If you would, as you're getting settled, take your copies of God's Word, and let's turn together to Revelation chapter 2. Revelation 2 this morning, we're going to continue our study in the seven letters of Christ to the seven churches in Revelation, and we're going to be looking specifically at the third of the letters here, the letter to the church in Pergamum. Revelation 2, beginning in verse 12 this morning, and reading through verse 17, Revelation 2, 12 through 17. Let's hear God's word together. And to the angel of the church in Pergamum write, the words of him who has the sharp two-edged sword, I know where you dwell, where Satan's throne is, yet you hold fast my name, and you did not deny my faith, even in the days of Antipas, my faithful witness, who was killed among you, where Satan dwells. But I have a few things against you. You have some there who hold the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to put a stumbling block before the sons of Israel, so that they might eat food sacrificed to idols and practice sexual immorality. So also you have some who hold the teachings of the Nicolaitans, therefore repent. If not, I will come to you soon and war against them with the sword of my mouth. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To the one who conquers, I will give some of the hidden manna and I will give him a white stone with a new name written on the stone that no one knows except the one who receives it. Let's pray. Our Father, we come to you this morning and we recognize that we do not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. Lord, the grass withers and the flowers fade, but the word of our God stands forever. So Lord, if we're to be anything this morning, we pray that we would be a Bible people. and that we would even now resolve in our hearts by the help of your spirit to submit ourselves to your word wherever it leads, because it is indeed the word of Christ and faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of Christ. Lord, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing to you. Oh Lord, our rock and our redeemer. We ask these things in Jesus name, amen. Many of you have picked up on the fact that I'm a nerd about a lot of different things and I'm especially a nerd when it comes to Bible, theology, church history stuff. I have a hard time restraining my desire to teach everybody church history all the time in particular. And I realize that for many of you, church history can feel rather abstract and obscure because it's hard sometimes to say how what happened years and years ago has immediate relevance to what we're doing right now in 2024 in Mantee, Mississippi. Yet at the same time, all of us appreciate church history to some degree or another. Because as we stand in the line of faithful witnesses to Jesus throughout the years, we realize that we are part of church history. We're part of Mantee Baptist church history. Just this week, I came into my office Wednesday morning and Miss Rhonda had left for me a photocopied version of our church record book from 1920 to 1946. And being the church history nerd that I am, I spent a lot of time reading names and reading business meeting records, they were called protracted conferences back in those days, about the things that had happened in the life of our church in many cases over a hundred years ago. And I had a great time. Now, some of you might be like, that's really weird. And there were times where I was like, I don't know what I'm gonna do with this information, but I really wanna know what's happening here. But as I looked through there, one of the things that struck me looking through those lists of names was how many people are here today because people were here back then. Look, you see some of the names that are represented there. Some of the same last names of people who are part of Manti Baptist Church today were part of families that were here all the way back in 1906. So we recognize that if we're here this morning, whether it's because of this church or another one in our area or another one far beyond it, we stand on the shoulders of spiritual fathers and mothers who've led the way to help us to be the people we are today. And that's great. It is great to be a part not just of a church family horizontally, where we relate to each other in a particular room, in a particular space, in a particular time, but we can also acknowledge that we're part of a family that stretches back way into history, all the way to the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus and the sending of the Spirit at Pentecost. That is great for us, and we ought to take that seriously. Some of you in this room, I know it's a burden of yours, especially if you've been around for a while, to make sure that our church is aware of its history. And there are others of you who are concerned that we not just think about the past, but that we engage in the present and the future. And one of the great questions that can come up in any church is how do we hold all this stuff together? How do we hold together a desire to recognize the past and the present and the future and all of their respective importance to the life of our church today as we seek to serve Jesus faithfully. So we come to Revelation 2 verses 12 through 17, we see Jesus dealing with a church's past and present and future. And as he does, I think he leads us into how we can begin to think as faithful Christians or striving to be faithful Christians in our time, how we can engage with the church of Jesus Christ and the work of Jesus Christ in all times and in all places. So I want you to observe. There are three things with me in this text about how we can relate to the church throughout history, in every generation, and through all generations. Number one, notice with me as we come to this passage that if we want to think about how we engage the church throughout her history, we need to honor the faithfulness of the past. We need to honor the faithfulness of the past. Jesus begins, as he often does in these letters, by praising past faithfulness in the lives of the Christians in this city at Pergamum. We read in verse 12, and to the angel of the church in Pergamum write, the words of him who has the sharp two-edged sword, I know where you dwell, where Satan's throne is, yet In spite of all of that, Jesus says, you hold fast my name and you did not deny my faith, even in the days of Antipas, my faithful witness who was killed among you where Satan dwells. Jesus praises the Christians in Pergamum because even in the midst of really difficult situations, they remained faithful to him and to his name and to his faith, which he had entrusted to them. Now, to understand the significance of what Jesus says, we have to understand a little bit about the significance of Pergamum. He says some pretty interesting things here. I notice he says, I know where you dwell, where Satan's throne is. What does that mean? Then he goes on later and he talks about the death of Antipas, his faithful witness who was killed among them, where Satan dwells. And the question that comes is, what is happening in Pergamum that makes this city so significant and these events so significant that Jesus wants to mention them here? Well, Pergamum was a really significant city in the entire province of Asia. In fact, at one time, prior to the reign of Caesar Augustus, it was kind of the regional capital. It was the center for all of life. Even though it was several miles from the coast, it was really, really important. Eventually, when Caesar Augustus took leadership of the Roman Empire, he moved the center of activities in this area to Ephesus, the city that we looked at first in this study. But even then, we see this even in our own time, cities may lose their identity as a geopolitical capital, but still retain a lot of cultural or religious significance. This is what happened with Pergamum. Pergamum had been a center of pagan idolatry and worship for the entire area and it remained that. It was where everybody went if they wanted to engage full stop in the idolatry of the people. It's represented in several different ways in the life of the city. There was a famous large altar to Zeus at the city's citadel overlooking the city. And this took great preeminence in the life of the city as they saw this altar and its presence representing the great God of the Greek and Roman pantheons. He was also home to the worship and a major medical training center of the Greek God for medicine. And what's interesting is the Greek God of healing and medicine, his symbol was a serpent. It was also the key city for emperor worship. We've talked about that before, but Roman citizens were expected to worship the emperor as God. And among all these cities, Pergamum was kind of the leading center of emperor worship. They did it very early and they kept it going for a long time. And it was very important to the people that were there that people continue to worship the emperor as God and that they continue to take this preeminent place in the empire as a center for pagan idolatry. Now you can imagine with all of these different expressions of idolatry happening in this particular city that when a particular people come along and they begin to distinguish themselves from the Jews among whom they've emerged and they start saying not that Caesar is king of kings and lord of lords but that Jesus is king of kings and lord of lords that people had a problem. Because people were proud of their devotion to the emperor and they were proud of their devotion to Zeus. They were proud of their idolatry and now they have a direct challenge to the very heart of who they think they are with this group of people saying you need to set aside your worship of the Roman emperor and you need to recognize that the kingdom of this world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ and he will reign forever. So what do you think happened? Local authorities recognized the challenge to their status and their significance, and so they began to persecute the Christians in the city. And one of the things that emerges, we saw this last week, you see it all throughout the scriptures, is that one of the great ways that people can identify themselves, not with God, but with Satan, is by persecuting the people of God. These Christians were persecuted. because of the local commitment to idolatry, and all of a sudden, Pergamum takes its place in the lives of the Christians there, and in the mind of Jesus himself, is the place where Satan himself dwells, because Satan's influence is so pervasive and powerful. Jesus tells us that among the Christians there, one even died. He says, yet you hold fast my name, and you did not deny my faith, even in the days of Antipas, my faithful witness who was killed among you. I wonder what would happen in our church context if we begin to see heightened pressure and persecution if someone were to die from our congregation for the sake of following Jesus. Have you ever thought about that before? Like not you, but somebody else in the