Slide 1:
“To the angel of the church in Sardis write: I know your deeds; you have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead. Wake up! Strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have found your deeds unfinished in the sight of my God. Remember, therefore, what you have received and heard; hold it fast, and repent.” Revelation 3:1-3

Slide 2:
“Sardis, the Impregnable.”

Slide 3:
“You have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead. Wake up!”

Slide 4:
“Watch your life and doctrine closely; persevere in them, because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers” 1 Timothy 4:16 

Slide 5:
Jesus often used the warning: “Watch out!” (Matt. 26:41; Luke 12:15; Luke 21:8)

Slide 6:
“Keep in view, morning, noon, and night, the interests of your soul.  Rise up each day desiring that it may prosper; lie down each evening inquiring of yourself whether it has really made progress…. This world is not a world in which we can do well without thinking, and least of all do well in the matter of our souls…. Lack of thought is one simple reason why thousands of souls are cast away forever.  People will not consider, will not look forward, will not look around them, will not reflect on the end of their present course, and the sure consequences of their present ways, and awake at last to find they are damned for lack of thinking.” – J.C. Ryle

Slide 7:
Vigilance in our Prayer Lives

Slide 8:
“Prayer is the very life-breath of true Christianity…. What is the reason that some believers are so much brighter and holier than others?  I believe the difference, in nineteen cases out of twenty, arises from different habits about private prayer.  I believe that those who are not eminently holy pray little, and those who are eminently holy pray much.” – J.C. Ryle

Slide 9:
Five imperatives (verses 2 and 3):

1. Wake up
2. Strengthen what survives
3. Remember what you had
4. Hold Fast
5. Repent (pull up from your downward spiral)

Slide 10:
Obedience

Side 11:
“When God raised up his servant, he sent him first to you to bless you by turning each of you from your wicked ways.” Acts 3:26

Slide 12:
“Moral character makes for smooth traveling; an evil life is a hard life.” Proverbs 11:5

Slide 13:
Bono: “Whatever you abuse, abuses you”

Slide 14:
“What is essential in spiritual combat is the perseverance with which we ought to mortify incessantly our passions, which are never dead in this life, but, on the contrary, like evil weeds, spring up hourly. And this is a battle that only ends when this life ends, so that there is no escape for us from it. He who does not fight in it is of necessity either taken captive or killed.” – Lorenzo Scupoli

Slide 15:
Your Marriage

Slide 16:
“If you don’t water your plants, eventually they’re going to die; you have to nourish your relationship.”

Slide 17:
“First, you have to keep working on your marriage, because ultimately everything else is going to be irrelevant if your marriage falls apart. I don’t mean to diminish the importance of childrearing, but if you put the children first to the neglect of your marriage, what will happen to them if the marriage falls apart? It was for Hillary’s sake that I realized I needed to take better care of my marriage. An intact marriage gives you better support and resources to face everything else.”

Slide 18:
“Second, I’d say don’t forget the small things that keep a relationship going: keep your finger on the pulse of your marriage. If you haven’t gone for a walk in a couple of days, do it! Just be upfront about it and say, ‘Honey, we need to get connected again. Let’s go have a cup of coffee.’ Make sure that you really are communicating; it sounds like such a cliché to say that communication is important, but it is! Regularly ask each other, are we okay? Do a periodic checkpoint, use a scale of 1 to 10, or empty to full, whatever works. But don’t forget to watch out for relational drift.”

Slide 19:
Five imperatives:

1. Wake up
2. Strengthen what survives
3. Remember what you had
4. Hold Fast
5. Repent (pull up from your downward spiral)

I grew up in a small town called Puyallup, Washington, very close to Tacoma, Washington, where at the time was the McCord Air Force Base. It’s since been combined with Fort Lewis, so they call it the Joint Base Lewis and McCord, but when you would go out there, you would see the fighter planes, the F fourteens at the time, they’ve all been retired and replaced with super hornets, but they were amazing achievements of engineering and mechanical ability. Those planes were so fast and so impressive. It was amazing watching them go by. As an 11 times sports writer of the year, Rick Riley was invited to fly in one. He thought it would be the dream of his lifetime until it became a nightmare. I wanna share some of what he wrote about that. Now, this message for America’s most famous athletes. Someday you may be invited to fly in the backseat of one of your country’s most powerful fighter jets.

