They onlytingle when life is coming back to them. One can fancy them saying-We dead! Do not we stand high among our brethren, have we not this and the other Christian work among us? Have we not prophesied in Thy name?' Yes, and the surest sign of spiritual death is unconsciousness. And they themselves, no doubt, would be very much astonished at the sledge-hammer blow of this judgment of their state. These people in Sardis had a name to live.' They had a high reputation among the Asiatic churches for vigorous Christian character. This death was unseen but by the flame-eyed Christ. How much of your Christian activity is the manifestation of life, and how much of it is the ghastly twitchings of a corpse under galvanism? Institutions last after the life is out of them, for use and wont keeps up a routine of action, though the true motive is dead, and men may go on for long, nominal adherents of a cause to which they are bound by no living conviction. A train will run for some distance after the steam has been shut off. So churches and individual Christians may keep on performing Christian work for a time after the true impulse that should produce it has ceased. In some animals of low organisation you may see muscular movements after life is extinct. Some works still survived, though not perfect,' shrunken and sickly like the blanched shoots of a plant feebly growing in a dark cellar. They were at the point of death, moribund, with much of their spiritual life extinct, but here and there a spark among the ashes, which His eye saw, and His breath could fan into a flame.
Their Christianity was dying out.īut this death was not entire, as is seen from the fact that in the next verse ready to die' is the expression applied to some among them, or perhaps to some lingering works which still survived. Their lives had no radiant beauty of self-sacrifice for Christ's sake. Their thoughts had no clear apprehension of Him or of His love. Their hearts beat with no vigorous love to Him, but only feebly throbbed with a pulsation which even His hand laid on their bosoms could scarcely detect. People and bishop had lost their hold on Him. Into this condition the church in Sardis had fallen. Death is the condition of those who are separated from Him, and not receiving from Him the better life into their spirits by communion and faith. But let us remember how, when on earth, the Lord, whose deep words on that matter we owe mainly to John, taught that all men were either living, because they had been made alive by Him, or dead-how He said, Except ye eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of man, ye have no life in you,' and how one of the main ideas of John's whole teaching is, He that hath the Son hath life.' This remembrance will help us to give the words their true meaning. We are not to take that word dead' in the fullest sense of which it is capable, as we shall see presently. It is all summed up in that judgment, pronounced by Him who knows its works': Thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead.' No works either good or bad are enumerated, though there were some, which He gathers together in one condemnation, as not perfect before God.' 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 the 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. "These things saith He that hath the seven Spirits of God, and the seven stars.'- Rev.