Revelation 2:1-7 - A Culture of Discipline
In modern parlance, you’d say the early church, according to Jesus’ assessment of it in this passage, was based. It was unapologetically Christian. It feared God and loved God. It worked hard. It was marked by fellowship, unity in Christ, love of God and love of the Body of Christ, refusal to tolerate evil people, discerning as to who was genuine and who was a liar, willing to patiently endure suffering for Jesus, hating evil, and a stubborn refusal to quit.
We can learn a lot about the Ephesian church 2,000 years ago via this passage that gives Jesus' “report card” on the early church. However, we can, more importantly, learn and understand God’s assessment of how we are lining up with Jesus’ standards for our church. Is God’s warning that He will remove the church’s lampstand from its place among the churches also a warning to the church today? I think so.
Jesus commands hard work. Good, we get that, but we are much more than hard work. We must indeed have a culture of discipline and hard work, but it is a culture of the Gospel that we must adhere to in our churches. If we don’t have that then we have nothing transformative to give to the world. Jesus gives something that no one else can, a new life. Eternal life.
Serious question. Is the culture of our church (or our Christian organizations) something that we’d want to export throughout the nation and throughout the world? If the answer is no then that is a five-alarm fire that needs immediate attention. That’s the fire alarm that Jesus is ringing in Revelation 2.
The Bible gives us the standard for godly churches and godly leadership. We are to be discerning. We are to assess how we are doing and align to Jesus’ standards. God’s way is our plumb line. You may recall the classic business leadership book, Good to Great, by Collins which sold millions of copies about 20 years ago. I read it at least once a year. In that book, Collins has a chapter on building a culture of discipline. It is excellent. In it, he compares and contrasts two companies, a great one called Nucor and a poorly led company called Bethlehem Steel.
Nucor had a culture of focusing on its core mission and it relentlessly stopped doing anything that was not in its wheelhouse. I think that is the key chapter of that book. It’s the key principle we see here in Revelation 2. Know your mission and stick to it. Be consistent and project your culture of discipline throughout your entire organization. Eliminate layers of bureaucracy and have a no-evil person policy (that Revelation 2:2 describes so well).
In my 27 years of advising public and private companies, I can attest that Collins is right, few companies move to the great category. For those companies, like Nucor, servant leadership starts at the top and permeates the organization. Great companies are lean and everyone contributes. Nucor had no unions. It operated out of a rented headquarters with old ragged chairs for the executives. It had no corporate jets. In fact, it had only about 25 employees in the headquarters (for a company in its early days with a market cap approaching $4 billion). Remarkable. Nucor put its employees ahead of its executives. Nucor’s employees daily set production targets that were well above anyone else in the industry. The employees were paid well, but they worked extremely hard. The employees had the same benefits plan as all the executives. There was no double standard and no us versus them mentality. Nucor created a culture of discipline and hard work. Not because of a tyrant or some lean operations fad project. It took years and an example from senior leadership of serving others and sticking relentlessly to the mission. Everyone knew what the core mission (the Hedgehog Concept) was and everyone bought into achieving it. Nucor was more like a family than a Fortune 500 company.
Bethlehem Steel, on the other hand, had a fat cat executive first culture. It was a celebrity pastor culture of the modern church. Economy for the sheep, private jets for the brass. It had exorbitant executive pay and a massive HQ. It had labor strife and a workforce that hated management. It had no unified culture of discipline and its results showed the fruit of its dysfunction.
The findings that Collins and his students mined out of their corporate research are, in my opinion, biblical principles. The stakes, I would humbly contend, are much higher from a spiritual perspective. But much of the practical application is the same. It is incumbent on us as Christian men and women to assess our lives and to assess the health of our churches. The culture of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is fragrant and good. It is a culture of godliness and Christ’s righteousness. The culture of the Gospel will transform the world for good. The culture of the Gospel does not let its love grow cold. Instead, it repents of evil deeds and turns back to God. We love Jesus because of what he did (and does) for us. And we love each other because we are God’s body (brothers and sisters in Christ).
My prayer today is that we hear and understand the Spirit’s call to holiness and righteousness in Christ. May we work diligently today to know and fulfill our mission and to be servant leaders who lead by example to create a culture of discipline. May God produce a rich harvest through our hard work today. Amen.
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