If you get this opportunity, let me urge you with the greatest sincerity. Move to Guam, change your name, fake your own death. Whatever you do, do not go. I know the US Navy invited me to try it. I was thrilled. I was pumped. I was toast. I should have known when they told me my pilot would be Chip Biff King, a fighter squadron. Two 13. I was worried about getting airsick. So the night before the flight, I asked Biff if there was something I should eat the next morning. Bananas. He said For the potassium. I asked No. Biff said, because they taste about the same coming up as they do going down <laugh>, a fighter pilot named Psycho, gave me a safety briefing and then fastened me into my ejection seat, which when employed would egress me out of a plane at such a velocity that I would be immediately knocked unconscious.

Just as I was thinking about aborting the flight, the canopy closed over me and Biff gave the grounds crew a thumbs up in minutes. We were firing nose up at 600 miles per hour. We leveled out and then canopy rolled over another F 14. Those 20 minutes were the rush of my life. Unfortunately, the ride lasted 80 minutes. We did barrel rolls, sap rolls, loops, yanks and banks. We dived rows and dived again sometimes with a vertical velocity of 10,000 feet per minute. We chased another F 14 and it chased us. We broke the speed of sound. Sea was sky and sky was sea flying at just 200 feet off the ground. We did 90 degree turns at 550 miles per hour, and I egress the bananas. I egress the pizza from the night before and the lunch before that, I egress a box of milk duds from the sixth grade <laugh>.

I made Linda Blair look polite because of the Gs. I was egressing stuff that did not even want to be egress. I went through not one airsick bag, but two Biff said I passed out twice. I was coated in sweat at one point as we were coming in upside down on a bank curve, on a mock bombing target, and the Gs were flattening me like a tortilla. And I was in and out of consciousness. I realized I was the first person in history to throw down. A week later when the spins finally stopped, Biff called. He said he and the fighters had the perfect call sign for me, said he had sent it on a patch for my flight suit. What is it? I asked two bags. He said, when you’re flying that fast, that close to the ground, when you’re using such power, you’ve got to be careful about maintenance and vigilance of that aircraft.

If you would go on the base, you would see the mechanics, you would see the engineers, you would see the pilots doing everything they could to make sure every little piece is operating perfectly. Because one mistake at that speed with that power and it’s catastrophic, it is fatal. Many of us today may be traveling at the speed of an F 14, but we’re not vigilant. We’re not doing the maintenance. We’re asking a lot of our lives, our relationships, our physical bodies, and we just keep running them. And we may be setting ourselves up for a catastrophic failure. We may be just like the church in Sardis. There’s a church we’re focusing on in our series seven letters to seven churches. Sincerely Jesus, in Revelation chapter three, verses one through three, we read this to the angel of the church in Sardis, right? I know your deeds.

You have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead. Wake up, strengthen what remains and is about to die for. I found your deeds unfinished in the sight of my God. Remember therefore what you have received and heard. Hold it fast and repent. Sardis was a very wealthy city that was pretty complacent. They were called ssy impregnable by all the cities and countries around them because they held their wealth in an Acropolis that was on a cliff. 500 meters above the ground on all three sides. 500 meters is a quarter miles worth of sheer cliffs. There was one side that had a narrow passageway that was easily defended and capturing. Sardis became a euphemism in the ancient world for doing the impossible. It would be sort of like when hell freezes over today, it’s just like it’s never going to happen.

