Revelation Chapter 3 

Message to Sardis (A.D. 1367–1517) 

Verse 1: 

And unto the angel of the church in Sardis write; . . . 

The name Sardis, in a more modified application, means “that which remains” in the sense of a used garment or remnant; something out of which the life or virtue has departed. As its name implies, Sardis was the remains of the true Church carried over from Thyatira. The slow, persistent crushing oppression of former centuries had left telling effects. “Worn out” by a long series of bloody persecutions, the object of which was to exterminate the opposition and thus silence the voice of protest against the Jezebel system, these discouraged witnesses of Christ needed special help from the Master to strengthen and enable them to resume their divinely appointed work (Dan. 7:25). To these survivors of the former era, the message of the Sardis Church is especially directed. 

However, there is an additional etymological thrust to this message. The name Sardis, as it applies to the false, pretending Church, takes on the harsher connotation of remnant in the sense of (a) refuse or sweepings and (b) carnality.¹ 

Sardis (presently Salihli), on the western coast of Asia Minor, was the capital of the ancient Lydian Empire. The city was then situated on the slope and at the foot of one of a series of hills forming a transitional change from the neighboring high Tmolus range. The citadel of the city was of imposing strength, for it stood upon a thousand-foot-high, flat-topped, elongated spur. Not only did the acropolis have steep sides, but one side was such a sheer perpendicular precipice that it was deemed unscalable and left relatively unguarded. This, its strongest asset, later proved to be its fatal weakness. 

In order to understand the import of the message to the Sardis Church, as well as its messenger John Wycliffe, the bold English reformer, one must have a knowledge of some of the historical, political, and religious events just prior to and during the Sardis period, which extended from A.D. 1367 to 1517. 

Wycliffe was first noticed at Oxford when he defended the university against troublesome neighbors, the begging friars, who taught that begging was a gospel institution and that Christ and his disciples were beggars also.² In addition, he called attention to the pomp and luxury of both the English clerics and the superiors of the mendicant monks, contrasting them with the simplicity practiced in the early Church. 

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1. “Sardis was notorious for its immorality.” (John Elder, Archaeology and the Bible [London: Robert Hale Ltd., 1961], p. 176.)

2. William Byron Forbush, ed., Fox’s Book of Martyrs (Philadelphia: John C. Winston Co., 1926), p. 135.
    

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