Tolerance Isn't Kindness

Thyatira was the smallest of the seven cities mentioned in Revelation, yet it received the longest letter from Jesus. It was a small city, full of merchants, craftsmen, and guilds, each dedicated to a patron god or goddess. Tanners, potters, weavers, robe makers, and dyers all lived, worked, and worshipped in Thyatira. Social and economic life revolved around idol worship and sacrifices at the local guilds. To participate in the economy, you had to participate in the worship of the patron gods and goddesses. The pressure was immense for Thyatira's Christians to compromise their faith, just to participate in the culture around them. And amid that pressure, false teaching had quietly wormed its way into the church, leading people into sexual immorality and idolatry. Jesus is clear, he will not tolerate mixed allegiances among his people. His rebuke is strong, but his promise is just as clear. To the one who is victorious and does my will to the end, I will give authority over the nations. This is Jesus's letter to the church in Thyatira. All right, Flatirons, sure, so good to be together today. Hey, what I want to do, I want to ask you to stand, as we've been doing all series, for the reading of God's word as we read this letter, and we just honor God's word for what it is and what it brings to us. And so, if you want to read along, if you've got your Bible, I hope you do. We're in Revelation chapter two, verse 18. It says, and to the angel of the church in Thyatira write, the words of the son of God, who has eyes like a flame of fire, and whose feet are like burnished bronze. I know your works, your love and faith and service and patient endurance, and that your latter works exceed the first. But this I have against you. You tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess and is teaching and seducing

my servants to practice sexual immorality and to eat food sacrificed to idols. I gave her time to repent, but she refuses to repent of sexual immorality. Behold, I'll throw her onto a sickbed. Those who commit adultery with her, I will throw into great tribulation unless they repent of her works. And I will strike her children dead and all the churches will know that I am he who searches mind and heart. And I will give to each of you according to your works. But to the rest of you in Thyatira who do not hold this teaching, who have not learned what some call the deep things of Satan, to you I say, I do not lay on you any other burden. Only hold fast what you have until I come. The one who conquers and the one who keeps my works until the end, I will give him authority over the nations and he will rule them with a rod of iron. As when earthen pots are broken in pieces, even as I myself have received authority from my father and I will give him the morning star, he who has an ear, let him hear what the spirit says to the churches. So God, right now in this morning, we pray. We've got our Bibles open. Got our ears open. We've got our hearts open. We are prepared for you to speak. Your servants are listening. It's in the name of Jesus that all God's people say amen. Amen, Flatirons. You all can have a seat. Well, hey, as we get into this letter, I just want to set it up and just set some context. And I want to start out with a question. The question is this. Do you have a person in your life who just has this ability to be able to convince you to do things you know you shouldn't do?

Nobody's raising their hands. You're like pointing at the person. Maybe when you're in middle school, every friend group has this person. It's like, I wonder what would happen if we jumped off the roof. We should try it. Let's see if we can outrun security. It'll be like a race with consequences. Every friend group has one. I know our student ministry, they got some in there. My friend group growing up, we had one too. This kid, he convinced our friend group on the golf course to go steal golf balls after people teed off. Just go steal the golf balls. Yeah, I don't know why we did it. Okay, well, you know why you do a lot of things. We would trespass on construction homes. We're like, I wonder what would happen if we would just light aerosol cans on fire. I'm sure it will be totally safe and very fun. And this kid in our friend group. He would always get us to do things that we didn't want to do, we knew we shouldn't do. He was even a pastor's kid, okay? He had brown hair, he had brown eyes, and that kid was me, all right? Like, I was talking with my mom, my mom's like, Jesse, you were the worst. Like, you are the reason I have gray hair. I was talking to some people last night, they're like, you and our middle son, we would really, you would really get along

