Quick Trivia: Which Church Age Sounds Like Today?

Monday's post walked through all seven church ages of Revelation 2–3 and the seven messengers held to carry them. Today's is shorter: a quick self-check. Read the four descriptions below, lifted straight from Christ's own words to the seven churches, and see which one sounds the most like a church you've actually sat in.

Does this sound familiar?

"I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love." Attendance is steady. Doctrine is sound. Nobody's committing open sin. But something that used to burn has gone quietly cold, and everyone's too busy running the program to notice.

"Thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead." A reputation built on the past, a founding revival, a famous pastor, a building full of history, while the actual spiritual life inside it has flatlined.

"I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot... so then because thou art lukewarm, I will spue thee out of my mouth." Nothing is technically wrong. Nothing is especially right, either. It's comfortable, respectable, and utterly unremarkable.

"Thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked." Full parking lot. Full budget. A church that would tell you, without irony, that it's doing great, while Christ, on the other side of the same verse, is standing outside knocking to get back in.

The Answer

That last one is Laodicea, the seventh and final church age, and by the reckoning laid out in Seven Stars In His Hand, the age we're living in right now. It's also, uncomfortably, the description most people picked before reading this far. That's not a coincidence. Of all seven letters, it's the only church Christ has nothing complimentary to say to at all, and the only one where He's pictured standing outside, asking to be let back in.

If that description landed a little too close, that's the whole point of the book it's drawn from.