Good morning, friends. Welcome. My name’s Alex. If you’re visiting, we’re really glad that you are visiting. We are in a series on the Book of Revelation, a book that we didn’t pick because it is famously complex. That’s actually the downside to going through the Book of Revelation. It’s a book we picked because it has a distinct message.

If you catching up to speed if you may be your first week Maybe you’ve missed a few of the last weeks. There’s this kind of rude idea The this book revelation provides the end and yet not to the end of the story. It’s the last word in scripture, but it, in itself, it describes another story yet to be written, this thing that is coming and will continue forever.

So there’s this kind of weird dichotomy to the book in that sense, but most importantly for us in this case, it centers around Jesus. In a world that is so divisive, in a world that, within this room, we have competing ends of the spectrum. In this room, we have people that vote Democrat. In this room we have people that vote Republican, and we don’t make them sit on opposite sides of the room.

In this room we have people that root for the Broncos. In this room we have pastors that don’t root for the Broncos. We have all of these different ways that we have a world that builds tension. And that ramps up at different points of the year, and especially of the four year cycle. The book of Revelation has this wonderful way of unifying around a specific subject, and that subject is Jesus himself.

And in a world in which it is now hard, perhaps harder than ever, to live as a follower of Jesus, it is Helps us to stay faithful even in hard times If you are someone who’s chosen to follow Jesus if you’re someone who was chosen to do this thing of dragging your kids perhaps out Of the house in the midst of them needing naps on a Sunday morning, then you are part of the counterculture You are part of the revolution And so in that case we need something that says to us when it gets hard when it gets complex stay faithful Keep following the way of Jesus.

And this invites us to look at the view from heaven to say, You know what? Maybe it looks different from there than it does on the ground. In the same way Dan can stand on a platform and say, There’s a different look from here. The view from heaven is different to the one on earth. There are things happening and God says, I know.

I have it covered. It’s all a part of the plan. And amongst that, in following Jesus, we have this kind of complex question to continue to ask. One that the church will look at today, Sardis had to ask for themselves. Bruce Metzger says this, Every generation of Christians must face the question, How far should I accept and adopt contemporary standards and practices?

What does it look like to live in the way of Jesus in the 21st century that may be different from the 1st century? We don’t require everyone here to wear 1st century clothing. We just simply don’t know where to buy it from. So how do we even do that? the standards that we allow to change, and then there’s things about the way of Jesus that are continual across multiple now millennia, and how we figure out those things, that is the work of conversation.

It’s a question that the Church of Sardis had to ask in their time, just as we have to ask it in our time. For this week, if you have scriptures in front of you, turn to Revelation chapter 3, we’re going to start in verse 1. To the angel at the church, of Sardis. These are the one, the words of the one who holds the seven spirits of God in his hand and the seven stars.

I know your deeds. You have a reputation for being alive, but you are dead. Wake up. Strengthen what remains and is about to die. For I find your deeds unfinished. Before my God. Remember, therefore, what you first received. and heard. Hold fast and repent. If you do not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you do not know the hour in which I will come.

I have some yet in Sardis who have not dirtied their robes. They will walk with me dressed in robes of white. The one who is faithful, like them, will join me dressed in robes of white. And I will never rub their knee out of my book of life. And I will acknowledge them before my God and before his angels.

Whoever has ears, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. These are the words of John. Jesus to the church in Sardis. So as we get to wrestle through this passage together, maybe we’ll just start with this simple question. Where and what was the town or city of Sardis? And maybe we’ll get to see does that have some kind of implications for how this group of first century followers of Jesus would have heard about Sardis.

this teaching, these strong words of Jesus. So let’s begin there. And to the angel of the church in Sardis, but first a word of prayer because this is complex, Jesus please give us wisdom. That I’ve prepared words, my heart hopes they’re your words. And yet, that there’s a difference between my head and my heart.

