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When We Forget

 “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 that 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. (Revelation 3:1-6)

 

Things were bad enough at Sardis that Jesus couldn’t say anything more positive about them than that there a few people who were something approximating right. It can’t get much tougher than this, though one church seemed to have decided to say, “Hold my coffee” about that. (We’ll get to them soon.)

There seem to be two pieces of good news to remember in this letter. The first is that if everyone else is jumping off a bridge, and you don’t, Jesus will notice and approve. The second is that there are things you can do. You can wake up. You can repent. You can strengthen what has become weak. You can resume what you failed to complete and see it through to completion.

You may have screwed up when the going got good, or when the going got tough. You may have shown yourself to not be tough, but you can exercise and get stronger. There are only two people who can make you fail – really fail: God and you. Others may get in the way, cause setbacks, send you off on detours, but God and you can prevent you from succeeding.

When the going gets tough, therefore, it’s time to examine our lives and hearts, and see if we have forgotten, or having learned, or haven’t tried. It’s time to pray about the direction we’re trying to go, to see if we are forgetting something, are leaving something unfinished, are weak, or have  forgotten something. And when we discover that we’re doing something wrong, we need to learn from it.

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