Getting Back on Track: Courageous Challenges to Contemporary Christians
Part One: Getting Back to the Exalted Christ
A Sermon by Thomas Boone, PhD
Delivered at Central Presbyterian Church, July 8, 2007

It didn’t take me long to learn that around here there are three basic questions to ask someone if you’re meeting him for the first time. First, where are you from? Second, who’s your family? And, third, where do you go to church?

In these parts religion is every bit as much of our identity and culture as our heritage and hometown. For example, I’ve lived in the north, west, and east, and the only place where Wednesday is nearly as sacred as Sunday is in the south. Another example is that church and conversation go hand in hand here. We’ve grown up accustomed to being open about our church life, so that for many of us another person’s faith is an expectation rather than an experience that changed our lives.

Of course things have changed around here with some churches. These days we’ve gone way beyond the traditional Lutheran, Episcopalian, Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist churches. We’ve got all sorts of non-denominational churches, and churches with names longer than my dissertation title. There are church buildings the size of Disney World, and churches that offer music that you’d hear on a CD rather than actually feel like you can sing as a hymn. Some churches have gyms, others have bowling alleys and pools. Tradition, programs, and entertainment have become the ways people tend to evaluate churches. Fine things, in and of themselves, but I wonder sometimes if we’ve lost sight of what our faith is really all about.

I had a conversation one time with a pastor who was very proud of his church. The church was a mid-sized church that was very active in social justice. He had two services going and small groups. The church was growing in the number of children’s programs that were being offered and he was proud of the music. But, here’s the sad thing. Not once in our 15 minute conversation did he mention Jesus. Of all things he should be proud of in the church, people coming closer to Jesus Christ was not on the list.

Where does Jesus fit into your experience of faith? The Bible’s clear that the core part of our faith is Jesus Christ, and we’re either on track toward Him Christ or we’re off track heading away from Him. All the things we do as Christians are secondary to our relationship with Jesus Christ as our Lord, but it’s so easy to get off track.

If you were to dig into the New Testament, you’d see that things haven’t changed much. In Philippians, Paul’s teaching a group of Christians to stop using the church as a way to get ahead in society. In Galatians, Paul’s pleading with believers to focus on the gospel’s voice rather than getting sidetracked by persuasive and charismatic teachers who lead them astray. In Corinthians, Paul’s concerned about disunity in the church and tries to correct their practices that had gone astray without good leadership. Sound familiar to anyone?

In Revelation, we have more of the same. John, who was a Christian prophet and not the author of the Gospel, was concerned about the overall health of the church in a particular region. They needed get back to the basics of Christian faith in times of duress, that’s really what this book is all about. He tells them it’s important for Christians to remain faithful to God even when it’s tempting to stray from Him. It’s important to trust that God is sovereign even when it’s hard to see Him. John reminds Christians that it’s crucial to keep focused on the victory that Jesus has already achieved even though evil is not fully wiped off the map yet. He tells people that whatever tribulation we’re going through has a purpose, which is to bring us closer to the Lord.

John writes these churches in order to get them back on track. While he wants to assure them of their future, he’s acutely interested in their current condition, which he finds in need of repair. He reminds them that being a Christian isn’t just about having the eternal-life ticket. It’s about leading a life of character and faithfulness while we’re alive. This is the message to the seven churches that, as John writes it, comes directly from the voice of the exalted Jesus Christ saying to them, “You’ve gone off track, it’s time get back on it.” It takes more than believing in Jesus to be a good disciple of Christ, and John’s letters to the seven churches challenge us deeply about this. It’s a courageous challenge to Christians of all times and places.

But before the challenge, John begins with the assurance of our faith: that Jesus Christ is the Exalted One. And he begins with an admission that the vision of Christ as He really is knocked him flat. It blew him away. Jesus shattered John’s image. Each of us likes to think about Jesus in a certain way that we find appealing. If you were to have a box in front of you in which you would place words to describe Jesus I wonder what your box would contain? Each of us is religious, and most of us have gone through Sunday School so we know some of the churchy things to put in there. Others of us will think about Matthew 25 and put descriptions of Jesus as the poor among us, or the prisoners, sick, and broken of society. Think about your box and what words you’d have in it.

