NEW BEGINNINGS & HOW TO GET STARTED FOLLOWING CHRIST AFTER SLIDING AWAY FROM HIM

BEWARE OF—Overconfident Watchlessness
Many of the seven letters from Christ mention local events that those who lived in that city and attended that fellowship would understand. Here in Sardis, it is the “watchfulness” allusion that rings in their minds. They all knew that twice their city fell to the invading armies of enemies because the soldiers who guarded them had slept on the job.

Sardis was built upon a thousandfoothigh cliff overlooking a fertile valley. This mountaintop location provided such an apparently unscalable wall of protection in the natural rock formations that it seemed impregnable to any attack other than through the heavily fortified entrance gates.

Yet Sardis was captured twice in history before this letter from Jesus arrived, and all the inhabitants knew why. Both Cyrus the Persian (in 549 BC) and Antiochus the Greek (in 218 BC), were able to take the city almost without a fight: both times because of its slackness.

Each time Sardis fell, enemy troops watched the guards on the cliff top, saw the hidden paths they used to get down to the valley, and used those same paths to creep up at night and take the city. In each conquest, when the troops scaled the precipice by night, they found that the overconfident inhabitants of Sardis had either set no guard or were sleeping in the guardhouse.

Sleeping on the job was a physical sign of overconfidence for any soldier tasked with guard duty.

Sleeping spiritually, by not guarding against the wiles of the Devil, is a sign of overconfidence for any believer. Jesus was warning them:

Beware of
Overconfidence

There was a clear parallel that the believers in Sardis would have caught and that all of us in the following generations of Christ’s church should heed. Thus, we have the key that unlocks the meaning of Christ's words for Sardis.

Jesus points directly at their need for watchfulness and ours. Jesus often used this metaphor of watching, staying awake, and sleeping in His teaching. He used it in several parables, contrasting the good and bad servants. Here are some of Christ’s key lessons in the Gospels:

Christ’s Lesson 1: Believers are to stay vigilant so that nothing keeps them from living for Christ's coming.

(CLW21; 110918AM)

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