The Book of Revelation: Revelation 2:19-29

Speaker: Greg Sanders

Passage: Revelation 2:19-29

We began looking at the church of Thyatira last week. David Mitchell did a fantastic job taking us through what the Lord is saying to this church. I just want to pick up and highlight a few details. To do that, I want to read from verse 19 through the end of Jesus’s message to this church and then make some observations. There’s a few things that are happening in this that I think are really important for us to grab on to.

“I know all the things you do – your love, your faith, your service, and your patient endurance. And I can see your constant improvement in all these things.”

Jesus stays in this pattern that we see, which encourages what’s right. I don’t know about you, but I’d love to have the Lord say, hey, I’ve looked at your faith, I’ve looked at your love and looked at your service, I’ve looked at your patient endurance, I know it, I love it. Good job. I see your constant improvement. All too often, there’s a trap we fall into if we’re not careful. We live in a very Western mindset that says, as long as I’m doing some things right, I’m good. 

But Jesus will dig in and say: “But I have this complaint against you. You’re permitting that woman–that Jezebel who calls herself a prophet–to lead my servants astray. She’s encouraging them to worship idols, eat food offered to idols, and to commit sexual sin. I gave her time to repent, but she would not turn away from her immorality. Therefore, I will throw her upon a sickbed, and she will suffer greatly with all who commit adultery with her. Unless they turn away from their evil deeds, I will strike her children dead. And all the churches will know that I am the one who searches out the thoughts and intentions of every person. And I will give to each of you whatever you deserve. But I also have a message for the rest of you in Thyatira who have not followed this false teaching (‘deeper truths,’ as they call them–depths of Satan, really). I will ask nothing more of you except that you hold tightly to what you have until I come. To all who are victorious, who will obey me to the very end, I will give authority over all the nations. They will rule the nations with an iron rod and smash them like clay pots. They will have the same authority I received from my father, and I will also give them the morning star! Anyone who is willing to hear should listen to the Spirit and understand what the Spirit is saying to the churches.”

THE DANGER OF PERMITTING SIN

I just want to make a few observations. The first one is that Jesus indicts Thyatira on this issue of “you’re permitting that woman.” He assesses the church for “tolerating” in Pergamum; He was saying, I have this against you, you tolerate. But here He’s assessing the fact that they are “permitting” something.

What’s the difference? Here’s the difference: to tolerate is to refuse to speak to something you know is wrong due to the fear of how it may be received.

After we worked through that teaching in Pergamum where Jesus says, I have this against you, you tolerate, it dawned on me: the very thing our culture is saying we should be doing, Jesus says the exact opposite. He says, I have this against you, that you’re tolerating things you know to be wrong because you’re afraid of how they’ll be received.

Whoa, that’s a wild truth. But see, what He says here to Thyatira is different. To “permit” is to condone what you know is wrong and grace it due to the fear of loss or a lack of concern for truth. You’ve decided it’s not that big a deal. You condone it, you say it’s okay, you permit it because you’re afraid of the backlash of how it’ll be received. Has anyone ever dealt with someone that you’re terrified to speak to because of how they’ll respond?

Originally, I built a fully different teaching, and then it felt like the Lord shifted at the last minute. I was like, wow, the other one was really solid. What a waste of work. I was going to take us through what it looks like to understand the way the spirit of Jezebel works in our day and in our time.

But what we see here is something going on with this woman in their culture. They’re afraid to deal with what she’s doing because of how she’ll respond, so they’ve just decided to justify it and make it okay. I will say this, I think the church at large is struggling with this very thing right now. We’ve started to call things we know are sin okay because we’re afraid of what happens if we call them sin.

If we hold the standard of scriptures, we have to say that we gave our life to Jesus Christ, chose Him, repented of our sin, believed in Him for salvation, and now we’re going to follow Him. He is setting the standards, not us. Just because we don’t know how to articulate a standard in our culture, it doesn’t change the standard. And His statement to them is, I have this against you, you’ve permitted... We would do well to make sure we don’t make the same mistake – that we’re never willing to condone what we know is sin because we’re afraid of how it’s received.

THE RESPONSE TO CONVICTION IS REPENTANCE

The second observation is that what we see here, and what Jesus says, is that conviction is a clock. “I gave her time to repent, but she would not turn away from her immorality.” I want us to understand this: the window to repent is finite. We are mistaken if we believe that we can choose whenever we’re ready. Jesus makes a statement here that terrifies me: I set a time period. The word is kairos: I set a time pocket for her.

