This is Living Waters of Grace, the teaching ministry of Clark
Wofford, senior pastor of Calvary Chapel of Westmoreland,
County of Greensburg, PA. Now here's Pastor Clark as he
continues teaching through God's Word.
There's always this group of people, thank God, since the
beginning of time, throughout the Old Testament, when Israel
rank and file were turning their backs toward God, there was a
remnant, always right, that moved toward God, that the Lord
could work through, that he could be glorified in the midst
of. And in this church, Sardis, in
the midst of its struggle and floundering, there was people in
the church that had an intensity regardless of what anybody else
was doing or thinking or feeling.
The faithful remnant has always been present among God's people.
Whether we look at Israel and the Old Testament with their
many rebellions and wars, or at the more recent church history
of the Middle Ages, we see there has been strife and dissension
within the people of God. Notably, though, there has
always been a section of those who remained faithful and
obedient. Noah, Joseph, David.
Each of these are an example of someone who continued to follow
the Lord even when it wasn't popular.
Now here's Pastor Clark in Revelation Chapter 3 with
today's edition of Living Waters of Grace.
This church failed to keep adequate watch in their own
spiritual community. The sin of the church was
encroaching upon the glory of God.
The importance of the church always being in repentance.
You guys might get tired of me talking about repentance.
When I stopped talking about repentance, that's when you need
to start start worrying. The message of repentance is
continual. Day in and day out.
I'm either moving and pushing and rushing toward God, right?
I'm moving and rushing away from God.
There's only two places you or I are heading in.
We're either pressing into God or we're moving away from God.
When we're moving away from God, that's when we need to repent
and we repent, we turn back to God and we're moving in the
right direction. And so the importance of
repentance and the Lord is very specific.
And the majority of these seven churches, the message to the
majority of them is this message of repentance.
If we don't individually and corporately as a church live in
repentance, the power of God will be non existent in this
church, starting with me and the elders.
If I allow hardness in my heart, or backsliding, or bitterness,
or unbelief or immoral thoughts or double mindedness to capture
my attention, the church will become weak.
If you come to the church with less than a passion for the
Lordship of Jesus Christ in your life, you will be weak.
Your family will be weak. The church will be weak.
It's a body of Christ, right? All of us together, we all
either inspire each other to press in deeper to God, or we
inspire each other to move away from God.
And so the Lord is clearly speaking what needs to be
occurring in this church now. It was a difficult city to live
in because of the intensity of the immorality, just like it is
for us today in our world. It's getting more difficult as
the days go by to maintain purity in your mind because of
what the media portrays every day.
The billboards, the radio advertisements, the television
ads. I mean, you cannot help but to
be assaulted by immoral thinking because of the dominance of
media, Internet, television, radio waves.
I have to discipline myself. I got XM radio and I'm working.
I'm driving around all the time and I get bored.
Sometimes I'm listening to CSNBC or sometimes I'm listening to
Fox. Sometimes I'm listening to
classical music. Sometimes I'm listening to talk
radio. And I was listening, I think
Glenn Becker or Sean Hannity was on the other day.
And Cindy and I are walking and all of a sudden like the next
person that came on singing this like immoral song.
I mean, and Cindy's like, what's that?
How did that, how did that, you know, this is like a a talk
conservative talk station that you wouldn't anticipate
something like that coming on. And I I was like, you know, for
a couple minutes, I'm like, listen to it.
I'm like, yeah, what what how did that?
Is this that I accidentally hit the wrong button?
You, you need to be constantly aware of what is coming into
your conscience. Now, this city was known for its
immorality. And so as a result of the
church, it was getting more and more difficult for them to have
moral restraint, not an excuse when the culture goes downhill,
that you say, well, if everybody's being somewhat
lackadaisical in their moral fiber, we can't help it.
We're just, we're all part of it together, the world.
So I guess, you know, we all sort of go down to drain
together. No, there needs to be a constant
remnant of believers that are saying, no, we're not going this
way. We're going the Lord's way.
And, and I'm turning the TV off and I'm teaching my kids,
there's certain things that you watch and there's certain things
you don't watch, right? There's certain filters you need
to have on your Internet so that the wrong things don't come in
to defile you and to attack you and to trap you and entice you.
And so the Lord is speaking about this church, but also
encouraging them in verse 4 that you have a few names even in
Sardis who have not defiled their garments.
And they shall walk with me in white, for they are worthy.
In every church there is always a remnant.
I believe there's a strong remnant in this church.
I believe that the Lord is drawing the type of people to
this church that are serious about their relationship with
Jesus Christ. We're praying.
