Wake Up!

Summary:

This powerful sermon takes us on a spiritual journey through Revelation 3:1-6, urging a profound awakening within our hearts and spirits. It warns against complacency, drawing a parallel between the church in Sardis and today’s spiritual climate. The term “woke” is explored, tracing its roots in awareness of oppression and evolving meaning. With poignant relevance, the sermon highlights the gap between professed Christian beliefs and actions, calling for genuine faith and rejection of superficial righteousness. Emphasizing the importance of prayer, the sermon encourages believers to be aware of societal injustices, align with Jesus’ teachings, and actively embody His love in a world hungry for transformation.

Transcript:

But hear the word of the Lord from Revelation chapter 3, verses 1 through 6. To the angel of the church in Sardis write, These are the words of him who holds the seven spirits of God and the seven stars. I know your deeds. You have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead. Wake up! Strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have found your deeds unfinished in the sight of my God. Remember, therefore, what you have received and heard.

Hold it fast and repent. But if you do not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what time I will come to you. Yet you have a few people in Sardis who have not soiled their clothes. They will walk with me dressed in white, for they are worthy. The one who is victorious will, like them, be dressed in white. I will never blot out the name of the person from the book of life, but will acknowledge that name before my Father and his angels. Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches.

This is the word of the Lord. Amen. You may be seated. All right. Hello, everybody. I'm Jeremy. Hello. My name is Jeremy.

I'm from the Passage at Journey. Glad to be here and to the future online people who are going to watch us later. You know, I'm just, I'm ready to be anywhere, especially in a cold day. Doing anything. Stay warm in your covers still, which are here. I appreciate that very much that we can gather together to be people who encourage one another in this gathering space. I want to start off, my old teacher days, but a pop quiz.

I'm going to have a pop quiz for you, okay? We have two focuses for 2025. Two focuses. What's the first one?

Gold Star Chamberlain. Yes, okay. Next question. That was very fast. And our second focus.

Yes, good deeds, good neighbors. Yes, so being a good neighbor. Okay, good. Because Johnson said that before in the beginning, he said last week. I'll say it again at the end, so open book test, I guess. You can write that down and have it for the end.

But last week we talked about Epiphany. And Epiphany wasn't technically until Monday, because Epiphany is on the 6th. It's the day that Jesus reveals himself, or is revealed as the Messiah, or at the very least somebody very special. And we celebrate a bunch of different ways in the church world as a whole. Some people celebrate the arrival of the Magi, because it's the first time that people who are not Gentiles, you know, outside of the faith, the Jewish faith, recognize the Messiah, that's the Magi. We celebrate it through his baptism, which is his public proclamation. And you know, the dove comes down, and the voice comes down, and says, this is my son.

So a proclamation of who he is. Other traditions, still yet, celebrate his first miracle, which is another pop quiz, which is Jesus' first miracle? Water and wine. Water and wine, yes. Yes, first public miracle. So a lot of firsts you can celebrate the day of Epiphany, but it's to recognize who Jesus is as the Messiah, as somebody very special. And last week on Saturday night, we had together a bunch of our readers together, people who are leaders of the church, and people who are ordained in our church.

We had to talk about 2024, we had to talk about 2025, and set these goals out of daily prayer and do good deeds. And out of that, I just want to say, I love hearing stories. There's a couple of really good stories in that time where people shared about how what we focused on impacted themselves, or the community. So if you have stories, please tell me. I love hearing stories, I love celebrating stories, I love knowing how we as a church are interacting in this world, because God is not dead, to use a very fun movie slash song, but you know, God is working in our lives today. So I'd love to hear your stories, big, small, it doesn't matter, because everything is used to encourage one another in our faith. And so I say all this because today's gospel passage, we're supposed to read from an lectionary.

So remember, the lectionary is a cycle of readings. We use what's called the revised common lectionary often, which is a three-year cycle of reading through scripture. Lately, I've been reading something called the narrative lectionary, which is put together by the Lutherans, and just tells the different type of stories in the Bible, and I got mixed up. And so the easy passage today would have been to talk about Jesus' baptism. It's a very famous talk about an epiphany, you know, Jesus gets baptized, John the Baptist proclaims him, it's awesome, very easy, but I messed up, and I read and was captivated by a passage in Revelation. And last time, or two times that I preached, I just came up here and talked about Revelation, and I made a joke that I don't often preach from Revelation because it's kind of a scary book. And God, with a sense of humor, said, here, how about this whole letter to a church from Revelation, and I said, okay, sounds good.