and get into a lot of trouble. But any parents, you just make eye contact with him, you give him a subtle nod, do you have that kid? You're like, I know my kid is turning into one of those. Well, the church in Thyatira, they had someone like that. Except, instead of leading kids into trouble, he's leading an entire church into compromise. The unique challenge in Thyatira, it wasn't like persecution in the church of Smyrna, it wasn't this political pressure like Pergamum, like the video said, it was economic pressure. Thyatira, it was built around these trade guilds. So this is an ancient version of like a union or a trade association. So if you wanna do business, you've got to belong to a trade guild. But the guilds, actually, they weren't just about business because at the meetings, they do so much more than discuss business. There was idol worship, there were drunken feasts, there's sexual immorality, and if you refuse to participate, you could lose your customers, you could lose your contacts, you could lose everything. It sounds like this. Compromise your convictions or pay the price. And it's one thing when we deal with this in the world, but it's a complete other thing when it starts invading the church.

And so Jesus starts his letter to Thyatira, he says, hey, I see what's happening, I know what's happening, and I'm not just gonna sit idly by and let this continue. And so in verse 18, he says to the angel in the church in Thyatira, write this, the words of the Son of God who has eyes like a flame of fire, whose feet are like burnished bronze. So you've been learning this, we've been learning this together. Every letter includes attributes of Jesus that mean something to this specific church. So he says, Jesus has eyes of fire. That means he has a way of seeing through everything. Just like fire burns away every pretense, anything that's fake, Jesus is saying, hey, I see what's really going on. I see the secret sin. I see the hidden motives. I see the things that nobody else knows about. He sees it. He knows what's happening in this church. So he says, I see everything. And then it says, hey, I've got feet of bronze. Why does he mention his feet? Because here's the thing, your legs are your foundation. If you talk to any athlete, you talk to a UFC fighter, for instance, what they'll tell you, every punch starts with your legs. Every kick starts with your legs.

And so if your legs aren't strong, nothing else is. So Jesus's feet of bronze mean he's got absolute strength. He's got unshakable authority. He's planted, he's immovable, he's ready to stand against evil and fight for his people. All right, this isn't passive Jesus. This isn't live your truth, Jesus. This isn't, hey, everybody just be nice to each other, Jesus. This is King Jesus, eyes like fire, feet like bronze. He's ready to come in and kick some tail. So what does he say next? Verse 19, he says, hey, I know your works, your love and your faith and your service and your patient endurance, and this is important, and that your latter works exceed the first. So what he's saying there with your latter works exceed the first, he's saying some churches, they burn hot for a season. They grow under one pastor, but then they burn out. He's saying this church in Thyatira, they're actually doing better in the second season than they were in the first. And as I was reading that, I was just thinking, and that is my prayer for us at Flatirons, that we don't just think about the next couple years or five years or 10 years. We're thinking about the next 57 years, because in 57 years, we'll be 100 years old, and I can't tell you how many old churches I've seen grow old, small, and ineffective,

because they took their eyes off of what really mattered, and that could happen to us too. I mean, 20 years ago, these campuses, these buildings, they could turn into office buildings and data centers and museums unless we keep our eye on what really matters. These churches, they don't become unhealthy all at once. They slowly begin tolerating things. they never should have tolerated. In the first season of Flatirons, hopefully you've heard some of the stories about this faithful group of people that sacrifices, they risk, they started this thing that we call Flatirons, and now we're in this season at Flatirons that I believe exceeds the first season as amazing as it was, and our prayer is that the next season of Flatirons is better even than this one, and on and on and on and on, till Jim's gone, I'm gone, all of us are gone, and our great grandkids are running the church, and Flatirons Community Church is still thriving because they know, hey, it was never about us, it was never about a brand, it was never about a building, it was only about Jesus, and guys, I am convinced that our future looks like that because right now, I believe,