Lord, send those who are hungry for you, take those out that
aren't hungry for you. And Lord, stir up those here
today that aren't hungry, that down deep inside really want to
be hungry. They've just sort of lost their
way. Help them to hear your voice
today and to be able to repent. But there's always this group of
people, thank God, since the beginning of time, throughout
the Old Testament, when Israel rank and file were turning their
backs toward God, there was a remnant, always right, that
moved toward God, that the Lord could work through, that He
could be glorified in the midst of.
And in this church, Sardis, in the midst of its struggle and
floundering, there was people in the church that had an intensity
regardless of what anybody else was doing or thinking or
feeling. And that's sort of like with all
of you. When you come here on a Sunday
or Wednesday or some gathering, some meeting, what's drawing you
to the community? What's drawing you to the
church? Hopefully it's not programs or
entertainment. Those are all well and good.
They can be fun. But it's the Spirit of God
that's drawing you, because if the Spirit of God isn't drawing
us in this church, we really don't have a church, do we?
It has to be the Spirit in our midst that's drawing all of us
to deeper places with the Lord. The only good thing about this
church is this fact that there is this remnant, and they're
described as people who are overcoming in verse 5.
He who overcome shall be clothed in white garments.
Now he says that they have this name that was alive.
If you ever gone to a church, it might be a big church, a lot of
people, a lot of activity and you just assume driving up
because of the parking lot and the police and all, man,
something must be happening here.
Look at all this man, look at this facility.
Look at the size of this or the size of that and you're a
remnant believer. You don't, you just maybe you're
moving into community, you're looking around trying to find a
church or whatever. And most times people think,
well, the biggest church is a happening church, right?
So you go and you park your car and you go in and you sit there,
but something down deep in your in your heart is struggling
because you're saying God, what in the world's going on in here?
All these people and the worship is so self-centered.
The worship isn't exalting the Lord.
The the message is about me and not you.
And if you're a remnant believer, you're going to
recognize that and you're not going to go back to that kind of
church. But if you're those who have a
name that you're alive because of the capacity to the crowd and
what the world says about the facility and the church, but the
Spirit says that you're dead. You won't know if you're not a
remnant believer and around that believer isn't a higher class
Christian or super Christian. It's someone who I believe is
truly a Christian. Because when you're really a
believer and you really know Jesus Christ, you can't help to
have conflict in your heart and in your spirit when things
aren't the way they need to be. You just know the Holy Spirit
convicts you. He gives you insight, He gives
you enlightenment, and finally you just say enough is enough
and you move on and you ask the Lord to guide you to where he
wants you to be. God has a way of looking at
ministries, and man has a way of looking at ministries.
And the Lord in this church is able to see that the community
thinks it's alive. The church itself thinks it's
alive, but he says really clearly you're dead.
The church is doing all kind of works.
It's busy, it's active. He says I found your works not
perfect. I have not found your works
perfect before God. So in other words, a church that
has a lot of programs and a lot of work, basically from God's
perspective, if it isn't the right work and it isn't done
through his Spirit is imperfect. Basically, it's a waste.
It's going to burn. You know, the judgment seat of
Christ. It talks about the works being
tried with fire. Some will go through and come
out gold, silver, Prussian stone, and some are going to
come out wood, hay, and stubble. Some are going to be found
worthless. And so when the works are tried
by God and they're not found perfect, He's looking about
what's the purity of the motives?
And is what you're doing being done by the Holy Spirit, or is
it this being done because someone said it was a good idea?
We should do this or we should do that?
I mean, we're told in our pastors conferences when there's
a ministry that's on artificial life support, pull the plug.
If God isn't in it, why waste your time and your energy and
your money doing something that has no life?
But many times our pride gets in the way.
Well, this is my ministry and this is what I'm doing.
And this is, you know, and the Lord isn't interested in my
ministry or your ministry. He's interested in his ministry.
So the public perceives one thing about this church
outwardly, it's mechanically driven.
It's, it's everything's firing on all cylinders.
Everything looks good, but it's a ministry of the flesh.
And God perceives one thing the heart and the remnant is
following the Lord after the heart here they overcomers a
faithful because they're being LED of the Spirit.
There was a man who gave a good in good insight regard to what
ministries are. It starts out with a man.