It's like a middle-of-the-week passage, I don't know how my, I don't know. Anyway, so here we are, Revelation chapter 3, verse 2, the letter to the church, it starts, and particularly this verse, verse 2, these two words just capture my attention, and they were, wake up, wake up. And so today I'm going to ask you to be a little woke, okay? I'm gonna ask you to be a little woke. You have to stick with me on this journey, okay? I promise you, we're gonna get to where this is. Who has heard that term before, woke?

You've heard the term woke. Good, bad, okay. Okay, let me read you some headlines with the word woke in it. So it's pretty popular today in the discourse. If you watch any news and entertainment slash news or read any papers or online stuff, you're gonna see this word woke pop up all the time. It's generally never a very good portrayal of the word woke. And so I did a Google News search last night, but up to the last minute, I wanted to see what other articles were talking about the word woke.

And here are the headlines. So you can tell me if you think this is a positive representation of this word or not. The first one that came up was from an art magazine or newspaper, it says, will the art world go post-woke in 2025? Or the next headline, LA County cut fire budget while spending heavily on DDI, woke items, midnight stroll, transgender cafe. There's a lot of buzzwords in that title. I don't know what, but they're not happy. Next title, woke culture has become a breathing ground for antisemitism and opinion piece.

Black Rock Quits Net Zero Initiative at Perfect Time as Woke Policies Contributed to Devastating LA Fires. This one from my hometown, Toledo, the town I came from. Editorial, FBI hostage to woke fear. And then Pentagon Chief Austin rejects Trump criticism that U. S. military is woke. And last one, I mean, I had to stop writing them down because it was making me angry, but blame LA fire horror on the woke religion bringing ruin to our cities.

Not a very positive representation of this word, woke. And so I then conducted a very scientific poll earlier this week on Facebook, because that's what all good researchers do, go to social media and ask. And I have a lot of, my Facebook friends, my feed is a very interesting group of people. I have always been a collector of friends and people that are very different and unique in their viewpoint and in their lives. That happens when you come from studying music at a college, then also being in the army, full of infantry people, you know, hard chargers and everybody in the church world. You know, I have a lot of interesting opinions. So I say, you're going to get no judgment or argument from me, because that's what people are afraid of on social media, right?

What does the word woke, what does that conjure up in your mind? Like, what are the first things that happen? And this is a little bit better than the news article headlines. So I've highlighted some of my favorite answers, not because I support them or anything like that, or don't support them, just they were interesting to me. The first one, so what is the word woke? What's it, what do you think about it? Intelligence. The next one is people upset that others are suddenly asking slash demanding fair or equal rights.

Another one is kids. So in the church world, we say that they use, you know. First thing I think of is a sarcastic response from those who are uppity, racist in classes, and use it as a negative description to describe those who are more progressive thinkers and those who advocating for socio-political changes are very smart people. That's not what I think it is. I see it as a positive, but I have seen it used in a similar context to radicals for those who want to frame it as a negative. Another person says, I see it as a negative word because it's discussed in a negative fashion, even though I think it's great that people are becoming more aware of how they approach people of all types. This is a very smart person.

I'm lucky to have some professors, but I can't say this word. I was going to put it up on the screen, but we don't have a screen, so I'm just going to say it and you have to accept it. That's what the word is. But as France Fanon first said, conscientization, so being conscious, the act of being conscious, conscious of the world. This person says, the word woke says, I just woke up and I'm running late to work. And then he went on to say, come on, man, talking to me. No one uses that unless they're old or inflexible and old school.

Only see things in black and white with no tolerance for people that disagree or stands in the gray areas of life. Another person said delusional. Another person said empathy. A person is upset that others are being shown basic decency. And maybe my favorite is confusion. And I do not think that word is used correctly in society. I think there are a million different definitions and views surrounding the word.

I think that the confusion in the way it is viewed sometimes today potentially contributes to the division, the division that I sense in some of the commons. And kudos to my friends. They did not argue with one another in the commons because I had started some arguments on my Facebook wall in my time. But they were all very, and there's some laughing emojis. You know, people were very nice to share their opinions with me. But I do want to, since I bring this word woke into our lexicon and our words here, it comes from the black community. The word woke is first seen as far back as 1930.

And actually before that, people who were supporting Abraham Lincoln as president, there's some allusions or mentions of something called the awake society. So it's an old term that is used for people, particularly in this case and in history, black people to show and highlight the mistreatment of their people in society. But how, you know, and however it's been used for any oppressed and marginalized people, that you are aware of their oppression and their place in life and how we as a society treat them. And then even more recently, if you're aware and follow, like I said, the news, it is used as a term probably to indicate radicals or crazy people or people who are just against the whole idea of society. And so why am I asking you to be woke? It's a pretty, you know, why would I say I want you to be woke? And it's pretty controversial, but I'm not necessarily asking you to do that, okay?

