we owe our existence to this holy one, God. The unique one, God. And again, God has many attributes,
but holiness is at the center of them all. One might even rightly
answer the question, who is God? With, he is holy. There is nothing
and no one like him. And even our holiness as children
of God is to be a representation and a reflection of the holiness
of God, not ours, but His. You see, what makes you and me
holy or gives us the opportunity to be holy is when we reflect
the holiness of God. And all of our other attributes,
righteousness, if we can attain any of it, truthfulness, honesty,
integrity, all of these things, they're a reflection, ultimately,
of the possessor of all of these things, which is God. And it's
important for us to understand this nature of God as being holy. There's a danger for us if we
don't understand the holiness of God. If we don't see His holiness
and one of those dangers is we get the idea that God is loving
and kind, which is true, but is somehow at the same time indifferent
to His laws being broken or to His creation being obedient. God is holy and He has created
the world and you and me and He. calls us to his worship and
praise, and it is right that he does so. and i think this is what i've
been important to this church in philadelphia to be reminded
of this holiness of god as they struggled against a culture that
in their day like ours demanded conformity to pluralism to the
idea that everyone's way is their own and their own path to god
is their own and it's all equal whether you call god god or buddha
or whatever in this culture as it mounts its It demands for
God's people to conform to these ideas. It's not new to us. Philadelphia was experiencing
the same things in their Greek pagan culture as they were faced
with this mounting pressure to conform to the world around them. God reminds them and he says,
I've opened a door for you. Who has? The Holy One. the Lord Jesus Christ, the unique
one. And as the church in Philadelphia
struggled against that culture of conformity to paganism and
pluralism, and at the same time struggled against Jews who demanded
obedience to their customs and traditions rather than to God,
to be reminded of the holiness of God would have certainly been
an encouragement as they thought about this God that they served.
They didn't serve the Pharisee, they didn't serve the pagan,
they served the true and living God. This idea of holiness being
the idea of separateness. To name something holy is to
declare that there is a separateness to it, that it is different.
And by claiming to be the Holy One, Jesus declares that he is
God. Many who do not believe that
Jesus was the Son of God will try to say that even He in Scripture
never claimed to be the Son of God, and they clearly have not
read the Scriptures fully. Jesus here makes no doubt about
who He is. The Holy One, the True One, and
we're going to get to this door that He's going to open, but
we want to, again, just take a moment and remember who it
is that's opening this door. The Holy One, God, the One who
is true, who speaks the truth, who knows the truth. If there
is something that is of great need today, and what seems to
be disappearing from the landscape of the larger society in which
we live, it is this understanding that there is truth. There is
truth, and there is a true One. His name is Jesus. He's the true
one. He is the truth and the life. He is the one that separates
right from wrong, false from truth. The one with the key of
David, and having the key of David means that Christ is the
possessor, the owner, the rightful heir of David's throne with the
accompanying right to rule God's people. Jesus is the one with
that key. He's the one with that key. It's important to always remember
this. It is Christ who has the key and not man. It's Jesus who
opens the door to heaven, not men. No one has the key but Him. To have the door to God's kingdom
unlocked for you, then you're going to have to go to the one
who has the key. And the only one who has the
key is Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who is now at the right
hand of the Father, but works and speaks to us through His
Holy Spirit that He has sent into the world to comfort, and
to guide, and to draw, and to convict, and to save, and to
discern, and to give us what we need today. He's the one with
the key. There's no man who has this key.