congregation. Somebody dies because they've decided to follow Jesus and they've been faithful. Have you ever wondered what you would do in that moment? Like the husband and dad in me realizes the great threat to my personal safety and the safety of my family. And there's a part of me that wants to say, well, I can be a Christian in private over here. Nobody has to know about my commitment to Jesus. And even in that thought, we're beginning to get into the heart of the problem in many of these churches. What would you do? Jesus praises the Christians at Pergamum because even in all of this happening, they remain faithful to him. And Jesus is honoring the great past of faithfulness that's represented here. Now by God's grace we have not seen large scale persecution in our context. We have well over 100 years of faithful Christians serving as part of Mantee Baptist Church, and we've seen wonderful fruitfulness from the life of our church. And yet at the same time, if you go back to the history of the 20th century, you realize that even within our context, there were real challenges that we saw people in our church face over those years. I mean, you go back and you see all the turmoil of the 20th century with world wars and different conflicts. You see all the massive social upheaval of the sexual revolution that happened in the 1960s and into the 70s. You see the sweeping changes to the political spectrum that we've seen in just a few years, even in my adult lifetime. And yet at the same time, we can rejoice today because in the midst of all of those changing societal norms, and in the midst of all of those pressures, this church has remained faithful. And Jesus can say of us, I trust in many respects as a body, and we can rejoice in this, that we have held fast to his name. And we ought to take pride and joy in that. In fact, we ought to go so far as to honor it. Church history is not a matter of personal interest. It's a matter of biblical faithfulness. Because what we need to understand is that our perspective on the Christian life is different than the perspective of the world. You understand the world views history as the story of dead guys. But our God is not the God of the dead but of the living. And the people that have gone before us and been faithful to Jesus, they're not dead. Their bodies may be in the ground, but they're not dead. Where are they? They are in the presence of Jesus, and they're worshiping him in that sacred throng, saying, worthy is the lamb who was slain to receive glory and honor and wisdom and power, and all of those wonderful things we read about. And they serve for us, as the author of Hebrews describes, as a great cloud of witnesses whose faith we look at and recognize the supreme worth of Jesus, and who now watch us and see the way that we run the race that Christ has set before us. We need to have a perspective that says that the history of our church and every church of Jesus Christ matters because it's part of what it means to celebrate all that Jesus has done. We need to honor the faithfulness of the past, but we also need to understand that as we honor the faithfulness of the past, the world is different today than it was even a few years ago. Sometimes we can get so caught up in remembering the past and honoring things that have happened that we can get lazy about dealing with the challenges that are happening in the present. We can sort of seclude ourselves from the world in which we live and the community in which we live and say, well, we're going to kind of continue to lean back into the things that have happened and we're going to ignore what's happening right now. But that's not an option either. We want to honor the faithfulness of the past, but if we're going to be faithful to all that Jesus calls us to be, then we also need to confront the challenges of the present. In light of the faithfulness of the past, encouraged by the faithfulness of the past, we need to see what's happening among us right now and ask ourselves, what does faithfulness to Jesus look like today? And I want you to notice where Jesus goes next. He praises the church at Pergamum for their faithfulness, but then he continues, verse 14, but I have a few things against you. The word few things, Jesus is here being kind. He's gonna state what he has against them, but he's sort of restraining it with that expression, a few things. But what he has to say is very real and very worthy of our own attention. He says, you have some there who hold the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to put a stumbling block before the sons of Israel so that they might eat food sacrificed to idols and practice sexual immorality. So also you have some who hold the teaching of the Nicolaitans. Now this mention of Balak and Balaam may lead to some bells ringing on your head, but maybe you're like, I know those are Bible people, but who in the world are Balaam and Balak? Well, if you go back to the story of the Exodus, and you look at the people of Israel as they wandered through the wilderness, making their way to the promised land, one of the ways that they could enter the land of Canaan that God had promised them was through the land of Moab. The Moabites were descendants of Lot, Abraham's nephew, through his own daughters. You can read that story in Genesis. And all throughout the history of the people of Israel, there was conflict between the Moabites and the Israelites. And so as Balak saw this numerous people whom God had delivered miraculously from Egypt coming his way, he