Discipleship According to the Revelation

Peter Voorhees

Discipleship in the New Testament • Sermon • Submitted a year ago • Presented a year ago

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John the apostle fills this last book of the cannon with mysterious imagery. The purpose of symbols is not to confuse but to reveal. Symbols illuminate rather than obscure. Revelation ends in a garden-city with the tree of life. However to get to peacetime, war must ensue. It centers and revolves around the finished work of Christ. On Palm Sunday we celebrate the King ascending upon Jerusalem and will one more time, to bring restoration and renewal, the New Jerusalem and a new creation.

Notes

Transcript

The point of our series in looking at Discipleship in the New Testament is life change. That is what we are shooting for. That is the destination. That is the metric as to whether or not we are accomplishing our purpose. Are we allowing the word of God and things within it by the Spirit of God to change our hearts?

Discipleship

(Slide) When we say, “Yes” to Jesus… what we are saying is we want to be His disciple...

You are my master and I am your apprentice (authority)

My priorities will be reordered according to your priorities (mission)

My loves will be reordered according to your loves (posture)

Discipleship is continuing to be transformed as children of God who have allegiance to Jesus, His teachings, and who hold onto faith until He comes again.

As we look at discipleship in the book of Revelation, we acknowledge that it is Palm Sunday. This is the day where we commemorate the week before Jesus lays His life down upon the cross, to take it up three days later, rising again on the day we call Easter.

The people of Israel were looking for the Messiah, the Savior, the one that would deliver them from all oppressive rule. At the time of Jesus, the Jewish people were under the rule of the Roman Empire.

We long for Jesus to come again, and as we have prayed many times in the way that he taught us to pray, “your Kingdom come, your will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.” We long for the return of Christ.

The people who saw Jesus riding into the city of Jerusalem upon a donkey or a foal, cried out “Hosanna” which means ‘save’ but the implication being ‘God save’! We long for Jesus to come again, and I cry, “God save.” “Come, Lord Jesus.”

We can put ourselves in the place of those that welcomed Jesus on that day. We want the world to be set right. We want the violence, the hurt, the pain, the death to stop. Come, Lord Jesus!

Discipleship in John’s revelation of Jesus looks like holding onto God’s words, persevering in difficult times, looking to the splendor of Jesus knowing He has overcome the flesh, the devil, and the world. Our goal being to pray for ears that hear and listen what the Spirit is saying.

We will read the account of the Triumphal Entry in Matthew 21:1-10, and then we will read the words of the apostle John in his revelation of Jesus Christ, Revelation 1:1-2, 9-20.

If you are able would you stand with me as I read God’s word this morning.

Matthew 21:1-10 When they approached Jerusalem and came to Bethphage at the Mount of Olives, Jesus then sent two disciples, 2 telling them, “Go into the village ahead of you. At once you will find a donkey tied there with her colt. Untie them and bring them to me. 3 If anyone says anything to you, say that the Lord needs them, and he will send them at once.”

4 This took place so that what was spoken through the prophet might be fulfilled:

5 Tell Daughter Zion,

“See, your King is coming to you,

gentle, and mounted on a donkey,

and on a colt,

the foal of a donkey.”,

6 The disciples went and did just as Jesus directed them. 7 They brought the donkey and the colt; then they laid their clothes on them, and he sat on them. 8 A very large crowd spread their clothes on the road; others were cutting branches from the trees and spreading them on the road. 9 Then the crowds who went ahead of him and those who followed shouted:

Hosanna to the Son of David!

Blessed is he who comes in the name

of the Lord!

Hosanna in the highest heaven!

10 When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in an uproar, saying, “Who is this?” 11 The crowds were saying, “This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.”

Revelation 1:1-2 “The revelation of Jesus Christ that God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place. He made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, who testified to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, whatever he saw.”

Revelation 1:9-20 I, John, your brother and partner in the affliction, kingdom, and endurance that are in Jesus, was on the island called Patmos because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus. 10 I was in the Spirit, on the Lord’s day, and I heard a loud voice behind me like a trumpet 11 saying, “Write on a scroll what you see and send it to the seven churches: Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea.”