I believe that one of our future church planters that we're gonna send out, they're a kid sitting in our kids' ministry right now, one of our next campus pastors, they're a student at Flatirons Academy down the road right now, one of our next preachers, they're in our student ministry right now, and because of the faithfulness of volunteers and leaders in their life, they're gonna be discipled, they're gonna be trained, they're gonna be raised up, and one day, they are gonna be leading us. The future of Flatirons, God willing, we pray, will exceed the first, but if that's gonna happen, if the next generation is gonna be stronger than this generation, then we've got to pay attention to what Jesus says next. Look at verse 20. It says, but this, with all those good things being said, but this I have against you. You tolerate that woman, Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess and is teaching and seducing my servants to practice sexual immorality and to eat food sacrificed to idols. Now, there's a lot to unpack here, but I just wanna start out

with just the name Jezebel, okay? If you're expecting a baby, I would keep that one off the baby name list, okay? Some names never recover. It's like Jezebel, Judas, Adolf, you know? You don't hear those. You didn't think you were gonna hear a Hitler joke at church 9 a.m. You're welcome, but nobody hears those names and they're like, that's a beautiful name. You hear Jezebel, you're like, something bad is about to happen. You just know that, but what I found in my study is that this woman's name probably wasn't Jezebel. Jesus is giving her a nickname. He's saying, hey, she's just like the original Jezebel. He says, if you go back to the Old Testament, Jezebel was this pagan queen who married the king of Israel, King Ahab, and Ahab was bad, but she made him worse. In her power, she murdered citizens. She hunted prophets. She set up idols all throughout the country. She used her influence to make God's people comfortable with what God hated. Does that sound familiar? That's why Jesus, he reaches all the way back 1,000 years. He says to this church in Thyatira, he says, you've got another Jezebel on your hands.

And what was the church's problem? It's not that there was a Jezebel. The problem was that the church was tolerating her. He says, but this I have against you. You tolerate that woman. There's a danger in the church, especially the American church, when we tolerate what Jesus doesn't tolerate. It's one thing when it's out there in the world. And what we know, one day Jesus is gonna handle that, but it is a complete other thing when it's right here in Jesus's church. And in this letter, Jesus isn't writing to culture. Jesus is writing to the church. And the problem was what the church had started tolerating. And as I study this passage, I realize something, and I want you to write this one down. This right here is in line number five. Skip down a couple. What we tolerate slowly shapes who we become. What we tolerate slowly shapes who we become. That is true for a church. That is true for a family. It's true for every single one of us. And Jesus shows us three things this church must never tolerate. So that top line, which you can write, is three things Jesus refuses to let his church tolerate. Here's the first one, people. Now, before you get too excited, you're like,

I have been tolerating that neighbor far too long, okay? I just need permission. What I wanna tell you is that Jesus has a much higher vision for people than just tolerance. Much higher. Tolerance, this word, it used to mean this. Hey, even if we disagree, we are gonna respect each other and we're gonna make room for different opinions. I wanna be clear. That version of tolerance was a good thing. But what happened to that word? Somewhere along the way, our culture started changing that definition on us, and it no longer means, hey, I respect your right to disagree. Tolerance now becomes, hey, I affirm you. I approve of you. I even celebrate you. That's what tolerance means today. But here's what, maybe you've discovered this. Tolerance seems to only go in one direction. Like, a month ago, I saw this. Maybe you saw this, some major league baseball players wore their team-issued Pride Month hats, but they wrote these Bible verses on them because they didn't want to violate their convictions. I think we got a picture of one of them right here. So they wrote these verses to not violate their convictions. And I want you to look at this next slide,

is the response from the league. And there's some language there that is very important. You see that line in yellow? The MLB issued a warning that similar behavior will not be tolerated. So let me ask you, what happened to tolerance? What I'll tell you is what happened is that tolerance is breaking down. The reason why is because tolerance was never meant to be the goal. Tolerance is a low virtue. Think about it. Is the highest vision you have for your marriage that you tolerate your spouse? Is the highest vision you have for your parenting that you tolerate your kids? Like, some days, honestly, yes. Like, that is the best I can do. But is the highest vision for your friendship that you just put up with each other? The truth is, none of us just wants to be tolerated. That's why Jesus didn't tolerate people, Jesus loved people. Jesus didn't tolerate people, He loved people. So you can write this down, we love people. The Bible doesn't say that God so tolerated the world that He sent His Son to tell people, hey, you do you, live your truth, follow your heart, you'll all live happily ever after. Like, that's not what the Bible says.