called in somebody who he thought could help. He called in a prophet. who had apparently had a decent bit of success and said, hey, could you come and help me out? Here's what I want you to do. I want you to stand up on the mountain and I want you to curse the people of Israel from the Lord, from their God. I want you to curse them. And Balaam wanted to. He decided he would do it. The story is kind of famous. As he tried to go, the angel of the Lord kept getting in his way and he kept trying to keep going until finally the donkey that he was riding turned around and talked to him and told him to stop going. But Balaam, like many of us, continued in his stubborn rebellion. A talking donkey couldn't stop him. And so he kept going. And he climbed the hill, and he looked over the people of Israel, and he attempted to curse them. But every time he spoke a word of curse, the Lord turned it into a word of blessing. So his curses didn't work. The theology that he was trying to speak wasn't true. It wasn't working. God was turning the lies of Balaam into truth. But Balaam wasn't done with his wickedness. We read later in the story of the Israelites in Numbers that he had another plan. If he wasn't going to get the Israelites to be cursed, then he could cause them to go into compromise. So he arranged a plan. We read about this in Numbers 25 and Numbers 31. He arranged a plan with Balak where they would send Moabite women among the Israelites. and they would begin to engage in intimate relationships with each other. And as that would happen, the Moabite women would lead the Israelites into the idolatrous worship of the Moabite gods. in this connection, they would begin participating in these feasts, these festivals, these celebrations of idolatry. And what we read about in Numbers is that when God sees this happen, he is angry and he brings judgment down upon the Israelites because they have abandoned his covenant and they have abandoned the command to have no other gods before him. And so we see in this picture that one of the devices that Satan uses against us is not just always outright persecution from the outside, but it's raising up among us compromise about the things that we believe and the way that we live. And there are all kinds of people who recognize how successful this strategy is. If we can just get the Christians to stop acting like Christians, then we can undermine their entire claim to be followers of Jesus. You know, unbelievers are not stupid. They realize the things that Jesus expects from us. Be holy as I am holy. There is a holiness without which no one will see the Lord. They realize that they can undermine our gospel message if they undermine our expression of holiness in all of life. And so they come after us and they seek to lead us deeper and deeper and deeper into moral compromise where we're allowing sin to continue to fester among ourselves and into theological errors so that we start teaching things that are inconsistent with the truth of God's word. And what begins to happen is we begin to bring discredit upon our witness and upon Jesus himself. And the enemies had great success in that. So, what do we do? Think about the Balaam thing. Moral compromise through sexual immorality and idolatry. What's the greatest moral challenge that we face today? Sexual immorality. I mean, all the moral things that we talk about. are ultimately an outflow of sexual immorality. And it didn't just start with the sexual revolution. It's been happening for a long time. Adultery. Affairs, premarital sex, cohabitation, you keep going down the list and then we start seeing the rise of very public and very praised homosexuality and the transgender movement. And you know where abortion comes from? Largely abortion is the overflow of the sexual liberty that people assume they're supposed to have. We've entered into a phase of existence where it doesn't matter what God you serve as long as the God you serve is sex. And that reality that's happening outside of the walls has begun to get into the life of the church. If you notice what Jesus says, it's happened among the people at Pergamum. He says that they've embraced the teaching of Nicolaitans, not all of them, but some of them. And it's probable that the teaching of the Nicolaitans is very similar to what's happening with Balaam. that they're embracing these lifestyles, thinking that they can continue to say, oh, I'm a Christian, I follow Jesus, I'm faithful to Jesus. But meanwhile, they're engaging in sexual immorality and they're beginning to worship the gods of this world. But I want you to notice what Jesus says. Jesus has things that I'm sure he would say to those that are embracing these false teachings. But in verse 16, he doesn't just talk to them. He says, therefore repent. To who? To the whole church. Notice what he says. If not, I will come to you soon and war against them with the word of my mouth. I will come to you, the entire church at Pergamum, and I will make war against whom? Against these people who've embraced false teachings that are inconsistent with the teaching of scripture. What Jesus is saying here is that he holds the whole church at Pergamum accountable for the way that some of them are acting as they've compromised morally and failed to keep the standards that Jesus has set down for us in his word. And so much of us as rugged individualists in the 21st century says, that's not fair. But that's everything the New Testament teaches all the way through. Because that's what church membership is about. Why do