How many places in our lives have we decided, when I’m ready, I’ll repent, when we already know He’s convicted? Or said, I’ll change that, but I’m not ready to change it yet, even though we know that He has touched something and said, I don’t like that. I want you to hear this: the correct response to conviction is predetermined. We actually don’t get to choose what the response is. We only get to choose to step into the response which is to repent. We are graced with the opportunity to repent from sin, not the choice.

What I see in this is Jesus making a very clear line in the sand. In following me, I am the one who dictates right and wrong. And if I say that’s wrong, I expect repentance.

GRACE SETS US FREE FROM SIN

The third observation I’d love to make is that the consequences are real. “Therefore, I will throw her upon a sickbed, and she will suffer greatly with all who commit adultery with her. Unless they turn away from their evil deeds, I will strike her children dead.” This is New Testament theology. Does it capture anybody besides me? That’s a really strong statement for the New Testament because we tend to get into this place where we think it’s all grace. It’s all love.

My question for us is, do we take our sin as seriously as He does? Where have we allowed a false understanding of grace to give us license to live in unrepentant sin?

Church, it’s a mistake if we start to believe, Hey, I know it’s wrong. He’s already told me it’s wrong. But you know what? I just love the grace of God. I’m not going to change because Jesus loves me, this I know. Jesus does love us, one hundred percent. But Jesus didn’t redeem and emancipate us so we could go back to our stupidity. Galatians says, “It was for freedom that Christ set you free, no longer to be subjected to the yoke of sin.”

His grace is given for the purpose of repentance from sin and for following Him. Grace was never to be an excusing of sin. A forgiving of sin is different than an excusing of it. I love the grace of God. I’m in desperate need of the grace of God. But His grace says this: You cannot fix your wrong. Let Me eradicate it for you. Come follow Me. The process of the Kingdom all the way through is repent, believe, and follow.

TRADING INDIVIDUALITY FOR HIS AUTHORITY

The last thing I want to talk about is that Jesus gives one message, but to two groups. The first group I want to highlight is those who are not following these deeper truths, those who are not following this sexual idolatry. He says, “To all who are victorious, who will obey me to the very end, I will give authority over all the nations. They will rule the nations with an iron rod and smash them like clay pots. They will have the same authority I received from My Father, and I will also give them the morning star! Anyone who is willing to hear should listen to the Spirit and understand what the Spirit is saying.”

Obedience to the end, I want to highlight that phrase. Obedience to the end is what gets rewarded. It’s interesting that Jesus makes a statement “To all who are victorious,” and then He defines what it is to be victorious in the Kingdom: “Who obey Me to the very end.”

How many understand that obedience is really a black and white thing? How many parents, when you ask your kids to do something, understand it’s a yes or no equation. Partial obedience is technically disobedience. Jesus’s expectation is that we begin following Him; we repent, we believe, and we never look back. That this process is to be our lifestyle. We are pursuing Him, staying after Him. We’re never taking seasons off. We’re never just going, I’m not really that into the Lord right now.

It is a lifelong pursuit that we’re in. I want to challenge you to learn to play the long game. Set your eyes on the long game with Jesus. Lord, the rest of my days you have my life. Surrendering our individuality to His authority is rewarded with Him trusting us with His authority.

One of the core concerns I have with the modern church is we have such a tendency to elevate our own individuality over His authority. If it makes sense to us, then we do it. That is not what it means to follow Jesus. It means to surrender who we are to Him. Because you feel it doesn’t make it godly. Because you think it doesn’t make it godly. Because He says it makes it godly. 

So the simple truth is in order to carry His authority, which is to be how we live, we must be willing to surrender ours. That tells me that the authority He shares with believers is conditioned on obedience. It’s not that He’s austere and trying to pull something away. It’s that the way He set this up is as we obey Him and surrender our hearts to Him, He releases to us His authority. We see a lot of believers walking in a diminished level of the authority of Heaven because there’s a diminished level of obedience to Heaven.

JUSTIFICATION DOES NOT EQUAL GOD’S WILL

The second group He talks to is those who are actually following Jezebel and her deeper truths. He says, you are permitting that woman–that Jezebel who calls herself a prophet–to lead my servants astray. She’s encouraging them to worship idols, the food offered to idols, and commit sexual sins.

There’s a reason why I want to camp here. If we look at Thyatira as a city, Thyatira was one of the rare pictures in these seven churches. They didn’t have a deeply occultic or pagan reality around them. They weren’t getting a ton of religious pressure. The church in Thyatira wasn’t fighting with all the occult and all the pagan temples that we saw on Pergamum. What Thyatira was struggling with was economic pressure. In a lot of ways Thyatira reminds me of most modern cities; it reminds me of Fort Collins, it reminds me of Loveland–it reminds me of this region.