The Bible says, for God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son. So love doesn't lower a standard, love climbs on a cross. Love paid the price for our rebellion and love called us to repent because love wanted to rescue us from the very thing that was destroying us. In other words, Jesus' version of love isn't simply accepting people as they are or affirming every decision that they make. Love seeks another person's highest good. It's sacrificial, it provides, it protects, but love is willing to endure short-term discomfort if it leads someone to long-term life. And love tells the truth because love wants what's best for someone else. And I think the American church, we've confused being nice with being loving. And being nice is more about us protecting our comfort than pursuing somebody else's good. I mean, nice is gonna avoid hard conversations because it wants to avoid tension. Love is willing to have hard conversations because it wants to save people from destruction. Nice says, hey, how can I avoid making this awkward? I just don't wanna make this awkward. Love asks, what does this person need even if it costs me personally? And that's why I love this in this letter, this letter Jesus says, hey, I even gave Jezebel time to repent.

In verse 21, he says, hey, I gave her time to repent. So think about this. Even here, his first instinct isn't judgment, it's mercy. He gives her an opportunity to turn around, that's love. But write this down, this is line number six. Love never celebrates what is destroying the person it loves. I'm telling you, I want more than tolerance from us. We're gonna deal with some hard stuff. We are gonna go in today because here's the thing. I love you too much to let you sit in the middle of the thing that is gonna destroy you and destroy everything that you love. So I'm gonna say the hard things. I want us to be the kind of people that love people so much we're willing to risk telling them the truth and helping them walk toward Jesus even if it makes things uncomfortable. So that's what brings us to the second thing that Jesus refuses to tolerate. And you can write this down. He refuses to tolerate false. teaching. The issue wasn't simply Jezebel's behavior, it was her teaching. Jezebel was taking God's people, and he's convincing them God's okay with things he had never been okay with. And here's what I've noticed, and I just wanna give you some insider

pastor baseball right now. The challenge facing Christians has changed over the years. There was a time where a pastor's job was simply to tell people, hey, what Jesus said. You just tell people what Jesus said. People hadn't heard it before. So tell them, Jesus is risen, you repent, you believe, you be baptized, you can follow Jesus. And then once people had heard, the church had to start adjusting, and the church had to start explaining why Jesus' way is actually better. So pastors started explaining why Jesus' way around marriage, around sex, around money, around forgiveness is actually better than the world. And if you look at all the letters in the New Testament, they're constantly saying things like, here's how Christians live differently. But now we've entered into something completely different. Now I talk to my pastor friends around the country. Now we're having to spend enormous amounts of time explaining what the Bible doesn't say. No, Jesus didn't say that. No, that's not what grace means. No, that's not what love means. No, that's not what tolerance means. And that's exactly where the church in Thyatira was. The problem wasn't that they hadn't heard the truth or that they didn't know God's word. The problem was that there were false teachers

taking God's words and twisting them. So what Jesus says, he doesn't say, just teach them more. He doesn't say, keep on teaching. He says, stop, tolerate false teaching. Stop tolerating it. That's why so many of the later books in the Bible, they address the topic of false teaching. And I'll tell you today, with the rise of Christian celebrities and politicians and so-called experts on social media, where millions of people can get, without degrees, without training, they call themselves an authority on an issue. Today we are seeing so many false teachers who are co-opting scripture to support their own pre-decided point of view. Be careful who is discipling you. Did you catch the phrase Jesus uses in verse 20? He says this, he says, this woman, Jezebel, she calls herself a prophetess, which means nobody appointed her. Nobody recognized her. She gave herself authority. That's how almost all false teachers operate. They don't submit to biblical authority. They just create their own. Be careful of people whose only credentials are that they have a camera. Okay, we live in a day where you can buy a ring light on Amazon and by Tuesday, you're an expert.

