How to Determine If Your Pastor is Leading on Empty

I want you to picture this, you're dying of thirst and you're in the desert. You've been wandering for days. And then on the horizon, you see it, water, miles and miles of it, shimmering blue water. You sprint toward it, you cup your hands, you bring it to your lips and immediately you spit it out. Why? Because it looks like life, but it's actually death and you realize you're at the Dead Sea. 47 miles long, 11 miles wide and nothing, not a single living thing inside of it. Why? Nothing survives because it's completely dead. Today, I want to show you a church that had the exact same problem. And I want to show you how Jesus diagnosed it so that you can determine if the church you're currently worshiping at is in the same situation as the church of Sardis. Welcome back to Get Into the Word. My name is Robbie Gallaty. Today, we're working through the seven letters to the seven churches in the book of Revelation. And of all the seven churches, there's only one of them that receives a verdict from Jesus that should cause every pastor, every elder, every Sunday school teacher, in fact, every church attender to stop dead in their tracks. And I want to talk to you about that.

I want to talk to you about the seven letters to stop dead in their tracks. We see it in Revelation chapter three, verse one. Here's what the Bible says. And to the church in Sardis, thus says the one who has the seven spirits of God and the seven stars, I know your works. I know you have a reputation for being alive, but you are what? Dead. So wake up, be alert and strengthen what remains, which is about to die, for I have not found your works complete before God. Remember then what you have received and heard, keep it and repent. If you're not alert, I will come like a thief and you have no idea at what hour I will come upon you. Now, I want you to sit with that for a moment. Jesus says you have a reputation of being alive, but you're actually dead. I want you to imagine that. Can you imagine being a member of a local church and Jesus himself writes us a letter and at the top it says D-E-A-D, dead as a doornail. I want you to think about what that church probably looked like from the outside, because I can guarantee you nobody in Sardis, in that city, thought that church was dead. Here's what we know about Sardis. Theologically, they were a sound church.

They had been seduced by false teaching that was plaguing them. It was plaguing the city of Smyrna, which was close by, but they didn't fall for that. They didn't fall for the teaching of the Nicolaitans. They didn't fall for the Balaamites like Pergamum. They didn't chase after the spirit of Jezebel like the church at Thyatira. Their doctrine was sound. It was straight. The preaching in a sense was biblical, but here's the problem. They were spiritually dead and beyond that, they were constantly active. The church was constantly and consistently reaching out. The church's calendar was packed with events. There were events and committees and programs and planned retreats and community outreach initiatives. They had men's conferences and women's conferences, if you will. They had it all. Sardis had programs, but they had no spiritual pulse. And here's what I want you to understand today. This can happen to any church, including yours and including mine, the one I pastored today. Why? Because a church has a life cycle. Every church does. Every church begins, watch this,

with a man around a mission. That mission then becomes a movement. But if it's not tended to, that movement can become a museum. And if it's still ignored, that museum eventually becomes a mortuary. A church begins to die the moment it stops reaching people, when it stops seeing people baptized, when it stops discipling its people, when the people stop encountering the Holy Spirit personally, when they turn their eyes inward and their criticisms outward, when the biggest conversations in the building are about the color of the carpet or the wall pattern or the type of sermon length the pastor's preaching, or whether he gives an invitation this way or that way, and you become a tragic statistic. And here's what's crazy to think about. Churches can rest on past successes while actively dying in the present day. You see, back in the 80s, we were the largest church in town, don't you know? Back when so-and-so was pastor, we were running 500 in Sunday school. We've heard of churches like this. You may know it. It may be your church. And here's what I'm saying. I'm not saying we shouldn't celebrate past victories.

We should celebrate the Lord. But past victories, don't miss this, don't equate to present vitality. Now let me make this personal because this isn't just about institutions. Let me say it directly to you this way. When was the last time God moved in your life personally? Not in someone else's testimony, not in your husband's life or your wife or your children or your parents, not in someone else's lives and yours. When was the last time you genuinely sensed the presence of God? When was the last time you came out of a prayer meeting feeling that you actually heard from heaven? Here's the question. Are you still celebrating a spiritual victory from one, two, five, or 10 years ago as if it's a current spiritual situation in your life? Or are you celebrating something fresh and new and relevant that God is doing today? Here's something I learned in my own life. The last person to realize they are dying is normally the one who's dying. I'll give you an illustration. A few years ago, I went in for a routine checkup. I had an older pastor who was a mentor of mine and he said, once you get to the age of 40, you need to start getting regular full body examinations. I didn't love the words full body, but I took his advice.

