The Church at Thyatira: The Tolerant Church, Part Two | Chris Chadwick | Revelation 2:18-29 — Chris Chadwick

Revelation chapter two, verse number eighteen is our text. And this is the longest letter to the smallest church that's mentioned in Revelation chapters 2 and 3. And we started off this morning. I'm just going to give a really brief overview and then preach for a few minutes and finish up this passage of Scripture because I want to go verse by verse through it. And we need to go verse by verse through it. But we have this understanding and it's imperative that we do understand this, that Jesus Christ has a passionate, on-purpose love for the local New Testament church. It's on purpose and it's passionate. It isn't accidental; He didn't just happen to love the church. He loves the church. He started the church in Matthew 16. He empowered the church in Acts chapter 2. He purchased the church with His own blood when He died on Calvary's cross, as Acts 20:28 teaches. And then we understood this morning. And I'm going to reiterate this again and again: Christ expects His church to be holy.

Holy—set apart, sanctified, spiritual—walking with Him, exemplifying the fruits of the Spirit. Not perfect. Church is an imperfect place filled with imperfect people. Sometimes folks say, ‘I went to church and got offended.’ Well, of course you did. Of course you did! Church is filled with imperfect people. I'd like to say you could come to Canyon Ridge Baptist Church and never get offended. But the chances are, just hearing me talk, you're going to get offended. Much less hearing somebody else. Church is a place where it's very easy to get offended. You bring together—I don't know what we have—150-something people. You bring 150 different personalities together. You're not going to get along with all of them as well as you do. You know, you'll have special people that you don't get offended by. But you'll find in a church environment that sometimes it's just part of being offended. But here's what Jesus said. Rather than living in offense, He gave us a means of resolving the offense.

And that's in Matthew chapter 18, where if you have a problem with a brother or a sister and they've done something, you're commanded as am I to go to them and resolve it by talking to them about whatever the issue is so that there can be resolution and unity. And if the offending party—or the perceived offending party—does not want to resolve their issue, then you take somebody else with you. And if they still don't want to resolve the issue, you tell it to the church. And if they still don't want to resolve the issue, then you remove them from the church. It's called church discipline. You remove them from the church and you consider them to be a heathen and a publican—an open rejecter of Jesus Christ. I mean, church discipline is no small thing. It's pretty big. By the way, this isn't a hobby horse. I just want you to understand the philosophy. I grew up hearing—and some of you who are older and grew up in church also heard— pastors say church discipline is one of the worst things that church could ever go through.

And you should never try to, or you should never practice church discipline unless you absolutely have to. Well, I don't think you should ever practice church discipline unless you absolutely have to. But let me say this, it should be a regular thing in a local church if people in a local church are sinning and unrepentant. The church should never be accepting of an unrepentant heart that is claiming to be a follower of Jesus Christ. Never. We have a biblical responsibility. And we've found it at Canyon Ridge to actually be very healthy for the church to get rid of a spiritual cancer that refuses to resolve sin in his or her own life and is affecting others. People often want us to be tolerant. That's exactly what the church at Thyatira did. I was talking to a pastor who said, ‘We've never exercised church discipline. We just tell people to leave.’ Telling people to leave and church discipline are not the same thing. They're not the same thing. Telling people to leave is a lot easier.

Church discipline is a clear biblical command that we have. And it's one of the ways that we keep the church holy. And it's what Christ commands in Matthew chapter 18, 1 Corinthians chapter 5, 2 Thessalonians that we would practice holiness inside of the church. Well, we talked this morning as well in the church discipline side or the introduction about the Council of Jerusalem commanding believers that were Gentiles that they didn't have to convert to Judaism in order to be saved, that what they had to do was ‘that ye abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication: from which if ye keep yourselves, ye shall do well. Fare ye well,’ he goes on to say. And so there's a lot that was said about that and rightly so. Let me talk about Thyatira, a city with a whole bunch of guilds or unions and those unions or those guilds became really little cultic places that began to worship false gods and to commit immorality inside the church or inside the city of Thyatira and the church began to practice it. And so Christ is writing here and He is incredibly concerned. Concerned isn't a strong enough word. He is judging the church at Thyatira. We see Him as the correspondent. You say, "Where's he judgmental?" Well, just in the introduction, as the correspondent, He refers to Himself as the Son of God. And this is the only time this phrase is used in Revelation with all of the apocalyptic talking or speaking in Revelation. This is the only time that this phrase is used and Christ is approaching the church at Thyatira and not as a sympathetic high priest, but as the divine judge. Brothers and sisters in Christ, it's important for us to remember that Christ is the judge and that His eyes in verse 18 are like a flame of fire. They're piercing. They're laser-like.