I’m sure Paul had a box, and so did John. They were religious men whose boxes were completely shattered by their visions of who Jesus is. Paul ended up blind, John ended up as though dead. Before Paul saw the exalted Jesus he was a man steadfast after God’s law and rigorously adhering to the Jewish faith. He was a man of God, but when Jesus shattered his box he was compelled to bring other people closer to Jesus. We don’t know about John before his life on Patmos. But we do know that it wasn’t until his vision of the exalted Christ that he was compelled to write these churches and plead with them to get back on track with Jesus. Something happened to their core spiritual selves when Paul and John encountered the exalted Christ. I suppose the question for each of us is this: Has Jesus shattered your box yet?

I recall one youth that came to the Lord when I was an intern in Canada. He started out thinking that Jesus was just a figment of everyone’s imagination, but something happened in his life that convinced him that Jesus was the reality of all realities to use his words. It didn’t matter what he was like before, all that mattered to him was that Jesus was real and it transformed his heart.

I was a youth director for a very small church when I was in seminary and there was one teenager whose last name was Gillchrist. He didn’t come to the church youth group, but his name was a subject of many jokes so he had a natural distaste for Jesus and the church. I worked with this guy for months trying to break into his shell, and finally it happened. He didn’t have a radical conversion, but one day he showed up at Bible Study and he just wanted to know more about Jesus. The other youth took over from that point and after I had left the church to do something else in my internship he wrote me a letter that thanked me for putting up with his jokes against Jesus. He wanted me to know that he had become a Christian because he figured if it was good enough for Paul, who tried to kill Christians, it had to be good enough for him, who only made fun of them.

In the gospels we get a picture of Jesus as the man who obeys God perfectly, helps those in need, performs miracles, and teaches amazing life-changing things. What we’re missing though is that He’s the exalted Lord of the Universe, and evidently the very sight of Him is enough to knock us down as though dead, or blind us for days. The language that describes Jesus in Revelation 1 is the same language that is used to describe Almighty God. Think about that. This isn’t a Jesus to be taken lightly. This is a Jesus who’ll challenge you from the inside out, and when Jesus says get back on track, we need to do just that. When Jesus says jump, jump.

Getting back on track is going to be the theme for this next sermon series. But, it begins with a vision of Christ as the Exalted and Almighty Lord over all things. What we will hear in this series are not words from a friend, but words from God Himself. We may think that we are fine just as we are because we come to church, but the Exalted Lord is about to put that myth to rest. We may think that its okay to accept a worldly way of living for ourselves lest people think we’re too radical or fundamentalist. The Jesus who has conquered death and who could destroy us if He so willed is about to explain to us that if we get into bed with the world we’ve got to get on our knees in repentance and get pure.

Max Lucado wrote a wonderful chapter in one of his books in which he said each of us needs a little bit of hangin’. We all need to hear from time to time that things aren’t quite right in our lives, and we all need to be challenged to move on up to the next level. We serve an exalted Lord who demands from us our best, and until we give Him our best He’s going to have things to say that will challenge us rather than soothe us. But that’s not altogether a bad thing. It’s okay to hear from time to time that we’re not on the right track because Jesus, as Exalted Lord, stands beside us and knows that we can do it with Him by our side.

There will be things you hear in this series that strike you to the core, but remember that your Exalted Lord will sustain you just as he lifted John back up in our passage today. There will be things you hear within these letters that’ll make you feel like God is talking right at you. If so, listen and don’t fight the Spirit. As the Exalted Lord, Jesus wants you to live with him forever. Jesus, who is Almighty God, wants to transform you at your core. My question to you is, are you willing to let Him do this? As we take communion today, this is what we ponder. Jesus gave his life up for us that we may live. That is done. What has yet to happen is the complete transformation of our hearts into His image. Let us walk this journey together knowing that His grace will never let us fall even if we falter. Hallelujah. Amen.