The One Thing That Changes Everything (Revelation 11: 1-13) | Pastor Jake Sweetman

In this message, we walk through Revelation 11 and discover “the one thing that changes everything” in the Christian life: self-giving, sacrificial love that shapes us into Christlikeness and propels us into mission.

Drawing from Revelation 11:1–13, we explore the church symbolized as the temple, the altar, its worshipers, and the two witnesses—prophetic images of God’s people living between the first and second coming of Jesus (Revelation 11:2–3; cf. Revelation 12:6, 14; Daniel 7:25).

Key themes in this sermon:

• Sanctification: From Clean to Holy
  • What it means to be holy: not just morally upright, but fully devoted to God (Exodus 19:5–6; Leviticus 20:26).
  • Clean vs. holy in the Old Testament (Leviticus 10–11; Numbers 8:14–17).
  • Jesus as the truly holy Israelite who learned obedience through suffering (Hebrews 5:8–10).
  • Positional holiness in Christ vs. progressive sanctification (1 Corinthians 1:2; 1 Thessalonians 4:3).
  • Feet-washing and ongoing cleansing (John 13:6–10).
• Salvation: A Missional, Prophetic People
  • The church as God’s prophetic witness in the world (Revelation 11:3–6; Acts 1:8).
  • Living so that others come to saving faith in Jesus (Luke 19:10; Romans 10:13–15).
  • Building intentional relationships with non-believers like Jesus did (John 3:1–10; John 4:7–30).
• Protected Yet Vulnerable: The Tension of Christian Life
  • Measured temple, unmeasured outer court—spiritually protected, physically vulnerable (Revelation 11:1–2; Revelation 21:15–27).
  • Joy in trials as the context for maturity (James 1:2–4; Romans 5:3–5).
  • Learning obedience in the mud of real life, not apart from it (Hebrews 12:5–11).
• Costly Yet Powerful: The Way of the Lamb
  • The two witnesses suffering, dying, and being vindicated in resurrection power (Revelation 11:7–12).
  • God’s power made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9–10).
  • Overcoming evil with good and sacrificial love (Romans 12:1–2, 9–21).
• Sacrifice Sanctifies; Sacrifice Wins the World
  • Holiness tied to sacrifice throughout Scripture (Leviticus 1–7; Hebrews 10:10–14).
  • Offering our bodies as living sacrifices as true worship (Romans 12:1).
  • The shocking mercy in Revelation 11:13, where judgment leads many to give glory to God—anticipating a great harvest (cf. Isaiah 6:13; Romans 11:5–6).

This message calls believers away from consumer Christianity—endless podcasts, books, and spiritual “dog bowls”—and back into the biblical process of Christlikeness: a long obedience in the same direction, lived out in community, service, and sacrificial love (Ephesians 4:11–16; John 13:34–35; Philippians 2:1–11).

If you’ve been longing to grow in holiness and fruitfulness but feel stuck, Revelation 11 will reframe your understanding of trials, mission, and the everyday altar where God turns sacrifice into power and witness.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:31

Um, so we're going through the whole book of Revelation right now. Did you bring your Bible to church? Come with me to Revelation chapter 11, and we're gonna be in uh that whole chapter. Um, I'm gonna read the first 13 verses. Excellent. There's still keys miraculously playing. He's on it. It's on it's somehow the keys are coming from the drums. It's amazing. Wow. The technicality is incredible. Uh Revelation chapter 11. I've only got about 30 minutes, so I'm just gonna dive into this, try to keep up. We've got quite a bit of ground to cover, but I think God's gonna speak through the profundity and simplicity of this word to date. It says, I, I here is the Apostle John. I was given a reed like a measuring rod, and was told, Go and measure the temple of God and the altar with its worshipers, but exclude the outer court, do not measure it, because it has been given to the Gentiles. They will trample on the holy city for forty-two months, and I will appoint my two witnesses, and they will prophesy for twelve hundred and sixty days, clothed in sackcloth. They are the two olive trees, and the two lamp stands, and they stand before the Lord of the earth. If anyone tries to harm them, fire comes from their mouths and devours their enemies. This is how anyone who wants to harm them must die. They have power to shut up the heavens so that it will not rain during the time that they are prophesying, and they have power to turn the waters into blood, and to strike the earth with every kind of plague as often as they want. Now when they have finished their testimony, the beast that comes up from the abyss will attack them and overpower and kill them. Their bodies will lie in the public square of the great city, which is figuratively called Sodom and Egypt, where also their Lord was crucified, which of course is Jerusalem, so this is clearly a symbolic city. For three and a half days, some from every people, tribe, language, and nation will gaze on their bodies and refuse them burial. The inhabitants of the earth will gloat over them and will celebrate by sending each other gifts, because these two prophets had tormented those who lived on the earth. But after the three and a half days, the breath of life from God entered them, and they stood on their feet, and