Some years were routine. The doctor just came back and said, we don't have to do anything, everything's fine. Some years they came back and said, well, we're gonna have to do an endoscopy this year or worse, a colonoscopy. And crazy as it was, I had both of them one time at the same time. And I thought, well, that sounds like a spiritual experience in the worst possible way. But we do these examinations, all jokes aside, for a reason. And the reason is to catch what we can't see before it kills us. How many times have we heard about someone who avoided the doctor for years only to go in and find out that they have stage four cancer and a month to live? It's a tragic situation. Here's what's even worse. Churches do the same thing. They avoid honest self-examination until it's too late, until it's too far gone. You see, the church in Sardis had missed one of the clearest warnings Jesus ever gave to his disciples. It was in John 15, verse four, when he said, remain in me as I in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it remains connected to the vine,

neither can you unless you abide in me. And then Jesus goes on to say, I am the vine, you are the branches. The one who remains in me will produce much fruit because apart from me, you can do what? A few things. Is that what it says? You can do some things. Is that what it says? No, it says, apart from me, you can do nothing. Do you know what the word nothing means in the language of the New Testament? It means nothing. Notice what Jesus does not say. He doesn't say you can give by on your own accord. He doesn't say there are things you can do in your own strength and power. He doesn't say you can manage certain things in your own strength. He says zero, nada, nothing. Apart from me, you can accomplish nothing that counts for eternity. There was a story I heard years ago of a group of Chinese believers who came over to America to try to figure out what was happening in American churches in order to take back the lessons learned to the underground church in China that was being persecuted for their faith. And when they came back from America, their leaders asked them, what was it you learned

from American Christianity? And their response was simply this. It's amazing how many things American Christians do for God separate and apart from the power of the Holy Spirit. You talk about sobering. But the better question is this. How much do we attempt to do in our own strength through our own effort, separate and apart from the power of God? I want you to think about something remarkable. And it's about the city of Sardis itself because Jesus doesn't just diagnose the church in abstract terms here. He's going to speak directly to their city and what they've experienced. Why? Because the people reading this letter would have known exactly what Jesus was talking about. You see, Sardis was built on not one, but two mountains. From a military standpoint, this was considered a fortress. An army attacking Sardis would have had to fight up against them on a steep, nearly vertical cliff before they reached the over outer walls. And the people of Sardis began to boast about this city that was, in their opinion, unconquerable. Sardis was considered to be invincible. They were untouchable. Well, that was until. B.C. 549, or 549 B.C., when Cyrus and the Persian army attacked.

They decided to circle the city, they studied the walls, and they were stumped like everybody before them. Until one day, one of the soldiers watched as one of their guards fell asleep on top of the wall. As the guard's head bobbed up and down, his helmet tumbled off of his head and fell below down off the cliff. Moments later, they watched the soldier come out from one side of the wall, he left his post, he disappeared into the face of the mountain, only to return with his helmet. What they realized was there was a hidden passageway inside of the rock. That night, under the cover of darkness, against all odds, the Persians found that passage, climbed into the passage, entered the city, and destroyed what some argued to be this invincible city of Sardis while the entire population was dead asleep. You would think they would have learned their lesson, but history has a dark sense of humor. 230 years later, this is crazy, in the year 218 B.C., a general named Antiochus the Great, he was trying to figure out another way into the same city, and one of the soldiers noticed that there was a dead donkey that had been thrown over the city wall. They killed this donkey, threw it over. Vultures started encircling the animal,

picking at the carcass, trying to eat it, and the soldiers reasoned that if vultures could access that part of the wall, it must be unguarded. Why? Because there's no soldier guarding it. Again, under the cover of the night in the darkness, they scaled the wall, attacked the city while the people were, you ready for this, sleeping. Twice, the same city fell in the same way twice. Now, knowing that and keeping that in mind, Jesus writes to the same city, the church inside, and says, wake up, and the reason he's saying this is they knew exactly what he meant. Don't be caught sleeping again. Don't let the enemy find you unguarded. Don't let him have a passageway into your life unprotected, and I think the same warning is for us today. When you and I come in close or comfortable, we tend to lend ourselves to danger. When things are going well, when attendance is up, when the quarter is advancing, when we're bringing in money, when everything seems to be going well, when giving is strong in the church or the calendar is full, that is precisely, that is precisely, sorry, when complacency will begin to creep in, and complacency is the hidden passageway that the enemy uses to bring down everything, not from the outside, but from the inside.