And His feet are like fine brass. He tramples out impurity and He is pure and holy and right. And then Christ gives them a commendation. And I still, I don't know about you, but in every one of these letters to the churches, I'm amazed that Christ finds anything good to say about them. Because I know when I'm frustrated, I often allow my frustration to cloud everything. This is incredibly instructive to me. But also, Thyatira is like, "Y'all are complete spiritual losers." That's not a spiritual term, but that's just what they are. I mean, literally everything they're doing seems to be bad, but Christ still sees in His mercy. And I'm reminded that His mercies are new every morning. In His mercy, He still sees the good in them, verse number 19. He sees their works. He sees their charity. In some ways, Thyatira was better than Ephesus. When the only mark against Ephesus is that they didn't love God like they once had, and they didn't love one another like they should. It seems like Thyatira in some ways was actually better than Ephesus in that regard. That was the only way, but at least that way they were better than Ephesus.

They were a model to the church in Ephesus in their love and their charity. He says, ‘I know your service.’ Love always serves. They were serving one another. Their faith, their persuasion. It seems like there was a group of them in the church that had held fast. We're going to talk about them tonight. And their faith led them to patience, perseverance, power to withstand hardship, stress, especially the inward fortitude necessary to continue walking with God. And their works, and verse number 19, He says this, notice this last phrase, ‘And the last to be more than the first’—the works at the end are more than at the beginning. And so He compliments them. He commends them. But He doesn't stop there. We saw this morning, He condemns them. There's a condemnation, ‘Notwithstanding I have a few things against thee, because thou sufferest that woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess to teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication and to eat things sacrificed unto idols.’ That is the condemnation.

The singular pronoun there, and He is talking, it seems like to the pastor or the leader of the congregation. You might call them senior pastor, pastor, whatever the case may be. But the leader of the congregation, it's like Jesus is pointing him out and saying, I have something against you. There's a lot to be said about leadership in the local church. There's some benefits, but bro, there are some intense responsibilities that we have. And I would encourage you to pray for your pastor. And to pray for the pastors that you know, and you just met another one, put them on your prayer list, which is why we gave you four blank pages in your Canyon Ridge directory to pray through your membership directory. And in November, when you get a new one, you get a new one every two months or three months. Every time you get one, add the pastors that you know there. Why? Because there's a great attack. And sometimes the attack is to throw us off track.

But sometimes the attack, if I can just be really candid with you, is to not fight the battles that need to be fought. To not fight the battles that need to be fought. I'm listening to a highly recommended book. I don't think I highly recommend it, but it's considered one of the best books about war ever written: Once an Eagle. And the protagonist in the book who has risen to the rank of Colonel is dealing with a general who is serving in the Second World War. He had also served in the First World War, and he's an older man in his 50s. And the general is literally just tired of fighting. And folks, it's not uncommon for men as they get older to just get tired of fighting and of the spiritual battle. Pray for pastors that will stay strong and true and willing to fight and defend the truth and that will not give up, that will be patient. Young men, be patient; older men, be strong and bold and not to quit what God has called them to fight for, not to give up what God has called them to fight for.

It seems Jesus is directing His attention to this man. The church is going to hear it, but he's directing his attention to the pastor who's allowed it to happen. Verse 20 says, ‘Thou sufferest that woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess, to teach and to seduce my servants.’

That female prophet, by the way, let me just say this, that in the day and age in which we live, the New Testament, the age of grace, the church age, there are no prophets. There are no prophets and there are no female prophets. I don't care what some chick on YouTube gets up and says, let me tell you what I prophesy. I prophesy that you're a false teacher. That's all I needed to hear. Nobody is foretelling the future. Everything that needed to be revealed has been revealed by God in this book, and there's nobody seeing anything. And if we want the test of being a prophet, that's great. As a prophet, if you're wrong one time in the Old Testament, they stoned you to death for being a false prophet. You can be right 99 times. If you're wrong once, as my dad would say, it's Katie bar the door. I'm not sure what that means, but it's bad.