But then it did. It happened in 5 47 bc. Cyrus had his Persian army around Sardis. They couldn’t figure out a way to get in. They’re just sitting there waiting. And one soldier from Sardis was guarding the walls, looking out at that narrow passageway. He fell asleep. His helmet fell off of him onto the ground, outside of the walls. Now that would be a capital offense in the Rome, in in the Army. And so he knew he couldn’t just leave it there. So there was this secret passageway where he went down stealthily to get his helmet, but it wasn’t stealthily enough. A Persian soldier saw what he was doing. They relayed the word. And under the cover of darkness, through the secret passageway, about 15 soldiers were able to get in. They opened up the gates from within and Sardis fell and nobody could believe it.

It held fast for another 300 years. And then in the third century, they were surrounded again by cretins this time. And what happened is they didn’t even look behind him at the cliffs. Those cliffs, 500 meters. I had never been scaled. We don’t have to worry about that. It’s never happened. It never will happen. But it did. Laris was one of the soldiers. He figured out a way to scale it, brought a few others with him. Once again, they opened up the gates from within and Sardis fell again. Twice. Sardis. The impregnable was conquered because they weren’t vigilant. They weren’t watching. They fell asleep. They weren’t looking. And what nobody thought could happen did. Sardis had fallen. And here Jesus says to the church, and Sardis, what happened to you militarily is now what’s happening to you spiritually. You need to wake up. You’re no longer vigilant.

He says, you have a reputation for being alive, but you dead. Wake up the message to the church and Sardis is a message to us today. Wake up, become vigilant. Throughout the Bible, we are told to live vigilant lives. That’s just a watchfulness. Taking the time to be aware what’s going on in our minds, what’s going on in our hearts, what’s going on in our souls and in our relationships. One Timothy four 16 says this, watch your life and doctrine closely persevere in them because if you do, you’ll save both yourself and your hears. And throughout the gospels, Jesus often begins his teachings. Look out for this. Watch out. It’s like He’s telling this world. You’re all kinda spiritually asleep. Be careful. Watch out. Wake up. It’s just this notion of letting God redirect us. It is the kindness of God that reminds us of that.

That he sees things we don’t. He can look forward to the future in a way. We can’t. We think that’s no big deal. And God is saying, well, maybe it will become a big deal. I remember the first time I started experiencing this, it was years ago and I felt pretty complacent ’cause there was no scandalous sin in my life that I could think of. But God just took me through what I was doing with my schedule, what I was reading, and listening to what I was cutting out and not devoting myself to. And again, it’s nothing that somebody would be terrified by, but it was as if God was saying, Gary, look at where this leads. Your heart’s gonna get colder and colder toward me. You’re making yourself vulnerable. And this has happened throughout my life. The most recently, a big time right before Ash Wednesday. I think God just wanted to shake me awake, be aware of what’s going on. Maybe because of the schedule I’ve been keeping.

Let me be honest, I, at this point in my life, I just don’t feel like I’m very susceptible to an extramarital affair. I’ve been married to my wife for 40 years. I love my wife. I don’t know that I’d have the time to have an affair. I don’t think I’d wanna do that to Kurt. He brings me here from Texas and then I dump this big mess on him as the senior pastor. Even more we, we have two just adorable grandchildren. I I get nightmares even thinking that little Ana would be told, yeah, Papa cheated on Nana. Good night. I couldn’t even imagine. Papa, you cheated on Nana. Why? The only, the only thing I could tell her, Nana, I thought I was duly impregnable. I thought, that’s not gonna happen to me. I don’t need to be vigilant. That’s the message of this letter.