we join a church? You ever think about what the purpose of church membership is? I mean, seriously. Like, why do you join a church? Not just because you like the group of people, right? That's important, we hope you like us. We hope you like each other. Why do you become a member? Is it so that you can vote to elect a search committee for a music minister because you're really concerned about that? That's a good reason to join a church, but that's not the reason that we have church membership. Do you join a church so that you can participate in business meetings or so that you can volunteer to teach a Sunday school class? Maybe. Those are good things to do. But we need to recognize that the reason that we have church membership is because we understand that we are one body and we are members of one another. And if we're going to appear before the Lord on the last day, we need people who will surround us to hold us accountable to Jesus so that we will maintain faithfulness to the end. We live in a war right now. And we praise Soldiers who refuse to leave any of their comrades in arms in the battle, who pull them out of the battle's frame and lead them to safety, no matter the risk to themselves. We praise our first responders, police officers, firefighters, when they jump into harmful situations to save people. What about when people who belong to the membership of our church are having their heels lapped by the fire of hell? Will we risk our own inconvenience or even having to deal with the difficulty of confrontation to ensure that those people don't recede back into sinfulness, moral compromise, theological error? Will we chase those people down and say, not on my watch, no man left behind. We're all getting to the throne of Jesus. I mean, I'll use myself as an example, right? Pastors are pastors, but the first thing, my first identity and connection to you is church member. I'm a member of this church before I'm a pastor. I need people to care for my soul just as much as you need me to care for yours. And God has given you as a gift to me to help me pursue faithfulness to Jesus. Now I wanna play out a hypothetical situation with you. Just pretend I'm not the pastor, that I'm just a member. If this week you got word that I had abandoned my family and that I had run off to Starkville and that I was building a new life there, what would the reaction of this church be? What would the reaction of many churches like ours be? You see, I worry that our instinct is to say, well, that's none of my business. I'm just gonna be glad and pray and thank God that it's not me or my spouse or my kids. But we're church members. We depend on each other. Sometimes we think, oh, if I have to touch that situation, either I'm gonna get stained in the process, I'm gonna be inconvenienced in the process, or maybe we just think if I get involved, that person is gonna say it's none of your business, and I'm not willing to go there. because that person might not think that I love them. But we have to understand that the most hateful thing we can do in this world is watch a brother or sister in Christ who professes faith in him, wander from the truth, wander into sin and say, well, there's nothing we can do. Brothers and sisters, if I leave my family and go off and do something else, my hope and prayer is that you would love me enough to come as an army, to call me to repentance and lead me to restoration. Because the most hateful thing that you could do is say, I don't care about your own soul as much as I care about my own convenience. See, church membership is a gift. Because church membership is this wonderful expression of what it means to belong to one another. We need each other. And Jesus holds us accountable for what we do. There's a big word that gets thrown around and we don't like the word because we associate it with things like school and parents. It's discipline. Talk about church discipline and it makes us nervous. Church discipline is not about kicking people out of church. Church discipline is about keeping the church together and ensuring that people maintain faithfulness throughout the duration of their lives. So here's the question. I mean, it's serious. When a member of this congregation falls into sin, what do we do? What have we done is important, but let's just start from today. What will we do? Our average attendance is about 140 people. Our membership is over 400. Our average attendance does not reflect all members. There are people that come that are visitors. So we have 300-ish people who are members of our church. Do we know where they are? Have we upheld our commitment to them? Listen, I know this is scary. Wow, Reeves is like his fourth sermon talking about all this stuff. But goodness gracious, this is the privilege of church membership. We're gonna take the Lord's Supper together next week. Do you know that Jesus tells us to the Apostle Paul that if we take the Lord's Supper in an unworthy way, we can get sick and die? And I believe that. I don't think it's just grape juice and bread, I do, I'm not Roman Catholic, I don't think it turns into the body and blood of Christ, but Jesus meets with us here. And if we come to this table in an unworthy way, what happens? There are real spiritual consequences that could even blend over into the physical reality of our own body because God tells us that. You know how we protect each other from that? We fence the table. We pursue reconciliation and restoration and repentance among ourselves. Listen, we are harming the church's witness