The city of Philadelphia, to whose Christian congregation John addressed the sixth letter, had been founded only a couple of hundred years earlier by Attalus II. What is of the greatest interest for our understanding of this letter is that he had founded it with the deliberate intention that it should be a missionary centre. It stood at a point where three provinces converged, Lydia, Mysia, and Phrygia, and commanding the highway from West to East, from the direction of Rome into the hinterland of Asia Minor. Attalus shrewdly chose it as a centre from which to spread the Greek language, the Greek civilisation, the Grecian way of life through all the regions beyond it, where lay the wilds of Phrygia and the barbarous tribes.
It was this the risen Lord had in mind when He said, "See, I have set before you an open door, which no man can shut."
It was the door of missionary opportunity.
One of the things that makes the Bible such a stimulating book is that the men who wrote it looked again and again at their purely secular circumstances, and saw the hand of God in them. Attalus built Philadelphia to be a centre from which to spread Hellenism. "But," says the risen Christ, "I have set before you this open door, so that you may send out through it, not the Gospel of Hellenism, but the Gospel of the Kingdom."
When David Livingstone had, by his courageous exploration, opened the door into Central Africa, he begged the Christians of our country to see in the result of his work an opportunity for evangelism. Speaking to an audience in the Senate House in Cambridge, he said, "I beg to direct your attention to Africa. I know that in a few years, I shall be cut off in that country, which is now open. Do not let it be shut again. I go back to Africa to try to make an open path for commerce and for Christianity: do you carry out the work which I have begun. I leave it with you." It was a challenge that met with an eager response among the living churches of Christ in Britain. Soon missions like the Heart of Africa Mission was formed, and its first missionaries went to the Congo, with many more to follow. Door after door was to open in those years to Christian missionary enterprise as an obedient church took Christ at His word and risked the great adventure. Some of those doors have closed, as the door to China did, others still are opening, as the door to Brazil has.
But bring the lesson of this letter nearer home. Have we ever tried to look at our secular calling as the situation into which Christ has called us so that we may serve Him there? Not simply as a verbal witness to the Gospel, but as a servant to Him in the very job we do. It is not an accident that we have the job we have; the scope for service to our fellows which the job provides is itself an open door the risen Christ has set before us. The same could be said of our churches. We must see our situations as God-given.
And in it all let us heed the counsel of Christ to this church that they set their eyes on the opportunities, not upon their own weakness. "I know that you have but little power," He says to them. "You're only a small company, meeting in a little place round the corner. But because you have kept my word, and have not denied My name, I will lead even those who despise you to find life and salvation through your faithful witness." It must have seemed a madness, on the face of it, to claim (as John does here) that these little congregations, insignificant and struggling as they were, should be the instruments in God's hand by which He would change the world. But that is the promise - and for them it was fulfilled - marvellously. The day was to come when the empire itself, which towered above these little Christian communities like a colossus above a mouse, did bow down at the church's feet, and acknowledge that in its midst dwelt the true love of the true God.
Alone among the teeming pagan millions of those days, those little groups of Christians had got their feet down on to the solid bedrock of spiritual reality, and when the time came, as it did, that the shape of worldly things came tumbling down around them with the empire's collapse, they stood firm, for they were founded on the rock that cannot be moved. Asked C. S. Lewis once, "What will all our chatter count, when the anaesthetic fog we call 'the real world' fades away, and the Eternal Presence in which we have always stood becomes palpable, immediate and unavoidable?"
The description of Christ with which the letter opens is "He that is true." The word for 'true' here means the genuine as opposed to the fake, which only looks real. Unless Christ be the solid rock of spiritual reality on which our feet are planted, all our world is shifting sands, trackless and waste, and is leading us nowhere.
Again, He is described as the One Who has the Key of David. "He opens and no man shall shut; He shuts and no man shall open."
Notice - John does not say, "He can open doors and shut them - but that He does." He is constantly doing it. This is a quotation from Isaiah 22, where Eliakim is described as King Hezekiah's faithful steward who was given the king's key, so that none might gain admission to the royal presence save by him alone. Christ alone can bring us into the audience chamber of the world's true king.
"No man comes to the Father," said Jesus, "except through me. I am the door. If any man enters by me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture." The Lord Jesus is our way to reality - our path to God, There is no other. He came to give His life for us, to open that door for us - and He lives to lead us in. Seek in Him the way, and it is promised that we shall find it. Many of those early Christians had been Jews, only to find after their baptism that the synagogue door was shut in their faces. They were cursed as apostates and excluded. Christ says, "Men may shut you out of their fellowship, but I have opened a door for you into God's fellowship which no man can shut in your face." Christ is the open door to salvation and service - both - and never one without the other.
And so to the promises, that lovely feature with which every one of these letters ends.
1. "Because you
have obeyed my call to patient endurance, I will keep you safe
through the trial."
Notice, Christ does not say, "I will keep you safe from the hour
of trial, but through it." The reward of faithfulness is not a
holiday from further service, but higher service. Hence the promise
of the crown. The crown is not a symbol of ease, but a symbol of
responsibility.
2. They will be
made a pillar in the Temple of God
There was a lovely custom in Philadelphia by which they honoured
men who had served the city with distinction. They erected a pillar
in one of the city's temples, shaped like a slender statue in his
image, and on it was inscribed his name, the name of the city where
he was born, and the name of the God he held in greatest
reverence.
The Christian's name, which Christ confesses before His Father in heaven, is the new name given him by Christ, as we saw in the letter to Pergamum - the name which signifies what that man means to Christ.
The name of the city of his birth is the name of the city of God, for by his new birth he is a citizen of the colony of heaven. And the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is the God he worships.
There is honour for the man or woman who serves Christ well.
3. He shall never
go out of that temple.
Philadelphia lay on the edge of a volcanic area, and was subject
to frequent earthquakes. Its citizens led an unsettled life. They
were for ever fleeing from the city into the open country for safety,
and then returning to build up the ruins again. This frightened
rhythm of flight and return had become a part of their lives; they
were forever "going out and coming in."
But the faithful in Philadelphia are promised that they shall go no more out. The promise therefore must be understood as the promise of final security. Nothing shall be able to separate them from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus.
4. Christ says
that He will write upon them His own new name.
The earthquake of AD 17 was the most severe in Philadelphia's
history. The town was almost completely devastated. But Tiberias, the
Roman Emperor at that time, remitted its taxes, and made a handsome
grant toward the cost of rebuilding. In gratitude, Philadelphia
changed its name to NeoCaesarea - the new town of Caesar. The
Philadelphians knew all about a change of name out of gratitude for
benefits conferred. So the Christian, out of gratitude for benefits
greater by far conferred upon him, not by the Lord Caesar, but by the
Lord Christ, takes the new Name of Christ upon himself.
If we want an example of Christian preaching that breaks through the trammels of hallowed language, and expresses itself freely in terms of everyday life, you we it here. And the words are Christ's!
If you want to reach a man for Christ, learn his language! Not Christ's language only, but the man's. That's Christ's way. Understand your neighbour. Put yourself in his shoes. See life through his eyes - without losing sight of Christ and all the world He has opened to you.
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