Let’s go back to the story of Jezebel. David Mitchell took us through that last week and I don’t want to rehash it, but I want to take us into just a touch of it. I challenge you to go read 1st Kings 16, 17, 18, and 19 to get a picture of it. Jezebel showed Ahab deeper truths. What she showed him was how to get around the inheritance law.

Remember, David talked about Naboth’s garden. Ahab saw a garden–a vineyard–and he wanted it, but it was tied to this man named Naboth. It was his inheritance. The law said you couldn’t, as a king, remove someone’s inheritance. And so Jezebel finds a way to do a workaround. She manipulates the system. She’s showing him how to violate the heart of God.

Just because you can justify something does not mean you honor the integrity of how the Lord said to do it. There is a spirit behind the way the Lord says things, the spirit of the law. And we are to be a people that honor the heart of God, not figure out how to manipulate the system to get what we need.

She eliminated truth and began to illuminate lies. A deeper truth, church, is any interpretation of or about His Kingdom that differs from what Jesus and the total witness of Scripture reveal. Real simple, it’s a justification of sin that can be rooted or grounded in a variety of deceptions. I want to challenge us not to walk in this, but to be a people who are mining the heart of God in every situation.

JESUS EXAMINES OUR INMOST BEING

Jesus goes on and says, “Therefore, I will throw her upon a sickbed and she shall suffer greatly with all who commit adultery with her. Unless they turn away from their evil deeds, I will strike her children dead. And all the churches will know I am the one who searches out the thoughts and intentions of every person.”

I don’t know about you, but the last part of that verse just jumps out at me: “all the churches will know I am the one who searches out the thoughts and intentions of every person.” I think we count in all the churches. He wants us to know that He is paying attention to the thoughts and intentions of everyone.

I’m not in any way, shape, or form trying to say He’s the Boogeyman. You know that idea? The person who, when you’re alone, you’re always afraid is hiding in the closet. My dad thought it was a really funny joke to put a mask on when I was about five and lay down between the wall and my bed. He would wait till I was almost asleep and then jump up and scare me. He swears to this day he didn’t do it. What five year old is making that up?

I’m not trying to create this image where we’re just afraid the Lord is going to jump out and get us. That’s not what’s going on here. But the word for “searches” that He used, we have to pay attention to the linguistics of it. It is used in what’s called the present imperative. It’s similar to His declaration to repent that we looked at in Pergamum. It means now.

So hear this: it means now He is and He will be searching and examining something. It’s not a one-time act, but instead, it’s an act that Jesus is engaged in and doing currently. I don’t know about you, but that’s a sobering reality, is it not?

To fully understand it, we have to actually look at what He’s searching, and in the original language, it’s thoughts and intentions. This is a place where we can make a major mistake if we just assume in English we know what it means. There’s two words that are used.

The first word is “cardio.” Now we get heart from that, we get cardiac out of that. Jesus is speaking to a Greek culture so He’s using language and words they would understand. How many think it would be cool if the Lord gives you a prophetic word, but He tells you later, Yeah, I didn’t mean that. No, He’s not going to do that. That’s not who He is. He’s going to communicate in a way we understand because His goal, in His love and grace, is that we understand.

So He’s using language that fits their time. The Greeks understood cardio to be the seat of physical life. We learn a lot of that through Aristotle’s writings. Their definition of heart was a person’s bosom, or their inmost being. They understood it with this phrase: as blood circulates from the heart, one’s inner self circulates to the outer person. The Greeks viewed the heart as the source of human character, feelings, and earnest wishes like deep desires.

This word cardio is interwoven with the Greek concept of psyche, meaning soul or conscious self. We could view it as our thought processes or emotional processes, our internal dialogue; how we see ourselves and interact with the world around us. It’s a whole lot bigger than just our ability to think.

JESUS EXAMINES OUR DESIRES

The second word that comes up is “nephros.” How many have ever had kidney problems and gone to a nephrologist? Yes, I’ve had kidney stones, five, six times, something like that. They’re just awesome. Just drink water, that’s all I’m telling you. Nephros is the root word here, and it’s the seat of desires and intentions. The kidneys for the Greeks were the irrational mind, distinct from the rational mind.

They had a word for the rational mind, which is just your ability to didactically think, like if you’re processing through and thinking through and organizing things. They called that nous. That’s a different word. Jesus uses these words intentionally; that’s what I’m getting at.