She was a self-proclaimed prophetess. I'm amazed at the number of professing Christians and professing Christian men who will fall prey to some woman because she says, I'm a prophetess, I have a word from God for you. You're not a prophetess—there aren't any—and you don't have a word from God. You might have a word from your God, but you don't have a word from the Creator God of the universe who gave me his word. Because He said, ‘If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book.’ Here's what God is saying. I'm given no more revelation until I return. I'll be the one who speaks for me. I don't need another mouthpiece because my word has been delivered.

This false prophet was like Jezebel in the Old Testament. We won't take time to study 1 Kings and the passages that follow. But Jezebel in the Old Testament, Ahab's wife was Satan's agent to corrupt God's people. This woman here in Thyatira was Satan's agent to corrupt God's people. Be careful because in churches there are often agents of Satan that want to come in and corrupt God's people. This vile woman claimed to be a prophetess and led many saints in Thyatira into immorality. She did it by teaching the instruction of her mouth. Why, Pastor, did you let her get up here? Paul said very clearly, ‘I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.’ There are other passages as well; we just pointed out 1 Timothy 2:12. And that's not chauvinistic. That's not some type of oppression. That's just the biblical complementarianism which says God gave these lanes for men and these lanes for women and God is glorified when we stay in our lane.

And if I'm going to live my life to glorify God I've got to stay in the lane that He gave me. And it's often that women want to be in the place of men and men want to be in the place of ladies. God has said no. We've got to stay where He has called us because He's glorified. Well they allowed the woman to teach in verse 20 and she seduced, led astray, many in the church, my servants, my douloi—my slaves. This is the strongest term for committed follower of Christ that there is in the New Testament. The singular form of that strong word is doulos. It's literally a slave. Think of that for a minute. And she led them astray. We would say this way. She led trustees and community Bible study leaders and assistant pastors astray. She was good at what she did and the pastor was allowing it and she seduced them. And what she seduced them to do, we read about it and talked about it earlier, but she seduced them to commit fornication and she seduced them to eat things offered to idols which was tantamount to committing idolatry.

And then, in verse 21, Jesus says I gave her space to repent, I gave her time to repent and she wouldn't repent. We talked about the fact that the church that is tolerant of sin will soon cease to be a church. And that we as a church family have a responsibility to be upset at sin. And so, if you were in the 8:30 service, that was a very kind and gracious service. Nothing about our governor was said in the 10:30 service, the spirit of God moved, your pastor was just frustrated. I'll let you know after the service review which one that was. But I will say, and this is not a defense mechanism at all, I will say, I think churches ought to be angry at the trafficking of children in our state when unelected bureaucrats and politicians say that we care about the needs of people. So we're going to make these laws that actually protect people. We're going to do away with these laws because we don't want people to be hurt by our laws. No, laws are put in to protect us from things that could hurt us. There's a reason the speed limit is not 112 because most of you can't drive 112.

And if you could drive 112 in San Diego, I guarantee you there'd be some old person in the fast lane anyway, and it would just cause frustration. Lois would be doing 95 in the fast lane and you'd be honking your horn at her, flashing your lights at her. Like, come on, grandma, brother Bill got a new Subaru and it doesn't drive itself. But he'd be doing that too, 95 in the fast lane. So there's a reason we don't have speed limits that fast to protect us. And the laws of the land are to protect us. And where government's supposed to be a terror to evil works, not to good works. And the governor in the state of California, many of the liberal progressive politicians are a terror to good and they promote evil. And I'm not coming off of that until they stop doing it. When they stop doing it, I'll be fine. But until that point, we have a responsibility when the text leads us to it to preach a very applicable message letting young people and others know that we're just not going to sit around and tolerate it with silence.

We say, well, I don't think everybody in the church is for it. But that's fine. That's why I'm called the spiritual leader and have a responsibility to preach the truth and help us to understand it. And I wouldn't want to be a part of a church where at some point the pastor doesn't get fired up about evil in the community.

