3 implications of Revelation 3:2

Wake up! Strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have found your deeds unfinished in the sight of my God.

1. We need to have a rich biblical understanding of a ‘dying church’. Because it’s not obvious. The church in Sardis didn’t look like a dying church. But it was spiritually comatose and on the verge of flat-lining. Jesus’ diagnoses of the churches in Revelation 2-3 challenge our definition of a ‘strong church’. Jesus says you can have good doctrine and good attendance and a good bank balance and be a weak church but you can be a small, suffering fellowship and be strong.
2. We need to have a rich biblical understanding of church death. As with so many things it is complex, there are lots of factors involved (planning, demographics, Satan…) but it may be that the Lord Jesus is actively removing the lampstand in judgment or passively allowing a spiritually atrophying church to wither away. At the very least we need to face up to the fact that churches do die. Very few churches keep going well for hundreds of years. New churches are always going to be needed.
3. We need a rich biblical understanding of church revitalisation. Strikingly Jesus doesn’t give up on Ephesus and Sardis and Laodicea. He gives them strong warnings and huge gracious promises. He calls these apparently-strong-but-actually-dying churches to live again. Again it is complex but this revitalisation is not first-and-foremost about injections of cash or strategy or marketing. It’s about heart-rending repentance and awe-struck gospel-remembering, and urgent returning to our first love, looking to Christ and his imminent coming.