Sometimes the difference between my words and your words, would you help us to hear from you today? Perhaps there are people in the room that are new to all this. Perhaps they’re asking questions. Would you speak to them? Perhaps there are people here that are afflicted. Would you bring them comfort?

Perhaps there are some of us who might own to being comfortable. Would you afflict us and bring us to new life, awaken our souls as we just sang? Thank you, Jesus. Amen. If you’ve been tracking the last couple of weeks the letters in Revelation follow like this kind of shape. John is on this island of Patmos and he writes these letters to the churches that are nearest to him, the fifth of them being this place, Sardis.

Sardis is known for a few things. It has some fame for a few different reasons. First, it was one of the wealthiest of the churches in the first century, but it was also one like the one with some of the most interesting history. Sardis was built on a valley with a couple of mountains next to it. So this is the citadel like as it is now of Sardis.

It’s about 1, 500 feet up. So it had this big mountainous rock that they built the central parts of the city on the places of the law courts, the places of worship, the places of meeting, all of those up there. Up until about like 600 BC, it was doing. Fairly well, it was somewhat prosperous. And then a guy, talk guy turns up called CREs, this is not a picture of him, but a piece of art that kind of resembles him.

Creases turns up somewhere around 600 BC and he does a couple of interesting things. Fir first he discovers gold. And he instantly becomes, people say, the richest man alive. He suddenly takes on all of the significance. When I say he discovered gold, I suspect some hard working guy with a pickaxe and stuff discovered gold.

And he said, hey everyone, I’ve discovered gold. This is a great thing for our town. But especially for me, so much so big was his reputation that in French there is an idiom that says this, Riche comme Croesus, rich as Croesus. It is what it is to have incredible wealth, and in the way that it offers so many niche jokes, the Simpsons take their billionaire, Mr.

Burns, and he lives. At the crossroads of Mammon and Creaser Street, which is the nichest joke I’ve ever come across, ever. It’s just brilliant why I love the show. Coins were invented in Sardis. Coins were discovered there. Now for us, in the 21st century, we’re like, so they invented coins, That’s no big deal.

I don’t even like having coins in my pocket anymore, unless it’s a 5 note. I’m not really interested with inflation. But back in the 600 BC region, to invent coins was like a Silicon Valley type move. Nobody had done this before, to have specific metals for specific values, to require specific weights and specific amounts of purity.

This was a big deal and Sardis fame just grew and grew. So great was their fame at certain periods, that Croesus wrote a letter To the ruler of Ephesus and said get out of town make sure the city pays tribute to me Otherwise, I’m gonna bring my whole army and we’re gonna wipe you off the planet Ephesus was a big city in the time and the guy just left he just got up and said, okay fine I’ll go city’s yours Let’s be friends.

So this guy was a significant person in his day. Croesus was rich. Croesus was powerful. And then something happened. Around 540 BC, this guy turns up. I know he looks suspiciously like Croesus, but he’s not. He’s a different person. This is Cyrus the Great. Cyrus appears in all sorts of different places within scripture.

He’s actually like an antihero within the Old Testament because he’s really good to the Jewish people. sends them back to their lands, but he comes and with his Achaemenid Empire, he just comes and he starts war with Croesus and they have a battle and Cyrus’s army just cuts through Croesus’s army.

But for the people of Sardis, they’re like we’re okay. We’re going to retreat back to our citadel and everything’s going to be fine. We’ve got 1500 foot walls. Nobody’s ever taken this city. It’s, we’re good. We’re going to be fine. And so this army comes and they encamp around Sardis and they just sit there day after day.

waiting waiting and waiting. And then one day a soldier from Sardis, a Sardisian, I suppose a Sardisian, is standing on one of the walls and he drops his helmet. This is all real history. You can read this in Herodotus, one of the historians of the day. He drops his helmet down and From the city. He rolls down and he thinks I’ve got to go get it.