Now, some of you watching know exactly what I'm talking about. The fire you once had for the Lord, think about it. When you first got saved, you were on fire for Jesus. The passion you used to have those early years as you were following God has some kind of way faded to barely being warm, and if you're honest, you don't even know how it happened, and here's the hard question we all have to answer. Jesus asks through this letter, are you even awake enough to even know it? Are you even aware enough to even recognize it? So then the question becomes, what's the solution? Jesus doesn't leave us without an answer in the text. He gives us five commands, which is pretty unbelievable. He says, get up, watch, remember, receive, and return to me. Every single one of those commands points to the same person, the Holy Spirit of God. I want you to look at the word spirit in Hebrew for a moment. I want you to think about this. The word spirit is ruach in Hebrew. The word ruach means wind, breath, or spirit. It's the same word, and depending on the context, we determine what the word means at that time. God gave life to Adam by breathing into him with the ruach, or spirit. You may remember in Ezekiel, the prophet Ezekiel, Exodus, or Ezekiel 37, the valley of the dry bones came to life when God commanded the breath, or the ruach,

to fill those lifeless bones. The breath entered them, the Bible says, and they came to life and stood to their feet as a vast army, and then when we look at what Jesus did in John chapter 20, verse 22, when he's in the upper room with his disciples. Now, don't miss this. A lot of people think that the first time the spirit was given to the disciples was Acts chapter two, when the church was birthed. That's not accurate. Jesus actually met with the disciples in John chapter 20, verse 22. Let me show it to you. to you. The Bible says, Jesus said to them, verse 21, let's start there for context, peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, I'm also sending you. This is the second time Jesus meets them, or I'm sorry, the first time Jesus meets them in the upper room, and he's going to give them this promise that he told them about before. Verse 22, after saying this, he breathed on them, the breath, the ruach of God, and said, receive the what? Holy Spirit. He breathed on them and said, receive the Spirit. He didn't hand them a certificate, he didn't give them a list of rules to follow, he simply breathed on them. The Holy Spirit, in a real sense, is the breath of God.

It's what animates the church, it's what transforms a busy institution full of programs and stresses and calendar items into a living, breathing organism called the church, which changes the world. And that is precisely what Jesus says to the church of Sardis. Remember what you received and heard from me. Now, that word received is an interesting word. It's a direct reference to the Holy Spirit. When Peter stood up on the day of Pentecost in Acts chapter two, verse 38, and says, repent and be baptized, each of you, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. And Paul, in Acts 19, verse two, walked in a room full of disciples, and he asked them, point blank, did you receive the Holy Spirit? You have to understand this. You and I, at the moment of salvation, received the promised Holy Spirit. He took a permanent residence in our life. He sealed us for eternity, and nothing and no one can change that. But here's where so many believers, including me, for years, get stuck. We confuse the permanent indwelling of the Spirit with the manifest presence and power

of the Spirit in our life, and they are not the same thing. Paul writes in Ephesians to the church of Ephesus, chapter five, verse 18, don't be drunk with wine, you know this verse, but be filled with the Spirit of God. That word filled there means to be consumed. It doesn't just mean to be poured into. It means to be consumed or to be controlled or led by, and crucially, it's a continuous command. It's not just a one-time event. At salvation, you're adopted in the family of God, and you are sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, but we are challenged to continue to be filled. The word there could be being filled with the Spirit. Think of it this way. You are positionally, positionally right with God for eternity. That doesn't change. You can't be unadopted in the family of God. You can't be unsealed, even if you want to. When the prodigal son left his father to go feast in the pig pen like the Gentiles, he never ceased being a son, but since you did nothing good enough to earn your place in God, think of it this way. You can't do anything bad enough to lose your position with God. Works, in a sense, are not the currency of our salvation. However, they're crucial.