because the world knows who we say we're supposed to be. The question is, are we that people? Church is not a place we come to hang out. Church is a people we belong to. If our children go off and abandon us and leave us for a life of reckless sin and self-abandonment, what do we do? Do we just let them wander off and say, oh, I hope it goes okay with you, bye? We chase them down. I'm not asking you to do this for each other right now. I want you to pray about this, but what I am asking is that you would do this for me. Don't let me fall. I may fall once or twice along the way, but ensure that on that last day I am standing before Jesus with you. I may lose an arm, I may lose a leg, I may lose an eye, but I hope that you will hold me fast because you want to hold me fast to Jesus. Jesus is calling us here to a perspective on church life that is difficult, it is costly, it is hard, but it is right. So what does this look like? How do we go forward? I'm gonna put a shameless plug in. This is what we're talking about on Sunday nights. Sunday nights is your opportunity to give feedback too. Listen, we can talk about all kinds of things. When I was pastoring and the cool people would come and say, I'm so sorry to call you, you have a Bible question. And I would say, no, apologize, that's the best question of all. Let's talk about the Bible. Hey, if we talk about something in a Sunday sermon and you're like, I wanna ask about that, come on Sunday nights and let's talk about it. We'll take a few minutes at the start to talk through things. Call me, reach out to me, come with an open Bible and an open heart and let's wrestle through these things together. But we need to think about what being the church actually means biblically, not just what being the church has meant for us historically. We face real challenges and Jesus calls us to real repentance and to pursuing a meaningful connection to one another that will ensure that we remain faithful to Jesus forever. Now, here's the thing. This stuff is not easy. So the question that comes up in my mind is, why is this worth it? I mean, you kind of harsh the buzz of coming together for worship when we talk about all this stuff. We just want to be excited about Jesus. Well, Excited about Jesus is what comes next. We don't just honor the faithfulness of the past or confront the challenges of the present, but we embrace the promises of the future. Because when we are faithful to be this kind of church, Jesus says there are great rewards that await us. Notice what he says, Jesus will come in judgment. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches, to the one who conquers, to the one who's victorious, to the one who obeys my word and does what I command. I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone with a new name written on the stone that no one knows except the one who receives it." And I don't know about you, I read that and go, what? What does that mean? What Jesus is saying here is profound. And for the Christians at Pergamum, it would mean so, so much. He says, to the one who conquers, I will give some of the hidden manna. You remember the story of the manna in the wilderness in the Old Testament? We've already had a mention of Balaam. It makes sense that this would come up. All throughout Israel's wilderness wanderings, even in the desert, God was providing bread for them to this heavenly bread that looked like little white stones. And they would eat it. They would cook it into cakes and they would eat it and sustain them together with water from rocks and quail from the heavens all throughout their journeys. God provided for them even as they suffered at the hands of people who opposed them. And all connected to these other religions is this pattern of worship feasts and idolatry that are connected together, eating food sacrificed to idols. And in many cases, not eating food sacrificed to idols was a screaming announcement that you don't worship the idol. It can lead to suffering. And Jesus is here saying, hey, as you're wandering through the wilderness of this world, as you're a pilgrim people on your way to the eternal promised land, don't worry. They may threaten you, they may deprive you, but I will continue to meet your needs. And then one day forever, you'll join me in a great messianic banquet with me forever. That will be far better than any of these dumb idolatrous festivals that you participate in. Jesus is saying here, I can meet your need through every circumstance. And if you conquer, you'll enjoy a feast forever that blows the feast of this world out of the water. He also says, I'm gonna give you a white stone. Now, I have a small child, and if you know anything about small children, they like rocks. It's kind of inexplicable. But literally, we went through a phase where I would come home for lunch, and Elise would have a pile of rocks on the dining room table that Hannah had picked up back here. So if you're wondering where all the rocks were that used to be back here, they're probably in my yard now. But she would have her pocket full of rocks, and we think, well, it's just a rock. What's the significance of this white stone that Jesus gives his people? Well, in this particular time and place, the white stone meant a couple of different things. On the one hand, white and black stones were used in jury trials. When somebody was being tried, a black stone indicated a verdict of guilt, and a white stone indicated a verdict of innocence. Now, if somebody in Pergamum had been worshiping Jesus and