And so he comes down this hidden trail in this steep rock face, grabs his helmet and goes back up to the top of the citadel. The watching a ed army say the must be a trail up there. And so while the Ians are sleeping, they sneak their soldiers up the trail, sneak into the city and take over the hole.

Think the town is caught sleeping. Then about 200 years later, the same thing happens to them. Alexander the greats army is now the dominant power of its day. They turn up at Sardis and they are watching the city to see what’s going on. There’s a graveyard near to the city where they would throw out like old bones if people had died in combat and stuff like that, and the vultures would come down and eat.

What was left? Grisly, I know. The watching Greek soldiers saw that there were vultures just perched on the walls at a certain point. And they said, you know what, there’s no humans there. Vultures don’t just hang out where there’s humans walking around. Nobody’s manning that part of the wall. They snuck up took over the whole city, and for the second time, the city got caught sleeping.

Cities carry reputations, they carry stories, right? There’s parts to them that they travel all over the world. Maybe you have something like, just an epithet Denver is Mile High City, or Las Vegas is Sin City. Maybe there’s the story of Detroit, Michigan. This is the Packard plan, 3. 5 million square foot of automotive history now wiped out.

When you travel around the country, when you live in Detroit, people say City’s kind of dead, right? It’s a mess. It carries a reputation. And when you have other cities around you in competition, those stories are remembered particularly in those places. They carry a whole bunch of weight.

This is a picture of the walls of the city of York in England. In the 13th century, the English army was at war with the Scottish army. So they wrote a rule for the city of York. If a Scotsman comes within the walls, carrying a bow and arrow, you can kill him, no questions asked, no punishment. It’s fine.

But nobody remembered to write this rule out of history. And so in 2010. It was still legal to kill a Scotsman if he came within the city walls of York. This is how towns hold history year after year. Now, as we turn to Sardis in the first century and read the words of Jesus, see what parallels you can see.

And you’re like, duh, clearly they’re awesome. You wouldn’t have wasted like ten minutes telling a history if there was no reason to tell it. Track this. First one and two, I know your deeds, Sardis. You have a reputation for being alive, but you are dead. Sardis had this hill that I talked about, the Acropolis, and then across the other side of the valley there was a necropolis, a cemetery, a place of the dead.

It’s as if Jesus stood in between the two and said, Sardis, you have a reputation for this. The fame of your city, although it’s in the past, is still significant. But really, you are dead. You remind me of this, the graveyard. It’s as if Jesus stood in Denver between Ball Arena and Cause Field and said, people think of you like this, the Denver Nuggets, but actually you’re this, the Colorado Rockies.

Sorry, I couldn’t help myself. You have a reputation of being alive but you are dead, wake up to a city that was caught sleeping twice. Jesus words are wake up, you are asleep. Now this becomes more clear when we start to understand some of the New Testament’s complicated relationships.

between sleep and death. Because there’s times when the New Testament says dead, and it means sleep. And there’s times when the New Testament says sleep, and it means dead. Here’s a couple of quick examples. This is John 11, the story of Lazarus, who was risen beautifully from Jesus from the dead. Jesus has been told that Lazarus is sick, and he’s going to travel to visit him.

He leaves it a couple of days and when he sets off, he says to his disciples, Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep. But I am going there to wake him up. His disciples replied, Lord, if he sleeps, he will get better. Jesus had been speaking of his death, but his disciples thought he meant natural sleep. So then he told them plainly, Lazarus is dead.

Do you see that kind of juxtaposition there? There’s times where it says sleep, when it actually means death, times when it says death, when it actually means sleep. In 1 Corinthians 11, Paul is warning about the seriousness of the Eucharist, of the communion table, and he gives them a warning, a number of you, because you’ve taken this lightly, have fallen asleep.

In this case, he means dead. If you want to look at the opposite side of this word play in Ephesians 5, we read these words. For this reason, it says, awake sleeper, And what rise from the dead? Is this person dead or asleep? And your answer might be both, right? He’s talking about maybe one naturally and one spiritually, or maybe both spiritually.