They viewed the kidneys in ancient Greek as the source of subconscious thought, human appetites, desires, intentions, inclinations, drives, anxieties, and fear. Have you ever heard someone say something akin to, “It’s just who I am,” or “It’s how I’m wired?” That’s what they use this word for. Core appetites, desires, drives, just who I am. We learned something a few weeks back: our appetites do not create our identity.

A second thing I want to highlight is that this term, nephros, was a slang term in ancient Greek. It was a Greco-Roman euphemism for a testicle or sexual organ. All of a sudden, this word gets very different. Jesus declared to the Thyatiran church that He’s examining their internal thoughts, their passions, their drives, their lusts, and the external activities that result from these. This includes their sexuality, their attitudes, their kindness, and their opinions. I think the simple place for us to land is that He is demanding all of them be fully submitted to His leadership. He’s communicating that He is to be in control of all of these areas.

I think it’s wild that the first place He goes is, I have this complaint against you. You’re partnering with wrong sexuality. And then He comes back and says, I want you to understand, this is an area I’m inspecting in all the churches. And I will give to each of you whatever you deserve. I want us to catch this sobering promise that He makes.

Our life choices in these areas are being measured. Our life choices and our appetites are being measured. Our life choices in how we handle our sexuality is being measured by Jesus. Our life choices in our attitudes are being measured by Jesus. Our life choices in every part of our being is being measured by Him.

I would submit that this understanding is the beginning of the fear of the Lord. I would submit that this should cause us to live with the consideration of the End Day because we have to realize that our lives will earn reward or there will be recompense.

BE SHAPED BY CHRIST, NOT CULTURE

He’s gracious. Our King is incredibly gracious. He forgives sin, but He does not excuse sin. What’s the difference? While He forgives it, He never permits us to stay in its grip. That tells me the only way we receive reward is to require of ourselves that we align our hearts and our intentions with His heart and His intentions.

I know it’s a hot topic in our culture, but I’d love to just submit to you this simple Kingdom truth: as a believer, you have a responsibility to submit your sexuality to Him and say, I will use this as You tell me to use it in the Scriptures. It’s a gift You gave me; it’s not my identity.

I’d love to invite every single person in this room to get alone this week and say that to the Lord, Culture tells me this is my identity. I’m handing it back to You and saying You’re my identity, this is not. I’d love you to take your attitudes, good and bad and ugly, and present them to Him. To say, my culture tells me that these define me. That I have a right to them because it’s how I see the world. I’m giving them back to You because You’re the one that tells me how to see the world.

I would invite you to take every aspect of yourself before Him and say, Look, there are places where I’ve let the culture shape my view, and so I’m giving you my worldview and asking You to reshape it. Holy Spirit, will You teach me? Will You expose all the places I’ve partnered with deception?

We have to do the work to evaluate and subjugate our appetites, desires, intentions, drives, inclinations, attitudes, behaviors – all of them unto obedience to Him. Anything short of that is recompensed. As I read through this message to Thyatira, I’m gripped with how direct and clear Jesus is in His assessment of these churches. I want to make sure that we have not become overly connected to what I would call cheap grace. It’s not real, and we’ve let go of holiness, which is to walk in purity because of our love for Him.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

You see, Jezebel failed to submit her thoughts and her intentions to Jesus. The faithful in the passage submitted their thoughts and intentions to Him. I think the message is clear. Jesus wants full control of His church. I don’t see another way to read this.

If you and I want to walk with Him, we have to invite His searching to reveal where we have bought into these deeper truths that our culture is preaching. Where have we embraced behaviors, attitudes, perspectives, sexual drives, and habits as being no big deal and permitted them? We have to have the courage to ask Him to clear out the clutter in our lives and reform our brokenness.

Church, we have to submit and surrender all of our lives to Him, every aspect. That is His message to the church at Thyatira: I expect you to submit all you are to Me and surrender all you are to Me; I want to be in control of all of it.

There’s a very human thing that rises up in us when we hear the word “control.” I want to know that my opinion matters. If you can’t at this point trust Jesus to know better, what are you doing? He is God. His statement was, I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. You cannot hope to get where you want to go except through Me.

We are in a day and in a time where the church looks far too much like the world around it. And I know that this could be labeled as holiness preaching. It is, but not holiness for some external expression. I’m calling for a purity of heart where we say, Lord, all of me. Nothing withheld. Search my heart and know me; expose any wicked place in me so I can give it to You.