Now, let me encourage you to turn in your Bibles, Revelation chapter 3, verses 1 to 6.

700 years before this letter was sent by our Lord Jesus Christ to the church in Sardis,

the resurrected glorified Jesus sending that church, 700 years before he did,

Sardos was one of the great cities of the world,

actually. The wealth of Sardis was legendary. Their reputation and their wealth and their power was all over the world, was renowned. But then two centuries later, that's the fifth

century, if you're counting, history repeats itself. It's amazing. It's amazing. The Persians from

modern day Iran came and invaded Sardos, invaded that city.

And after two centuries of being battered and battered by the Persians,

Sardos was surrounded by Alexander the Great until they surrendered to him,

and Alexander the Great rebuilt it as a Greek city.

Then history repeats itself, as I said, after the death of Alexandria the Great, it was defeated once more until it was taken over by the Romans. You said, Michael,

why are you giving us this little history lesson? There's a reason for that. Just listen carefully.

Because what our Lord Jesus does,

we've been seeing this throughout the letters. He sees and he takes a cultural phenomena or a culture

characteristic of the city. And then he warns the church, his church. It is, after all, Jesus' church.

He warns his church against adopting these cultural characteristics. And he's doing the same

thing here. He warns the Christian believers in Sardis of the pitfall of adopting

those cultural characteristics of Sardis, the culture. What was Sardis cultural characteristic?

Well, it was they had the reputation of being lazy. Lazy. The people of

Sardos were known for relying on their past blessed reputation and wealth, and often they

fail to protect their city.

As soon as a foreign attack has come, they surrendered.

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