The Revelation 1:1-4 | Episode #1005

August 15, 2025

Hope Alive: Applying God’s Word to Your Daily Life

The Revelation 1:1-4

I am Chad Harrison, and I am the teaching pastor of Lake Community Church and had been serving as a pastor for 25 years. I'm also a practicing attorney. This podcast is designed to help you study God's word and find God's will for your life. The purpose of studying scripture is that you might know the character of Jesus Christ, and that you might see the world from the Father's perspective. That you gain wisdom that changes your life. I pray in the name of Jesus right now that God would open His word to you and allow you to see Him and to know Him. To know His will, that you might glorify Him and that you might walk in faith and power each day, especially today. In Jesus name.

If you would like to revisit today’s Bible study, please visit our website at https://hopealive.buzzsprout.com/ to download the transcript. 

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Transcript

This is Chad Harrison, and you're listening to Hope Applying God's word to your daily life.

Hi, this is Chad Harrison and I am the teaching pastor of Lake Community Church and have been serving as a pastor for 25 years.

I'm also a practicing attorney. This podcast is designed to help you study God's word and find God's will for your life.

I pray in the name of Jesus right now that God would open up his word to you and allow you to see him and to know him and to know his will, that you might glorify him and that you might walk in faith and power each and every day,

especially today.

In Jesus name,

it says, the revelation.

Of Jesus Christ, what God gave him to show to his servants through things which must shortly take place.

And by the way,

notice it was given to Jesus to give to us,

okay? When Jesus was on the earth, he did not know everything.

He only knew what his Father had revealed to him. In fact, when he was asked when, when the end would come, he said, no man knows that time or season.

He doesn't know. No man knows.

Now, after he was.

After he was crucified and resurrected,

they asked him the same question. Because, you know, he'd been to heaven and he's resurrected. And they said, when are you coming back? And he said, it's not for you to know.

Which means when he came to them and said, all authority in heaven on earth been given to me, nothing was not his. By then, he was totally in charge. He knew everything.

But you're not going to know absolutely everything.

But that should not limit you in seeking to know everything.

It should not. Just because you're not doesn't mean you shouldn't.

You should try.

You should say to God, reveal yourself.

I want to see the fullness of what's going on. And what must happen quickly is the church age, which means it's right now.

And actually we're going to spend a long time in the church age, okay? We're not going to get out of the church age till then, till halfway through the summer, okay?

Because the church age is your age. It's the time you're in,

okay?

And we're going to talk about that. He says,

and he sent us,

and he sent and signified it by his angel to his servant John.

Now remember, every time you read the word angel, you need to know this, okay? Every time you read the word angel, we're not talking about the fat baby with wings, okay?

All right? I went to Rome recently,

went into a lot of cathedrals There were a lot of fat babies with wings, okay? Those are not angels. No angel in the Bible is described as a fat baby with wings, okay?

They are not. That is not an angel, okay? Some of y' all have fat babies with wings in your houses, okay? I just letting y' all know that is not an angel.

I don't know what it is, but it's not an angel, okay? Angels are messengers from God,

okay? And when they show up,

people fall down on their face and get afraid and sometimes hundreds of thousands of people die. Am I right?

When the angel of the Lord showed up or the death angel showed up in Egypt, a lot of people died. When the death angel showed up outside the gates of Jerusalem, a whole army one time died.

Okay? Angels are powerful beings who were created by God to minister to you.

The Bible says they're not angels ministering spirits sent to minister unto the saints of God,

okay?

They have a job to do, and we are a mystery to them because they do not get to experience the full grace of God.

They don't get to experience that,

okay?

To them, we're a mystery.

And they watch us because they can't fully understand all that God is without seeing us.

We unveil an aspect of God that only God could do through human beings, he said, who bore witness to the Word of God. And if you'll notice, John,

John being the oldest apostle,

John being the oldest apostle,

he gets into the Word of God heavily. Did y' all notice that? And he always equates Word of God with who?

Jesus.

Jesus is the Word made flesh.

Jesus is the Word alive.

Jesus is the Word revealed,

okay? Jesus is the Word made alive to you, revealed to you,

okay? And so when we're talking about the Word, we're talking about this now. So many times people want to come up with reasons why this is not true.

I want you to hear me why this doesn't work.