I just wanted to highlight that I want you to wake up, as Jesus puts it, as written in Revelation to the church in Sardis. So Revelation, as I said, is kind of a scary book. It is a prophetic and an apocalyptic book written to us, written to the churches in the forms of letters to these churches. And we have these great visions, and there's lots of books and movies and resources written about Revelation and how we can predict the end times through Revelation and on and on and on. So it is kind of a book of controversy. But the one thing I took from my last church I worked at, our senior pastor there, he always said, and I agree with him on this, and so I'll show you where I'm coming from, that we can't fully understand the book of Revelation because it is difficult for us, we're not on the underside of power. Particularly, I am never, rarely ever, on the underside of power in society.

I mean, I'm honest with myself. I'm a Christian, and we are, especially in this Dallas area, that is not an underrepresented or underclassed group of the population. I'm tall, which is, if you do all the studies, tall people, especially men, make a lot more money. So I'm privileged in that way. I am white, so that is not somebody who's on the underside of power. So it can be difficult to understand the book of Revelation fully as it is intended to people to give hope when they're in oppression. So one thing that interests me, though, about this letter and what captivated me and captured me is the parallels that we see in our culture today, right?

The parallels that we see, this is written to a city, a specific church in a city, but us as Christians in the United States is where I saw some of the parallels. And like I said, it's an apocalyptic slash prophetic book containing these letters that are written to these churches. And it doesn't always necessarily mean that this book is gonna tell the future or it's gonna be able to hold the secrets to the future in a way that, like, we think of a fortune teller can tell, you know, you're gonna have love for the rest of your life at age 35 and you'll be married happily ever after and all that stuff. It's not like that. A lot of times prophetic works are just, they're good observations from a holy person of what is happening in the current reality they exist using the history that came before them to predict future outcomes that will happen in the future. So I'm sure there's wonderful prophecy in the Bible that predicts the coming of Jesus and all that, but prophecy doesn't always mean fortune telling. It can be just, this is what's happening and this is where you're going to end up.

The way I think about it is I know that if I touch a stove after it's been turned on, it's gonna be hot. So if I see my kid going to touch the stove and it's hot, I can say, you're gonna burn yourself and they're gonna think I'm the most prophetic man in the world and they just have to touch it themselves and they get burnt, right? But I can just use what I know from the history to implicate what's gonna happen in the future. So this work is a magical work, magical is a bad word, but a prophetic work is a letter from Jesus written to the church in Sardis. But this city particularly was an important city because it had all these international trade routes. It's in Western Turkey now, so there's a bunch of water around it which is important for trade and all that and it was a capital city of a province and it was most importantly for its protection on a hill. And what's important about being on a hill is it's very hard to attack a city that is on a hill because you can sit up in the city, you can look down, especially the city has some cliffs around it, like you can see who's coming and you can easily defend it and it's really not difficult to repel attackers unless you become complacent and that is what happened to the city in 546 BC, so before Jesus came.

So 500 years before Jesus came, this city who they thought they were so safe and so protected and had nothing to worry about had a sneak attack brought about on them by the Persians. They climbed the cliff and they surprised them and they attacked it and they conquered the city and they were caught unaware of what was happening or what was going to happen. And so I can think of perhaps a nation, ours, that thinks they're relatively safe from attacks and then we are very surprised when they happen to us, right? We get safe, we feel good, we feel like we can't be attacked, we're the best, we don't have to worry about anything and then we get complacent and something bad happens and then, for example, we start a 20-year war that costs us trillions of dollars because we want to re-establish power. We were powerful, we were attacked and then we want to re-establish power. But like Sardis or as Sardis got attacked, I think it changes the way that we hear scripture. I think it changes the way we hear scripture of how important and how much of a warning this is, right?

So Revelation 3, 3 in particular, so this is right after my favorite verse of wake up, but it says, Remember therefore what you have received and heard, hold it fast and repent. But if you do not wake up, you stop being complacent, I will come like a thief and you will not know at what time I will come to you. That's the very direct correlation between what they experienced 500 years before Jesus came and what's going to happen when Jesus returns if they're caught unaware and they're caught being complacent. He says, get together and stay woke, understand what is happening around you. Even the opening verse is one of knowing what is truly happening. So the very first verse, so this is the address to the angel of the church in Sardis, says, These are the words of him who holds the seven spirits of God and the seven stars. That's Jesus.

Jesus says, I know your deeds. You have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead. You look good, but you're dead. That's a pretty serious condemnation from the word, from Jesus. Everyone thinks they're good to go, but Jesus is writing a letter to them and says, you're not, you're not good. Sure, you look like it and you've got it all together on the outside, but you are not where you think that you are or where you should be.