There’s this complicated back and forth that goes on and on, and this is particularly pertinent when we talk about Sardis. He says you have a reputation for being alive, but you’re really dead. He doesn’t mean physically dead. There’s a spiritual element in play and so his strong word to them is wake up, come back from this kind of spiritual death, come back from this kind of slowness of being, come awaken yourselves to what God is doing.

As we push on into verse 2 we see the problem with this kind of way of living spiritually. Strengthen what remains, he says, and is about to die. Something that they’re about to lose and because of their state. Their deeds, the works, the way of being Jesus in the world to the people around them, there’s something about it that is unfinished.

He says to a town that was caught sleeping. You are living through almost a spiritual like sleep. You’re not living the way of Jesus as called to. There’s an indifference in you. There’s a way that the time is just passing by you and you’re almost, unaware of what’s happening. It’s like you’re walking through syrup in some way and it’s snap out of it, friends.

Wake up. Because your deeds, they’re not finished. There’s more to be done. You’re missing it. And then catch this for a town, again, that was caught sleeping. Verse three, 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 to a town that had a whole bunch of shoulder soldiers sneak in.

Because they were asleep. He says, now, church, wake up. Churches have a way of mirroring in some way the towns and cities that they are in. As you travel around, ways that a church operates a certain way in a certain town that would never work or never fly in a different place. While we aren’t of this world, there are ways that the different locales mimic that different culture.

See it all over the world. If you put a church like South in the middle of the Philippines, it wouldn’t work in the same way it might here. But sometimes, churches take on the negative aspects of that culture. And somewhere, we are called to be the dissonance. We’re not called to be the same voice as the culture around us.

When we look at this passage here, we see some of Jesus words from his own teaching jump out the page to us. In Matthew 25, we read this parable. At that time, the kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins, or bridesmaids, who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish, and five were wise.

The foolish ones took their lamps, but did not take any oil with them. The wise ones, however, took oil in jars, along with their lamps. The bridegroom was a long time in coming, and they all became drowsy, and fell asleep, and when unpacked at the end of the story, Jesus says this in verse 12, Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day, or the night.

or the hour. For the people of Sardis, they would hear this warning as from Jesus own lips. There’s a wake up call. That term, wake up call, comes from the hotel industry. It comes from that idea that someone would be staying in a hotel and request the hotel to wake them up at a specific time, but now it’s become idiomatic of this kind of this alert, this moment of revelation where you start to take notice of something.

Maybe it’s an experience you have when you notice you haven’t taken care of your health. Maybe an experience you have when you notice that you’re not taking care of your diet. Maybe an experience that you have when you notice that there’s something going on with your family and you’ve slept on that.

All sorts of ways that hits our idiomatic language. Here the term wake up call speaks to the spiritual state of this town. For those of you that were born after 1995 ish, I’m going to introduce you to something. This is an alarm clock. Back in the day For us older types when we didn’t have iPhones that changed automatically with the date where we didn’t have these little things that could wake Us up.

This was the dissonant note that wake you up. It’s shrill and it’s loud It means to draw you out now the new invention of the alarm clock is one called clucky who jumps up and runs off and hides in dark places of The room and makes you get out of bed. It draws you out. It gives you no kind of Somewhere, this message to these people is an alarm clock to a church that is sleeping.

The flow, perhaps, of this passage we might describe as this. Jesus says, you are asleep. Somewhere, the implied message is, your sleep means things are undone, and you are not watching. You are not prepared. So here’s the question, after reading this for a first century audience, What actually does this mean for us?

Because here’s the challenge with reading scripture like this. It might be that I, in my spiritual state, am what might be called asleep. It might be true that you, too, might be asleep, or this church is sleeping, or the cultural Christianity of this world is asleep, but it might be for completely different reasons than it was for Sardis.

