To the angel of the church in Thyatira
Stephen Cave · What The Spirit Says
4 October 2026
https://media.glenabbey.church/talks/to-the-angel-of-the-church-in-thyatira

[0:01] Morning.
[0:04] Apologies to those of you who lead home groups because you got the questions sent out a couple of days ago and I only knew I was doing this on Friday afternoon so you can forget all those questions, you're going to have to make up new ones because I didn't dare look at them because I thought I'm not going to try and go with someone else's sermon.
[0:20] Anyhow, question, it's brilliant to see all the kids that come in here.
[0:24] I mean, it's just such a kick.
[0:26] How many families in here have had a baby born in the last year?
[0:34] There's probably some.
[0:36] I see a few hands.
[0:37] So, of course, one of the first questions that people ask when the new baby comes is, what's the name?
[0:44] And many parents have agonized over what to call their precious new arrivals.
[0:49] So yesterday, some of us were at a wedding, and in the conversations, it goes different places.
[0:53] I was chatting to Andy Seymour and Annigail, and They're due to give birth any minute, and they don't know what the name's going to be.
[1:03] And they know what gender the baby's going to be, but they don't have a name because, and I've got their permission to share this, she drew up a list of 71 names.
[1:14] And he's ruled them all out.
[1:16] He said I wouldn't call my dog any of those.
[1:19] So it's going to be interesting to see what happens.
[1:21] I found in the same situation that with a mother that's just gone through labour and she says something, you don't argue.
[1:30] Anyhow, I was doing some research on baby names and I discovered that there are some names that have actually been declared illegal in certain countries.
[1:39] So in France, one example, a particular set of parents were told that their chosen name was not allowed because they wanted to call their child Nutella.
[1:49] Not allowed.
[1:49] Another set were turned down when they tried to call their child Prince William.
[1:54] And then they were turned down again with their second choice, which was Minnie Cooper.
[2:00] So none of these are going to be accepted.
[2:03] And it was spelt like that.
[2:04] In Sweden, parents actually had to go to court to fight for their chosen names.
[2:10] Metallica, Lego, and Elvis.
[2:16] And they actually won.
[2:18] And so they were allowed to call their kids that.
[2:20] But another set weren't so fortunate.
[2:22] and they had to give up on their plan to call their child IKEA.
[2:28] In Mexico, parents were refused permission to call their kids RoboCop, Rambo, and Facebook.
[2:38] And Switzerland has got really strict rules, so you can't call your child Mercedes or Chanel, because they're brand names, and it's illegal to call your child Judas.
[2:51] I don't think I've ever heard of anybody using the name Judas since something happened about 2,000 years ago.
[2:57] Closer to home, a Welsh mother was told that she couldn't call her twins cyanide and preacher.
[3:08] Intriguingly, the judge actually decided that the two stepchildren were going to be allowed to name the twins, and the mother wasn't allowed to give them a name.
[3:16] Really rare.
[3:17] But she thought that cyanide had a positive connotation, because it was the poison that was used to kill Hitler.
[3:26] And whilst we're on that one, calling your child Adolf, that's been ruled out in several places, although again, it's probably not high on the list of choices.
[3:36] So I'm pretty sure none of those names pretty sure, have featured in the choices with any of the families around our church.
[3:44] And I'm also pretty sure there's another name that has rarely featured anywhere.
[3:50] And it's in our reading today in a letter that came from Jesus to the church in Thyatira.
[3:55] And it's the name Jezebel.
[4:00] Not a name that carries many positive connotations, and we're going to come back to that in a few minutes.
[4:06] But first of all, let's read this letter from Revelation 2, starting at verse 18.
[4:12] To the angel of the church in Thyatira write, these are the words of the Son of God, whose eyes are like blazing fire and whose feet are like burnished bronze.
[4:23] I know your deeds, your love and faith, your service and perseverance.
[4:29] and that you are now doing more than you did at first.
[4:32] Nevertheless, I have this against you.
[4:37] tolerate that woman Jezebel who calls herself a prophet.
[4:41] By her teaching, she misleads my servants into sexual immorality and the eating of food sacrificed to idols.
[4:50] I have given her time to repent of her immorality, but she is unwilling.
[4:55] So I will cast her on a bed of suffering, and I will make those who commit adultery with her suffer intensely, unless they repent of her ways.
[5:05] I will strike her children dead, then all the churches will know that I am he who searches hearts and minds, and I will repay each of you according to your deeds.
[5:17] Now I say to the rest of you in Thyatara, to you who do not hold to her teaching, and have not learned Satan's so-called deep secrets, I will not impose any other burden on you except to hold on to what you have until I come.
[5:34] To the one who is victorious and does my will to the end, I will give authority over the nations.
[5:40] That one will rule them with an iron scepter and will dash them to pieces like pottery, just as I have received authority from my father.