You're in NT, right? Bob Revelation, a very smart man. And this is what he wrote. And he says, it's all or nothing. Either Jesus really is the Lord, rightly asking for our absolute allegiance, or he is a sham and should be rejected outright. It simply won't do to bumble on, looking busy, but achieving little or nothing. Reputation is not enough.

Reputation is not enough. So the question I had to ask myself, of course, I'm asking you guys, are we complacent as Christians? Are we complacent as followers of Jesus? Are we leading a life that emulates Christ? And does the way we walk and talk, does it look like Jesus? Do we act like Jesus? Do we talk like Jesus?

Do we look at other people like Jesus? Do we do as we were instructed in this passage that was come back a few weeks in a row now, I think in Colossians. In Colossians three, and it says, starting at verse 12, therefore, so Colossians three, 12, therefore, as God's chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another. If any of you has a grievance against someone, forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these verses, put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity. Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body, you are called to peace and to be thankful.

Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly, as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, through psalms, hymns, and psalms from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts. And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. Is that how we are interacting in our life? And that's a tricky one, because I wrote in my notes last week when Jonathan brought that verse up, and talked about this, Pastor Carly on Wednesday evening, but how we dress matters, how we look. I judge books by its cover, and I'm not supposed to, but I go to the library, and I look at all these book covers, and I'm making snap judgments of what I'm going to read, what I'm not going to read, and it's bad, I know, I'll repent, but I judge a book by its cover, and I think that that's the first step of acknowledging who we are, and living as who we are as Christians. You know, like, if we go out, and we think it is important to be Christian, at least a period, we're going to act in love, and in kindness, and with grace, and with peace, and you can do that up to a certain point, but as it said in Corinthians, if it's all done without love, it means nothing, it is nothing. It's just a shell, a facade, a fake Christianity, a fake faith that's not changing you in any way.

I do often fear that we as Christians become complacent in the pursuit of being influential, and being in charge of the culture around us. You know, we look good, and Christian from the outside, we memorize certain scriptures, we have Caleb, or Erewhon, as our number one preset in our car, we won't listen to anything else until the drive comes on, if they want to give you money, and we avoid cursing, et cetera, you know, we do all these good Christianese things that we're supposed to do, and then we think that, hey, that's enough. I am a good, I am a good Christian. I fear, I fear we become complacent, and I was thinking about like how this could be, and I started going small, and then big, and I just think like, poor Jonathan, I send him articles all the time, news articles about churches that are making me mad, leaders are making me mad, because they act not in a Christlike way. In our own Dallas area, we have multiple churches with leaders and pastors who are just hurting people, and covering it up, and holding on to power in any way that they possibly can, because they're supposed to be good, godly people, and then we look at our state government, Jonathan, I'm starting small, I'm going big, our state government, you know, is led by a Christian, and Christians, they put, they put razor wire in the water, and celebrate that we're hurting people in the name of keeping people out of our country, and out of our state, so we can be deterring them, but we celebrate that, they celebrate that, and we look at our national government, our current leadership is, they're Christians, everybody who, they're professing Christians, and they provide weapons, overwhelming amount of weapons, and bombs, and destruction to people, and they say, here, you can have this, and then in the same breath, or at the other side of the mouth, they say, hey, make sure you are peaceful, and you figure out how to be peaceful, and all this, but here's all these bombs you can use however you want to, but go ahead and be peaceful, and our incoming, our incoming organization, you know, they're full of adulterers, and bullies, and felons, and those who wish to hurt people simply because they're brown, but we do not have good models of Christians, and positions of power, but we align ourselves with people who seem powerful as Christians, so we can be in power as Christians, and Jesus would come back, and I would be confident and say that you look like Christians, you talk like Christians, you seem alive, but you are dead. And then we get into fights amongst ourselves. We say, this person's more righteous, this person's more Christian, this person's more Christian, how are you?

Who is more Christian? And the people who control all the platforms we argue on don't care about any of that, they just get richer, and richer, and richer, because we take all of our arguments online into spaces to be more Christian, to appear more Christian, to put on more jewels of heaven that we have not earned yet, and say we've made it. And so to repeat what Jesus said, wake up, wake up and be aware of what is happening around you. And it is hard, Revelation is a hard book, these letters are hard, because we're not like them, right? Well, we're not. They had the warnings, we see the warnings, it's good, we read them, and now we know better. But we don't repeat history and understand and learn from the letters that are written in Revelation, and we feel like we have it all together, but in reality, we're unaware oftentimes how far we have fallen away, because it looks good on the outside, or I am comfortable, so I don't realize how far away from the ideal that I am supposed to be.