Yep. My friend Clark Bozier, Colin Browning, many of you remember Colin Browning, he and Amanda moved away. He's going to send this as a meme now because he listens to every service. Like before it's actually updated, he's got some wizardry thing and he listens to it. Actually before I say it, he's already listened to it. But he sent me a part of a service where our friend Clark Bozier at Willow Park Baptist Church is preaching and Clark's up there and he's just firing off out of, I don't know, 1 Kings, I think it was or judges or something like that. And Clark's just going off about it in Texas, about the Democratic candidate who has called God a woman and said that the Bible's okay with abortion and that God loves trans people and he does love them. He wants to save them, regenerate them, make them new and whole again. And Clark, I don't know, he's just going off about that.

And Clark says something like this, he goes, this isn't a political church, this is, and he does it with that West Texas accent, this is a Holy Spirit-filled church. And everybody says amen. He said, if that offends you, the door out there swings both ways. And so Colin sent me a text, the door swings both ways. I guess it does, it does. And sometimes people will go out the door and that makes me sad. We don't go for that, that's not what our agenda is, but standing for truth and righteousness and holiness, sometimes that is the case.

And we're not going to lose our shirt when that happens, because if you stand for truth that somebody leaves, and somebody might even say, I just don't think we should be aggressive like that. Well, I'll just be honest with you, I'm a church planter and I'm an entrepreneur, we are by nature aggressive people. It's our nature, it's my personality. The next pastor probably won't have that kind of personality. In other words, services will be way less fun. I'm teasing about the next pastor; he could be a comedian for all I know. I don't know who he is. But this church was tolerant: they allowed a woman to teach and allowed her to teach heresy and then allowed her to respond with callousness. Verse 21, gave her space to repent and she didn't repent. Well, all of that—24 minutes—was review, which is about 18 minutes longer than I anticipated. I want you to notice the command in verse number 24, the command, Christ addressed a word of comfort, gave a word of comfort and encouragement to the true believers. He is speaking to the remnant in the church. It seems from the text that the vast majority of the church was following Jezebel, but there was a small remnant who were not following her. Those are the ones Christ addresses in verse 24: ‘But unto you I say, and unto the rest in Thyatira, as many as have not this doctrine, and which have not known the depths of Satan, as they speak; I will put upon you none other burden.’ In other words, Christ said there are some faithful members here and I just think it's important to understand what made them faithful. Number one, they rejected the doctrine of Jezebel. They rejected the doctrine of Jezebel. I love this because it is so important for us to remember the importance of biblical doctrine. Ephesians 4:14 says, ‘That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive.’ Brothers and sisters, we're supposed to know the word of God, which is why discipleship matters and we're supposed to live out the word of God, which is why discipleship matters and we're supposed to know doctrine, which is why doctrinal preaching matters and it's not just the pastor's responsibility, it's everyone's responsibility.

And I would say that the doctrinally weaker people and the emotive followers and believers in the church at Thyatira were the ones that Jezebel was able to lead astray because they didn't know sound biblical doctrine. Hebrews 13:9 says, ‘Be not carried about with divers and strange doctrines. For it is a good thing that the heart be established with grace; not with meats, which have not profited them that have been occupied therein.’ And he says, "Be not carried with these different and strange doctrines. Stop it. Be grounded. Be foundational, be tied to the word of God." Second John 9, I'm just picking something because I have something that I always pick. I just wanted to share some diverse ones tonight. 2 John 9 says, ‘Whosoever transgresseth, and abideth not in the doctrine of Christ, hath not God. He that abideth in the doctrine of Christ, he hath both the Father and the Son.’ These believers were faithful because they rejected the doctrine of Jezebel. What she taught, they rejected.

By the way, they didn't have a Bible to go home and read. It wasn't completed like this. They didn't have commentaries to go home and peruse through. They didn't have the internet to research. They had preaching and prayer. And it's really what they had. And in praying and seeking the Lord, the Lord led them to this understanding and having studied the word of God before and talked about the word of God before with sound biblical teaching. They were not dissuaded from the truth of the word of God. They rejected the doctrine of Jezebel. Number two, they were a pure group living pure lives. Look at verse 24: ‘As many as have not this doctrine, and which have not known the depths of Satan.’ They had pure doctrine. They were a pure group with pure doctrine living pure lives. Again, we don't know how small it was, but it seems like a rather small group of people.