And these self-proclaimed experts are making thousands of dollars telling Christians what they want to hear. And I'm telling you, if you are getting most of your theology from TikTok or Facebook, be careful. Because algorithms don't reward faithfulness. They reward novelty. So these people, they're paid to keep you clicking and they keep you clicking by number one, coming up with something new that the Bible never said, or number two, telling you the Bible's actually saying what you wanted to hear all along. And I mean, I could give some examples of some Christian politicians or influencers or pastors who have massive followings, but the point isn't one person. The point is this, if somebody's platform depends on having a brand new interpretation of the Bible that 2,000 years of Christians somehow missed, be careful. Because the truth about false teachers is that they don't care about being wrong. They just care about their own agenda. You think about the historical Jezebel. Now think about this, if you know the story, she literally watched God send fire down from heaven. She saw God send fire down from heaven and she still refused to change her mind. She doubled down. Because she stopped asking, is it true? She was only asking, does it already support what I've already decided?

And if you and I are not careful, we can do the same thing. We can be so committed to an agenda that we stop listening to God's word for correction. We only wanna listen to it for affirmation. And that's why Paul says this. He says, hey, we demolish arguments. Every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God. We take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. Notice he didn't say we demolish people. Remember, we love. people, but we demolish the lies the enemy is using to destroy them." You can write, I think, no, no, don't write this one down yet. People are to be loved, ideas are to be tested. So write this down. Test ideas. Because Jesus wasn't angry at false teaching in Thyatira. False teaching was happening everywhere. He was angry because his church tolerated it. Don't confuse an open heart with an undiscerning mind. We love people, we test ideas, and never become so committed to an opinion, a political party, a personality, or a tribe that you're no longer willing to let God's Word correct you. Because the moment we stop testing ideas against Scripture, we then start reshaping Scripture to fit our ideas. And that is exactly what Jesus refused to tolerate. Here's the third thing that Jesus tells us not to tolerate. You can write this down. Our own sin. Notice I didn't say somebody else's sin. We're pretty good at spotting that. The last couple points have been pointing out there, pointing out there. Now Jesus is turning the spotlight right here into our own hearts. Here's what Jesus knows. The longer we give sin a seat at the table in our lives, the less we recognize it for what it is, the less we notice it, and the more we just become numb to it. And we can get so comfortable with the sin in our lives, we don't realize that we are getting comfortable with the thing the enemy intends to use to destroy us, our marriages, our witness, and our relationship with God. Because

the truth about sin is it never introduces itself to you as your enemy. It always introduces itself as your friend and your companion. Maybe you've heard about the performers Siegfried and Roy. For decades, decades back in the 80s, 90s, they performed one of the most famous shows in Las Vegas. And the signature moment of the show is when they would walk on stage with full-grown white tigers. We got a picture of it right here. And they would pet them, they'd lay beside, they would put their heads near the mouths of these tigers, and the crowd would just be amazed, just watching like, how in the world did they do this? And they would do this just night after night, year after year, thousands of performances, and eventually it started to feel normal. It looked like they had tamed something that could never really be tamed. And then in 2003, one of the tigers did what tigers do. It attacked Roy Horn in front of a live audience. And at first, the people who were watching, they thought, oh, this is just part of the act. They'd seen the show before, maybe this is a new twist to it. But they'd watched these men work with animals for years. But then the truth came out that Roy was actually attacked. He got rushed to the hospital. He survived, but he ended up with damage from the attack for the rest of his life, and the show was over forever. And when you listen to interviews from people who were right there that night, who had watched the show dozens of times, here's some of the things that they said. They said things like this, we're just stunned. There's no explanation for it. The tiger wasn't just playing, the tiger was attacking. We don't understand. The tiger is usually under control. Is that not the dumbest thing you've ever heard? Like, the tiger's usually under control. They thought that they could control the thing that ultimately was never going to be controlled. They became convinced that the thing that was designed to kill them was actually harmless. But tigers never stop being tigers. And you want to know the lie that every person who's blown up their life told themselves? They said, I can handle it. I can handle this. I can stop whenever I want. It's not hurting anybody. It's just this once. In the same way, how many of us, it's gotten to the point