12 Then I turned to see whose voice it was that spoke to me. When I turned I saw seven golden lampstands, 13 and among the lampstands was one like the Son of Man, dressed in a robe and with a golden sash wrapped around his chest. 14 The hair of his head was white as wool—white as snow—and his eyes like a fiery flame. 15 His feet were like fine bronze as it is fired in a furnace, and his voice like the sound of cascading waters. 16 He had seven stars in his right hand; a sharp double-edged sword came from his mouth, and his face was shining like the sun at full strength.

17 When I saw him, I fell at his feet like a dead man. He laid his right hand on me and said, “Don’t be afraid. I am the First and the Last, 18 and the Living One. I was dead, but look—I am alive forever and ever, and I hold the keys of death and Hades. 19 Therefore write what you have seen, what is, and what will take place after this. 20 The mystery of the seven stars you saw in my right hand and of the seven golden lampstands is this: The seven stars are the angels of the seven churches, and the seven lampstands are the seven churches.”

This is the word of the Lord… let us pray. Amen. Please be seated.

If you have been walking the Christian walk for any length of time, from 6 months to 60 years, you feel the fatigue and temptation to walk through the path of least resistance. To faithfully walk with Jesus is an exercise in grace, faith, tenacity, resilience, bravery, and grit.

Jesus says, count the cost. Know what you are getting into. The Psalmist reminds us that sometimes it’s like walking in the valley of the shadow of death. The struggle is real.

The seven churches, their blessing, their warning, and the vision that Jesus gives them is revealing even of my own life. John is seeing this vision at the earliest date of 68 AD and as late as 96AD as he is exiled on the island of Patmos. Jerusalem was sacked by General Titus in 70AD and the church would eventually come under heavy persecution. This letter is for the Christian that finds themselves in the midst of “Babylon”. “Babylon” is representative of the world, it’s systems, and the ways it often times is counter to the gospel ethic.

Ephesus: He sees them, He walks among them, in all of their wonderful doing… they lost their first love. They have great orthodoxy (right belief) but they have lost their way in their orthopraxy (right practice, especially love of God and love of neighbor). While they are doing the right things, they have lost their love one for another. Anytime we see the other and are moved with anything other than compassion, we’ve lost that vision of Him. In fighting within the church is real. The tree of life awaits for us keeping our eyes on Jesus when we get distracted in the practice of doing.

Smyrna: In poverty and suffering we doubt the favor, kindness, and presence of God. There are those that betrayed their identity as God’s people by colluding with those possessing economic power. Walk that life in faith even to the point of death and what awaits is the crown of life. We are cherished, loved, and bought at a price… the First & Last, the one who was dead and is now alive sees you.

Pergamum: Looking at the world around us and mingling cultural practice compromising our commitment to holiness and faithfulness in Jesus. The church is nevertheless indicted for harboring a group of compromisers, and the image of the sword is in this context primarily a symbol of threat to the church for not disciplining that group. The church had and adopted values of the world. “The problem is the opposite of that in Ephesus. An overemphasis on internal doctrinal purity can lead to a lack of concern for the outside world, whereas a deemphasis can lead to over-identification with the world.”

Beale, G. K. (1999). The book of Revelation: a commentary on the Greek text (p. 248). W.B. Eerdmans; Paternoster Press.

Thyatira, Sardis, the church in Philadelphia and Laodicea are all exemplary in ways that the church and even in our own walk/faith journey can stray from a fidelity to Christ.

Can you relate to this? Can you identify areas in your life where these things are true?

We take on a worldly approach to living and being in this world?

We are out to get our own at all costs. We roll up and use people for our pleasure, taking, manipulating, robbing until we are satisfied and discard them as quickly as we did come up on them.

We don’t have time to go through all seven churches, but we see compromise, having an outward appearance of life (Christian in name only), but inside we are dead. This looks like naming the name of Christ and in the wake of our life there is nothing but hurt, broken relationships, and we wonder why everyone else has the problem.

In all the ways that we fall short, Jesus calls to the church to repent, look to Him who supplies the way forward and gives us a gift that only He alone can give… authority, a new name, dressed in white, knowing Him intimately.