John MacArthur said Jezebel and her followers claimed they could plumb the very depths of Satan's domain and remaining spiritually unscathed. It was pseudo-Gnosticism, pre-Gnostic teaching. In their perverse libertine, licentious, false theology, they believed they could enter the feast days of the false gods with all their public displays of impurity and immorality and idolatry, and they could partake in all of that and remain unscathed.

But there was a handful of folks that said, "Yeah, we're not going to do that. We're not engaging in that." They were probably made fun of outside of church, and I'm just going to assume something. They were probably made fun inside of church. They were probably ridiculed outside of church and they were ridiculed inside of church.

That's why we at Canyon Ridge, we don't mock people who have more conservative positions than we have on certain things. Like, we'll celebrate that. We love that. We love that. I use this as an illustration all the time. He actually gets tired of it, but it illustrates my point so well, and that's James Stone always wearing a tie. Like I think sometimes James mows his grass with a tie on. He changes a tire with a tie on. I'm being silly. I'm being silly, obviously, but I've been in places where if somebody's more conservative than the pastor of the church, they try to mock that person to give up either a preference or a conviction to be in line with the church's family when that person feels a conviction of the Lord not to, and they get ridiculed and mocked in the church for that. Brothers and sisters, that ought never be the case at Canyon Ridge.

We had a lady come to our church for well over a year, and she believed that she needed to walk in based on 1 Corinthians with her head covered. It's a position that many Christians have. I don't have it. My dad didn't have it. I don't think the Bible holds to it, but she felt it. And she actually said, "Pastor, we'll leave the church if this is a problem." I was like, "Who's it a problem with?" She goes, "Well, I don't want to be a stumbling block to any of the other believers." I said, "Then don't be." She asked, ‘It's that simple?’ I said, ‘It is for me. I don't care. You could walk in with four head coverings. Good grief, we let Bernardo come in and his hair is yellow. Have you seen it?’ He looks like a woman too, an ugly one, but we're not going to mock somebody for a different position.

They probably were being mocked. MacArthur goes on to say that pre-Gnostic teaching held that one was free to engage in the sphere of Satan or the depths of Satan and participate in sins of the body without harming the spirit. Since the spirit, they argued, belongs to God, their twisted logic went like this: ‘What does it matter if the body attends idolatrous feasts and engages in sexual immorality? They imagined themselves to be free to explore Satan's sphere and then brazenly come to worship God and feel no need of repentance.’

Romans 6:1–6 addresses this: ‘What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein? Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection: Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin.’

Paul addresses it even more clearly in 1 Corinthians 6:15–20: ‘Know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ? shall I then take the members of Christ, and make them the members of an harlot? God forbid. What? know ye not that he which is joined to an harlot is one body? for two, saith he, shall be one flesh. But he that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit. Flee fornication. Every sin that a man doeth is without the body; but he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body. What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's.’

And Jesus says to them, folks, you've been doctrinally pure, you've rejected the doctrine of Jezebel, you're living pure lives, and I love how He says this: ‘I will put upon you none other burden.’ Think about the care of the Savior. Jesus could have given them more instructions. If Jesus was an engineer, there would have been a twelve-step plan for how to protect them. If Jesus was a Baptist pastor, it would have been alliterated. If He was a preacher at Canyon Ridge Baptist Church, that's an engineer from an engineering school on the east coast that floats ships, He would have alliterated the subpoints. But here's what He said. But He simply said, ‘I will put upon you none other burden.’

You're going through enough. You're just going through enough. Sometimes people say, "Pastor, something needs to be done about this." Yeah, you're probably right. But nothing's going to be done about it. Why? I can't put them under any other burden. We're just following the example of Christ. I'm not going to try to fix everything. I guarantee you, the small remnant had some problems that could have been dealt with. But here's what Jesus is saying to them. You're watching leaders abandon responsibilities. You're watching women preach heresy and encourage grotesque sin. You've been through enough.