Wherever you think you are impregnable, wake up, strengthen what you have. Remember where you’ve been. Look at what could possibly happen. Don’t be sardis. Don’t be caught asleep. Yesterday’s reputation won’t protect, won’t protect you from today’s temptation. Yesterday’s victories don’t ensure tomorrow’s victories. We need to stay vigilant. Sardis stood impregnable for centuries, many, many generations. Two instances of not being vigilant and this impregnable city fell. JC RI puts it this way. Keep in view, morning, noon and night the interest of your soul. Rise up each day desiring that it may prosper. Lie down each evening inquiring of yourself whether it has really made progress. This world is not a world in which we can do well without thinking, and least of all do well in the matter of our souls. Lack of thought is one simple reason why thousands of souls are cast away forever.

People will not consider, will not look forward, will not look around them, will not reflect on the end of their present course and the sheer consequences of their present ways. And this is what hits me and awake at last. Fine. They are damned for lack of thinking. Fell asleep. Can I just say, as a pastor, I see this happening. This is Satan’s major agenda against the church. He keeps the young preoccupied with entertainment and dreams of the future. The middle age preoccupied just earning a living and raising our families. The the older amongst us, preoccupied with their health and retirement. He can push us through an entire lifespan without giving a single thought to our souls. And we can be damned for lack of thinking. When a savior is right there, I will save you. And we don’t even glance his way because we’re too busy with the things of the world.

So let me ask you, are you traveling at the speed of an F 14 and not doing maintenance and not being vigilant at how you may be attacked? There’s three areas of our lives I’d like us to consider this morning. The first one is this. It’s our prayer lives. How’s your prayer life? It’s so easy to let this slip. I remember talking with my son when he was in high school. We were just talking about his walk with God. And I said to him, grandma, I bet if you look back on your life, the times that you felt closest to God were the times when you were most active in prayer. There’s really no substitute here. I remember the testimony of Wayne Gruden. He’s a renowned New Testament scholar and he was chosen to help translate the English standard version, the ESV. That’s the version Kurt always quotes from when he teaches.

And it’s a big affair. They, they bring in the scholars together for the final decisions on how they translate this or that. 11 hours a day, they’re studying the Bible, they’re making decisions. He’s with scholars, other men and women who are, are just looking at the context and all of that. It’s a heady time. But as the deadline was growing closer, they started working more than 11 hours. They worked later and later. So he woke up later and later and the easiest thing to cut out was his prayer tart. After all, he said, I’m studying the Bible all day long. What’s the big deal if I coast a little bit in my prayer life? And yet he found out it was a really big deal. Here’s what he said he noticed. I noticed an increase of pride talking about myself a lot inwardly, hoping people would praise me, lack of love for friends, irritability, a general inward feeling of unease, self-reliance and no peace.

See, when he wasn’t receiving what he needed from God, he’s asking it from other people and he’s becoming the kind of person he doesn’t wanna be. Every single one of us are vulnerable to this. Scripture says, we all stumble in many ways. James three, two. Roman says, there is no one righteous not one. Our sin nature that is still a part of us means if we’re not vigilant we can all go back. There are no super saints among us that are above this. Prayer is a key component of staying connected to God. JC Ryall says this prayer is the very life breath of true Christianity. What is the reason that some believers are so much brighter and holier than others? I believe the difference in 19 cases out of 20 arises from different habits about private prayer. I believe that those who are not eminently, holy pray little and those who are eminently holy pray much so just ask you, how am I doing there?

And find ways. Here’s what I found is easiest. When you wake up, stay in bed for five minutes and pray just five minutes when you’re going to sleep. Make your last thoughts a time of prayer. God, thank you for what you’ve done today. What do you think about my day? What are we thinking about tomorrow? I don’t think that completes our time of prayer, but it begins and ends the day because we just wanna create lives where we’re inviting God to speak into our hearts. We’re inviting him to be a bigger part of our life. And it is essential for that. If Cherry Hills is gonna be the beacon of light in Highlands Ranch in Colorado that God desires it to be. I mean, think about this. What will be more effective for the kingdom of God? Having a superstar senior pastor and a great worship team and a lukewarm church body or a pretty good pastor and a pretty good worship team and a church body where 50% of the people are devoted to prayer.