where we've just been living with and tolerating the sin in our lives, and it started to feel normal. We've stopped guarding against it. We stopped protecting against it. It kind of feels like, oh, we've just got this under control. Flatirons, sin never stops being sin. Sin has never stopped wanting to destroy your marriage, your integrity, your joy. your witness and your relationship with God and tolerating the sin in our lives just makes us less aware of the danger. You notice how we just can change the vocabulary around sin? Like we don't say we sin anymore, we struggle. I'm struggling. Think about how the Bible talks about sin. The Bible says that sin is crouching at your door. Peter says about the devil, he is prowling around like a roaring lion. He's looking for somebody to devour. The Bible never looks at sin and says, manage it. Learn to deal with it. The Bible says, flee from it, put it to death, crucify it. And so you can write this down in the response to our own sin. We need to kill sin. We need to kill sin. Because, and you can write this down in line number seven, the sin you tolerate today will become the thing that costs you tomorrow. Look at how Jesus tells Thyatira what their sin is gonna cost them. Verse 21, he says, I gave Jezebel time to repent. I gave her time to repent.

But she refuses to repent and change of her sexual immorality so behold, I'll throw her onto a sickbed. He's saying, hey, there's gonna be consequences to this. He says, and those who commit adultery with her, I'll throw into great tribulation unless they repent of her works, and I will strike her children dead. What he's not saying, that's not literal, that's allegorical. That's saying her sin is not just gonna land on her, it's gonna land on the people around her and the people she cares about the most. And then all the churches will know that I am he who searches mind and heart. And I will give to each of you according to your works. Now that last line there, let's be clear. Jesus isn't saying that we earn our salvation by avoiding sin. He's not saying he's gonna give that salvation to us based on our works. The gospel's clear, we are saved by grace through faith, not by our works. But don't confuse being forgiven with being exempt from the consequences. I mean, God can completely forgive your sin, and that sin can still cost you. He's forgiven the affair, but the marriage is still struggling. He's forgiven the addiction, but it's still gonna take years to rebuild the trust. That's why the pastor I grew up in in Kentucky,

he would say it like this. He would say, sin will take you farther than you wanted to go, keep you longer than you wanted to stay, and cost you more than you wanted to pay. I mean, I have sat with too many couples whose story started with something they thought they could control. Too many people sitting on opposite sides of the table saying, I never thought it would get this far. Nobody plans to destroy their marriage. Nobody plans to lose their integrity. Nobody plans to get addicted. But every one of those stories starts with one small compromise from somebody who thought they had it under control. So let me ask you just a very direct question. What sin have you been tolerating? What sin have you stopped fighting? What sin have you just accepted? This is just the way it is. And guys, I don't want you to feel any finger pointing for me on this one, because this week I've been letting these questions reflect back on me, and God has illuminated some stuff that we are dealing with right here. I don't know the sin in your life that you've just accepted for what it is. I don't know.

Maybe it's pornography. And you're just, it's just part of your life right now. It's got a hold on you. Maybe it's private conversations that your spouse would be devastated if they heard them. Maybe it's a bitterness that you have been feeding for years. Maybe it's this subtle greed that's convinced you just one more bonus, one more raise, one more promotion, and I'll finally be satisfied. Maybe it's. Gossip, it feels harmless because you say, well, it's technically true. Maybe your pride has made you unteachable. Maybe alcohol is slowly becoming your refuge instead of Jesus. I don't know what your tiger is, but you do, and Jesus does. And he's saying the same thing to us that he said to Thyatira. He's saying, repent, repent. And we say this around here all the time. Repent, it means rethink how you think about everything. But it's not just about changing our mind, it's about changing our direction. Because I don't know about you, I know about me. I'm like on my best day, five minutes away from blowing up my life. I'm not, I know I'm not immune to that.

