Monday, January 31, 2011

What's Your Context?

We've been focusing on Jesus' seven letters to the church in Asia Minor in this sermon series. I've found it interesting how the Spirit has led me to approach each letter and each sermon differently. I had originally thought I would apply the same structural considerations to each letter and use the structure to make it easier to understand the point of each letter, and the point of all the letters together. But that is not how it has worked out.

Yesterday, for example, we looked at Revelation 3:1-6, the letter to the church at Sardis. I had already entitled the message, "The Church That REVIVES From Sleep." Yet, in the message itself, I did little to describe either the condition of the church at Sardis or its application to the church of our day. I found myself simply assuming the application and building the sermon around a response to Christ's letter by a sleeping church willing to be roused by the warning of a loving Savior. Sleeping people, after all, don't need to know they're asleep. They need an alarm to wake them up.

I sat down at the coffee shop a little while ago to read over the next letter, the letter to the church at Philadelphia. It wasn't peaceful and quiet there this morning, and I did wind up in a very providential and beneficial discussion with another community leader, but before my attention turned elsewhere the Spirit raised a question with me. In each of the letters Jesus reveals something personal about his nature as God that both gives him the right to demand something of the church to whom he is writing and to provide a basis for an appropriate response from them. The One who "walks among the seven golden lampstands" tells the church at Ephesus to return to their first love or face having their lampstand permanently removed. This same One is the One "who died and came to life" and encourages the Christians at Thyatira to remain faithful even though their faithfulness may cost them their lives.

Each letter begins with a revelation of Jesus and that revelation provides the context for what Jesus asks of the church. The churches response to their individual environments and to Christ himself is set in the context of who Jesus is himself. They are to determine their values and responses in this world based not on their personal preferences or experiences, but upon the Person of Jesus Christ, his experiences and his sovereign preferences.

So that led me to ask, "What other contextual clues do we use to determine our values and responses when Christ is not our context?" I believe it is a fair and necessary question because Jesus is writing to churches who in one form or another have either abandoned him as their context for life or are in danger of doing so. And I believe that churches today, and Christians today, face either the same spiritual ailment or the same danger.

So, what other contextual clues do we use to determine our values and responses in life when Christ is not our context for living? I thought of five and would be very interested in knowing what others you can think of. My five are:
  1. cultural "norms" - these are values and responses broadly acceptable to the society in which we live and function; 
  2. peer pressure - these are values and responses made specifically in reference to the people whom we feel most responsible to please;
  3. selfish inclinations - these are the values and responses that we are most likely to resort to for self-preservation and self-advancement; 
  4. personal experiences / history - we naturally allow the results of previous choices to influence future choices, sometimes to our detriment; 
  5. church traditions - these are values and responses that might seem more positive and beneficial than the previous list, but can nonetheless stifle an authentic, personal response to the word of God.
 Jesus makes it clear that He alone is to be the context for developing and evaluating our values and life responses. He reveals himself to be the only adequate Source and Model for the life God rightly requires of faithful people. So, in the Spirit of these seven letters I find myself wondering, what other sources do we engage for determining spiritual values and life responses? And why would we entrust our lives and eternal destinies to anything less adequate than the Son of God himself? And what do people today need to do to establish our hearts in Him?

What do you think?