I want you to hear me tonight if that's the case for you,

that you struggle with that, I want you to hear me. The enemy is doing his very, very best to keep you from knowing God.

You cannot know God outside of His Holy Spirit.

Revealing Jesus through the Word to you,

and this is the fullness or the finality or the completion of God's plan. And his plan works through Jesus, who is the maker of all things.

He is the sustainer of all things,

and he is the culminator of all things.

All right? So it says he bore witness to the Word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ to All things that he saw. What he's saying is, I'm telling you everything I saw.

I'm giving you a witness to this.

I'm not hiding anything from you. I'm going to tell you what God showed me.

Now, as we read the book of John, as we read first, second, third John,

we understand that John is into imagery, he's into symbolism. He's into explaining Jesus in ways that are easy and yet so, so deep.

Okay? He says, blessed is he who reads and those who hear the words of this prophecy.

This is the only place in scripture where it says you receive a special blessing to read and to hear the words of this prophecy.

Now, does he say you get a special blessing if you understand all of it?

No, he doesn't say that.

What does he say? Blessed are you if you read it and if you hear the words of the prophecy,

meaning if you've got ears to hear, God's going to show these things to you.

He's unveiling these things to you. He's making it alive in your head, in your mind.

All right? Now I want you to hear me.

You can't get parts of this,

okay?

You can't do parts of this.

So many people,

when they. They hear somebody's going to teach the Revelation, they show up for a week or three weeks or six weeks or eight weeks,

and you're not going to get it all that way.

You can't get it all that way.

If you're going to study this,

we got to go through a lot. There's going to be some. Some nights that I don't even teach out of the book of the Revelation.

Okay? You go. What are you talking about? Well, it's going to point to something, and I'm going to have to take you to that something and explain that something so that you'll understand what he's talking about.

So it'll all come together for you.

All right? This is not. This is not a show up and have fun Bible study. This is a show up and let's dig deep.

This is. You got to bring your boots,

you got to bring your shovels,

you got to bring your.

What are those little things called? My whole post hole diggers. You got to bring those post hole diggers. My granddaddy. My granddaddy was with the power company. And you know, back then they didn't have those augers on the back that you had to dig the actual telephone lines with.

Post hole diggers. My grandfather could do it with penny loafers on and a nice shirt. He could dig a giant hole, just throwing it in the ground, just throwing in to dig it and pull it out.

I'd be over there dying, sweating. Bigger than he was, stronger than he was, he could do that. You've got to show up and you got to dig deep into this.

You can't play around. If you're going to get the blessing that comes from this,

you gotta. You gotta what? You gotta read it and you gotta hear it.

And you need to hear it all together.

You need to hear every bit of it so that it all come together for you. Because remember what God's doing is everything he put into existence. When he unfurled the universe in place,

he's culminating in this book.

All right? I've always said there's four books of the Bible that you really need to read in order to understand the Bible.

First of all, you gotta read Genesis. Cause you really don't understand what's going on with that Genesis, okay? It's the beginning.

Second of all, if you're gonna really understand theologically the ideas of all of scripture, you gotta read Romans and Hebrews. You got to. Those are theological books of the New Testament.

And finally, if you're gonna know how everything works out and why God's doing all this stuff,

you gotta read the book of the Revelation.

If you don't know the book of the Revelation,

you really don't understand. Why are we going through all this?

Okay? The disciples were always wanting to get to the end. Well, why? Because the end's good.

Okay.

Spoiler alert.

God wins. I don't know if y' all know that or not, but God wins. Spoiler alert. It's gonna happen. God's gonna bring it all to a culmination, and he's gonna glorify himself with his creation.

Blessed is he who reads and those who hear the words of this prophecy and keep those things which are written in it,

for the time is near, which means we're in the church age.

The time is right now.

You're in the age that was began with Jesus Christ and His resurrection. You're living in that time period.

And now you go, well, when is Jesus coming back?

I'm going to tell y' all something. I'm going to tell y' all what, When Jesus is coming back, okay?

He's going to come back sometime after. What I'm talking about right now.

I don't know.

I have no idea.

Okay? I tend to think it's. It's a little bit farther. I have people come up to me and Say, you know, Jesus, come back anytime. Well,

not, not really.

I mean, we got to have the Iranians and the, and the Russians attack Israel and, and get destroyed. Now they, they thinking about it, okay? They've been working on it for a while.