You know what would be more consequential for the kingdom of God? It is what we do in the middle of the week that impacts the ministry of this church. There are five imperatives in verses two and three that we could apply to our Christian life. First it’s wake up. Just ask you, how am I doing? It is so easy to let this area of our spiritual life slip, strengthen what survives. Where is it easiest for you to pray? Build on that. Grow from your strength. Remember what you had. Think back to when you felt closest to God. What were you doing? Can you start doing that again? Hold fast. We gotta guard and keep what we already have. Before Sacred marriage came out my book, I helped feed my family by working on a lot of other books with famous Christians. One of ’em was with Franklin Graham.

I just love the guy. He’s bold, he’s courageous. God has really used him. And I heard him late one afternoon telling his assistant, ’cause we wouldn’t weren’t making as much progress on the book as we had hoped. He said, Hey, I gotta fly out to my parents this evening to have dinner with them. He’s his own pilot. He goes, why don’t I take Gary with me? We can work on the book while we’re flying, have dinner with my parents. We’ll work on the book on the way back and we’ll just get this thing done. So overhearing this, here’s what I hear. I’m gonna have a private dinner with Billy Graham. Ruth Graham and Franklin Graham. And this is when you don’t get to see Billy Graham. He was getting older. He wasn’t in the best of health. They just didn’t let anybody spend time out. This is amazing.

As an amateur student of Christian Israel, I thought, this is incredible. The problem is it was gonna blow up my schedule and maybe my bank account ’cause I already had a reservation to fly back that I would miss. And especially back then, airlines would say, sure, we’ll sell you a ticket from Seattle to North Carolina for 300 bucks. You need to change it last minute, 1500 bucks. Okay, sure we’ll do that. I didn’t care. It’s the one time I’m gonna say, Dave Ramsey, close your eyes, pulling out my credit card and handing it over. I’m gonna pay what it costs to see Billy Graham. I had appointments the next day. People I’d agreed to meet, but I didn’t care. I was gonna say to any of my friends, look, it was you or Billy Graham. I chose Billy Graham. You know, I think they would be okay with that.

Now it turned out we got enough done. I didn’t go out and get to have that private dinner, but in prayer the next day I was so convicted by God because I realized I didn’t care how much it cost to meet with Billy Graham. I’m gonna pay the price. I didn’t care how it would blow up my schedule. Who, what I would offend the chance to meet with him in a private dinner is so great. It’s gonna happen. And yet every day, one much greater than Billy Graham and who’s like Billy Graham is all but invisible invites us to spend time with him. And how often we look for ways to get out of it or to cut it short because we have a phone call or a text. We have to value this invitation. We guard it, we protect it. And then finally we repent. We pull up from the downward spiral.

If we realize, yeah, I, I’ve let my prayer life go down, we pull it back up. The second area of your life that we could be vigilant is how we’re doing in our obedience. Peter says in Acts 3 26, I love the way he put this. When God raised up his servant, he said him first to you. What? To bless you. By turning each of you from your wicked ways. We often see the word repentances, harsh mean word. He say no. God is blessing you by turning you from the wicked ways that will destroy you. Explains in Proverbs, this is from the message. Moral character makes for smooth traveling. I’m old enough to see that this is true. An evil life is a hard life and God doesn’t want you to have to live that life. The great Christian philosopher Bono said this, whatever you abuse abuses you think of the world that a rockstar lives in.

Think of what he’s known and seen. And he says, yeah, you, you can abuse that. It’s gonna turn around and abuse you. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, I’d often see these pictures from the Multnomah County that’s in Oregon department of of Justice. And these are methamphetamine addicts. And they show how they began and where they ended up. You wanna say, did you not look in a mirror? Did you not start to see what is this doing to me? And wake up? And the whole point of vigilance is keep looking in the mirror. So you don’t have to go from here to here without stopping and saying maybe this isn’t the life that I want to live. I wanna wake up Lorenzo s Capoli, a 16th century priest says, none of us are above this. All of us have to live this. Here’s what he says, I love it.

