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For the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd. He will guide them to springs of living water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Amen. You may be seated. In the name of Jesus, amen.
Dear Saints, today we celebrate All Saints Day, November 1st, the closest Sunday after Spirit, which is a day to remember and really to rejoice about all those who are in the church triumphant, that is, those who have left us and now stand before the Lord in glory before His throne in heaven. And it’s good for us, then, to talk about first what exactly a saint is.
I think when we use the word saint in normal circumstances, we’re talking about like… It’s almost like the whole world is in the classroom and you’re being graded on your good works and the saints are the A students, the teacher’s pets, those who have done enough good works to excel above all the rest. So we think of like Saint Teresa or people who have done all these kinds of good works or even in our own lives, if someone does something unexpected and surprising to us, we say, “Well, they’re really a saint.” This is probably very close to the Roman Catholic idea of what a saint is. That is a person who has managed, through a life of devotion and effort, to attain a particular state of holiness so that they can be called a saint, that when they die they avoid purgatory and go straight to heaven.
Now, is that what the Bible teaches? It’s true that the word saint means holy one, but how is it that we’re holy? Are we holy by being full to the brim and overflowing with various good works? As if if we wanted to be a saint, we just had to work harder for it? Paul says, and we heard this text last week, he says, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” In fact, in the Scriptures when it talks about holiness, it means much, much more than moral superiority. In fact, in the Bible, to be holy means to be set apart for a particular purpose, to be set apart by the name of the Lord, to be set apart for the Word of the Lord.
So for example, in the Scriptures there’s not just holy people, but there’s holy days and holy places; there’s holy hills and holy buildings and holy cities and holy spoons and forks even. Now, you wonder if those forks did more good works than your normal fork, or if those hills accomplished more good works than your normal hill. This is the point. Those hills and those forks and those buildings and those places and those days were set apart for the name of God and for the Word of God and for the worship of God, for the preaching of His name and His kindness.
And this then is what it means to be a saint, to be a holy person. It means to be set apart by and for God’s name and God’s Word. In other words, to be a saint is to be baptized. Now, it’s true that our lives should be full and overflowing with good works, but it’s not our good works that make us saints. In fact, it’s the opposite way around. The Lord makes us saints by His grace, by His kindness, and by the forgiveness of sins. We’re saints first, and then the good works follow that.
Consider for example how St. Paul begins his letter to the Corinthians. This was a drastically troubled church. You remember reading through 1 Corinthians and you see what some of their troubles were. They were fighting; they were in different factions, “I’m of Apollos, I’m of Paul, I’m of Cephas, I’m of Christ,” they argued. They were getting drunk at the Lord’s Supper. They had women pastors serving in the church. They were boasting about their sexual liberty. They were, in fact, a lot of them, it seems, were doubting the resurrection, maybe even the resurrection of Jesus. And Paul writes to them, and this is how he addresses them. He says,
“Paul, called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus and our brother Sosthenes, to the church of God that’s in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, together with all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Now, this is Paul’s custom not only in this letter, but in almost all of his letters: to the Romans, to those who are in Rome who are loved by God and called to be saints; his second letter to the Corinthians, to the church of God that’s in Corinth with all the saints who are in the whole of Acacia; to the saints who are in Ephesus and are faithful in Jesus Christ; to the saints in Christ Jesus who are at Philippi with the overseers and deacons; to the saints and faithful brothers in Christ at Colossae; and so forth.
So that Paul says that every Christian, every Christian is a saint. Every Christian is a holy one. And this is because—this is not because we’re sinless, but it’s because we are forgiven for all of our sins. It’s not because you’ve accomplished some sort of state of perfection; it’s because you are justified, you are declared to be righteous in the name of the Lord. So that you are holy, not by your works, but by the grace of God which declares you to be holy. You are God’s children, not because you’ve earned it or deserved it, but because the Lord has adopted you into His family.
This is, by the way, why I like to start every sermon by saying, “Dear saints,” because I want to remind you of this. I want to remind you who you are, that you belong to Jesus, that you are set apart by His name and by His Word, that you are holy by God’s grace, that you are forgiven by Christ’s death, that you are washed and you are cleansed by the blood of Jesus.
And that’s really what the text in Revelation is about. When we realize this, we realize that being a saint is not to be an A-plus student of Moses, but to be a follower of Jesus. It’s not to accomplish all of these good works, but it’s to be cleansed by His own work. And when we recognize that, we realize that we, in fact, are the Lord’s holy ones, and this day is also our day. You also are part of the celebration, which brings us to the glorious vision of the saints in heaven that was put before us in Revelation 7.
This is really quite incredible, and we want to spend the rest of the sermon just imagining this glorious picture that’s painted for us by the words of St. John. The angel brings John into the heavenly throne room to see how things are going there. And this text, I mean, especially as we mourn the death of our loved ones, this text probably more than any other text in all of the Holy Scripture tells us how it is with those who have died in the faith. I mean, what’s going on with them right now?
In verse 9 it says, “‘After this I looked,’ John says, ‘and behold, a great multitude that nobody could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne and to the Lamb.’ And all the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, saying, ‘Amen. Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever. Amen.'”