And so that's why repentance, it's not just about confessing sin, it's about putting distance between yourself and the thing that's trying to destroy you. Maybe picture it like this. Imagine a dad, and every night before bed, he leaves the front door wide open. Like neighbors are telling him, police tell him, his wife begs him, lock the door. And he responds, he goes, well, nothing's happened yet. I think we're fine, nothing's happened yet. And then one night, somebody walks in. You wouldn't say, I'm so surprised, how could that happen? You'd say, what kind of a father leaves the door open? Why would he leave the door open? And I wonder if today, Jesus wants to ask us the same question. Why are you leaving the door open to sin? He's saying, why is that app still on your phone? Why is it still on your phone? Delete the app. Saying, block his number. Nothing good happens when he comes around. Block his number. He's saying, confess to somebody and get that shame off your back. You need to install some software, some protective software on your computer.

You gotta stop drinking with those friends. Get some accountability, lock the door. Stop leaving it wide open, but lock the door. And I've watched the sin that so many people tolerate end up sealing too many marriages and too many families and too many futures and too many callings. And I don't want the same for you. Because we hear this about sin, and this is not about Jesus trying to take something from you. He is trying to protect you. He is trying to close that door. And I just want you to know, I want your marriage to thrive. I want your kids to have a mom and dad that they wanna be like one day. I want you to have, experience the freedom that Jesus died to give you. And that's why Jesus tells us this. You gotta repent. You gotta repent. Because here's what he knows. On the other side of repentance, there's a promise. Repentance isn't just changing and then leaving empty-handed. Repentance is you exchange this for what I have for you. And if you've been paying attention during the series in Revelation, you know that every one of these letters ends with a promise.

And the letter to Thyatira is no different. And so in verse 26, we see the start of the promise. He says, the one who conquers and the one who keeps my works until the end, the one who stays faithful, says to him, I will give authority over the nations. He'll rule them with a rod of iron as when earth and pots are broken in pieces. Even as I myself, I receive authority from my father. So the first thing that Jesus promises to the one who stops tolerating sin, he promises authority. He says, I'm gonna take the authority that my father gave me. I'm gonna put that authority in you. And you probably didn't wake up thinking, man, today what I really want is I want some authority. But really, we all want authority. We want authority in our homes. We want authority in our parenting. We want authority in our prayers. But Jesus says the path to authority, it isn't talent, it isn't power, it isn't position. He says it's holiness. Have you ever known? Notice how some people,

they carry a level of spiritual authority, like not personalities, not control. It's not like loud. It's just authority. It's like when they pray, something is different. When they speak, people listen. When they lead, others follow. And the promise that Jesus gives to Thyatira is authority. Why is this? Because holiness and authority have always gone together. And you cannot expect authority over others while refusing authority over yourself. Some dads wonder why they have no authority in their home while they are secretly tolerating pornography. They go back and forth between passive and a tyrant because their life doesn't have authority. They know where their son is headed. They know what their daughter's doing is gonna end up hurting her. But every time they start to speak, there's this voice in the back of their head. Who are you to say anything? And so they stay quiet. Some moms, they know the conversations they need to have. They know the boundary they need to set. And they know the example they need to model. But they've been tolerating gossip and jealousy and resentment. They know it's the opposite of what they're telling the kids.