What is essential in spiritual combat is the perseverance with which we ought to mortify incessantly our passions, which are never dead in this life. But on the contrary, like evil weeds spring up hourly that sin nature isn’t completely dead. And this is a battle that only ends when this life ends. So that there is no escape for us from it. He who does not fight in it is of necessity. Either taken captive or killed. We’re forgiven, we’re safe in our eternal destiny. But what he’s saying is we’re not safe in our eternal, in our earthly living. If we’re not vigilant, those weeds that we thought were dead like Sardis thinking, nobody can come up behind us on these cliffs. Catch us by surprise. Let me ask, is aggressive driving a sin? I was going 10 to 15 miles over the speed limit, cutting corners being the third person through the yellow light. That’s actually a red light. Overshooting stop signs trying to make up being late by the way you drive. Is that a sin?

Is it wise? A very incredible servant of God, a godly man that I worked for sometimes young. He’s in his forties and I saw how God used him to turn a dying nonprofit into a powerful prophetic voice for the kingdom of God. He refocused it. It got renamed. He brought in prayer. He brought spiritual life. It was amazing what God was using him to do. I was in awe seeing a leader in full function. Blessed by the spirit of God. One night he’s coming back from a conference. It was late at night. He would speak at these things and he was always in a rush to get home. It was in Virginia where they have rolling hills. It was a rainy night and a windy night and he’s driving like crazy to get home. And he told me that God stopped him. I’m just gonna give a fake first name.

I don’t want to besmirch his Mary, but say Fred. Fred, Satan wants to kill you and you’re cooperating with him. Now that might sound like hyperbole to some of you, but remember Peter said, Satan, it prowls around, prowls around like a roaring lion looking for whom he may devour. Jesus says, Satan, the thief comes to steal, to kill and to destroy. Is it too much hyperbole to say that Satan wanted to kill him so he couldn’t keep doing the work he was doing? Is that ridiculous? I left that ministry. We moved back to Washington state. Within a year of me being back in Washington state, I got a call from one of my coworkers, Gary, I’ve got some terrible news. Fred died last night. I said, what happened? He was coming home late at night from an event he’s in a hurry to get home.

He overshot a stop sign a little bit. And the the crossroad was like, where you go 60 miles per hour, which means people usually go 70. He knew he was sticking out too far. And a lot of people think, well, I’m gonna back up, but that’s not the way Fred drove. He said, well, I’m just gonna gun it. I bet I could beat it. So he hit the gas and this car saw him. And so they went left trying to avoid him. T-Boned right where he was sitting. He bled out and died. And this powerful servant of God didn’t make it through his forties.

Now I wasn’t there. I’m not bes spurting his man. I don’t know that that’s exactly what he was thinking. It was aggressive driving. But here’s the thing. If you are a Christian, if God is using you in your family at home, any kind of ministry at all, Satan wants to destroy you, if not kill you, to kill your ministry, to kill your reputation, to kill your platform of influence. Are you cooperating with him in any way? Are you giving him a foothold to take you out? The last area I want us to be vigilant of, I wanna ask, how’s your marriage? Diana told me she had a crisis in her marriage when Ken, her husband, told her that he cared about her, but he didn’t love her anymore. I’ve heard that so many times. And she looked back, she can predict the drift. She was head of it for her company.

The systems crashed. Everything was broken apart. She was in charge and it took her over a month to get it done. And they were screaming, do you realize how much money we lose every day that the systems are done? So she stayed late. She brought work home. She worked on the weekends for an entire month. That’s all she did. Try to get the system back up and running. During that time that, well, I should say the day after she got the systems back up, their only child, a daughter, Hillary, overdosed on drugs. A boy had broken her heart. She felt terrible. She thought drugs would make her better feel better. It almost killed her. Then two weeks later, a young man took advantage of Hillary’s broken heart, seduced her, took away her virginity. Hillary confesses to Diana and she felt terrible. She so angry at the young man.