It’s this vision of people from all over the world, every tongue and tribe and nation all gathered before the throne, and there on the throne is a lamb as He had been slain. Again, that is the crucified Jesus, who by His death has won for us eternal life. And they’re falling down at the feet of Jesus, and they’re singing Him their praises, and they’re throwing their crowns on the ground before Him. It’s wonderful.
And the angel turns to John, and he points to all these people with their white robes and with their palm branches waving their hands. The angel, the angel points to John and he says, “Who are all these people?” And John says, it’s kind of funny, he says, “I hope you know.” It goes like this.
“One of the elders addressed me saying, ‘Who are these clothed in white robes and from where have they come?’ And I said to him, ‘Sir, you know.'”
And then we hear this answer, which is a glorious mystery. The angel is going to tell John who these people are and where they’ve come from and most especially how their robes got to be so white. Listen to this, and He said to me, “These are the ones coming out of the great tribulation. They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”
Now that is backwards. Blood does not make things white. But if I learned anything from childhood, it is that, one of them was at least, that blood is hard to wash out. It was apparently blood stains and grass stains all my whole childhood, elbows, knees, noses, whatever it was, and a frustrated mom saying, “Do you know how hard it is to clean this?” I know then that you do not, if you want to make a robe white, you do not dip it in a vat of blood. But that’s exactly what happens in this vision.
Now I want you to imagine it like this. I want you to imagine that as soon as you are born, you are handed a white robe and you are to wear that robe every day of your life. And every time you sin in your life, that robe gets messed up. Every time you neglect or despise God’s Word, then that robe is stained like a mustard stain or salsa or something. Every time you rebel against your parents, then there’s another spot on that robe. Every time you get angry with someone and lash out and your temper flares or whatever it is, then there’s a tear in the robe. Every time you have a lustful thought, or accomplish a lustful deed, or tell a dirty joke, there’s another stain in the robe.
Every time you’re greedy, or lazy, or every time you take something that doesn’t belong to you, there’s another mark and another scuff and another tear and another loose thread. Every time you talk behind someone’s back, gossip, fail to put the best construction on anything, want something that’s not yours, fail to fear and love and trust in God above all things. In other words, every time you break a commandment, every time your own life, your words and your deeds and your thoughts are not marked by the love of God and love for a neighbor, that robe is diminished and torn up and stained a little bit more.
Now imagine your robe. It’s really just a pile of filthy threads, I would guess. Mine too. And you have to appear before God dressed in these rags. So you’re in line. You’re in line for the throne room of God. But before you step into that room, there is this huge big vat, huge big pot full of blood, and you take that robe of yours, that filthy, dark, stinky, disgusting pile of yarn that you’ve managed to accomplish in this life, you take that and you dip it into this blood and you pull it out and it comes out pristine, perfectly white, perfectly pure, every stain washed— as if it was never there to begin with, every tear mended—you can’t even tell where the tears were in the first place, every spot, every mark, everything washed away, perfectly washed away. And this robe is now spotless, perfect, gleaming, washed in the blood of the Lamb.
Peter says this in 1 Peter 1:18, “Knowing that you were ransomed from the feudal ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things like silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like a lamb without blemish or spot.” Hebrews says, this is Hebrews 9:13, “For if the blood of goats and bulls and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God?”
Paul writes, Romans 5:9, “Since therefore we have now been justified by His blood, how much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God?” Or one more, and this is beautiful, 1 John 1:7, “If we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus, His Son, cleanses us from all sin.”
The elder said to me, “These are the ones coming out of the great tribulation. They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” It does not matter what your sins are. It does not matter what you have done. It does not matter how deeply you have stained your white robes with the filth of your own sin. It doesn’t matter how deep the tear is that you’ve managed to put in these robes. His blood, the blood of your Jesus, is strong enough to cleanse. To cleanse you, to wash you, to sanctify you, to make you holy in His sight. It doesn’t matter.
You say, “Pastor, you don’t know what I’ve done. You don’t know how bad I’ve been. You don’t know how deep these stains go, how day and night I feel like my conscience is stained and I want to wash it and I want to cleanse it and I want to make it go away.” The blood of Jesus cleanses all of your sins, all of them, every single one of them. There is not one stain that is so strong that His blood is not stronger. And by His blood you are clean. By His blood you are holy. By His blood your sin is washed away and you stand before Him dressed in perfect robes, robes of the righteousness of Christ, gleaming with a holiness that we can’t even imagine.
Listen, this is a description not only of the saints of heaven, but of you. Therefore, they are before the throne of God and serve Him day and night, and He who sits on the throne will shelter them with His presence. They shall never hunger nor thirst anymore. The sun shall not strike them nor any scorching heat, for the Lamb who is in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd and will guide them to springs of living water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”
You, dear saints, are the holy ones, holy because of the suffering and death, because of the blood of Jesus, because He has washed and forgiven all of your sins, holy because His blood has cleansed you, and you do not need to be afraid of appearing before the Lord in the rags, the tattered rags of your own sin or even your own good works, because you stand before Him perfect, cleansed by His blood, the same blood that is here for you today, the same blood that is about to be poured across your lips, the same blood. These are the ones, says the elder, who have come out of the great tribulation and have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.
Amen. God’s peace be with you. The peace of God, which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.