The manifest presence and power of the Holy Spirit in our life is conditional, meaning from our salvation, we don't work for it, but we will work from salvation. And this is why, coming close, when you sin, God can feel distant, not because he's left you, but because you may have grieved the Spirit. And Paul warns us in Ephesians 4, bitterness, harsh words, unforgiveness in our heart, these things will grieve or quench the Spirit, as he talks about in 1 Thessalonians 5. He warns, don't quench the Holy Spirit of God. How? Through disobedience, through unbelief, through faithlessness in our life. Friends, when you and I grieve the Holy Spirit, we sense his absence. When we quench him, we lose the spiritual power and fervor in our life. And the solution is not complicated. When you recognize you're out of step with the Spirit, you begin to name the sin in your life. If you're in sin right now, you name it, you repent of it, and then you return to God. That's it. The pathway back to God is always open for anybody who'll come back to him. Now, I told you I was going to be honest with you today in the beginning, so let me tell you something personal

that I don't share lightly. There was a season where I pastored Long Hollow, the church I'm at now, in my own strength. And I'm not proud to even admit this. And you probably wouldn't have known it if you watched me preach from the outside. The church wasn't collapsing. Our finances were pretty fine. The outreach was still happening in our church. But I was leading, I knew personally, separate and apart from the Holy Spirit's power. And looking back, I... I could trace it. Because of the criticism I received early in my ministry, I started to think out of fear that I was making decisions out of fear and anxiety. I was more concerned at times, it's hard to admit this, that I was trying to keep people happy. I didn't wanna lose anybody. And so I started to doubt myself. I started to please people. I started to acquiesce at times to popular opinions. I was worried about what people thought of me way too much. I started performing instead of shepherding. And that's what drove me to spend 10 months, you heard me right, 10 months on the porch in daily silence and solitude before the revival of Long Hollow started in 2021. If you're unfamiliar with the revival at our church, God gave me two words, spontaneous baptism.

We offered that at the end of 2020. And over the next eight months, we saw over 1,600 people baptized. And I'll talk about that at another time, but the point I wanna tell you is this. I wish I could tell you during that porch season of 10 months crying out to the Lord that I was crying out for revival, that I was desperately asking God to send revival to our church or send revival to the world. But honestly, I was just simply praying for God to revive me, to change me. If someone had confronted me back then in that season and they would have said, Robbie, you're leading in your own strength, I would have pushed back and said, no, I'm not. I would have justified it, surely I'm not. I'm a pastor, I trust the Lord. But when the Lord himself begins to put his finger on the pulse of the exact problem in your life through a time of silence and solitude, where you begin to bend your ear to the accent of the Holy Spirit, you can't argue with the voice of God. The Holy Spirit is gentle, but unmistakable in how he puts his finger on areas of pride, even in my own life. Robbie, you're so prideful. Robbie, you're arrogant, you're jealous. The selfishness that I buried in my own heart

was preventing me from seeing God to work in my church. And I had to reintroduce myself to the Holy Spirit. I'm not proud of this either. I found that I knew more about Jesus who was only on earth for 33 years than I knew about the Holy Spirit who had been on earth for 2,000 years and dwelling believers. And I went to a seminary that, in the world there's two sides of the pendulum for your view of the Holy Spirit. On one side, you have the independent, fundamental Holy Spirit. Don't talk about him, those charismatic, crazy charismaniacs on that side. So you discount the Holy Spirit and you become a frozen chosen. The other side is you have this charismaniac idea, as you've heard people say, where everybody and everything is about the Holy Spirit. It's all about expressing yourself. And so I found you have to have more of a central, centered approach. Here's what I've learned about the Holy Spirit. For some of you, you're even nervous hearing about his name, which you shouldn't, but I learned a couple things. Number one is he's not weird. Number two is he's not scary. He's not gonna lead you to do anything in your life