There's no preacher who has this key. There's no priest who has
this key. There's no wise man or woman
who has this key. It is Christ and Christ alone
who has this key of David. It opens up to the kingdom of
God. This is the one who is opening
the door. And not only is he opening, but
he is one who opens, and when he opens, no one can shut. When the Lord opens a door. No
one and nothing can close that door. No power of hell, no power
in earth can shut the door that God has opened. And if you don't
believe that, then just look around and understand that God's
church is still here in the world today, though all of Satan's
power and all of earth's power for thousands of years now have
been focused on its extinguishment, we are still here because God
opened the door, and the doors He opens, no one can shut. No one can close that door. When
God opens a door for you, and He's gonna open a door for the
church in Philadelphia, He already had, but when He opens the door,
this Holy One, this Righteous One, this Unique One, this God
of God's ruler of heaven and earth, He has opened a door,
and when He opens it, You and I, no one else can ever shut
it. We can refuse to go through,
but we can't shut it. Not only that, he is the one
not only that opens doors that can't be shut, he shuts doors
that then cannot be opened. He closes opportunity when he
chooses to close it. Book of Revelation calls out
the Lord, and often it will say, our sovereign Lord. He chooses,
and He makes these decisions in His own divine counsel, unmoved,
unprovoked merely by anyone other than His own will, listening
to the prayers of His saints, of course, and being moved upon
their compassion, and yet He closes doors And when He closes
them, they remain shut. And this, by the way, is one
caution for us all. When the Lord opens a door, go
through it. When He opens a door, go through
it. It may not remain open. And when He shuts it, it's going
to be closed. I have regrets in my life of
doors I didn't walk through that I no longer can because He shut
the door. That doesn't mean that I am morose
or that I retreat. I pray and we wait and we listen
and we watch for God to open other doors. And when he opens
them, may we learn from past mistakes and walk through the
door. He's opened it, no one can shut it. But when he shuts
it, no one's gonna be able to open it. Job said it this way,
all the way back, Job, the oldest book likely of scripture, contemporary
of Abraham, Job said it this way, if he tears down, none can
rebuild. Speaking of God, if he, God,
shuts a man in, none can open. Job knew it all the way in the
early days. And Jesus reminds them at the
end and the closing of the New Testament, I am that one. I'm
the one who opens the door and nobody closes it. I'm the one
who closes the door and pound on it as you will and strike
against it as you will, it will not open to you again. far from teaching and preaching
the lack of responsibility of mankind to respond to God in
free choice. This defines that. God says,
I open and I close, but you decide whether to go through it or not.
And he says to them just that very thing in the first part
of verse eight. I have given you an opportunity.
I know your works. Behold, I have set before you
an open door, which no one is able to shut. Having declared,
His possession of the key of David. The Lord proclaims that
He has set before the church in Philadelphia an open door,
and recall, if God has opened it, no one is going to be able
to shut it. This is the opportunity that
He has given, and He has given it to a church in the second
half of verse eight that says this, I know that you have but
little power. He recognized that for them,
and he knew that they did as well. Philadelphia, again, seems
to have been a small church. Whether that's to be taken in
the sense that they truly were literally a number of a small
church, which I tend now, at this point in my study, to agree
with, that it seems that it's probably a smaller community
of people. Whether that's true or not, what
is true, and what we can know, is that they had little power.
The open door the Lord placed before them represented though
an opportunity of great service. Didn't it? Wouldn't it by default? When you consider that the King
of kings and the Lord of lords, the master of heaven and earth,
the omniscient one, the omnipresent one, the omnipotent one has opened
it. That's a door he's opened. then
that is a door of great opportunity for anyone, even a church with
little power. And they knew that. The church
in Philadelphia understood it. The other churches that received
letters were likely, seemingly, probably larger in some cases,
and much larger than the church in Philadelphia. To the average
onlooker, the church in Philadelphia probably seemed of little consequence
and worthy of very little notice at all. Well, that church in
Philadelphia, the Lord wrote them a letter, too. This is a
little community, that little church up there in Philadelphia,
he wrote them a letter? Because, by the way, these seven
churches, we know there were others. There was no letter from
the Lord in Revelation to the church in Galatia or Thessalonica. We know that they were there.