She hurt for her daughter. And so when her husband, Ken would ever bring up times of physical intimacy, she was like, don’t even think about, no, I can’t even talk about it. I don’t want to picture it. Look at what it’s done to Hillary. And everything happened. It just stopped and, and it doesn’t take a PhD to figure this one out. You put your marriage on a shelf for a work crisis. You’re dealing with emotional issues with your children. You let one aspect of your marriage die. It’s not a surprise that somebody feels like they’re not in love anymore. Diane admits if you don’t water your plants, eventually they’re going to die. You have to nourish your relationship. For years, they put up with separate interests. Diana loved romantic comedy movies. Ken couldn’t stand them. He said, look, the couple meets cute. They get in a fight, hate each other.

They get back together. The movie ends. I don’t need to see that again. But Ken, Diana thought Ken’s vision his desire to watch was more pathetic. He loved to watch nascar. He said, Gary, I just don’t get it. You go around and around and around you get gas, you go around and around, get tires, go around. It goes, I just can’t keep watching that. And so they were content. Diana would watch a romantic comedies. Ken would watch NASCAR races until Ken was online and he saw another married woman. They had the same favorite driver. They would talk about how he was doing every week. And then they started to talk about more than MAs nascar. They started talking about their marriages that Ken’s wife wasn’t paying attention and her husband wasn’t paying attention until Diana got a call from a woman who was this woman’s mom.

And she said, do you have any idea what your husband is planning to do with my daughter this weekend? Diana was shocked. She thought it was a business trip. She confronted Ken, he confessed. It stopped. They never actually met. But as Diana looks back, she believes that Satan took a natural lull. These things to marriages. Busy, busy, vocational time up, you know, emotional time with the kids and used it to try to kill their marriage. Coming outta that. Here’s what she says. Here’s her wisdom. First, you have to keep working on your marriage because ultimately everything else is going to be irrelevant if your marriage falls apart. I don’t mean to diminish the importance of child rearing, but if you put the children first to the neglect of your marriage, what will happen to them when the marriage falls apart? It was for Hillary’s sake that I needed to, that I realized I needed to take better care of my marriage.

An intact marriage gives you better support and resources to face everything else. Second, I’d say, don’t forget the small things that keep a relationship going. Keep your finger on the pulse of your marriage. If you haven’t gone for a walk in a couple of days, do it. Just be upfront about it and say, honey, we need to get connected again. Let’s go have a cup of coffee. Make sure that you really are communicating. It sounds like such a cliche to say that communication is important, but it is regularly ask each other. Are we okay? Do a periodic checkpoint. Use a scale of one to 10, empty to full, whatever works. But don’t forget to watch out for relational drift. Most affairs and divorces happen not from one big decision, but a couple accepting many separations along the way until they’re so far apart, they can’t see each other anymore.

And they say, well, let’s just pack it in. Diane and Ken tell us, we endanger our marriage if we let loneliness set in, in a world where there are so many options for that loneliness to be addressed in unhealthy ways. So let me ask the men, those who are married in our, in our church today, men, what did you do to win the hand of the wife that you’re with here today? How did you go out of your way to winner? You know, it’s amazing. Get to be with a a wife to have her be committed. What did you do to win her? Will you do that to keep her? I do should be followed by. I will. One thing I can say to the men in the church, the younger husbands here, there are a thousand things I wish I could be a better model of.