And just as an aside, that's why I really appreciate the holiness tradition, which the Nazarene Church is a part of, because it is always calling you to be more holy, to be more in relationship with the Lord, because you can never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever reach a point. In this life, where you fully understand the depth and the greatness of God's love and mercy for us, all we can do is continue to pursue after it and allow ourselves to be changed and to be molded by the Holy Spirit in our lives. So to be woke, in the most general sense, is to be aware of the world around you. When you're sleeping, you can't know what's happening, unless you're super hypervigilant and you don't really sleep, but if you're asleep, you cannot know what is happening around you. When you're complacent, you can't fully understand what is happening around you, because you take things for granted. When you don't try to be holy and you don't try to pursue after God and to surrender to the Holy Spirit, you stagnate in your growth and you think you finally reached it. There's a hundred now, I don't know if it's in here, but it's in my mind, it's not, there's a hundred now who talks about prayer and he says that the moment that you think that you have understood the fullness of God, you're starting to sin, because you think that you know, but you don't know.

So what you have to do is go back in prayer and be quiet and ask the Holy Spirit to work on your life some more. So don't try to stagnate when you try to... take over your sinning. And finally, when you're woke, you should be challenged to not be a part of the problem, but a part of the solution. Jonathan, last week talked about there's these big societal problems we face in the world, and it feels overwhelming. It certainly is overwhelming. We talked about one of the stats I shared with my group is in the past six months, we've sent out 2,000 text messages.

We've received 600 some back, and I think I said 600 back, which means another 600 of those initial are my responses to people's prayer requests. You know, I take all the prayer requests in generally, and I respond to most of them, and there are some... there's some big problems in the world that we're facing. I mean, everything from crazy sickness to unexpected death, and people who just need money, you know, simple things like that, and it seems overwhelming. And so a lot of times in prayer, I'm just getting through these prayer requests and just saying like, you know, what can we do? Give me an answer, Jesus. That's like my prayer most of the time, is I'm getting through all these prayer requests, is what can we do?

And it can be overwhelming, but if, you know, if something we can do is resolve to not be a part of the oppression of people, to hold them down, and to hurt them, and so that our witness and our example is not one that looks good and is very pretty and Christian from the outside, but when they come into our inner circle, they realize that everything is a shame, and I'm not going to be a part of that problem. So this here journey, we are going to be a little bit woke, and that's okay. That's okay.

I promise you, it's okay. If you commit yourself to serious daily prayer, which is what we're calling daily prayer, with the intention of actually knowing, and meeting, and understanding God in that prayer time, a prayer that seeks the wisdom God has communing with the Holy Spirit, I would bet, but I cannot because I'm a Nazarene, but I would say confidently that you will become more aware of injustices faced by people in this world. I don't think that you can go to God and say, help me to see the world like you do, and not see the oppression of people, and how people can be loved and cared for more and more.

You will weep as Jesus wept. You'll be prophetic in how you view what has happened in the world. You will love like Jesus did, which will be overwhelming and heartbreaking at times, but you will love like Jesus loves, and you will call people to holiness, just like Jesus and the Holy Spirit does to us all the time, and that starts with prayer, that you're aligning your heart to be like the heart of Jesus. And so to remind you again, the two things we're supposed to be doing this year, the first thing is daily prayer, yes, and the second thing is good deeds. You can do both of those things separately. You can. You can pray. You can do good deeds, but I think if you start with prayer, you lean into it, prayer will change the deeds that you do, or at the very least, prayers will change how you interact and the good things that you are called to do as Christians, and we are called to do as this church in East Dallas.

And then further, your deeds that you do, if you are in prayer, will change the way that you pray in this world, and you will keep doing it over and over and over and over again, so please do not be complacent in this world, and wake up. I think, um, do you want me to come up and sing the song after you? Don't mind. I'm gonna offer a prayer first as he comes up here.

Um, yeah, let's pray. God, thank you for being present here in this community. Thank you for all of these people that are gathered here today in, um, in community, and to be encouraged by one another, and to learn, and to be open as a community to the movement of the Holy Spirit. As we, uh, sing this song, we process whatever the Holy Spirit has laid on their heart. Uh, we just do so with an overwhelming desire to be formed and shaped by the Holy Spirit, to look more Christ-like than when we walked into this place. Help us to be challenged. Help us to feel comfort and uncomfortability when it is needed.

Lord, most importantly, help us to just be, um, seeing the world, and feeling the world, and existing in the world as Jesus did when he walked amongst his people. We love you as Salvator Jesus Christ with the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.