Why these seven? He wrote a letter to the church
in Philadelphia too? That little church? Hardly worth
anyone's notice? Sound familiar? This little power of theirs might
even, I wondered about this, I wondered if it would even present
to that little church a stumbling block to their belief that the Lord
was opening a door to them. Maybe they fought something like
this. There are other churches with more resources, more people,
more, quote, power that can make a true difference in the Lord's
work. But you see again, God does not
measure as men do and often prefers to work in the exact opposite
manner as men do. 1 Corinthians 1.27, as we've
already quoted today, God chose what is foolish in the world
to shame the wise. God chose what is weak in the
world to shame the strong. 2 Corinthians 12.10, for the
sake of Christ, Paul says, then I am content with weaknesses,
insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. Why is he content
with those things? For when I am weak, then I am
strong. I believe God opens doors to
service that represent work far beyond sometimes our own perceived
power and ability. It's been my experience and I
want to share this with you. It is at, and I'm just going
to read it the way it came to me, it is at the moment God opens
a door like this that an individual and a church must determine if
they are going to trust God and go through it, or if they are
going to take an earthly-minded measure of the situation and
remain still. The moment that that door is
opened and that God lets us know, I've opened a door here. I have,
the Holy One, the True One. I've opened the door to you.
Yes, I recognize your little power, which makes you just the
type that I need for this work. Have you ever thought about how
many times in Scripture it works that way? Remember Gideon? Gideon,
your army's too big. What was it, 10,000 it started
out with and whittled down to 300? Everybody remember David? The runt of the litter? one that
no doubt this isn't God's chosen surely it's it's his older brother
one of them no it's David and then by the way I thought of
Job as the other side of that coin a man who was of great influence
and power and position God humbled him to use him And by the way,
Job was the same inwardly in both. But in the eyes of the
world, he was a man who was powerful and successful, had a large family,
had much wealth and riches in the world, and he yet was faithful
to the Lord then. And then God turned that around,
and Job was faithful even in the midst of that. But the man's
earthly measures are usually 180 degrees out of phase with
God's heavenly measures. We can't examine things the way
that makes sense merely to us. And when God opens a door, as
he does for Philadelphia, this small church, this church with
little power, he says, look here, I've opened a door. Go through
it. Go, and when he does that, go,
even without all the answers in advance. If you're like me,
an over-thinker, an over-planner, what's gonna happen if situation
A, B, C, D, all the way to Z happens? I wanna know all of the what-if
scenarios, and I wanna know what I'm supposed to do when those
what-if scenarios come about, and Jesus is standing there the
whole time simply pointing at the open door. It's at that moment
that we're going to have to choose to trust the Holy One or remain
still. Going through the door without
all the answers, without any earthly confidence or certainty
of success, risking failure in our eyes and in the eyes of others.
But the Lord has opened the door. The fact remains. The Holy One,
the True One, the One who opens doors that no one can close and
who closes and no one can open. He has just told them in no uncertain
terms, I've opened the door. It's now yours to go through
it or not. But I've opened it. And I want to give you a little
bit of spiritual insight here in the few years that I have
had the privilege of walking with the Lord. You're going to
have to go through the door again tomorrow when you wake up, and
the next day, and the next day. There are going to be moments
and times in your life, pivotal places and pivotal times, maybe
which you won't even recognize at the time, that were pivotal
for you to walk through the door that God opened. and follow that as God would
lead you and guide you. When He opens a door, no one
can close it, but know that when He closes it, it's never going
to open again. The Lord recognizes their faithfulness,
and that's why I think in part, He says, I recognize your faithfulness. Now I've opened another door.
I've opened a door here for you to exercise that faithfulness.
Though small and of little power, The church in Philadelphia remained
faithful. Whatever degree of power and
strength we might believe we have as a church, our primary
goal is ever and always to simply remain faithful. Faithful to
the Lord. What does the Marines say? Semper
Fidelis. Always faithful. Always faithful. Though they were small, they
remained faithful. And the Lord tells them how this
is all going to pan out, and I don't know how much time I
want to take in going through verses 9 and 10, but the Lord
tells us, tells the church in Philadelphia, His plans for men. In verse 9, He tells them His
plans for the unbeliever. Behold, I will make those of
the synagogue of Satan who say that they are Jews and are not,
but lie. Behold, listen to what he says to this little church.