Our ministry started out with a man by the name of Chuck Smith,
86 years old now, still going strong, still preaching 3 times
on Sunday over 2000 churches. The result of this man's calling
and his willingness to open the doors for others to serve in the
heart and the movement of the Holy Spirit through Calvary
Chapel. So it starts out with a man
that's like Charles Wesley the Methodist Church and John Calvin
in the Presbyterian Church and Martin Luther in the Lutheran
Church starts out with a man. God uses a man verse a ministry,
a movement through a man, and then what happens is after the
movement begins and it's birthed by the Holy Spirit, the movement
has a tendency to become a machine.
So all of a sudden we have our dove and we have our Maranatha
music and we have our blue jeans and we have our laid back way
about ourselves. Well, that can be very easily
mechanical, can it? And machine will eventually
break down. And then after the machine, the
movement becomes a monument. I was at a church down in the
college down in West Virginia, and I see a big statue of a
person out front. And I asked the person, well,
who is that? And they said, well, that's John
Wesley. And I went into the church,
beautiful church. And I asked, you know, what kind
of services they had there and what went on.
And it had nothing to do with what Charles Wesley was called
to do. Great Awakening.
The church had moved away from the vision of the Holy Spirit
through that man's life. And now it literally became a
monument, right? Beautiful college, big statue of
Wesley. But no one knew Wesley's heart
or what he was like or what made him tick for God.
If you turn over to Galatians chapter 3, for a moment, Paul
speaks about this phenomena occurring way back in his
ministry days. He's speaking to the Galatians
church in Galatia, and he says in verse 1 of chapter 3, O
foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you?
In other words, who hath deceived you?
Who has confused you, Who's mixed you up, that you should
not obey the truth before whose eyes Jesus Christ was clearly
portrayed among you, is crucified.
This only I want to learn from you.
Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the
hearing of faith? Are you so foolish?
Having begun in the Spirit? Are you now being made perfect
by the flesh? Have you suffered so many things
in vain? If indeed it was in vain, that's
every time Chuck would come to the Pastor's conference.
I used to think, well he's getting older, he must have some
degree of Alzheimer's and dementia because he keeps saying
the same thing to us every year. And after about 3 conferences, I
started getting what he was talking about and I understood
why we needed to be reminded. He'd stand up, he'd say, oh
foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that you starting
out in the Spirit, thinking now it can be made perfect by the
flesh. He said.
I've never seen a movement of God in the history of the church
that didn't start out as a movement of the Holy Spirit,
that didn't end up dying, because it became a movement
controlled by man. And his expectation to us all
the time was to be men of the Spirit, men dependent on the
Spirit, men desperate for the Holy Spirit, men crying out for
the Holy Spirit. That we in our churches would
not turn the ministry into a machine and a monument, That the
ministry would be fresh all the time.
That it wouldn't be something that anybody could say it was
because of some historical thing that happened 30 or 40 years
ago. But at its current, it's
contemporary, it's present working and movement of the Holy
Spirit. Zechariah chapter 4 verse 6 says
this is the word of the Lord to Zerubbabel, not by might, nor by
power, but by my Holy Spirit, but by my Spirit, says the Lord
of hosts. The Holy Spirit is the power of
the church. He's the one that gives the life
to the church. He's the one that reveals Jesus
Christ to the lost. He's the one that encourages you
and lifts you up, not of your despair and out of your sin and
out of your lethargy and complacency.
If we grieve the Holy Spirit, we lose the power in the church.
But the good news is if we repent of our sin, and that's
what many of us did here last Sunday after church, if we
repent of our sin, the church becomes alive, doesn't it?
Jesus said in John 663 it is a Spirit who gives life.
The flesh prophets nothing. The words I speak to you are
Spirit and they are life. The Lord is here in our midst
today. His heart is totally focused
upon Himself being revealed to your heart and mind today.
That's what this is all about, Christ in our myths, Christ
being worshipped and glorified and magnified.
Nothing else is important but Him.
He says it's a spirit who'll give you life.
The flesh profits nothing. So it's easy as churches to fall
into mechanical activities of ministry.
You have people running ministries, many places that
aren't walking with the Lord, but they're in the ministries
because the church needs people to do whatever it is that they
need to do right in order to keep it going.
And so the church begins to be desperate instead of praying and
waiting on the Lord. Lord send me the right person to
do the ministry. I'll just grab any warm body
that I can get right just to keep it alive.
And what happens is you get people who are living in sin
that are teaching kids. You got pastors who are burnt
out because they're trying to keep the machine going and they
know it's breaking down, but they can't keep it going.
And they're getting weary and tired and bitter and angry.
And the devotion that the people are supposed to have, that they
would serve the Lord out of only the motivation of love for God.
As Jesus said, if you love me, you'll keep my word.