contrary to the word he wrote. He wrote every word in the Bible. He's not gonna lead you to do anything that he didn't inspire. Here's also something else I learned. He's a far better preacher, teacher, leader, father, manager, pastor, than I'll ever be or you'll ever be. And here's the final one, and I wanna have you think about this. Jesus said his role when he comes is to be a counselor. And if that's the case, if he's a counselor, when was the last time you consulted with the Holy Spirit and him alone? Someone who had left their church earlier before I started spending time in the porch and had come back afterward, came up to me and said, man, I noticed a difference in you, pastor, because it affected me. I became a different person. And they came up to me and they said, Pastor Robbie, your messages are completely different, different than when I first came to Long Hollow to when I'm coming now. And I responded to them and I said, hey, the messengers are pretty much the same, but the man who's preaching them is not. We joke at Long Hollow and say, there's a pre-porch to a post-porch Robbie.

Pre-porch Robbie was different than post-porch Robbie, and what I mean is this. After the porch and spending time with God where he wrecked me in a good way, I came back and got a new church and my people got a new pastor and no one had to leave. It's kind of a joke, but that's what happened. And even in the hard section of this letter, Jesus chooses and closes with extraordinary grace. And this is encouraging for all of us today. I wanna go back to Revelation chapter three, verses four and five. Notice what Jesus says. But you have a few people in Sardis who have not defiled their clothes or garments, and they will walk with me in white because they are worthy. In the same way, the one who conquers. be dressed in white clothes, and I will never erase his name or her name from the Lamb's Book of Life, but will acknowledge his name before my Father and before my angels. There were still a few people in Sardis who had remained faithful in spite of all the challenges, in spite of all the persecution. There was a remnant, and Jesus sees them, and he names them, and he honors them. Now here's something you need to understand about the white garments Jesus is referring to.

The largest temple in Sardis was dedicated to the god Sibyl. The Sibyl god was a fertility deity whose mythology was steeped in the most degrading acts of immorality you can ever imagine. Once a year, this is crazy, but think about this. Once a year, over a million people would flood the city for a 40-day festival. Everyone was required to wear white robes. The entire celebration was an exercise in moral defilement. And Jesus says to the people in the middle of this city, in the middle of this festival, keep your garments clean. Stay pure. Don't participate in the filth of society around you. And to those who do, he makes three promises. You're gonna walk with me, I will clothe you in righteousness, and I will never remove your name from the Book of Life. The Book of Life appears 11 times in Scripture, believe it or not, seven times in the Book of Revelation alone. In Revelation 13, eight, we hear something else about names written in the Lamb's Book of Life that they were written before the foundation of the world began, before you were even born, before you drew your first breath, feel the weight of this, before you made your first mistake or even made your best decision. Now, this is not a scare tactic

to try to scare you into heaven and out of hell. This is a security statement. If you have repented and believed in the gospel of Jesus Christ, your name is in the book, signed, sealed, delivered, and nothing and no one can erase it. That's good news today, man. And the only question is, do you know him? Have you called upon his name? Because anyone who calls upon the name of the Lord, the Bible promises, will be saved. And if you're here today or watching this at home or on a television and you've been coasting, maybe you've been living the Christian life in your own strength. Maybe you haven't sensed the Lord's presence in weeks or months or even years. You can't remember the last time you truly encountered the Holy Spirit. I want you to know something. Today can be a new beginning. Jesus's words to Sardis are not a eulogy. They're a resuscitation, in a sense. They're like a wake-up call. Get up, wake up, repent, return, and receive the Spirit afresh. A dead church in Sardis didn't die because of persecution. It didn't die because of heresy. It didn't die because of false theology. It died because of self-sufficiency.

It stopped depending upon the Holy Spirit and started depending upon its own activity, its own reputation, its past celebrations, or even worse, its own programs. And we know churches like this. Maybe you're a part of a church right now. The breath of God has slowly faded from the room. Don't let that be your story. Don't let that even be your church. If you're a pastor watching this, the most important thing you can do for your congregation is to stay full of the Spirit yourself. The messages stay the same, but when the man changes, everything begins to change. You know how I know? Because God changed me. If this video helped you, do me a favor and share it with someone who needs it. If you get a chance, hype this video. It really helps us get the Word out. And if you haven't subscribed, make sure you do so now so you don't miss another upcoming episode. Until next time, get into the Word until the Word gets into you.