terror struck those who saw them. Then they heard a loud voice from heaven saying to them, Come up here, and they went up to heaven in a cloud while their enemies looked on. At that very hour there was a severe earthquake, and a tenth of the city collapsed. That is, seven thousand people were killed in the earthquake, and the survivors were terrified. So the other ninety percent were terrified, and they gave glory to the God of heaven. The title of the message today is The One Thing That Changes Everything. When my son was about two years old, I heard him rustling around in the kitchen of the home where we lived at the time. And considering I was supposed to be watching him while my wife was out, I figured I'd better go and investigate why my two-year-old son was in the kitchen by himself. So when I rounded the corner into the kitchen, to my shock and horror, there was my cute little boy on his knees scooping water out of the dog bowl and bringing it up to his mouth and drinking it out of his hands. I guess he wanted some water and decided that that was the best place to get it. Have you ever gone looking for the right thing in the wrong place? There are lots of areas in which you could use that question to evaluate your tendencies. The one that I'm interested in today is in the area of bearing fruit as a Christian, what we can simply call today Christ-likeness. Now, Christians try to develop Christ-likeness in all kinds of ways, listening to podcasts, hopping around different churches, sometimes just the good old-fashioned wishful thinking method, one-on-one mentorship, the next great book, even self-condemnation. People actually convince themselves that if I can just beat myself up enough, then eventually I will become like Jesus. So the desire for Christ-likeness is there, but none of those things are going to actually give you Christ-likeness. Now, some of them can be supplemental to your growth. A great podcast can point you in some good directions. Shout out to Archway Bible. It's pretty good. A good mentor can give you some wisdom, correct you, encourage you. A well-written and insightful book can unlock some new and helpful ideas, but not even the best of these things can make you like Christ. Much less self-condemnation, wishful thinking, or hopping around different churches, denominations, or traditions until you find the perfect one, which by the way does not exist. Perfection, or to use a better word, completion, which is what the biblical Greek word actually means, is something that Jesus is working on with his church, and it won't be finished until the day that he comes again. And so rather than looking for the perfect product, rather than looking for perfect perfection, we need to submit to Jesus' process. Everybody say process. The process is where you develop Christ-likeness. Anything else is looking for the right thing in the wrong place. And so we have to answer two questions at this point. First of all, what is Christlieness? And what is the process that produces it? First, let's answer what is Christ-likeness. We can narrow it down to two words. The first word is sanctification. Everybody say sanctification. That's just a theological term that means becoming holy. Now, broadly speaking, holy does not mean morally perfect. Holy means devoted to God. That's our goal. We want to be wholly devoted to God. Now, being devoted to God will involve your morality, no question, but it's much bigger than morality. In the Old Testament, when something or someone was holy, it meant that they were devoted to a particular purpose in the service of Yahweh. So, for example, an animal could be holy to the Lord, which meant that it was devoted as a sacrifice and could be used for nothing else other than that sacrifice. A piece of furniture in the tabernacle or a priestly garment was holy to the Lord and was to be used for nothing other than its intended purpose. Of course, a priest themselves was to be holy to God, and they were set apart to do particular things that a general Israelite was not permitted to do. Okay? So under the old covenant, all Israelites were made clean. Everyone say clean, but not all Israelites were holy. Those are two distinct categories in the Old Testament. In other words, all Israel were in the covenant community of Yahweh. They were no longer worshiping idols like their unclean pagan neighbors, but that didn't mean that they were yet living lives of total devotion to God. So as a nation, you could say that Israel, generally speaking, were holy. They were God's people. But even when God describes them in this way in Exodus 19, God says, If you obey me fully and keep my covenant, you will be a holy nation. So their holiness was conditional on their obedience. Because that's what holiness is. It's devotion, and you can't have devotion without obedience. Are you with me? So if you read the first five books of your Bible carefully, especially the ones that you tend to skip over in your Bible reading plan, what you notice is that God's intention was to make all of Israel holy, but they weren't holy yet. What did they need? They needed time with the presence of God in their midst. They needed to camp around Him. To borrow Eugene Peterson's phrase, uh description of discipleship, they