refusing to worship the city's idols, what kind of stone would the jury in that particular city have presented to them? A black one. They would have been viewed as guilty of great sin of what the ancient world called atheism because they rejected the true gods of the Roman Empire. But Jesus here comes to the Christians and he says, the world may give you a black stone and say you're guilty, but the verdict of the world is not what you should build your confidence on. Jesus says they may give you a black stone but I give you a white stone because you are not guilty. Why? Because I have borne your sin on the cross and you can repent. Jesus's command to repent here is not an empty one. It's a real meaningful invitation whether you're the compromiser or we're the church that's allowing people to compromise. Jesus says you can repent and the reason you can repent is because I have died for your sins and there is no condemnation for those who were in Christ Jesus. Jesus says, you are not guilty when you belong to me, and I will give you all the evidence that you need. The white stone was also used, especially with a name written on it. to represent a ticket to inclusion and a great meal, a great banquet, a great party. You wanted to come, you had to give a representation of some kind that you were invited. So people would carry around white stones and they would have names written on them and they would present them to say, I'm part of the party. I've been invited. I get to be included. And Jesus is here acknowledging to these Christians at Pergamum that though they are outsiders and they're suffering greatly, if they will pursue faithfulness to Jesus, if they will do all that Jesus is commanding them, he will give them a white stone that will give them admission, not just to a party, but to a marriage supper. And not just as a guest, but as the bride. He tells them, I'm going to give you a white stone with a new name. And the language of new name is one that we read all throughout the Bible, and it's one that we know ourselves. What happens when somebody gets pronounced husband and wife? The minister says, I present to you Mr. and Mrs. One Name, because the wife takes the name of her husband. And as Jesus presents the Christians here with this white stone, it has his name on it, because their name is no longer their own, it's Christ's. Christ is saying, you are mine, and I am yours. My banner over you is love. And what Jesus is saying to us this morning is that if we will pursue a course of faithfulness to him, of holiness in all of life, of clarity in our doctrine, of truth and love and all of the things that he represents to us, he can give us this wonderful assurance as his spirit works in us that he will be faithful to us to the end. And that all the difficulty that we endure right now is worth it because Jesus is worth it. We live in light of these promises. So the question that comes to us this morning is what are we gonna do? Are we gonna allow our lives, our life together, to be shaped by the sort of historical ignorance that shapes much of our world today? Are we gonna honor the Christians of the past and recognize that we are standing on their shoulders even this morning? Are we going to recognize that we face real challenges and that to confront them is going to be costly? That to belong to a church means something and that we're going to go into the messy places the gospel takes us because Jesus is worth it and because we love each other so much that we will endure anything in order to ensure that we remain faithful to Jesus to the end. And are we gonna allow our perspective on all of this to be shaped by what the world says is good and right and valuable, or by what Jesus promises us? You know, sometimes I think one of the mistakes that we make is we look at the world around us and we say, but there's so many good things, right? I like the good things the world offers me, I want those things. And we fail to see that what Jesus offers us is so much better. Listen, we're gonna come to a time of invitation. And I don't know about you, I know this week, Friday night I told Elyse as we were getting ready for bed that this passage was shaking me to my core. And so I went and I spent some time praying late that night and asking the Lord for help because I think we have so much, all of our churches, not just Manti, but all of us have so much growing to do in these areas. And as I was praying about these things, I was kind of doing that thing. I don't advise this as a method for seeking truth in a word from the Lord, but I was just kind of flipping through my Bible and I landed on the passage in Jeremiah where God rebukes the unfaithful shepherds in Israel because they have not cared for the sheep. And what I realized in that moment is like, this is too great for me. But the thing that we take comfort in this morning is that the great shepherd of the sheep is not a pastor in a local church. The great shepherd of the sheep is Jesus, and he will not let his sheep go. And so we go forward together as one great flock under one great shepherd, trusting that he will be faithful. If you've not trusted in Jesus this morning, come to him. and receive the peace that he offers you through what he's accomplished and the promises that he gives us as we follow him. And if you have, let's just ask ourselves this morning, not looking for all the detailed explanations, but let's just ask ourselves, what does moment by moment faithfulness look like for us as we recognize Jesus's purpose for his church?