MathMan,

            That post was exceedingly instructional, really. It was well thought out and clearly explained. Have you had those thoughts for a while, or did you recently study this out and come to those conclusions? Either way, it had to take a lot of studying. Anyone doing any preaching or teaching on those seven churches, would do very well to speak on all those different applications, and not to focus on only one of them.

 

I had a couple of related questions that I would like to bounce off of you. I’ll write the question, followed by my reasoning for asking it.

1)      Could chapter 2 be prophetically about the church history mainly in the Middle East & Europe, whereas chapter 3 would be mainly referring to the Western Hemisphere?

a.       the Sardis church began while the power of Thyatira still reigned over Europe

b.      but it was the Sardis church that came across the Atlantic, and originally populated America

c.       by the time of Jonathon Edwards, the Sardis church in America was dead, and even more so what they had come from in Europe

d.      the Great Awakenings and the great Missionary work (open door), was predominantly, though not exclusively, American churches,

e.       there is nothing as close to Laodicea as the American churches, that have cooled off over the past century

 

2)      Could the beginning of the Philadelphia church period possibly date back to the early 1730s?

a.       the First Great Awakening began in the early 1730s, from which great evangelism (open door again) came, e.g. Whitfield, Wesley, etc

b.      the great modern missionary movement actually began in the early 1730s

                                                              i.      there were Moravians from the Sardis period, hiding out in a castle in Europe

                                                            ii.      they became convicted that they needed to go out into the world and evangelize

                                                          iii.      they broke up to maximize their ability to evangelize, even some families

                                                          iv.      one of the first groups sold themselves into slavery, in order to evangelize the slaves on St. Thomas, the Virgin Islands, in the early 1730s

                                                            v.      the Moravians were responsible preaching to John Wesley, about being born again, which led to his salvation

c.       perhaps the Philadelphia period ended in the 1^st decade of the 1900s, when the church began looking inward, more than outward

 

Thank you,

            Gino