What if Jesus Christ wrote a personal letter to your local church? In Revelation 2-3, Jesus wrote to seven churches in Asia Minor (modern day Turkey): Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea. To those who were persevering in faith, He gave tender words of assurance. But to those who were compromising and disobeying, He offered a stern warning.

What would Jesus say if He wrote to your church? That’s exactly what a friend of mine, Chips Ross, recently asked his congregation at Forest Ranch Baptist Church. And for two Sunday nights, they drafted a letter of what Jesus might say to them. (It’s helpful to know Forest Ranch is a small community in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountain range, just north of Chico, California). Here’s the letter…

To the messenger of the church in Forest Ranch:

The One who sees into the deepest woods¹, who is faithful to even a few, and who reigns over the trees and hills, says this:

I know your deeds, that you have persevered, worked hard, and have been faithful as a tree remaining firm in the midst of storms.

But I have this against you: you have sat like an old tree with too much fill around you² and you have each pursued your own trails³.

Therefore, repent, lest I close the yellow gate⁴ before you. Come alive as a poppy and be faithful as the sun that rises over the mountain.

To him who overcomes, I will make him to be a conifer, standing tall and straight, in the land of my God and to be red dirt⁵ that remains through all.

Let him who has ears hear what the Spirit says to the churches.

1 – Pictures that Jesus sees all and thus knows all
2 – Pictures complacency; become like the culture around and thus have begun to rot
3 – Being independent from God and from each other
4 – Yellow gates are put up to close mountain trails
5 – Red dirt of Forest Ranch that clings to your clothing and can never quite be washed out; once it’s on, it’s on.

In A Call to Spiritual Reformation, D.A. Carson writes,

The Church is to see itself as an outpost of heaven. It is a microcosm of the new heaven and the new earth, brought back, as it were, into our temporal sphere. We are still contaminated by failures, sin, relapses, rebellion, self-centeredness; we are not yet what we ought to be. But by the grace of God, we are not what we were. For as long as we are left here, we are to struggle against sin, and anticipate, so far as we are able, what it will be like to live in the untarnished bliss of perfect righteousness. We are to live with a view to the day of Christ.

That means, of course, that Christians constitute a kind of missionary community…until the consummation, we live out our lives down here, a heavenly, missionary outpost in a lost, dying, and decaying world. We are to see ourselves as an outpost of a new heaven and a new earth in an old world that stands under the judgment of God.

Unfortunately, many people look at the church and see only its “contaminations.” The church is often accused of being full of hypocritical, self-righteous, unloving people. Then disillusionment and resentment begin to set in. Yet we must not neglect to see God in the process of redeeming His people as a chosen race, a royal priesthood, and a holy nation (1 Peter 2:9). Yes, the church has many blemishes (because it’s comprised of sinful people), but it is also a testimony of God’s grace, as He purifies and prepares us for that glorious day when the Bride of Christ will be presented to Jesus Christ, the Bridegroom. And until that time, the church must remember our mission as an “outpost of heaven.”