And so deep down, they feel like a hypocrite. So they stay silent. And when they finally do speak, their kids, they've already learned just not to listen. Some couples wonder why things never change, but both spouses are just continuing to feed bitterness. Some leaders, they know what to say, but deep down, it just feels like they're running the playbook. All the words are right, but there's no weight behind them. And we wonder why our prayers feel powerless and our leadership feels empty, why it feels like we can never get traction and never have spiritual power, and why it seems like nothing ever changes. And here's why, we have no authority because we've been tolerating the very thing Jesus died to set us free from. We've been tolerating the sin in our life. So I want you to write this down. This is the last one. God is going to establish authority over you before he exercises authority through you. He's gonna establish authority over you before he exercises authority through you. His promise is that we're gonna find more authority in our lives when we stop tolerating sin and we start pursuing holiness. And that's been Jesus' invitation throughout this whole letter.

He's been saying, hey, don't tolerate people, love people, don't tolerate lies, test them. Don't tolerate sin, kill sin. And if we'll stop tolerating the things Jesus told us not to tolerate, we'll discover that Jesus always has something better than what he's asking us to leave behind. That's his first promise. But that's actually not the greatest promise in this letter. There's one that I found, and it's even better than the promise of authority. In verse 28, Jesus says, and I will give them the morning star. That's a nickname for Jesus himself. I'm gonna give him myself. He who has an ear, let him hear what the church, what the spirit says to the churches. You see, the greatest promise isn't actually authority. The greatest promise is Jesus. Because I know what some of us are, in this room we're thinking, we're thinking, hey, I get what you're saying about holiness and authority, but holiness feels so far off for me right now, and so authority feels so much further off than that, and it feels like I have tolerated so much, and I have broken so much, and I'm too broken, and I'm too far gone, and authority and holiness might work for somebody else, but it'll never work for me, because I just feel stuck in my shame right now.

And that's why Jesus says he gives you the morning star. That's one of the names of Jesus. But the meaning of that name is so important, because the morning star, it's the star that appears in the sky right before it turns to dawn, that star you see right before the sun comes up. The morning star tells you, no matter how long the night has been, no matter how dark the night has been, morning. is coming, and it's a callback to a verse in the Old Testament. I love this verse in Lamentations. It says, the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. It never ends. His mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning. And that's who Jesus is. When we're lost and we're broken and we're trapped in sin, we're convinced we've gone too far. Jesus doesn't come looking for us to finish us off or to tell us how much that we failed. He comes to us as the morning star, announcing that the night is over, the darkness is over, and that mercy has arrived again. And every morning, His mercies are still new. Every morning, His grace is sufficient. Every morning, He offers us another chance to repent, to get back up, and to follow Him.

And the one with eyes of fire that sees everything that we've ever done also forgives everything we've ever done. The one with bronze feet has nail-scarred feet. The one who exposes sin is the one who went to the cross and died for sinners like you and me. See, ultimately, this letter, it is not about tolerance. This letter is about Jesus. The answer is more of Jesus, because when you see Him for who He is, the things that we've been settling for, they start to lose their grip. Why would we settle for pornography when Jesus offers us intimacy with God? Why would we settle for bitterness when Jesus offers us forgiveness? Why would we tolerate cheap substitutes this world offers when Jesus is offering us Himself? So please, Flatirons Church, don't settle. Don't tolerate what Jesus died to free you from. Let's lift up our eyes. Let's fix them on Jesus, because He's holy, and He is worthy, and He's victorious, and He is the morning star who left heaven and came to earth so that you would never be separated from Him again. So why would we settle for anything less than Him? And so, Flatirons, our response is we're gonna stand up together, and we are going to worship the one who is worthy.

We are gonna fix our eyes on Him. So God, Father, in this moment right now, God, many in this room, we still just feel the weight of our sin. God, we still feel the conviction of this thing that we have been tolerating for far too long. God, we feel stuck in shame. And so, God, right now, what we need from you is, God, we need the morning star to let us know that in the same way that light wipes out the darkness as far as the east is from the west so far, have you taken our sin from us? God, you are holy, and because of your holiness and because of Jesus' sacrifice, we can be holy like you. God, that is our goal. That is our prayer. God, we worship you in your holiness. God, you are the morning star with new mercies for us every morning. So we worship you. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.