[5:50] I will also give that one the morning star.
[5:54] Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches.
[6:01] So this city Thyatira wasn't really a major city compared to some of the others in these letters we've been looking at over the last few weeks.
[6:10] And yet this is the longest of the seven letters.
[6:13] It was a city with a significant military garrison.
[6:17] It was protecting some key trade routes.
[6:19] and it was also a trading centre.
[6:22] It was heavily influenced by the guilds that have been mentioned before, kinds of trade unions.
[6:27] And it was famous amongst other things for pottery and for its dyeing business, as in dyeing material, not dyeing.
[6:37] But if you've read the book of Acts, you may remember in Acts a key figure in Philippi called Lydia, who was from Thyatira and who had a business dyeing and selling purple cloth.
[6:50] And when Jesus introduces himself to this church, he uses imagery that would have reminded his listeners of the Old Testament, similar to what we've seen with other churches and particularly to images from the book of Daniel.
[7:03] He says he is the one with eyes like blazing fire, a piercing gaze that can see what's really going on, one from whom you cannot hide.
[7:15] I know, he says, There is no hiding the reality of who they are from the one who sees everything.
[7:23] So what did he see when he looked at this church?
[7:27] Well at first glance things looked quite good.
[7:29] I know your deeds, your love and faith, your service and perseverance and that you are now doing more than you did at first.
[7:38] So far so good.
[7:39] In many ways this was a great church.
[7:41] They were getting on with being a faithful witness despite the inevitable pressures that they faced.
[7:46] And we've already learned how hard it was for these early Christians.
[7:49] Suffering under evil emperors and especially even when it came to earning a livelihood.
[7:54] These trade guilds that we've mentioned were very loyal to the emperor.
[7:59] And to get on in life and business they expected you to toe the line, join the group, fall in with their pagan rituals and practices.
[8:08] And that was something that the early Christians were struggling to do.
[8:12] And it would appear that in Thyatira these Christians were trying not to back down.
[8:17] They hadn't given up and they were commended for their perseverance in the face of opposition.
[8:23] They weren't the sort to have just given up their ministry and service and leave it to someone else because it was too hard.
[8:29] They were doing more than they used to do.
[8:32] which I guess is a challenge to us all.
[8:34] In fact, compared to the first church in Ephesus who had forsaken their early commitment, these guys were in pretty good shape.
[8:42] But the piercing gaze of Jesus could see that not everything was going well.
[8:50] And that brings us back to Jezebel.
[8:54] Nevertheless, I have this against you.
[8:57] You tolerate that woman Jezebel who calls herself a prophet.
[9:01] By her teaching, she misleads my servants into sexual immorality and the eating of food sacrificed to idols.
[9:11] Now we need to have some knowledge of the Old Testament to understand this mention of Jezebel.
[9:18] And for the people in this church, that should have had alarm bells ringing.
[9:22] I mean, if you're looking for a list of the very worst characters in all of the Bible, Jezebel would be pretty high up that list.
[9:32] We read her story in the book of First Kings.
[9:35] She was the pagan daughter of a pagan king and she worshipped Baal and she was part of introducing Baal worship and Baal's prophets to the northern kingdom of Israel when she married King Ahab.
[9:51] And if you know anything about Baal worship, you know it involved serious sexual immorality.
[9:59] And when you think about that, you start to see the link with what was going wrong in Thyatira.
[10:05] This Jezebel back in the day had killed the prophets of the Lord, tried to kill Elijah, and in one story, she even arranged for a man called Naboth to be murdered, just so that her husband Ahab could have his vineyard.
[10:21] Now Ahab, king of Israel, has grown up with the teaching that God had given his people.
[10:27] Why would an Israelite king marry such a woman?
[10:32] Well, the answer to that question also gives us some insight into what was wrong with the church in Thyatira.
[10:39] And it can be summed up in this, a desire for security and prosperity.
[10:45] So back in the day, Damascus to the northeast and the Assyrians were a threat So Israelite kings like Ahab made treaties.
[10:54] And in Ahab's day, they had a treaty with the Phoenicians to the northwest.
[10:58] But he didn't just want security for the kingdom.
[11:01] These treaties also provided ways to get wealth and prosperity.
[11:05] And the treaty that they had with Phoenician gave them access to their treasures and culture and everything else that went with it.
[11:12] And as often happened in those days, to seal the treaty Ahab married the daughter of the king of Phoenicia, none other than Jezebel.
[11:25] And in marrying Jezebel, Ahab compromised the religious principles that he had been brought up with and his calling as a king of Israel to follow the Lord faithfully and a great evil was introduced to the land.
[11:38] And like so many Israelite kings before and after him, he refused to trust God with his security and prosperity.
[11:46] he refused to obey and decided that he needed to do things his own way.
[11:51] And if we turn back to this church in Thyatira in the New Testament, in a sense there's something similar going on.