needed a long walk of obedience in the same direction in order to grow in their holiness and ultimately fulfill God's plan, shining as a light to the remainder of the nations of the world. And so, as a nation and even as a priesthood, we know the story, they failed at that. But in God's perfect plan, Jesus came as what? He came as the holy Israelite. He came as a human, totally devoted to the Father, as our representative. So that through unity with Jesus, we actually become the holy nation God always intended his people to be. That's what certain Bible verses like Hebrews 5, uh verses 8 to 10, are talking about, describing Jesus. Listen to this. This ought to catch you off guard a little bit. It says, Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered. And once made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him and was designated by God to be high priest in the order of Melchizedek. So saying that Jesus learned obedience doesn't mean that he was once disobedient. Saying that he was made perfect doesn't mean at one point that he was morally deficient. What it means is that he walked out what it means to be holy in the human sense, completely devoted to the Father, even in the midst of suffering and the temptation to disobey. And because of that perfect or complete holiness, Jesus is able to make us holy by through the Spirit joining us to himself. This is good news. So in the positional sense, in the declarative sense, all Christians are holy. Why? Because you are in Christ, the perfectly holy one. So the question of your holiness is already settled in heaven. Your salvation is secure because Christ is your holiness. But at the same time, in the practical sense, you are still growing in holiness. You are clean, you are in the covenant community, but your holiness is still in progression, or you're still being sanctified. Think about the Last Supper where Jesus kneels, takes on the position of a servant to wash the feet of the disciples. And one by one he goes down the table and he washes their feet. And then when he gets to Peter, Peter cannot fathom the idea of the king of the cosmos performing such a lowly, servile task. And so Peter says, No, Lord, you will never wash my feet. And Jesus says to Peter, If I don't wash you, you have no part with me. And so Peter says, Well, go on and wash my whole body then. Just let's let's do the whole thing. And listen to what Jesus says in response. This is very significant for the subject of sanctification. Jesus says in John 13, 10, those who have had a bath need only to wash their feet. Their whole body is their whole body is clean. And you are clean, Peter, though not every one of you is speaking about Judas. Right? So because Jesus saves you, you've been washed, you're clean, Jesus says to Peter, but your feet still need washing. Why? Because as you journey along these dusty roads on the trail of sanctification, on the journey of ongoing, increasing devotion to God, your feet pick up dust. Right? Your heart is his, but your money isn't yet. That's true about a lot of Christians. A lot of Christians would sooner trust God with their eternity than they would with their wallet. Oh, I just need to let that one sit. Yeah. That's why, like, less than 10% of us tithe. But we'll just put that aside for another day and we'll talk about that. So, like, you your heart is his, but your habits aren't yet. You're still trying to wrestle your sexuality out of his hands. What do you need? You need to submit to the process of sanctification. To pull upon our mission statement here as a church, the bride is still being beautified. Like we call her beautiful, but she looks kind of ugly sometimes. And she needs the process of beautification. Now just hold on to all that because Revelation 11 is going to show us the environment where that kind of holiness actually grows. Okay? First, let's consider the other half of Christ-likeness because it's not just about what God is doing in you, it's also about what God wants to do through you. And this brings us to our second term, the term is salvation. Everyone says salvation. I don't just mean your own, I mean others. Another word that we could use here is missional. Jesus came on a mission to seek and to save the lost. He found us, and to be like him, to be Christ-like, is to join him in his mission of finding others. And ultimately that means the salvation of people's souls. If you are growing in Christ-likeness, then that means that there will be people in heaven because you share Jesus with them. I don't mean from a platform during a Sunday service. Like the fact that I stand up here and tell people about Jesus does not give me an out for telling people about Jesus in my day-to-day life. It just means that I have to work maybe a little bit harder than some of you because I'm around Christians all the time for work. It's what I do. So I have to find ways to connect with non-Christians. And I've been deeply convicted about that, particularly this year. Now, I've not usually shied away from like one-off drive-by opportunities to share the gospel, but I'm convicted about developing relationships with non-believers so that I can share Jesus with them more meaningfully. Now that doesn't mean that it's the number