For Sardis, it feels like somewhat their old, some of their old significance caused them to sleep. Some of their wealth caused them to sleep. It seems like the Christians in Sardis had no problem with other religious groups where almost every other church in Revelation does. But it might be that the things that caused us to sleep spiritually are very different in nature.

What is it that you and I struggle with that we might say this causes me to sleep? And I want to give you an idea that may be very pertinent to some of you as it was for me. and less pertinent to others of you. It’s an idea that I suggested to one of our staff members and they said something like this, I don’t want you to talk about that, but I think you should talk about that.

And so here it is. These are the words of Anne Lembecky. She is a sociologist at Stanford. She works with addiction. She says this of our modern culture, our brains are not evolved for this world of plenty. We’ve transformed the world from a place of scarcity, To a place of overwhelming abundance, drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, texting, sexting, and tweeting.

The increased numbers, variety, and potency of highly rewarding stimuli today. is staggering. And you can maybe start to feel where she might be going when I show you the next line in her work. The smartphone is the modern day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24 seven for a wired generation.

As we start to look at the way we are asked to live today, or perhaps you might say the way we would choose to live today, we start to see ways in which there are all sorts of bombardments of tiny little details that grab our attention. If you have started to feel that kind of never ending urge, that weird sensation of longing to be on your own in a room looking downwards, then you know of what I speak.

There is something different in play. Dr. Tom Finucane says this. We are like cacti in the rainforest. And cacti adopted, adapted to an arid climate, we are drowning in dopamine. There is so much going on in our world that we find it hard to operate in a way that would be familiar to anyone of even 30, 40, 50 years ago.

And even if you experienced that time, as I caught the end of, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect you. Now, I grew up with the idea that technology was tethered. And now I’m familiar with the idea that I am the one to which technology is tethered. I grew up watching movies like The Matrix and yet find myself completely unprepared to live in a digital age which takes so much from me.

J. Kim says this, We are all self centric to a degree, but the digital age has accelerated our journey down a dead end path. Before the smartphone, most of our hours were spent engaging the world around us. tenuously navigating our connection to real people, places, and things in real time. But in the age of the smartphone, At even the slightest hint of discomfort, awkwardness, or boredom, we shift our focus downwards and inwards, away from the world and towards the screen.

I caught this problem early when I bought the first iPhone that ever came out. At the time I was walking through the streets. I’m working on a golf course. I had music playing in my ear and I suddenly noticed the music had stopped. I reached for my pocket and there was no phone there. I turned around, I was on a big industrial mower with those five kind of things that come out.

And I turned around to see the glass, the grass littered with all sorts of little pieces of metal. For the next day, I walked around slapping my thigh at different moments, trying to figure out where this thing that had become such a significant part of my life was, and yet, hated the fact that it wasn’t present.

The sociologist, Carol Korinsky, has done a bunch of artwork that depicts some of our way of sleeping through the technological age. See if you find some of these profound for your condition. So one talks about the sterilization of parenting, our desire to protect our children from everything, but yet are willing to throw technology at them from the earliest age.

This one’s a little darker, right?

And this one’s a little lighter. It reminds us how easily we are controlled by the thing that’s so easily within our grasp. Recent studies say this, the average iPhone owner opens their phone or unlocks it 80 times per day. It is a constant impact on our life, it goes tick, tick, tick, and as the days go past the iPhone impacts us more and more.

J. Kim again says this, Rather than building community, we’ve been torn down to a collection of lonely individuals. Our screens, surprisingly, are not open doors, but mirrors turning us away from others and towards ourselves. We linger alone and afraid, behind a curtain of seemingly mundane and ordinary lives, while listening to the party, always an unreachable distance away.

How can we escape from the despair, from despair’s choke hold? on us. Perhaps this resonates with you, perhaps it doesn’t, but as I started to look at ways where I sleep through what is going on around me, ways that I long to detach into a different world, this was the most obvious one. And in a moment what I hope you see is ways in which this may actually make it noticeably harder for you to live the way of Jesus in the world around you.

