Westside Church

When thinking about the purpose of attending Sunday services, we typically think we are going for God's benefit but in reality we are going for our benefit where the Triune God wants to serve and minister to us by tasting the powers of the Age to come and the spiritual feast they have prepared for us in the Divine Service. We attend church because we are summoned and served by God and therefore, it is the most important appointment of our week.

Given the events of the past eighteen months with a global pandemic, the question about the necessity of gathering for church has been brought to the forefront. In this biblical theological series on answering the question about what is the church, we see that the church by definition means to gather and assemble before God and for one another. This is for the purpose of receiving God's grace and testifying to the powers of the Age to come when God's kingdom will be realized in all its glory and splendor.

Revelation 4-5 contain the most important sections arguably in the entire Bible as the scene shifts from Christ addressing His church to the throne room of heaven where we see the holy, transcendent, sovereign God of the universe fully in control of His creation and church. This stands in contrast to the futility and hopelessness of the secular world that is powerless to solve the problems of suffering and death. The vision of Revelation declares that God has done what man is incapable of: redemption bringing new creation.

The Laodicean Church is one of the more familiar passages in the book of Revelation with what Jesus says about spitting the church out of His mouth due to their being lukewarm. The most common misinterpretation is that lukewarm means that they need to stop riding the fence with their indifference towards Christ. However, being lukewarm says nothing about their indifference but rather their smugness and self-righteousness which Jesus sees as their spiritual blindness and nakedness. He calls them to be zealous in their repentance towards Him in understanding their true spiritual condition and they're need for holy zeal as a church.

Trials & difficulties are an inevitable part of the Christian life. Fortunately, Jesus knows this and calls us to hold fast to Him, His Word, and His promise that He will provide spiritual strength to endure to the end when the New Jerusalem that He and His Father are preparing for the New Heavens and the New Earth.

Just when you think you are safe, you are not. The church in Sardis had a reputation of being a vibrant church yet the Lord Jesus knew what they were at the heart level: dead. Such is the danger when the church capitulates to the world and compromises with the culture influencing the church more than the church influencing the culture. Christ's call for the church to wake up is both sobering and merciful as the threat of judgment looms.

The church in Thyatira, while commended for their patient endurance in love, faith, and service by the Lord Jesus, was nevertheless in deep peril having giving itself to tolerating false teaching and immorality. The Lord warned them that judgment would fall upon the church unless they repented by purging the threat from within. The call to discern is an essential need for the church today as doctrinal compromise and immoral toleration are always present temptations with the world pressing into the church. The power to resist comes not from toleration but from revelation -- the revelation of who Jesus Christ is in all His glory and power.

Today we begin our look at the Book of Revelation that will be a timely word about the call to endure for the Christian Church. The book of Revelation is emphatic that the strength to endure comes not from within but from "Him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood and made us a kingdom, priests to his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever."

The key to the Book of Revelation as in the Christian life is always seeing Jesus as He truly is, the One who says, “Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades."

As God's image-bearers, humanity was made to behold the glory of God as the highest aim of our lives. Paul's doxology at the end of the first half of Ephesians tells us why we should glorify God for the great things He has done in redeeming His people with the promise of full reconciliation coming for His universe.

Stunningly, Paul prays that the believer's life in Christ would be rooted and grounded with a deep understanding of Jesus love and God's power toward them in making them new creatures with new identities as His redeemed people.