one thing that dominates my calendar, but it is on my calendar. I'm giving those relationships intentional space and time to develop so that I have a context to really show them who Jesus is. And you have your own version of that. You've got your own context that is available to you. Listen to me. The people that are joining this church a year from now should be doing so as a result of the relationship that you started developing today. There are people that you should invite to church in a couple of weeks from now on Easter Sunday because you already have been building that relationship with them. And you're going to invite them to come hear the gospel and experience the community of Christ. And people's journey will be all over the spectrum, depending on where they are. Our role is just to walk patiently with them, to pray for them, and even to be open for the fact that Jesus might want to suddenly save them one day, just like he did for Paul. And Jesus had the whole spectrum around him. He had people who followed him right away. He had people who seemed to be following him for a little while, but then later left. He had people who did not follow him at first, but then months or even years later ended up putting their faith in him. I think of Nicodemus, who in the beginning of John's gospel could not comprehend what Jesus was talking about when he was describing being born again. And so he didn't follow. But then at the end of the gospel, Nicodemus is one of two men who is taking Jesus' broken body down off the cross in order to honor him with a proper burial. So the journey looks different depending on the person. The constant thing needs to be that we are building relationships of people to get them on that journey and to walk with them on that journey. To be Christ-like is to live your life for the salvation of others. So Christ-likeness can be summed up in pursuing our own sanctification, say sanctification and others' salvation, say salvation. And so, in order to spare us from drinking water from various dog bowls in the pursuit of Christ's likeness, we should answer the next question what's the process? What's the environment where that kind of life is produced? And that's exactly what Revelation 11 shows us. I'll move quickly. Most scholars agree that Revelation 11 is a story about the church, symbolized, first of all, by the temple, the altar, and its worshippers, and then also by these two witnesses whose ministry recalls the Old Testament figures of Moses and Elijah. That's the general consensus. And I think that that's right. I think we're looking here at a story of the church in between the first and second coming of Jesus, a time frame that spans, according to the text, 1260 days or 42 months. And if you do the math, both of those pan out to about three and a half years. Three and a half years is the consistent timeline that Revelation assigns to the wilderness age in which we live. Okay? So specifically, Revelation 11 is a story about the church living during that time, operating in the world as a prophetic people whose lives bear witness to Jesus. In other words, it's about Christ-like people. We live holy lives that point people to Jesus and we share with other people the message of Jesus. That makes us prophetic. To be prophetic doesn't mean that you go around predicting the future. To be prophetic means that your life preaches Jesus Christ. And that's how the church is described all throughout the book of Revelation. And that theme develops a lot here in chapter 11. And unsurprisingly, when we begin to parse out all of the biblical data, it looks a whole lot like the two points that I just described to you of sanctification and salvation. The way the Apostle John might summarize the first point is that a Christ-like life is very costly. The text begins by saying that the Apostle John was instructed to measure the temple and the altar with its worshipers, but not to measure the outer court, which is given over to non-believers. That's what's meant by Gentiles, non-believers to trample. So there's this measurement that's taking place. Now measurement in Revelation has to do with safety and protection. That's why at the end of the book we see an angel measuring the walls of new creation. And the purpose of those walls is to keep out that which is impure and that which is evil. And so here in this text, we see in one sense, the church is measured. In other words, we're protected. But in another sense, the outer courtyard is not measured, and so in that sense, we are vulnerable. And this symbolizes a common theme about the church in Revelation and the rest of the New Testament, which is that the church is spiritually protected and physically vulnerable. In other words, our salvation is secure, even if our circumstances are not. The well-being of our souls is anchored in Christ. So we have joy in suffering, we have peace in pain, and we can live righteous lives even in the midst of unrighteous cultures and contexts. Why? Because we have the Holy Spirit, and greater is he who is in us than he who is in the world, right? So although there's a lot going on around us, and there's a lot that happens to us, the reality is that as we continually draw near to Jesus through the Holy Spirit, we are