[11:58] It wasn't an easy existence trying to be faithful to the Lord when your livelihood and security was under threat.
[12:05] And somehow a Jezebel had introduced similar evils into this church.
[12:10] Now we can't be sure if this was an individual who had risen to significant prominence or if it's a reference to a way of life or a belief system, but most commentators seem to think that it likely was an individual who had taken on herself the title of prophet and had become really influential in this church.
[12:30] She probably claimed to have special knowledge and special revelations from God.
[12:37] And so some of these believers were led astray by listening to her and believing what she said.
[12:45] And what she was teaching was pretty serious stuff.
[12:48] Because she was encouraging these Christians to take part in feasts where the food had been offered to idols and in feasts where sexual immorality was a major part of what went on.
[13:02] I think sometimes though it's easy for us to roll our eyes in horror at them.
[13:08] And yet we do have to remember how difficult it was for these early Christians.
[13:14] We've heard it each week in this series and we need to keep it in mind.
[13:18] If they refused to join the trade guilds and participate in all that went on, it was really hard to get work.
[13:24] And as a result.
[13:25] it was difficult to have enough money to live.
[13:27] And then you add to that the threat of physical violence as this new group of believers.
[13:34] And you can see that taking a stand for Jesus was difficult.
[13:39] Your security was at stake, your prosperity was at stake, just as it was back in the day with Ahab.
[13:48] But this Jezebel figure or the teaching that was going around, pretended to have the answer to this problem.
[13:56] You see, she said, I know the deep things, and I can help you work a compromise.
[14:02] And it likely went something like this.
[14:04] If you want to defeat this evil around you, have to get to know it.
[14:11] You have to get to know the deep secrets.
[14:13] And when you do, you'll be better equipped to handle it.
[14:16] So actually, the way to get to know it is go to these feasts and do what they do.
[14:22] Sacrifice to the idols, take part in the immorality, and then you'll know what you're talking about.
[14:28] And you'll be able to handle it better.
[14:31] And you'll just do better all around.
[14:35] But it was almost as if they were just being told, you know, you don't need to worry about such rigid rules on morality that God has given us.
[14:45] Look, after all, they're becoming a little bit outdated, and we've advanced beyond that.
[14:49] No.
[14:51] And for me, as I sort of consider that, it just has echoes of the earliest parts of Scripture and Satan's first treacherous appearance in Eden.
[15:05] Did God really say that?
[15:08] I mean, really, do you think He meant that?
[15:12] Would you not be better to make your own mind up and not let God keep you from something that's really good?
[15:20] And I guess in many ways, not much has changed, because I think our greatest temptation today is to think that we know better.
[15:31] And to come to the conclusion that, yeah, well, those things that God teaches, that was good for a different era, but we're smarter now.
[15:41] Or even the temptation to think that we can't trust God enough to bring us through our challenges, but that's been That's been humanity's problem right from the start.
[15:52] Facing up to the fact that God is God and that he does know best and that there are two issues at least on which God will not compromise.
[16:04] One is idolatry and one is immorality.
[16:09] And you can follow this right through the Old Testament because the Israelites were at it all the time.
[16:17] idolatry, other gods taking the Lord's place, and regularly people who decided to ignore or try and relax God's moral standards.
[16:31] Some time ago, I was looking back through open notes, and I came across a sermon that had been preached by a minister in Baltimore in the USA as he was going through a series on the seven churches.
[16:43] And I actually wrote down some of what he had said at the time.
[16:46] And it's bang up to date still now.
[16:48] Here's what he said.
[16:50] If you follow the sermon series of the last three weeks, you might be thinking, Christ seems to be kind of hung up on spiritual and sexual purity.
[17:02] You better believe it.
[17:04] But because he is God, because he has designed you and me, and because he has at his heart of hearts your best interests and mine, These are not hang-ups.
[17:17] This is Christ's unerring, merciful, loving, gracious will for your life and mine, that we do not mess with either idolatry in any form or sexual immorality.
[17:31] And then he went on to say, but there are a lot of people, especially in the mainline church today, who don't want to buy that.
[17:37] No, they want to change the name of the church to Saint Jezebel's.
[17:41] They like the doctrine down at old Saint Jezebel's, where you can believe anything you want.
[17:46] They like the lifestyle affirmation down at Saint Jezebel's, where you can do anything you want.
[17:55] But the picture of the Lord with eyes of blazing fire and feet of burnished bronze speaks loudly.
[18:06] It reminds us that he sees through all of our attempts to explain away his truth and he stands in judgment on it.
[18:17] Listen to the words in the letter.
[18:19] I will cast her on a bed of suffering and I will make those who commit adultery with her suffer intensely unless they repent of her ways.
[18:31] I will strike her children dead then all the churches will know that I am he who searches hearts and minds, and I will repay each of you according to your deeds.
