Passage from Revelations 3:1-6
“To the angel of the church in Sardis write:
These are the words of him who holds the seven spirits of God and the seven stars. I know your deeds; you have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead. 2 Wake up! Strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have found your deeds unfinished in the sight of my God. 3 Remember, therefore, what you have received and heard; hold it fast, and repent. But if you do not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what time I will come to you.
4 Yet you have a few people in Sardis who have not soiled their clothes. They will walk with me, dressed in white, for they are worthy. 5 The one who is victorious will, like them, be dressed in white. I will never blot out the name of that person from the book of life, but will acknowledge that name before my Father and his angels. 6 Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches.”
In a rapturous vision, the apostle John wrote these words of encouragement and woe to the church in Sardis. Sardis, the capital of Lydia, was known in the ancient world for its luxury, power, military strength, and the tall, formidable walls that surrounded the city. In its time, Sardis was impenetrable.
As someone who has grown up in the church all my life, I have often felt like the equivalent of Sardis—a symbol of spiritual stability. I went to Christian schools, was on the executive board for my Christian fellowship in college, and lived in Africa on the mission field for six years. In the Christian youth community, my Christian reputation knew no bounds.
However, in my third year of college, my faith began to waver.
It began slowly and strangely. I have never been very athletic, so I didn’t think much of it when my left leg started to drag a little as I walked to and from class. But over time, my body became increasingly unfamiliar.
In class, I couldn’t type as fast as I used to. While playing piano for the worship team, my fingers fumbled over the arpeggios. I kept dropping dishes when I washed them and mourned the perfectly good bowl that was shattered.
I couldn’t point my toes. I lost my balance when walking down the stairs. When I rested my left arm in my lap, I noticed that if I didn’t consciously keep it still, it would start sliding off.
Something was very wrong.
Armed with enough knowledge from an introductory biology class, I scheduled an MRI with images of multiple sclerosis and Lou Gehrig’s disease dancing in my head. A large part of me was optimistic. I expected the MRI to show nothing except maybe some signs of stress from studying too much.
Instead, they called me the next day. There were multiple lesions of inflammation in my right brain—it looked like I had a stroke.
I won’t get into all the horrid details of the medical world—how I became the It-Girl of the neurology department for being such a rare case study, how I started mentally Yelp-reviewing the different MRI machines I encountered, how I made friends with many grandmothers in physical therapy as we practiced picking up marbles together. Suffice to say, my life imploded and my Sardis walls crumbled.
As a Christian, what hurt the most was knowing that this was somehow part of God’s design. “God has a plan for my life”—I had repeated this mantra to myself daily. I did not know his plan would mean this. He knew. He planned this. He allowed this. He orchestrated the collapse of my Sardis walls.
Yet I knew that, unlike Sardis, I had not been unwatchful. In a twist of irony, the downfall of Sardis was its belief in its own indestructibility. One fateful night, a guard relaxed in his duties and entered a secret passage while the enemy was watching. Following close behind, the enemy infiltrated the secret passage, entered the city, and massacred the whole town. There is tragedy in the story of Sardis, but there is also some logic. An unwatchful eye led to its ruin.
Yet in my story, I could find no logic. I was not unwatchful. I had not been particularly negligent of my spiritual life or my physical health. I had, in fact, been good. In some ways, it would have been easier if I had committed some egregious sin so I could point to why this was happening to me. Instead, I had lots of unanswerable questions.
The unanswerable questions consumed me, transforming me from the bright face of a Young Christian to an angry, disillusioned skeptic. It was like all my training from growing up in the church was for naught because suddenly I could not pray, I could not sing, I could not with good conscience say “All the time God is good, God is good all the time.” I was, in a word, angry.
Yet I kept this anger inside, letting no one but the walls of my bedroom know. In my mind, grief and anger had no place in a good Christian girl’s heart. At least not the kind of red-faced, swollen-eyed grief and anger I was feeling. I suppose I had lost so much of myself because of sickness that I at least wanted to maintain my good Christian girl persona. Hiding my anger was my way of staying sane.
So each day, I woke up and chose to be “good” and not angry. I continued going to church, I shared in Bible study, I talked a lot about Job and I wore “suffering produces perseverance” on my arm. I tried very hard to spin my good Christian girl persona into the “good Christian girl who is spiritually enlightened because she has suffered a lot” persona.
But the more I tried to bring my anger and grief to the trappings of the church and not to Jesus himself, the more I found that church culture could only offer me the kind of grief that can be stitched onto a pillow. It was one that is easily spun into a story of spiritual triumph—the “God works all things together for good,” “For when I am weak, then I am strong,” or as the passage in Revelations says, “strengthen what remains.”
But what remains when I do not have a functional body to strengthen? How could I “be strong” when I could not hold a cup of coffee in my left hand, could not walk down stairs and could not walk without limping. This was not just some spiritual wavering in need of a boost. There was nothing remaining for me to strengthen.
I began to seriously doubt whether this faith really had anything to offer me.