kept safe through all of that. In fact, you would even find that your experience is that you begin to flourish in those kinds of circumstances. The world can try to bury us under all kinds of circumstances, but as Christ-like people, we are like seeds. So the more manure, the better. Like we're just gonna grow. We will get better, we will bear more fruit. The apostle James said it like this. He said, Consider it pure joy. My brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Therefore, let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. So these are Christians that the apostle James is talking to. People who are what? Who are clean because of the blood of Jesus. And yet James says to clean people that their right response to trials is what will make them mature. The Greek word is the same word that gives us perfect. It's the same concept as holy, right? So the irony here is that the journey from clean to holy goes through the mud. It goes through the dirt. You get clean by the blood of Jesus, but then you gotta walk through some trials. You gotta walk through some mud on your way to maturity, on your way to holiness. Okay, that's the tension. And so we see something here about the process of sanctification that it has something to do with embracing the hardships of life as a sacrifice that forms you into the image of Jesus Christ. And those hardships are gonna happen to you because while you are spiritually protected, you are physically vulnerable. There are trials. You do interface with an unrighteous world who don't care about fair, who don't care about kind, who don't care about generosity, they just want to get ahead of you. Okay? So there is pain, there is suffering. We will experience the consequences of our own sin. And God protects us from some of that, but in his wisdom, he does not protect us from all of it. And the reason for that we just saw is because that stuff is the dirt, that stuff is the context for our growth. So if Jesus learned obedience through his suffering, what makes that you think you can learn obedience a different way? God is not interested in protecting you from the stuff that is gonna grow you up. So he's not interested in no, he's delivering you from the mud. He wants to like plant you in it sometime. It is not his priority to overly shelter you. He is a good father, not a helicopter parent. You remember that movie The Water Boy with Adam Sandler? Yeah? Where are my millennials at? Come on, you remember The Water Boy, right? Bobby Boucher's mom did not want him doing nothing. No school, no football. Why? Because it was all the it was the devil, she said. So Bobby Boucher was like a 10-year-old boy living in a 37 year old's body. That is not God's strategy with you. God says, yes, the devil is out there. Do not be afraid of him. Go overcome him by walking in the way of the lamb, by following my son. And so so, broadly speaking, our physical vulnerability will. Mean that we are going to deal with the frailty and the brokenness of this age. We do not preach a health and wealth gospel. You are going to endure tough times. We will deal with sickness. We will experience heartbreak. We will face immense disappointments, but we will do it together in Jesus' name and we'll be blessed as a result. We are vulnerable like the rest of the world is. Now, in the early churches context, that physical vulnerability meant martyrdom. That meant persecution for them. And that's still true for so much of our brothers, brothers, and sisters who make up the church in different parts of the world today. For us, maybe it means you lose a friend because you took an unpopular stand on a moral issue. Or maybe you didn't condone or celebrate a choice that they were making, making. Maybe it means you lose out on some money because the project didn't align with what God says is good and what God says is evil. In the text, the vulnerability of the church is symbolized most clearly by the fact that these two witnesses are attacked, overpowered, and killed by the beast. Now the beast comes more into the picture in chapter 13. We'll get there next week, actually. Wow, praise God. No, the week after. No, the week after that, because it's Palm Sunday, then Easter. Pray for me, friends and family. But the beast we go on to learn later in Revelation represents worldly powers who have rejected God and have deified themselves in his place. And because they reject the Messiah, they reject his church. Jesus says, Don't be surprised when they hate you, they hate me. And so we see here in the text, Christians, we don't just carry our cross as a symbol of our willingness to suffer for the sake of the truth. Sometimes we actually get placed upon that cross. And no matter the context of what that looks like, there is no getting around the fact that the Christian life is a costly life. That's what makes it Christ-like. You cannot follow Jesus if you're trying to avoid living a costly life. You can pay lip service to Jesus, you can tell people that you're spiritual, you can wear a cross as jewelry. If you're avoiding the cost of Christianity, you're not just avoiding Christ-likeness, you're avoiding Jesus altogether. And as part of that, you're avoiding the incredible life that Jesus has for you. Here's how