Behold, I will make them come and bow down before your feet
and they will learn that I have loved you. The Lord says, ultimately,
all are going to recognize that you were my servant and I have
served and I have loved, I should say, you. Isaiah 45, 14 puts a little light,
I think, on this passage because if you're like me, you thought,
wait a minute, these people are going to come and worship me?
You're going to worship these Philadelphian saints? The Lord
is the only one worthy of worship, and that is true. So how does
all this come together? How do we reconcile that reality? Isaiah 45, verse 14, thus says
the Lord. The wealth of Egypt and the merchandise
of Cush and all the Sabians, men of stature, shall come over
to you, speaking to Israel, shall come over to you and be yours.
The wealth of Egypt, all of it, the merchandise of Cush, the
Sabians, men of stature, they're all, Israel, gonna come over
to you and be yours. They shall follow you. They shall come over
in chains and bow down to you. They will plead with you, saying,
and here's the insight, Surely God is in you, and there is no
other, no God besides Him. That's what people are going
to recognize in the end, about those who follow Christ and go
through the doors that He opens. As they come to them, and they
recognize them, as they come to us, and we, no doubt at that
time, are where? Our souls at the feet of Christ. Our worshiping of Him and any
pointing to us points directly back to Him, and I believe surely
this means that the unbelieving world will be at the feet of
believers as they worship Christ, the only one worthy of worship. Certainly not worship due to
them, but due to our Lord. That's the plan for the unbeliever.
They're going to acknowledge it. They're going to state it. Every knee is going to bow. Every
tongue is going to confess, as we read in Scripture, that Jesus
Christ is Lord. He tells them what his plan is
for the believer because you've kept my word in verse 10 about
patient endurance. I will keep you from the hour
of trial that is coming on the whole world. And boy, you want
to go down a theological rabbit trail, you start reading the
commentaries on that verse and the post-millennialism and pre-tribulational
premillennialism and mid-tribulation. I mean, you can get into all
of the terms and you can get buried in some of those arguments. And I'm not saying that they're
not without some worth, But I'm telling you this, what this simply
says to me is that the unbeliever is headed toward you are not. As a believer, church, you're
headed to a home in heaven with the Lord Jesus Christ to ever
be at peace and safety because of who He is and what He has
done. The unbelieving world is headed for a trial, an eternal
one, a non-ending trial. And I know this trial particularly
talked about an hour and so it is a specific period of time
and it is a specific trial. Ultimately when it all washes
out, the church in Philadelphia has no fear of the trial that
is coming on an unbelieving world because they are not going to
be subject to it. Deliverance from the trial that
is coming to the unbelievers promised to the church. gives
them this encouragement as we come toward our close today.
I'm coming soon, says it again. The Lord said that multiple times
in his earthly ministry while he was here that we read about
in the Gospels and he says it multiple times here in the book
of Revelation. I am coming soon. And again we want to remind you
that that word soon in the Greek, it doesn't just mean soon as
in a very short amount of time, it means suddenly. I mean, just
suddenly, whether that suddenness is what we would determine as
soon or long is almost set aside with that idea that it's going
to be sudden. And so he says, I'm coming soon.