But you would be astonished 40 years into my marriage, how hard I work on my marriage prayer every day. I don’t want just my wife just to feel loved. I want her to feel cherished. I’m always thinking about there is a present up in my office right now that I bought for Lisa. I don’t even know what holiday it’s for. ’cause I’m always thinking about how can I please her? How can I bless her? If you wait men till December 24th to buy your wife, her Christmas presents. And so you go to the only drugstore that’s open, you find out on Christmas morning that she’s not that thrilled and doesn’t feel that loved when she gets tooth floss and a toothbrush.

Last Christmas I got Lisa three presents. One for her comfort, one for her pleasure, one for her to address her fears. I remember my youngest daughter saying, mom, this was given to you by someone who knows you. Why do I work that hard? Let me show you a picture of the first year of our marriage. I’ll never have that hair again. <Laugh>. I will never be in that shape. I can never be the cook that Lisa wishes. I could be the mr. Fix-It man that a lot of husbands are, but I can decide. This guys, I can say she will not find anyone that will try harder to cherish her, to serve her, that will pray for her. I can do that. Men will you have that attitude, not taking your wife for granted. But, but wives, let me ask you, what would you have to do to be your husband’s girlfriend again, that flirty, teasing, affirming girlfriend who said, you’re my guy.

You’re the best. Not just the husband who I need him because I need somebody to help me parenting. I need him because we need somebody to help pay the bills. I need him to fix something around the house or open up the pickle jars that he becomes, you become his girlfriend again. Can you do that? Here’s a helpful Ken and Diana exercise. Just think about what are we doing? Are, are we closer than we used to be? Or are we farther apart? Are we building separate interests? Are we choosing to grow closer together? Let’s apply the five imperatives that we did to prayer from verses two and three to your marriage. First wake up. Just ask yourself, is our marriage stronger now than it was a year ago? Is it dangerous to let it keep drifting? Strengthen what survives. Every marriage has different strengths and weaknesses. Where are you strongest? Where do you work? Begin there, rebuild from there. Remember what you had. When were we closest? Let’s go back

To that Hold fast. That means to keep and to guard what you

Have. A couple that I know are in national marriage ministry. They have

A podcast. The

Wife pointed out how

Every time they have sex,

She puts an X in her journal. She does a daily journal, and

The reason for that is just vigilance. I mean, they talk about this seven pillars of intimacy. This isn’t the only thing they focus on, but she just wants to know what’s going on. She wants to look at that as sort of a barometer. So she looks back over a month and she sees two exes. She goes as, Hey, babe, twice last month, is this what we wanna be? Is this what we aspire to be? Now, there may be some times in life when that’s more than you can do, but she said, I want us to be intentional and thoughtful. She’s being a

Vigilant wife.

It’s so easy to say, look, my spouse is a Christian. He’s not gonna stray. My wife would never do that. Just like Sardi said, they’ll never come up behind us. Nobody can get up those walls

Until somebody does. And then the final word, repent. If you see this pull up from the downward spiral. Get that plane going nose up again. Now, here’s

The good news. This is the wonderful news. This is why we’re so blessed to be

Believers.

If we’re just vigilant, we don’t have to be afraid. Satan cannot kill us. He cannot defeat us. We literally have the most powerful spiritual army behind us that no enemy can

Defeat.

We just have to be awake and vigilant. We see something attack, some attack coming. We say, holy Spirit, go get him. Jesus, forgive me. If you realize today you’re in bad shape, Jesus will forgive you today. You start over Today, you have the power of the Holy Spirit. You have the affirmation of the Heavenly Father. You cannot go down if you’ll just stay awake.

You don’t drop your helmet, you don’t ignore the cliffs. You present yourself before the Lord. Speak into my life and you’ll have assured victory. Let’s pray. Father, thank you for the warning to sardis that we hear today. And Lord, I just pray that if people are sensing drift in their prayer or their obedience or their marriage, Jose could take steps. Lord, maybe those who are married would get involved and reengage something, Lord, that could pull them up from the downward spiral. Thank you for the hope we have in you. Thank you Lord for this word of warning that we know is a word of love. We pray in Jesus name. Amen.