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Short Clip
Jesus originally found Sardis, and Ephesus, and Pergamos, and Thyatira, and Laodicea, dead in a ditch. Every person was spiritually dead, exactly like every other unsaved person in town. But Jesus performed a miracle. This was the kind of transformation no doctor could explain. He took people who were dead and made them alive.
Nobody but God could do this, and Jesus didn’t just make the church at Sardis alive. He made them abundantly alive. But when the Great Physician comes to give Sardis a check-up, He finds that something is very wrong.
They’re lying in a ditch again, no pulse, not breathing, flat-lined. The ones He saved, brought to life, fundamentally altered, and made alive were behaving like they were dead. Sardis was in spiritual cardiac arrest.
They looked alive. Jesus even comments that they have a reputation for being alive, but when He examines them, He finds that they are not. No pulse. The church of Sardis was full of the walking dead. They walked like, talked like, and acted like all the dead-in-their-trespasses-and-sins unbelievers around them, and however good a front they put up to everyone else, Jesus could see right through it.
To Jesus, Sardis looked like death warmed over. And when He finds His church in a state of cardiac arrest, flat-lining in a ditch, no measure is too drastic to shock His church back into usefulness to Him. The power of their new heart once possessed is still available if only Sardis would repent of her corpse-like condition and return to God’s prescribed plan for her health. Once again, Jesus prescribes radical repentance. They needed to stop just going through the motions of being a Christian and get His power at work in them again. They needed to repent.