In other words, if you love me, you'll do what I ask you to do.
There is no devotion. There's no love.
The moment I stop loving God and the moment I stop loving you
guys is the day I got to resign. There's too many of us in
ministry that are in ministry because it's become a mistress.
It's become an ego thing. I want to speak to 10 people.
I want to speak to 100 people. I want to speak to 1000 people.
And then meanwhile, the pastor goes home and he's kicking the
dog and yelling at the wife, miserable.
But everybody in the church thinks they're so wonderful
because no one really knows who they are because they can't get
to them, especially in the bigger church.
So they assume they walk on water until the wife says, I've
had enough. I quit.
You can't quit if you quit. They'll really know what I'm
like and they won't come into church anymore.
Matthew 15-8 says these people draw near to me with their mouth
and honor me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.
So you got a church, whether it's this size or 10 times this
size, God sees the heart when we worship.
And Rick and the guys, Giles, lead us in the Lord's presence
that we can sing the songs, we can raise our hands.
But Jesus says the possibility exists that there will be some
of us here that will draw near to him with our his, our mouths,
honor him with our lips, but our heart is far from him.
You know, the works that this church was doing was not drawing
attention to the greatness of God.
It was drawing attention to the greatness of the church.
That's why everybody thought the church was alive, right?
But Jesus says these works aren't perfect.
He's only interested in perfect works, and only by the Holy
Spirit can works be perfect. If I'm doing them in my own
strength, they might look good. You might say, oh wow, that was
great, or whatever the Lord says it stinks.
And the problem is that churches and leaders have become more
interested in what the people think than what God thinks.
Man pleasers wanting people to think highly of them instead of
God seeing them and saying, well done, good and faithful servant.
Ephesians 210 says, and John went over this in the men's
meeting this morning. We are his workmanship created
in Christ Jesus for good works. God saved you and delivered you
and me from sin to do good works which God prepared beforehand
that we should walk in him. So in other words, I believe
every one of our lives, when we're brought into the Kingdom,
God has a plan, a perfect plan for every one of our lives, a
list of works that he wants to work through us if we're yielded
and dependent on him. And many of us, for whatever
reason, we get sidetracked so often and we see these other
work. So I'm going to go do these.
And God said, well, I didn't create you for that.
I created you for this, but I really want to do this.
And the Lord said, no, no, come over.
This is this is what I'll empower you with.
This is how I'll bless you. This is how I use you.
No, no, I want this, I want to do this.
And so we go do this and it's not perfect.
It's weak, it's dead, it's dry, it wears on us, it makes us
breakdown. And eventually we say, I can't
do this anymore. And the Lord says, well, I never
asked you to do it. You're doing your works instead
of my works. He says my yoke is easy and my
burden is light. So if we're wearing a yoke and a
burden and we're trying to serve God and it's burning us out and
wearing us down, God's saying this is not the yoke I have for
you. Come back over here and humble
yourself and do these things. Well, Lord, that's doesn't seem
real important. Well, to me it's critically
important because if you do what I made you to do, people will
see me in your life. In the Book of Revelation,
Pastor Clark is taking us through all kinds of events and
happenings that are predicted for the future.
But for those who believe and follow Jesus, there's much to
look forward to in heaven with Jesus.
However, for those who are here on earth during the Tribulation,
there's all kinds of chaos that will unfold.
The Bible talks about an Antichrist, a false prophet, and
of course, that evil enemy, Satan.
Do you see how there are such clever attempts for the enemy to
disguise himself as God and even the Trinity?
The true Savior of the world is God and how he comes to rescue
through his triune nature God the Father, Jesus the Son, and
God the Holy Spirit. Just like Satan tried to take
over for God in heaven and was cast out, Satan will try to
convince people on earth that he is the Triune God to be
worshipped instead of the legitimate God in heaven.
It's an attempt, and although he will capture plenty in his
schemes, he will not win. The true God wins, and
Revelation unpacks how that will all happen in detail.
Be encouraged because there's a way out for all of this madness
that will ensue on this earth. But you don't want to wait
indefinitely to make that decision about Jesus.
We don't know when the church will be raptured, and you want
to be ready to be with Jesus. To learn more about this, head
over to calvarychapelonline.com. We're so glad you've been with
us today. And if you'd like to connect
further with this ministry, find us on Facebook or YouTube.
You can also download our mobile app at calvarychapelonline.com.
Be sure to join us for weekly services at 400 E Pittsburgh St.
Ste. 6B in Greensburg, PA 15601. This has been living waters of
grace.