Just stay faithful. That's what He says in verse number 25. Here's the command, verse 25. ‘But that which ye have already hold fast till I come.’ Hold fast. Remain firmly committed to. This choice of the verb ‘hold fast’ indicates it's not going to be easy. There's a lot of things Jesus didn't tell them to do.

I sometimes tire. Maybe it's because we're in San Diego here and we have preachers in our church on a regular basis. But maybe it's just this, that sometimes people from church enclaves like states where every county votes for a Republican president, they have church traffic on Sundays. And the hallways of their church, you could drive a tank down the middle of the hallway at the church. Their buildings are so big and their property is so vast. People say, "Yeah, our church, we only have 25 acres of our church, we're really praying for more." And I looked right at them and I'm like, "I guess because you need more." He goes, "Well, we'd like to have like ball fields and stuff. Oh, your parks aren't good enough." I was just being myself, you know, gracious, kind, loving. I just thought we've never had a ball field. We had time trying to figure out where to put a ping-pong table and a bounce house and we're like, "Oh, we figured it out. We got bounce houses next to each other."

I mean, we're just like, "Oh, that's so good and glorious out there." You know, she and Burnie with their protractors, like I think we could get it out here, which is crazy because Gloria doesn't even know what a protractor is and Burnie doesn't know what a bounce house is. So you talk about one person who is all about fun and another who can't even spell it. The only words he can't spell are joy and fun. And so they try to get out there. And I just sit there and I'm like, "Ah," and guys like, "We've got to have all this."

And sometimes people from like church-strong environments want every community in the country to be just like them. They're putting, this is just an aside but an application. They're putting a burden on people that they shouldn't be putting a burden on. You live in New York City or San Diego or LA or Seattle. It's a little bit different than living in Florence, Colorado. I'm just going to assume that they're going to get snow this year and they're just going to like hole up in their house and like eat soup and chili. We pretend when it sprinkles outside, we're like, "Oh, it doesn't feel like winter." And Debbie's like, "We should make like chicken tortilla soup." And I'm like, "Yeah, why don't you drive and go get it?" She's like, "Y'all just have it delivered." Yeah, yeah.

It's a different world that we live in. Things aren't the same. Sometimes we put our burdens that God has given to us on others because we assume that if God has given it to us, He expects it for everyone. Now, doctrine He expects from everyone; holy living He expects from everyone. But there are some expectations that God has for certain groups that he might not have for other groups of people. And I don't have the authority and neither does anyone else to put that burden on them if God hasn't led that church to have it. And I love the words of Christ here. I'll put no other burden on you, meaning he put burdens on other churches, but he's not doing that to Thyatira. And because He is God, He is right to put burdens on other people. It's like really important to me. Hopefully it is. You see it.

And then we finish here with the counsel in verses 26 through 29. Now I'll go real brief because we've seen this in every letter. ‘And he that overcometh, and keepeth my works unto the end, to him will I give power over the nations.’ Oh, we actually haven't seen this. I can't take time to develop it like I want to. We'll see it in our study in Revelation, but I will say this.

This is a millennial kingdom promise. He that overcometh, just true Christians, true followers of Christ. You could read about it 1 John 5:5 and 1 John 5:13. You could read about those who have put their faith in Christ, those who have overcome, those who are true followers of Christ will overcome, those who are true followers of Christ will remain faithful to the Lord. Hebrews 12 teaches that God will end their life prematurely if they keep on sinning. He that overcometh and keepeth my works unto the end and keepeth my works, keeps living for God, keeps doctrinal purity, keeps living a personally pure life, keeps doing what God has called them to, how long unto the end, steadfast obedience marks a genuine follower of Christ.

I'm just telling you right now, I worry about believers that serve Christ for like a minute or two, by minute or two, I don't mean literal sixty seconds, I just mean a short period of time and then they fall back into the world and then they conjure up emotions and they follow Christ for a period of time and then they fall back into the world and that becomes the pattern of their life. It's almost like they're either double-minded or they're simply not believers, and what they're doing is being done in the flesh. He says, ‘Those who keep My word—how long? Unto the end.’ Christ promises two things.

