As a parent did you ever find yourself warning your kid about the impending discipline over and over again? Why do parents do that? I think mostly we don’t really want to take away the things that our kids love or to keep them from enjoying their friends or to cause any kind of pain at all. We come to one more round of sevens and again John is warning of God’s judgement and wrath.

As a parent did you ever find yourself warning your kid about the impending discipline over and over again? Why do parents do that? I think mostly we don’t really want to take away the things that our kids love or to keep them from enjoying their friends or to cause any kind of pain at all. We come to one more round of sevens and again John is warning of God’s judgement and wrath.

We’ve all seen the bad action movie in which the hero is surrounded by a group of bad guys. The bad guys begin to attack with the inexplicable strategy of doing so one at a time! If only life worked that way. As believers living in the world we are surrounded and attacked from all sides.

Every Sunday there is much more going on than we think. In the midst of a Sunday service, the enemy is behind the scenes convincing us that there isn't any hope. The spiritual reality is that even as a seventh trumpet blows there is hope and the Church is where we find it!

“Hey! Don’t shoot the messenger!” If you have ever had to deliver bad news to someone you’ve either said or thought this very proclamation. In Revelation 10, John encounters another amazing messenger as he prepares to share God’s message.

Have you ever stopped at a scenic overview or visited somewhere that they had coin operated binoculars? Maybe the better question, have you ever escaped without dropping a few quarters into those machines? You look out amazed at what you see and it’s just really tough not to think, but what would it look like through the viewers? In Revelation 8-9 we zoom in on the suffering unsealed in the previous chapters.

There was or is a world wide pandemic. There was or is world wide inflation. There are wars and threats of wars, world wide. Climate change is a world wide problem. We live in a world struggling to respond to all of these crises at one time. Every time one problem seems to subside another one rears its ugly head. We are a reactionary world and it is easy to think that everything is out of control. Revelation 6 & 7 shows us who is on the throne and in ultimate control.

Revelation 5 furthers the point that Jesus is the central message of the throne room and Revelation as a whole.

We talk a lot about heaven. We hope to find pennies from heaven or be a part of a match made in heaven, we cry out to heaven, we sing about stairways to heaven. We talk a lot about heaven. In Revelation 4 we get our first glimpse at heaven.

Sometimes we read the Bible like the events within it occurred in the their own world or universe. Kind of like we read a

science fiction book or watch a super hero movie, but the truth is Bible events happened right here, in our world. Revelation is no different. It was written to real people in a real place. It was written to seven churches in Asia Minor in order to encourage them.