[18:43] Those are really strong words of judgment from Jesus.
[18:48] And as I read them, it brings to my mind some of those Old Testament examples where God repeatedly called out to his people to change their ways.
[19:03] and yet still had to hand them over to the consequences of their rebellion.
[19:08] Because you see, when we decide that we know better, God actually respects our choice.
[19:16] But we have to live with the consequences of that choice in front of His holiness.
[19:21] But conversely, those who refuse to compromise, those who will remain faithful, will they share in the reward of the glorious risen Christ who will stand in judgment.
[19:37] When the world has treated his faithful people so badly, they will find that Jesus is Lord.
[19:46] And in an image that would have resonated with those pottery guilds in Thyatira, evil will be dashed to pieces.
[19:59] And Jesus is calling his people to be faithful now.
[20:03] And trust that God will prevail.
[20:07] To believe him when he says that sacrificing whatever we must and facing the call to obedience will pay a rich eternal reward.
[20:20] I can't think of anything more relevant to us today when we face up to the challenges of living a faithful Christian life in the face of so many challenges and so many temptations to compromise.
[20:35] Because Jesus says it will be worth it.
[20:39] And as we read so many times through all the pages of Scripture, He calls us not to worry when evil seems to prosper.
[20:46] Because God is one day going to roll this all up.
[20:50] And He will prevail.
[20:53] He will reward His faithful ones.
[20:56] and he will bring judgment on the world.
[21:01] And I'd love us to be encouraged by that, especially when we're tempted to compromise to ensure our safety or our prosperity.
[21:12] The twin temptations that confronted Thyatira and Ahab before.
[21:18] God is going to judge.
[21:19] We should be comforted by that.
[21:21] But I also want us to note this.
[21:24] Whilst God will act in judgment, and that image of the feet of burnished bronze, pointless to that, God's immovable holiness.
[21:34] Please also note these words from the letter.
[21:39] I have given her time to repent of her immorality.
[21:45] And then later on, unless they repent of her ways.
[21:50] So we're being left in no doubt of the reality of judgment.
[21:57] But we're also being reminded of God's desire for people to repent.
[22:03] And we're being reminded of God's incredible patience.
[22:08] The apostle Peter wrote this, and he knew all too well about it from his own experience of failure.
[22:14] He wrote this.
[22:16] The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise.
[22:19] as some understand slowness.
[22:21] In other words, God's not going to be slow to judge, but
[22:26] he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.
[22:39] Because we worship the most merciful God.
[22:44] And whilst we rightly seek God to righteously judge evil.
[22:53] I also believe we're called to mirror God's greatness as regards his mercy.
[23:01] And that we should be driven by a desire that those who are even going so far wrong would turn around and find his mercy.
[23:12] And it's right that we should because, you know, like I'm getting older all the time.
[23:19] and every part of my body reminds me that I am, but the older I get, the more aware I am of my own sin and my failure, and that every day, every day, I need God's mercy and God's patience.
[23:40] Indeed, we're going to move into communion just now.
[23:45] And surely at the heart of this feast of remembrance is our need for grace
[23:55] and our thankfulness that the sacrifice of Jesus has opened that possibility to us.
[24:03] I don't know.
[24:03] There's maybe some of us in here today are actually engaging in some form of idolatry.
[24:10] We've decided to let something else or someone else take God's rightful place in our lives.
[24:16] Some of us in here today are probably engaging in some kind of immorality.
[24:21] And we've deluded ourselves, like Jezebel, that it doesn't matter, that we know better, and yet deep down we know it's a burden that we can't carry much longer.
[24:36] And some of us are compromising things because we don't trust God enough with our safety or or prosperity.
[24:45] And the great news that meeting around bread and wine tells me is that no matter how far gone I think I am, no matter how great my sin, today, right now, God is still patiently offering me you, his mercy, and his forgiveness.
[25:12] and even the promise of a reward.
[25:17] Each of these letters to the churches ends with this: Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches.
[25:30] Today, may we hear the Spirit of God calling us away from idolatry and immorality, but above all, may we hear him calling us to repent and telling us again that in God we get mercy and grace.
[25:51] Let's pray together as the band come back and then we'll hand over to Jeff.
[25:59] Lord, I just want to thank you today that your word is so incredibly alive and bang up to date and speaks into the situations that we all walk.
[26:07] And I also want to thank you that you're such an amazingly great God that you can take your word and through the work of your spirit you can apply it to each of us individually in whatever situation we are facing.
[26:21] Lord, for those of us who are really conscious of our failure, would you just speak again your mercy and your grace, remind us of your patience and help us to repent.
[26:35] And Father, for Lord, just wherever each of us is today, would you bring something of your word and make it alive in our hearts and help us make a difference, we pray, in Jesus' name.
[26:46] Amen.