He shall rule them with a rod of iron. He shall rule them with a rod of iron. Rule them. As the vessels of a potter that shall be broken to shivers or broken to pieces, this promise is taken from Psalm chapter 2, verses 7 to 9.

It is a promise of participation in the Millennial Kingdom. When you say, ‘Pastor, what do you mean by the Millennial Kingdom?’—very briefly, the next prophetic event to happen in the prophetic calendar that we'll study in Revelation is the Rapture of the Church, then there'll be a seven-year tribulation period, at the end of the tribulation period will be the Battle of Armageddon where Christ will defeat all of the nations of the earth with the word of His mouth in the Valley of Megiddo. We'll study all this much more in depth in the future and after the tribulation period, after the defeat of the armies of the nations marching on Israel, Christ will set up a thousand-year kingdom on this earth called the Millennial Kingdom and when He does, we're going to rule and reign with Christ and those who are going to rule and reign with Christ will be those that have been faithful to the end. He says that the one who has been faithful will rule the nations with a rod of iron.

The nations in the Millennial Kingdom who rebel against Christ's rule and threaten his people will be destroyed during the Millennial Kingdom because people will still be being born without Christ during the Millennial Kingdom and if they fall away and they start doing nonsense, He will rule them with a rod of iron. Here is what it says: ‘And he shall rule them with a rod of iron; as the vessels of a potter shall they be broken to shivers: even as I received of my Father.’ God will protect His people emphatically during the Millennial Kingdom.

Verse 28 says, ‘And I will give him the morning star.’ Some suggest that this is a reference to Daniel 12 verse 3 here, Matthew 13:43. I think a much better understanding of this word is seeing the person the Morning Star as Christ Himself. It is a title He assumes in Revelation 22:16, where Jesus said, ‘I Jesus have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star.’

He is the Morning Star. Jesus is saying, ‘I'm going to give them Myself. I'm going to go through this struggle with you.’ To the small remnant in Thyatira He says, ‘You're not going to walk through this alone.’ His yoke is easy and His burden is light. Canyon Ridge, you're not going to walk through this alone. As we see our world going in all sorts of crazy directions, He remains the bright and morning star. Well, Pastor, I want Jesus to walk through this with me. Live a pure life and keep sound doctrine.

There are three things in this very long letter that we just kind of skim the surface on in really an hour and 40 minutes of preaching. There are three important truths that I encourage you to remember.

Number one, the seriousness of practicing and tolerating sin. God will judge continued, unrepentant sin in churches. If you tolerate or practice sin—if you tolerate gossip or gossip yourself, God will judge that unrepentant sin. If it's happening in the church and we know about it, we are going to confront that sin. I said, "We are going to confront that sin." ‘Well, I just don't want to scare people.’ No, you don't care for people; you care for yourself. Literally. I don't mean to be rude or ruin the blessing of the evening, but you care more about yourself than you do the person because if you cared about the person, you would rebuke them for their sin because they're going to stand before the Lord, just like I am. Number two, a pattern of obedience marks true Christians. A pattern of obedience marks true Christians. Number three, God promises His true followers that in spite of struggles with sin and errors in the church, they will experience all the fullness of Christ as they reign with Him in His kingdom.

God promises His true followers that in spite of struggles with sin and errors in the church, they will experience all the fullness of Christ as they reign with Him in His kingdom.

‘And I will give him the morning star.’ Friends, a church that is tolerant of sin will soon cease to be a church. May it never be said of Canyon Ridge that we are tolerant of sin, patient, long-suffering for sure, but never tolerant of sin.

If there's sin in your life, I can't encourage you enough to repent of it. Change your mind about it in such a way that it leads to a change of behavior. Repent of it and turn to Christ. Brothers and sisters, if you know about it, you ought to have a loving, gracious conversation with that person.

If you're here tonight and you don't know Christ as your Savior, the greatest decision you'll ever make, the most important decision, the first decision, I should say, that will affect eternity for you is putting your faith and trust in Christ alone. Our prayer tonight is that you will put your faith and trust in Christ alone as your Savior. Not your works, not your efforts, not praying to an idol or a picture or a painting or something like that, but you put your faith and trust in the finished work of Christ on the cross of Calvary. The tolerant church, a needed lesson for Canyon Ridge.