In his 2004 movie Michael Mann, Tom Cruise plays an assassin who travels around the world with his job to kill a few people. He takes a taxi driver in New York, played by Jamie Foxx, who drives him for a significant portion of the movie as they dialogue back and forth. At one point, Jamie Foxx asks him a difficult question.

He says this, Why haven’t you killed me yet? And then Tom Cruise starts to unpack some of what he’s heard. Jamie Foxx, eh? Some of his dreams for the future, some of the ways in which he’s going to leave his taxi job and he’s going to start a high end limousine company. And then he starts to pick holes in all of the reasons that he could quite easily have done what he says he dreams to do already, but he hasn’t yet done it.

And finally he ends with these terrifying words. He says to Jamie Foxx, there’s no point. killing you. You’re already dead. You’re going to wake up one day and realize that you’re 90. There’s this way it seems that we can sleep through life, give everything a pass, and yet I would look at the iPhone as a predominant reason for that.

You might ask, why does this matter? We have a life to live, why not spend it in this way? And yet, even for those of you who might say you’re not sure about following Jesus, we can see the harm that this way of living causes. These are the words of the DJ Avicii, who wrote this song about 10, 15 years ago.

Life will pass me by if I don’t open up my eyes. That’s fine by me. So wake me up when it’s all over. When I’m wiser and I’m older. All this time I was finding myself I didn’t know. Wake me up when it’s all over?

That’s just fine by me. These don’t seem like words of a person who’s really living life in a healthy way. Avicii sadly committed suicide just maybe five, six years ago. There was something going on with him that was broken, and we see that all the time now as we work with teenagers in this age.

More and more addiction, more and more discomfort, more and more uncertainty as to how to live in the world, more and more suicidal. Even outside of following Jesus, it seems that we’re choosing to live in broken ways. But, for a follower of Jesus, it seems that our attachment and our addiction to dopamine actually causes us to live in ways that might be classed as distinctly unloving.

In some of her research, Anne Lembke says this, Experiments show that a free rat will instinctively work to free another rat trapped inside a plastic bottle. But once that free rat has been allowed to self administer heroin, it is no longer interested in helping out the caged rat. Presumably too caught up in an opioid haze to care about a fellow member.

of its species. This was the moment that this kind of jumped off the page to me and caught me as an application for this week. If you have experienced that moment of feeling called to help a particular person, to be involved in a particular life, and yet you’ve had this urge just to retreat downwards and inwards to go back to the life and world of screens and technology, then somewhere.

That addiction is stopping people like you and I living the way of Jesus. Love, we’re told, is the family likeness. Love, we’re told, is the family language. And yet, if I’m honest on my own life, I’ve noticed that patterns of addiction in terms of dopamine and technology make me less loving to those around me.

More caught up in a desire to live selfishly in this world. So a question. Accepting, perhaps, That like the Christians in Sardis, we are wrestling with what it is to leave things undone. That we are wrestling with a propensity to sleep through what is going on around us. That we might at times describe ourselves as something like comatose, if not dead.

And accepting that maybe one of the ways in which this happens to us in this world is an addiction to screens, technology, dopamine. My final question is, what should we do? Is it just as simple as on the drive home take a journey past Chatfield and just let the thing go? Is that the way? Is that the way forward?

I don’t know if it is. I think there’s other broader benefits of technology that I haven’t even had a time to get into. And yet there are a couple of options. And in most of the time, I find that when we’re trying to step into the way of Jesus, there’s maybe something to do, or something to not do, sorry, and then another thing to do, there’s a like a fast type practice, something to stop.

And then there’s a doing practice, something to try, perhaps, for the first time. In this case, what might those be? First, I tried a couple of things that were really helpful on the practical level. You can turn an iPhone to just grey. And it’s incredible how less interesting it is when it’s grey.

