Encounters with God is a sermon series about the theophanies or divine appearances and how they reveal the stunning character of God and his heart for a world that is lost without him. How can we face the danger and chaos of this world with courage and poise? The Apostle John encountered Jesus while he was in exile. What did he learn? That Jesus has authority over life and death, that Jesus has a plan and knows the end from the beginning, and that Jesus is near and involved in his church. Recorded on Jan 9, 2022, on Acts 9, by Pastor David Parks.

Sermon Transcript

All year, we’re talking about The Greatness of God. And today, we’re finishing our Encounters with God series. Next Sunday we’ll start a new sermon series called The Making of Heaven and Earth from Genesis 1-3. But, as we’ve said throughout this series: in the Bible, when God appears to someone it’s known as a theophany or divine appearing. And these encounters are wild stories; God never seems to act how we would expect. But these encounters, reveal the stunning character of God, and his heart to save a world that is lost without him. Well today, we’re finishing a series that started in the first book of the Bible by landing in the last book of the Bible, the book of Revelation. And Revelation is wild, full of vivid and sometimes disturbing imagery. It’s written in the style of Jewish apocalyptic literature, which was a style popular in the first century AD, but no longer really exists, which makes it notoriously difficult for us to understand/interpret. The closest modern style, I would say, would be a combination of a zombie and superhero movie, everything is big and scary and there’s a cosmic battle between good and evil. So today, and like last week with the story of the conversion of the Apostle Paul on the road to Damascus, we get another theophany of the risen Jesus, high and lifted up, to an elderly Apostle John. But in this, our final encounter with God, we’ll see that Jesus is the reason that we can face all the danger and potential chaos of the world with courage and poise. If you have a Bible/app, please open to Revelation 1:9.

Revelation 1:9-11 (NIV), “9 I, John, your brother and companion in the suffering and kingdom and patient endurance that are ours in Jesus, was on the island of Patmos because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus. 10 On the Lord’s Day I was in the Spirit, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet, 11 which said: “Write on a scroll what you see and send it to the seven churches: to Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea.”

Let’s pause here. So the Apostle John was a young man when he met Jesus and started following him with his brother James. Based on the gospel accounts, he seems to have had anger issues when he was young, but by the time he was an old man, he was known as the Apostle of love. John was raised near the Sea of Galilee, like Jesus, but eventually served as a bishop over the churches in the region of Ephesus in Turkey. You never know where your life might take you or how you might change when you start to follow Jesus. But here, toward the end of a long life, we’re told that John is in exile on the Island of Patmos because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus. They didn’t kill him for talking about Jesus (although according to historical accounts they tried several times), but they did send him into exile. Perhaps, for this reason, much of John’s vision is similar in style to Daniel’s and Ezekiel’s theophanies when they were in exile in Babylon. John says that it was the Lord’s Day, meaning it was Sunday, the day that Jesus rose from the dead. This is why Christians continue to gather for worship on Sundays. 

We don’t know if anyone else was there,