Let us think of the condition of the church which especially needs this vision. To such a church comes flaming in upon its stolid indifference this solemn and yet glad vision of the Lord of the ‘seven Spirits of God,’ and of ‘the seven stars.’ Why should the world trouble itself about a dead church? It exactly answers the world’s purpose, and is really only a bit of the world under another name. But Sardis had not life enough to be obnoxious. Faithful Smyrna had tribulation unto death, hanging like a thundercloud overhead, and Philadelphia, beloved of the Lord, was drawing near its hour of trial. It was not flagrantly corrupt, it was only - dead. Philadelphia had none, for it kept close to its Lord, and Sardis is rebuked for none, because its evil was deeper and sadder. The gross corruptions of some in Pergamum had no parallel there. Better the heresies of Ephesus and Thyatira than the acquiescent deadness of Sardis. There may be a lower depth than the condition of things when people are all thinking, and some of them thinking wrongly, about Christian truth. Neither weeds nor flowers grow in winter. It had not life enough to produce even such morbid secretions. The church in Sardis, to which Christ is presented under this aspect as the possessor of ‘the seven Spirits of God and the seven stars,’ had no heresies needing correction. The correspondence can usually be observed without difficulty, and in this case is very obvious. The titles by which our Lord speaks of Himself in the letters to the seven churches are chosen to correspond with the spiritual condition of the community addressed. And unto the angel of the church in Sardis write These things saith he that hath the seven Spirits of God, and the seven stars I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead.Revelation
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