Hold fast what you have. Hold fast what you have so that
no one may seize your crown. Church in Philadelphia understood
we have but little power. Fine. Hold on to it, Jesus says. If you're like me, most of the
time, as you approach the Lord, you sense a weakness in yourself,
an unworthiness in yourself, but then you're reminded again,
it isn't me that I am coming to the Father with. It is the
righteousness of my Savior, Jesus Christ the Lord. That's why I
can approach the throne of God boldly, not because I can approach
Him in the name of Kent Welch. That would be the worst thing
I could possibly ever think to do. I don't approach Him with
that name. I approach Him with the name
of His dear Son, Jesus Christ. It's when we close our prayers
in His name, in the Lord's name, not in mine or someone else's
that I may think a lot of or little of. It's in the Lord's
name that we come before the Lord. And He says to them, you
have little power? Great. Hold on to it. Grab a hold of it and don't lose
hold. So no one else can seize your
crown. Don't lose your crown. The crown the Lord has for you
and only you. The one he has for you and only you. It is the enemy
who wants us to think that our place is insignificant. that
our work isn't worth mentioning. In contrast, the Lord says, hold
on to it and don't let anyone seize what I have prepared for
you. For you. He gives many great
promises to the faithful in verse 12 that we won't take the time
today to unwrap, but I encourage you to go and read it again and
consider the promises that the Lord has left His church, the
name that He's going to write on our hearts and upon us, the
new names and the new life that we will enjoy in this day that
is coming suddenly. It says in verse 13, once again,
if you've got an ear to hear, then hear. If there is the smallest opening
in your heart to the voice of the Spirit of God in your heart,
listen. If there's just a crack, it's
not as open as it needs to be yet, but there's something there,
then hear. Listen to what the Spirit of
God says to the churches. Acknowledge it, understand it,
internalize it, invest your thoughts in it. Think critically about
them and apply them to your own life. And then to see this little
church with open doors, As the Lord would open them one after
the other, and we leave those doors to Him that He opens, and
we leave those doors to Him that He closes. But for us, it's ever
and always forward. Isn't that what Paul said? Forgetting
the things that are behind. It's Satan that wants you to
live there. It's the enemy that wants you trapped in history. God is bringing us to a new thing. He says, behold, I do a new thing. I give them new life. A new life
that will never end because I have spoken life into their souls.
So as we follow the Lord and faithfully try to follow Him,
we forget what's behind. We are thankful for the lessons
there. We are appreciative of the time
that the Lord has given us in the past. We are pained about
the times that we failed and floundered, and yet it's not
there that we live. We learn from the past. We anticipate
and we look forward to the future, but we live today. It's the only
day we have. It's the only day we will ever
have today. Learn from that in the past,
anticipate that in the future, and if you're not prepared, today,
as you live today, follow the Lord and become prepared. Acknowledge
Him as your King, repent of your sin, trust the Lord Jesus Christ,
turn everything over to Him, acknowledge that you don't have
the strength, that your righteousness is as filthy rags to Him, and
come to Him and repentance and faith until he saves you and
gives you a new heart and a promise of a new home in heaven. And
that promise when Jesus said, I've gone to prepare a place
for them is now yours. And there's a place there for
you. But do that today. Don't do it tomorrow. Who says
you have tomorrow? You didn't do it yesterday. Fine. Yesterday's gone. It's no longer
relevant. In an accounting term, you might
call it a sunk cost. It's gone. let it go, move forward,
faithfully walking through the doors that the Lord opens for
you, that you know nobody's gonna close that thing. Nobody's gonna
close that door, the Lord opened it. And yes, in my own life,
there have been moments in this preparation, in this study, in
these thoughts, these opportunities of life that God has given me
to be the pastor of this church, to do work in other places. These
are doors I didn't even know existed, but he opened. When he opened them, nobody's
going to shut them except him. And no one will shut them, and
no one will open them when he has shut them. So while the door
is open, ours is to follow and to move, whether we believe ourselves
large, small, or somewhere in between, is irrelevant. What's relevant is the Lord,
the Holy One, the True One, the possessor of the keys to the
throne of David, the One who opens the doors that no one can
shut, and the One who shuts the doors that no one can open. What
matters is He's opened the door, and we're going to follow. He
who has an ear, let him hear this from the Spirit of God today.
Open Doors for Small Churches
Series Revelation
| Sermon ID | 1217232252595894 |
| Duration | 42:39 |
| Date | |
| Category | Sunday Service |
| Bible Text | Revelation 3:7-13 |
| Language | English |
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