John would summarize it in I think what Revelation is telling us is that a Christ-like life is very powerful. Look at the prophetic ministry of the two witnesses. Fire comes out of their mouths to devour their enemies. How many wish that they had that superpower some days? You're like James and John. Jesus would rebuke you for that. I'm just kidding. They have power to shut up the heavens so it doesn't rain. They turn water into blood. They strike the earth with every kind of plague as often as they want. Now, all of those things have Old Testament roots, and we don't have time to go into detail about them. Many of you would be familiar with them, but they're connected to prophetic lives that declare the truth about Jesus. And so in doing so, you and I are called to live that same kind of prophetic life. And when we do that, we actually overcome the enemy. We actually put demons to flight. We really do confront idolatrous power. We really do set captives free. We reignite the wayward. We strengthen the faith of the weary. We show the way out of darkness. That's the kind of stuff that characterized the ministries of Moses and Elijah. And that stuff finds its fulfillment in the ministry of the church as Christians powerfully bear witness to Jesus Christ. Revelation is telling you, embrace the costly life of becoming like Jesus. And if you do that, you will experience the power of the Holy Spirit working through you. But if you don't, then you won't. The two go together. Paul said, God's power is made perfect in our weakness, right? And what he meant by that is that when you embrace the sacrifice of what it really means to be a Christian, to plant in God's community, to serve, sow, sacrifice, and even suffer, it's in that condition that you will start to see miracles happen in your hands. Because God's power works through all of our perceived weakness. That's how it works. Not when you get to the other side of your weakness, in the weakness, God's power meets you. So most powerful of all, that the two witnesses, they proclaim the truth of Jesus at the cost of their lives, which is the ultimate weakness. But in the end, God answers with the ultimate display of power, which is resurrection. And so they lie dead in the streets for three and a half days. Notice the literary connection there, three and a half days in contrast to three and a half years. The idea is like their immense suffering is like a fraction of the time of their ministry. And then God vindicates them with undefeatable, indestructible life. Now that's obviously speaking about the actual event of resurrection at the end of this age. But it's also speaking of God's vindicating power in our lives throughout this age. It speaks of the abundant life that Jesus provides us amid the chaos of this wilderness. And if you walk with God long enough, you will experience his vindicating love. As you incur the cost of following Jesus, you will experience the joy of a father who loves to redeem and restore and bless his kids. And what the text is saying is, hey, don't lose perspective. The greatest expression of his vindicating love and power is that those who rejected you because of your stand for the gospel eventually look at your witness and become convinced of the truth of Jesus Christ. Remember, that's the amazing way that Revelation 11 ends. 10% of the earth is destroyed by the final judgment and 90% are spared. It's literally a reversal of a pattern that happens throughout the Old Testament, where 90% are destroyed and 10% saved. But here in the gospel vision, those figures are reversed. Now the figures aren't literal. It's not literally 10 and 90. It's just meant to communicate to you hey, don't lose hope. The mission of the church of Jesus Christ is actually effective. Our witness reaches a world that is currently captive to sin and idolatry, but the power of freedom is greater than the power of bondage. So much so that even those who rejected Jesus and his church will end up clinging to him in the end. And what could be more powerful than that? And so that shows us something about Jesus' process to help us grow in working for the salvation of others. That part of our Christ likeness. Actually embracing hardship as a willing sacrifice doesn't just help you become more like Jesus. It helps other people come to Jesus. Which brings me to the final thing that I want to point out about this attack. That both the costliness, the sanctifying process, and the salvic power of a Christ-like life stem from the same thing. And that same thing is self-giving, sacrificial. That one thing is what it looks like to embrace both the cost of Christianity, our willingness to sacrifice. That takes us further on our journey of sanctification, of holiness. Like it's almost like God was trying to foreshadow something in the Old Testament when He frequently tied holiness to sacrifice. Now remember, holiness isn't about being saved. There's nothing you can do to save yourself. Holiness isn't about salvation. Holiness is about going from clean to sanctified. It's participating in your sanctification through your devotion to God, empowered by the Holy Spirit. It's to be set apart to Him and for His purposes. Listen, sanctification is not just running from sin. Sanctification