The Letters to the 7 Churches

Transcript: Hey everybody, I wanted to welcome you to a new feature that I’m doing on YouTube. It’s going to be a playlist called Todd’s Take. Basically what’s different from this and my other YouTube videos is this will be a little bit more teaching, a little bit more specifically related to Bible prophecy and eschatology, like a specific nugget of truth that I want to get across or something that I find personally interesting and I want to share with you guys.

As you know, I’m coming out with a book number two soon, it’s The Non-Prophet’s Guide to the Book of Revelation. I was just kind of skimming through it, thinking about which things I can highlight and share with people that give them a taste for what’s inside. And one of those things, one of the most overlooked areas of the Book of Revelation are the seven letters to the churches that are early in the book.

A lot of times people tend to kind of skim through those, get a little bit familiar with them, but then they want to hurry up and get past those so they can get to the action scenes, you know, the tribulation period and the judgments, and all the crazy stuff with demonic locusts, and meteors crashing into earth, and earthquakes, and the four horsemen, and the apocalypse, all that kind of stuff. And I’ll highlight some of that here shortly. Not today, but in other videos as well. But today, I really want to talk about the seven letters to the churches. There are so many epistles in the New Testament that are letters written from Paul or Peter or James to the churches. But what people fail to realize in the Book of Revelation, there are actually seven letters from Jesus to seven specific churches that were in, what we now know as Turkey, but at the time it was Asia Minor.

A lot of experts think that those were seven churches that John oversaw, that he was kind of the the head of those churches and helped facilitate their spiritual growth and that kind of thing. But what’s unique is there’s so many levels to the truth and to the application of those seven letters. And because people know that those were letters to specific churches, they often breeze right past them, but what people fail to realize is those seven letters can also be kind of like self evaluation report cards for us as individuals and to our churches corporately. You know, we can evaluate our church that we go to or that we’re considering to go to or maybe that we have a leadership role in. We can use those seven letters to evaluate how effective ministry is, again, either personally or corporately in a church. That’s fascinating. That’s worth taking a read right there.

But the thing that fascinates me the most, and I go through this in great detail in the book, and I have charts and graphs and specific things to help highlight this. But when people started studying Bible prophecy in depth, recently, passed 100 years, 200 years, they started to see that there’s a pattern that the more we know about church history, the more we realize that the seven letters line up with seven very distinct periods of church history. And I’ll highlight a few of those in some future posts. But I just wanted to mention that because a lot of people don’t even realize that.

In the book, I talk about how when I first heard that concept, I thought, you know, that’s probably a bit of a stretch. Like maybe there’s some similarities, but it’s really a stretch to say that, that section is also prophetic. But when I … And I did the hard work of digging in myself and studying those church periods, the meanings of the names of those churches, the combinations, the positive things that Jesus said to those churches, and the negative things that he said, the things they needed to work on. And even many of the other details about what was going on in those churches lines up incredibly, specifically, and accurate with seven distinct church periods. The last of which is the Laodicean church. And again, I’ll unpack this in another video.

And if you don’t hold to that, if you don’t believe that, there’s a prophetic application of those letters to the seven churches, I get it. It’s not worth fighting over or anything like that. But I would challenge you to study it for yourself to see if it’s true. Because what I found when I dove in was it is absolutely accurate, and that we are living in the times of the Laodicean church. And when you think about the different church periods, it doesn’t mean all churches of that period have the characteristics of, like for now, the Laodicean church. There are still some great Philadelphia church type characteristics in many churches in our day, but they’re the overall trend of Christianity, especially in the West, lines up 100% perfectly with the Laodicean church.

So anyway, that’s a little bit more than I wanted to share because I wanted to be able to unpack that specifically and kind of show you the, the value and the truth in it as I go through each of those churches. So I’ll share some videos in the future. But anyway, just now, i just wanted to tease that, just highlight that, and just let you know that those seven letters to the churches from Jesus that we often overlook, even those of us who read Revelation and study it, we often overlook it, but there’s some incredible truth in there for personal application, for historical application to those churches in John’s day and as a prophetic application as we look at the periods of church history.

So anyway, that’s Todd’s Take, I’ll talk to you next time.