Not doing too good.

Okay. But, but that's got to happen before any of this comes to. Comes into play.

So what am I telling you? Well, I'm telling you this.

If you're trying to figure out when Jesus is coming back, there was a group that did that several, several times and set dates and. And then they got so embarrassed that they just quit doing it.

They called Jehovah's Witnesses. Okay? And if you want to. If you want some dates that don't actually come about, you can go hang out with them. Otherwise,

you. There's not a date out there I can give you, okay? It's not going to happen.

He says, he says from, he says, john,

to the seven churches.

What did I say seven was?

The complete church.

So this is written to.

If you're the church,

it's written to you.

It's not hidden from some sections of the church. God's not hiding it from everybody,

anybody. He is writing this for you.

This, this book is for you to know.

If, if, if. If you read something that says God says you're blessed. If you hear it,

you're blessed if you read it.

And that I am writing it specifically for you.

Shouldn't you know it?

Yeah.

And obviously he's not writing this to hide something from you.

He's writing this that you might know to the seven churches which are in Asia. Now, this is kind of weird to me, and, you know, I don't really even know why,

but. But it is weird.

All right? These seven churches are in what is called.

He calls the seven churches in Asia.

When I was growing up, it was called Asia Minor. Do y' all remember?

I didn't realize that Asia Minor was in one of my favorite country names in the world, Turkey. Okay, you gotta think about it. Turkey is a great name for a country, right?

I mean,

in fact, it's such a great name that they actually kind of changed it. So it, so it's said differently.

It's, it's, it's, it's. It's Turkey.

Historically, you're going to hear a lot of times if you're on YouTube or things like that, they will call it Anatolia.

Okay, so those are the three names that you'll have. Turkey,

Asia Minor and Anatolia.

These three towns are not so important.

A couple of them are A couple of them are big. Big. Big or big cities. A couple of them aren't. They're actually kind of in a circle. If you go from one city to the other, they're a little circle.

And they're a little circle kind of down toward the southeast corner of Asia Minor.

Southwest corner. I'm sorry, southwest corner. And if you kind of follow them around, they're just seven cities that are there. Now there's seven cities that are there, which is interesting to me.

They're seven cities that are there. And the church was planted there by. Does anybody know the Apostle Paul?

So John is mentioning seven churches which I'm sure he had visited.

But those churches had not been planted by John. They'd been planted by the Apostle Paul.

So you've got seven churches in Asia Minor, which you go. What does that really mean? Well,

I just kind of think about it this way.

Oftentimes we get to thinking that, you know, we really don't mean anything. You know, we're just a small hick town in the middle of Alabama and nobody thinks a whole lot good about Alabama.

And,

you know, we're. We. We. We don't have a whole lot to offer. You know, I went all over Europe for two weeks.

There ain't no place I went to prettier than where I live right now.

Not any. I mean, not any place I went to. I went all through Italy, went through Austria, one of the most beautiful places in the world. Went through German. Went.

Went through Germany. And would I say that Austria is as beautiful as Alabama? Yeah, but I'd also say Alabama is as beautiful as Austria.

It is.

So many times we begin to think that we don't matter.

And I want you to notice that God, Jesus didn't say to the seven churches around the world, because he could have. He could have picked Rome,

right?

He could have picked Jerusalem. To the church at Jerusalem,

right? He could have.

He could have. He could have picked. Picked a. One of the big cities in Egypt.

That would have made sense, right?

He could have. He could have picked. He could have picked some of the other major cities in Italy where. Where most of the commerce and most of the world was.

Was out of. He didn't pick those. What did he pick?

Seven little towns around each other, a couple of them larger cities.

He said,

I'm writing these letters to you to these churches in Asia Minor.

I'm going to write these letters to you.

Which always, for me, has always been fascinating. It always made me feel good that no matter where you're at God's got a letter for you. God's got something to say to you.

You're not hidden.

And oftentimes, God does the biggest stuff in the littlest of places,

right? Oftentimes God does the biggest stuff in the place. Nobody imagined it could happen.

And so when you're thinking about who you are and where you're at,

you should never, ever limit God and what he's willing and wanting to do for you.

Does that make sense?

As you go today, I pray that.

The Lord will bless you and keep you, that he'll make his face to shine upon you, and that he will give you hope and peace today in Jesus name.