The time of the triumphal entry, we can see these attitudes in the religious leaders of the day and even in the disciples. Judas sought means to turn Jesus over, forcing through means of manipulation, Jesus to show His power. The chief priest confessing before Pilate that there is no King but Caesar in order to send Jesus to His death. It’s all over the gospels, and we are tempted often to do the same thing if we harden our hearts and deafen our ears.

God has beautifully orchestrated this all around His throne room in the imagery we find in Revelation.

GOD

Chapter 1 as we read earlier gives us glimpse of who Jesus is that gives us a lens to see the book.

Revelation 1:12-16 “Then I turned to see whose voice it was that spoke to me. When I turned I saw seven golden lampstands, and among the lampstands was one like the Son of Man, dressed in a robe and with a golden sash wrapped around his chest. The hair of his head was white as wool—white as snow—and his eyes like a fiery flame. His feet were like fine bronze as it is fired in a furnace, and his voice like the sound of cascading waters. He had seven stars in his right hand; a sharp double-edged sword came from his mouth, and his face was shining like the sun at full strength.”

This the image that we see of Jesus.

“The centering vision of the whole book is chapters 4 and 5, the throne room of God. The prophetic messages to the churches, and to the church as a whole, are complete: seven words, each directed toward a specific context yet applicable to the Christian church as one body and to specific congregations in various times and places. The book of Revelation now undergoes a dramatic shift from the kind of text we understand fairly easily, the relatively straightforward record of pastoral-prophetic oracles, to the kind of text that may confuse, scare, or distress us.”

Gorman, M. J. (2011). Reading Revelation Responsibly: Uncivil Worship and Witness: Following the Lamb into the New Creation (p. 102). Cascade Books.

Reading Revelation Responsibly: Uncivil Worship and Witness: Following the Lamb into the New Creation A Unified Vision

John’s peek into heaven—which appears to be a “beehive of activity”—is a vision of worship that then becomes a call to worship. Worship, as Eugene Peterson writes, is

a meeting at the center so that our lives are centered in God and not lived eccentrically. We worship so that we live in response to and from this center, the living God. Failure to worship consigns us to a life of spasms and jerks, at the mercy of every advertisement, every seduction, every siren.… If there is no center, there is no circumference. People who do not worship are swept into a vast restlessness, epidemic in the world, with no steady direction and no sustained purpose.

If the worship and center of our lives is not Jesus, we are tossed about with culture, every clever philosophy, and whim of the time. This is likened to building our house on the sand. Wind, waves, trials, difficulty come and our house is decimated. But centering our lives and worship on Jesus is likened to building our house on the rock where those same trials, circumstances that destroyed the house on the sand has minimal affect on the house built on the rock.

In chapters 4 and 5, two images appear and we see them throughout…

Reading Revelation Responsibly: Uncivil Worship and Witness: Following the Lamb into the New Creation A Unified Vision

The record of John’s experience introduces two images that dominate the rest of the book: the throne of God and the Lamb of God. The word “throne” appears 43 times from chapter 4 until the end of the book (19 times in chapters 4 and 5 alone), and the word “Lamb” (referring to Christ) 28–7 × 4—times. Together these images constitute the hermeneutical, or interpretive, key to the entire book. They reveal in pictures the essential theology of the book of Revelation: God the creator reigns and is worthy of our complete devotion, and Jesus the faithful, slaughtered Lamb of God reigns with God, equally worthy of our complete devotion

This book is written while the apostle John is on the isle of Patmos, exiled, punished, stuffed away from the world… those who love him and those in whom he loves. In this moment God gives him a vision, an apocalypse (revealing) in the moment of his exile.

At the center of this vision is The Lamb and the Throne of God.

Chapters 6 to 8:5 we se judgements that take place on the Earth

Chapters 8 to 11:19 the trumpets sound; this announces a coming war, a victory, and a great warrior. That as these judgements fall, they mirror the plagues in Exodus (all the while sealing believers, like the people of God in Egypt).

Chapters 12-14 is the Holy War that has been raging since Genesis 3… Satan pursuing the seed of the woman… and then a shift of Satan’s attack on the children of the woman. The unholy Trinity is revealed.