is running to God. That's true sanctification. And it happens through self-giving, sacrificial love. It's like Paul said in Romans 12:1. He says, Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, in other words, because you've been saved by the gospel, here's what you should do in response to your salvation. Offer, that sounds like sacrifice language, offer your bodies as a living, yeah, holy and pleasing to God. This is your true and proper worship. And Paul goes on to describe all kinds of things in Romans 12 about the sanctification, the devotion that stems from a self-sacrificial life. And at the end of that list, he starts talking about loving your enemies, and he concludes with this in verse 21 do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. In other words, sacrificial love for the sake of the gospel is what leads to the changing of a culture and the salvation of the lost. Both of those things are what we see in Revelation 11: Sanctifying, missional Christ-likeness that stems out of a Holy Spirit-empowered life, self-sacrificial way of being motivated by love for God and love for others. It's almost like the Bible really wants you to know something about where you can get Christ-likeness, so you stop looking for drinking water in dog bowls. If you want to stop looking for the right thing in wrong places, then stop looking for Christ-likeness in another YouTube channel. Stop looking to another podcast. Stop looking to another internet preacher. Stop looking for the perfect mentor who has all the answers to your questions. All of those things are individualized expressions of consumption, and that cannot make you like Jesus Christ. Now, some of those things can enhance, but they cannot replace the one thing that God calls us to and that positions us to fulfill what it means to be a Christian, what it looks like to be Christ-like, which is self-giving sacrificial love. Which, by the way, cannot happen in an individualized life. Self-giving love only happens in the context of an other oriented-oriented way of being in the world. Here's what I think Revelation chapter 11 is about to sum it up is that sacrifice sanctifies our lives. Sacrifice wins the world. The genius of God is that He asks you to do the one thing that literally changes everything. Can we clap for God and give him praise? Let's stand to our feet. Thank you, Lord. Oh, I'm excited. Isn't the Bible awesome? Thank you, Holy Spirit, for making these words alive. Just close your eyes for a moment. Let's let our hearts respond. Worship team, you guys are good. You can hang. Something that needs to be reawakened. Maybe it's taking your holiness more seriously. Maybe you've been delaying a self-giving, sacrificial, loving life. Maybe you've taken on that individualized identity of Christianity. And you need to lay that down and come back into the fullness of the body. Maybe it's asking the Holy Spirit to recover in you a passion to see lost people come into saving faith in Jesus Christ. Some of you are just weary in the journey altogether. Listen to me, the Bible says that you and I are like oak trees. It's not meant to be an overnight phenomenon. This is gonna take time. It's a long walk of obedience in the same direction. And maybe today you just need to ask the Holy Spirit to come and just breathe fresh life into you and help renew your perspective that you, in fact, are going to make it if you just keep putting one foot in front of the other and following after Jesus, empowered by the Spirit. So, Lord, as we lift our hands in your presence, we ask, would you come apply the truth of your word to every heart? Come and help us. We want to be living sacrifices just as you command. And we want to be like Christ, so help us not to try and skirt the process, to look to quick fixes, but rather to come back to the calling that you have for us of self-giving sacrificial love. In Jesus' name. Amen. Sacrifices belong on altars. That's where sacrifices go. Normally, this space down here is the altar. Today, I thought I'd do something a little uh different and say that the altar is not at the front of the room today. The altar today is at the connect desk. See that little desk back there? Doesn't it look like an altar? Doesn't it look like a place where you can just kind of lay your life down in service of other people? Oh, I see it, Pastor James. That's a good-looking altar. I can see a lot of lives laid down. A lot of people who are not willing to stop at inspiration from the text, but to step into obedience to the text, to perfect obedience through a life of suffering, sacrifice, servanthood. Some of you, today, that's your altar. You're going to the Connect S and you're saying, Hey, I need to get plugged into community. I need to find people that I can serve. Hey, I need to go through essentials so I can stop dating church and actually make this thing official and get married to these people and start serving them. Some of you you've been serving for a long time. You got leadership capacity on the inside of you. You need to say, Hey, how do I learn how to grow as a leader in this community? That's your altar. That's where you need to go. As you do that, I believe fire will fall from heaven and turn your life into a living altar. Amen.