You can go into your settings, you can turn it to grey style, and I pick it up a lot less, just on a practical level. There’s apps called things like Dummyfy, where you can actually turn this into your home screen, and there’s not all these different things to just autopilot onto. There’s all these sorts of ways that we can maybe restrict technology for ourselves.

These are the words of Immanuel Kant. When we realize that we are capable of this inner legislation, this inner control, the natural man feels himself compelled to reverence for the moral man in his own person. There’s something that happens when we actually practice saying no to something. It’s maybe his way of saying what Paul the Apostle said here.

I have the right to do anything, you say, but not everything is beneficial. I have the right to do anything, but I will not be mastered by anything. There’s ways that we can choose to say no to the mastery that technology would have over us. But there may be another way is this. To try something new. To do something different.

Maybe there’s a role to step in, a way to serve the church or the world around you in ways that are stretching, ways that no longer allow you to be as introspective. I don’t know if you’ve noticed like I have, but stepping into something new requires a focus that isn’t always present. When we’re doing something we’ve done for a long time.

A story that I’m often reminded of when I talk about this is skiing with my sister there. This is me as I was then with the hair in the middle and that’s my sister in the pink next to me. We went out skiing together with a group, including my other brother over there in the blue and white. And we skied in 2006, I think it was and my sister learned for the first time.

So I got to help her kind of potter around. the mountain. And then we went back another time and I got to help her again as she slowly struggled with learning to ski. She was, if I’m honest, a decidedly average skier. And then we went the third year and we invited my youngest sister with us. I gave her some pointers, but if I’m honest, I wanted to go and ski the fun stuff.

And so I left my sister Rosie in the pink with my other sister to do the greens, to potter around for a while. And when I came back and Rosie and I skied together, I had this moment where I looked at her and said, what has happened to you? She had turned into an incredible skier, seemingly over the short week that we had together.

The only reason I could give it is this. For once, she was actually not thinking about what she was doing. Her focus was on somebody else and what they needed. Sometimes in life, we need something to draw us out of ourselves, to commit to loving the person around us, to commit to their transformation, their discipleship, their change.

Perhaps a question you might ask is, what is new? What is new for me to do? What is new for me to do? We have loads of options here. You can go on our website. You can click on Serve at South. You can follow the links there. And then there’s all sorts of wonderful organizations in our area that might say the same thing.

This need for those that are no longer addicted to self medication. No longer like the rat we talked about who can medicate and leave everyone else to be themselves. But are those committed to what is going on around them. Living the family language. Of love, living the family likeness of love. That’s why Peter says at the end of his letter, Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.

For a moment, as the team get prepared to lead us, we’re going to reprise that song that we sang at the end, Awake My Soul. My encouragement to you is to ask hard questions about the way that you are living right now. Does it represent? Life or death. Awake or sleep. Which is it? The strong word of Jesus is to awake.

His beautiful promise is that those that do will join him dressed in white. That he’ll acknowledge you before his father. That to me is one of the most beautiful promises in scripture. That one day I get to stand face to face with the God who loved me, who died for me. And he will say of me, you are mine.

He says it now, but to hear it face to face, imagine that. If you find yourself drifting in and out of consciousness, drifting in and out of attachment to this world, finding yourself too easily medicating through technology, then here’s a meditation that may be helpful. Rebecca Harding Davis says this, We are all of us from birth to death.

Guests at a table which we did not spread. The sun, the earth, love, friends, our very breath are parts of the banquet. Shall we think of the day as a chance to come nearer to our host and to find out something of him who has fed us so long. You are invited deeper into relationship with this Jesus. Don’t let anything get in the way.

Jesus, as we ask questions of ourselves, Awaken our souls to you. It’s a beautiful first word for what it is to come to know you. Awaken to God is the invite. For those of us that find ourselves dazed by all this world offers, by every invite, every hit of dopamine that we receive. Help us to learn what it is to deny.

Help us to learn what it is to love.

Amen.