Chapters 15-16 are the seven bowls that repeat the scene of the trumpets and seals… preceded with a moment of worship that mirrors the song of Moses in Exodus 15:1-8. It prepares the readers for the bowls as Moses watched Egypt perish at the Red Sea.

Chapters 17-19:10 Babylon falls… this worldly structure, which props itself up to be a salvation, a false city of peace and refuge, falls fantastically and those who trust in her share her fate. The harlot who once looked desirable is now clothed in spoiled rags, but the bride has fine linen, pure, bright and married to the Lamb.

Reading Revelation Responsibly: Uncivil Worship and Witness: Following the Lamb into the New Creation Revelation 17–18: Babylon the Harlot

Babylon, the great whore, the seductive and self-glorifying city, is the antithesis of the people/the city of God: the woman in chapter 12, the Lamb’s bride of chapters 19–22, the new Jerusalem of chapters 21–22. And the harlot remains with us. It does not take a political activist or liberation theologian to recognize the ongoing power of “Babylon.” New Testament scholar Bruce Metzger, writing in 1993, said the following:

Babylon is allegorical of the idolatry that any nation commits when it elevates material abundance, military prowess, technological sophistication, imperial grandeur, racial pride, and any other glorification of the creature over the Creator.… The message of the book of Revelation concerns … God’s judgments not only of persons, but also of nations and, in fact, of all principalities and powers—which is to say, all authorities, corporations, institutions, structures, bureaucracies, and the like.

Even, Metzger adds, the Christian churches.

Chapters 19-20 tells of Christ fantastic return crushing those under his feet. Judgement clears the path for peace.

Chapters 21 and 22 is the final vision of a new heaven and a new earth. The holy city prepared for the bride of the lamb. It’s not just a new city, it’s a new Eden. A river is in the middle of the city, the tree of life, and nothing will be cursed like after the fall. The river flows from the throne, giving life to all the inhabitants.

YOU

How does this impact you? What emotion does this bring up in you?

Can you place yourself in the crowd at the time of Jesus and the triumphal entry where they were oppressed, disenfranchised, wavering of hope and expectation… to then see the King, the messiah, coming on a donkey… God will you do what you said you were going to do?

He’s crucified, died and buried… what now? Hope dashed… but, is the lamb at the center of your life. Is the throne of God in your vision?

What is concerning you today? What has occupied your mind even now during this message? What are you anticipating in this coming week? Are you afraid, are you worried, are you fretting over things that you can’t possibly know the outcome? Is it possibly distracting you from what’s right in front of you?

Often times we can focus on the things that are no longer at risk of neglecting the things right in front of us.

We’re in the in between time… Jesus has come, died, resurrected, ascended and is coming again… we are in the now and not yet. Where is your vision placed? In your family, in your relationships, in your work, in your play, where is your vision… is Jesus at the center?

Are we praying, God give us ears to hear… give us eyes to see.

Jesus is calling you and making you into a faithful bride. Hear, see, respond!

May we live a life that has Jesus, the Lamb of God, at the center of what we do. May we commit to encouraging one another (and thereby encouraging ourselves) to look to Jesus (asking how does this honor or glorify God; how does this further the kingdom), knowing that the flesh, the devil, and the world are defeated… may we pray and ask God to give us ears to hear what the Spirit is saying, that we might follow the Triune God watching Him as He establishes His Kingdom here on Earth, that His will would be done… and until the culmination of all things, until His word is fulfilled, we continue to cry along with John…

Revelation 22:20-21 “He who testifies about these things says, “Yes, I am coming soon.” Amen! Come, Lord Jesus! The grace of the Lord Jesus be with everyone. Amen.”

Hosanna!

Would you stand with me… today is the day of salvation. If you are not sure what team you are on, be on team Jesus. Receive the life that he has for you today. The lover of your soul desires to bring you unto Himself and give you good things. Yield your heart to him, give your allegiance today over to Jesus and allow this new life to bring you peace, joy, goodness, and deep realization of being fully known, fully accepted, and fully loved.

We repent of our sin, we accept the gift of life that is given to us through the life, death, resurrection, ascension and inevitable return of Jesus our King.

There will be staff, deacons, elders to pray with you in the back of the room if you want to make that decision today.

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