In this season, I met with a mentor over lattes in a local café. While sipping almond milk, I berated him with how Christianity was doing nothing for me. If I hear one more Hillsong song about Jesus “healing,” if one more person tells me that this is my “thorn in the flesh”…
Mid-rant, he calmly put up his hand. He stopped me and asked, “Who is saying this to you?”
And again. “Who is saying this to you?”
At first, his question annoyed me. I felt like a smiling pastor or a small group leader was handing me a Bible verse bookmark as I bled out.
But this question continued to stay with me. Over time, I came to realize that my mentor was saying to me what Revelation says, “Remember, therefore, what you have received and heard; hold it fast, and repent.”
And I realized that the reason I found these Christian platitudes so painful is because they often came from chipper faces of people who didn’t seem to have ever felt the sting of real suffering. At least in my eyes. But now I realized that these words ultimately came from Jesus. Jesus who knows suffering very intimately.
This gentle question redirected me. It prompted me to return to what I once received and heard and look to the person of Jesus himself.
This past year, I’ve committed to going through the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and reading every account of Jesus healing. Previously, I avoided these passages because it often felt like Jesus was dangling stories of healing in front of me and then snatching relief away before I could grab it.
But after being convicted to remember, I’ve forced myself to strip away the version of Jesus based on my fears and examine him as he truly is.
This study has proved to be transformational for my understanding of healing in God’s kingdom. Out of all the new insights this Bible study has shown me, this one has made me feel known in an incredibly personal way.
As a Korean American who grew up in Kenya, I have often felt like an “outsider,” unable to fit in fully because I am not Korean enough, not American enough, not Kenyan enough, and not cool enough to deftly handle a multicultural identity. With existential longing, I would look to the Bible in search of a word that would speak to my life or my identity. There are, of course, verses I could “apply” to those areas of my life. But sometimes I craved God’s direct voice to my exact situation in a clear, undeniable way. A verse that said, “For when you feel ashamed for not knowing how to speak Korean, I am with you.”
However, here was an area of my life and identity that is directly in the Bible. Jesus only had about 30 years or so of life here on earth, three of which were in ministry. In this concentrated time, I was blown away by how much of this time was spent with the sick. With people like me.
There are several stories of people who have been sick for many years, including a woman who went to several doctors and could never find a diagnosis or a cure—stories of people like me—and Jesus spoke to them. I don’t have to extrapolate what Jesus would say to me in my sickness. I know how he talked to the women who bled for 12 years, and I can know this is what he says to me as I lie in the MRI table for the fifthteenth time.
I have been a Christian for a long time and I’ve always recognized that the gospel is good news. Jesus died for me, and (hurray!) I am glad for it.
Yet I have never felt like the gospel was specific to me. If I am allowed to use an alcohol metaphor on a Christian platform, I shall. It was like I saw the gospel as an open bar with free drinks on the table. Anyone could come and drink what was offered, no matter where they came from, no matter what they did. And it was good! It was good to partake in such a gift.
But for the first time in this past year, it was like Jesus was the Great Bartender who saw me from afar, weary and limping. He knew ahead of time what I wanted, what I needed, and he made a great cocktail of good news that was specific for me.
This is a gospel that is good news for the sick.
Before I was sick, I always saw God as the God of the spiritual-emotional but not necessarily the physical. When I read 2 Corinthians 12:10, which says, “For when I am weak, then I am strong,” I always took weakness as an abstract spiritual entity. But now that I am physically weak, unable to lift large objects or bend down without holding something for balance, I realize I need God for all of me—even my physical life.
The amazing thing about this is that Jesus isn’t just a spiritual being either—he physically came to Earth, subjecting himself to our fragile human bodies. Jesus’ sacrifice for us was not merely spiritual, it was extremely physical.
When Jesus died on the cross, his actual skin was pierced with nails. God chose for the story of salvation to be a story of intense physical pain.
Thus, I can receive this story and know that Jesus physically hurt as I am physically hurting. I have a God who doesn’t just know and hear my spiritual suffering but he also knows what it’s like to have sharp objects stuck in your skin. For him it was thorns and nails, for me it was needles for a blood test. When Jesus says, “All things work together for the good of those who love him,” he does not say this from an ivory tower, safe from harm. He says it with the authority of someone who knows the deepest suffering there is to know.
I am amazed that this is the story God chose. It was as if He knew what I would be going through, and so he wrote this story of salvation from the beginning of time solely for the moment where I would hear it. So I could see Jesus in pain and feel His death and resurrection as a story I can claim.
To those who read this, I do not know where you are in your relationship with Christ or the church. But probably at some point in your life you have felt angry with God or doubtful that this faith really has anything for you. We need only to look at the state of the church right now to feel like it might only have the reputation of being alive when it is really dead.
Wherever you are, I have the same message for you that Jesus had and has for me, “Remember.” Remember what you have received and heard, and see for yourself. My hope and prayer is that you go back and remember what you have heard, stripping away what you have been told about Jesus and looking to him yourself. I pray Jesus will reveal his gospel to you in a renewed way and it would feel like he has written this story of salvation just for you.