Sweetwater Presbyterian

Small in size, Large in Faith and Love

Sitting Together

REVELATION: THE CHURCH OF THYATIRA - “Beware False Teachers”


As we continue through our look at the 7 churches in the book of Revelation, we are getting bits and pieces of Jesus’ design for His church. Church is important to us. Some of you have been here in this church your whole life. You’ve put blood, sweat and tears into the work that is done here. Significant life events have happened here - baptisms, weddings, funerals… We have a sense of ownership for this place. So every now and then we need to stop and remind ourselves that this is Jesus’ church and we are simply a part of it. We need to remind ourselves that Jesus has definite expectations of what he wants his church to be . Looking at these 7 churches it is like we are getting these different pieces of a puzzle and as we put the pieces together, the whole picture of Jesus’ ideal church begins to appear. Then, we are challenged to look at this picture and see where we measure up and we see where we need to make corrections. That ideal picture helps us to allow the Holy Spirit to aid us in moving closer and closer to Christ’s design for the church.
We have looked at the church of Ephesus where we hear about the importance of holding true to correct doctrine and of how important it is for us to love one another in this congregation - or as Jesus says - How can we teach love to our community if we can’t even love one another. Smyrna was the church that held true in the face of severe persecution as a witness to their faith - so we learn that as difficult as things may get for the church, if we rely on Jesus then we will hold together regardless of what problems we may encounter. Last week was Pergamum - the church that again was complimented for holding it together when some of the members had been martyred. But Jesus reminds them he requires the church to be holy - meaning ‘different’ than the unchurched community around them. Jesus tells them that the choices within the church must reflect Jesus’ teachings rather than what culture holds important.
We have learned to be loving, holding true to doctrine, relying on the Holy Spirit to hold us together in times of difficulty, staying apart from the culture - and now on to church #4 - the church at Thyatira. Unlike the here previous cities, Thyatira was a pretty nondescript sort of place. It was a lot smaller and a lot more insignificant than the other cities. It had no fantastic buildings, no huge temples and no real political status. All it really had in its favor was that it prospered as a trading center.
We have no idea how the church here came into being but as Jesus’ talks about this church in Revelation he does so with glowing terms. The section of Revelation directed to Thyatira is actually the longest of all the letters written to the churches. Jesus says, “I know your deeds, your love and faith, your service and perseverance.” He goes on to say that the church is now doing more in the way of service and deeds than they have ever done before. The church of Thyatira was living as Christ wanted to his church to be - they cared for one another, they were active in mission in the community, they had a strong and hearty faith. The church is growing and they are able to do more and more mission. The church stood in the community as a witness to the faith, hope and love of Jesus. The church understood that the Christian life is a life of continual growth - not growth in the terms of numbers but growth in the knowledge and understanding of Christ’s teaching. It reflected the movement we in the church today call the principle of “Deep and Wide”. - you have to grow your church deep in its faith and knowledge of the things of God before you can really grow your church wide - in bringing in new members.
But this is the situation - Thyatira was known for its trade guilds. There were guilds for carpenters, dyers, sellers of goods, tanners, weavers, tent makers and such. These trade guilds were similar to what we know as trade unions. It was very difficult for the tradesmen to make a living unless they were a part of one of these guilds. All work was contracted through the guild so if you were not a member of it, you would get little if any work. Now these guilds were different from our unions is that they were linked with the worship of pagan gods. Each guild had its particular guardian god and as a member you would be expected to attend all its functions and participate in its activities which included worship of the pagan gods with offerings, feasts and immoral activities.
The guilds would hold common meals which were in the temple of ‘their god’. The meal would begin and end with a formal sacrifice to the god. The meat then served during the meal would be the meat that had just been sacrificed to the god. The meeting would then degenerate into consorting with the women who worked at the temple. Now remember that even though this is far from our understanding of what worship is - this was their tradition for worship of their god. They felt they honored their god because this is what the god required of them - eating, drinking and having relations with the women.
The members of the church in Thyatira were torn between making a living on the one hand, which meant having to be a part of the guilds and participate in their worship and on the other hand staying faithful to Christ and his standards.
Now there appears there was a leader in the church that Jesus labels “Jezebel” - not because their real name was ‘Jezebel’ but because this person was acting like the Old Testament character Jezebel. The Old Testament Jezebel was was a woman who was not a part of God’s people, but from the nation of Sidon and she was a pagan worshipper. King Ahab of Israel, who was a part of God’s people, married her for political reasons and brought her to live with him in the palace in Israel. Now in a perfect world, Ahab would have converted Jezebel to become a worshipper of the one true God - but instead told her she could worship whomever she wanted which then caused her to convert Ahab to the worship of the pagan god Baal and then proceeded to convert the entire nation of Israel to Baal worship. Within a very short period of time because of the influence of Jezebel, God’s people had abandoned him for the fake god Baal. Jezebel was simply just an evil woman. We read the story of Naboth’s vineyard earlier in the service just to show what a self-serving, conniving woman she was. Jezebel represents someone who purposely deludes people into thinking they are right when they are clearly doing something wrong.
This is what this leader of the church at Thyatira was doing. This leader was encouraging the members of the church to continue in these trade guilds - even if it meant they participated in worship of the pagan gods and participated in the immoral acts associated with these gods. “It really doesn’t matter”, this Jezebel taught, “God is a God of grace and he will forgive whatever you do. It’s OK. Don’t worry. You can pretty well do whatever you want….” But in this letter Jesus says, “No!” This is not right and he tells the church that they are being led astray by this false teacher. He tells them they need to ‘repent’ quickly - to turn away from these trade guilds and their practices. In other words, Jesus was telling these members that they were going to have to take an economic risk to stand for what they believed in.
We do have a modern day example of what Jesus is telling these church members to do - and that is the Hobby Lobby lawsuit. Now whether or not you agree with them, the issue is that the owners of the company were willing to risk financial loss in order to stand firm in their Christian faith and what they believed. And honestly, biblically, the Hobby Lobby owners are are on pretty solid biblical ground in what they have decided to stand for. Or we could look at Chick-Fil-A who is willing to do without commerce one day a week because they practice the Biblical directive to honor the Sabbath.
So Jesus is fussing at Thyatira because they were not willing to take a stand, but are more than willing to allow this false teacher to lead them astray. It is certainly a deep challenge to us to consider if we have the confidence in what Jesus’ teaches to stand firm in our faith and not to compromise - even when it starts to cost us something.
And how do we get that confidence? By reading and studying and learning what scripture has to say. We have all the information we need if we will just use it. That was the same instructions given to the church in Pergamum - learn what scripture teaches then your decisions become easier to make.
Just like that passage from Matthew where Jesus tells us we can either build our house on rock or on sand. Rock meaning the word of God found in the Bible - sand being ‘what we think’ or ‘what we have heard someone else say’ or ‘what we have learned from popular TV preachers’ or wherever other than the Bible itself we have ‘heard’ that the Bible says this or that. Your conviction can stand firm on the rock, but the house on the sand will collapse quickly.
Jesus tells his church - know what I have really said so that you can stand firm in the face of false teachers.

Amen.