What Does Jesus Think of My Church? - Part 3

**Jim Scudder** (0:04)
If you're not out proclaiming, Jesus is the only way to the lost and dying world, to the lost and dying city, there isn't going to be any persecution. No one even knows that you belong to Christ. You have a name, but you're dead.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:24)
Welcome to InGrace with Jim Scudder, the senior pastor of Quentin Road Baptist Church in suburban Chicago. He is the author of Why Life Hurts, Healing Hurt, and co-author of Evangelism Made Simple.

**Jim Scudder** (0:39)
Hi, this is Jim Scudder. Welcome back to InGrace here on this Monday, August 3rd. I hope your summer's going great. I can't believe it's all the way in August already. And here at Quentin Road Baptist Church, Quentin Road Christian School, Dayspring Bible College and Seminary, and we're in the Chicago area, we're starting to think about gearing up for the educational season. And I know all the kids are really excited to get back in school, but it's still a few weeks away. What can we do today to cheer us up? Well, how about if we talk about the future, the end times? And I don't know about you, but ever since the last five years or so, with COVID and Russia attacking Ukraine and the Hamas attack on Israel and all of these just crazy things, earthquakes, I have to think that the Lord's return is soon. So we're in a series called Armageddon's Dawn, and today we're in Revelation chapter three. And we've already talked about the first four churches of Revelation. They're in Revelation chapter two, Ephesus, we called the careless church, Smyrna, the crowned church, Pergamos, the compromising church, Thyatira, the corrupted church. And today we're going to talk about Sardis, the feeble church. And I believe each of these, of course, were actual real churches where they were all in Asia Minor. We would call it Turkey today. But I also believe that these represent probably church ages. And I believe that Sardis represents the age of Protestantism. And I also believe that everything that the Lord is telling each of these churches could be true of our churches today. So we're gonna be talking about how important it is for us to be analyzing our own churches, especially pastors, to make sure we are doing what the Lord wants us to do today. And we're gonna be talking about the return of the Lord as well because once Jesus gets done talking to these seven churches in this chapter, all of a sudden, the rest of Revelation, the church is gone until the end. And we would look at that as the Rapture. If you want more information about prophecy related resources, we've got a lot of good products here at InGrace. One is a free prophecy chart. It's called Armageddon Dawn. You can get it for free on our website, ingraceradio.com, ingraceradio.com. Or you can get it by calling us right now at 1-800-78-GRACE.
People will say, well, that's just hype, you Christians, sensationalizing things. And that's really not going to come to pass. Let me tell you something. I don't believe in sensationalizing or hyping. I really don't. There's a reason for that. The reason we shouldn't over sensationalize or hype these types of things is because it turns people off when the date that they set, whether overtly or just kind of subtly, doesn't come to pass. I was with someone this week that said he grew up believing the way we do on end times events, which means that Jesus is going to come back to take the church and we are raptured and then a seven year tribulation takes place and then Jesus comes again and establishes his millennial kingdom, Satan bound a thousand years. So he said, you know, that's how I grew up and that's what I used to believe. But then he said people like how Lindsay and others, they were always talking about this incredible thing that Israel was reborn in 1948 And Jesus said that this generation will not pass away until all these things are fulfilled. So that was a misunderstanding of what Jesus was saying, and we don't have time to get into that. But because people were on TV saying, and rightly so, that Israel is a miracle, there's no other explanation than if you look at the modern nation of Israel, they're there in unbelief, but God has brought them back just as predicted for such a time as this. But then to say that this generation will not pass away, now you have a date. And once he said the mid-80s passed, he started to think, well, obviously, the pre-tribulational, pre-millennial view is wrong.
Obviously, and he rejected that, and he became an all-millennialist, which basically says that we're in the kingdom age now.