I invite you to open your Bibles this morning to Revelation and we're in chapter 2. We're still looking at the church at Thyatira and today we're going to focus on verses 20 and 21. I wish we could have seen her face. She must have been radiant with joy because she had just heard the gospel. She had heard the gospel and the Lord opened her heart to respond to the things spoken by the Apostle Paul. Her name was Lydia, and her story is found for us in Acts chapter 16. Paul was the preacher while he was visiting the city of Philippi, and Lydia was there, we are told, with some other women from her hometown of Thyatira. This native of Thyatira became the first convert in all of Europe. Acts 16.14 has this remarkable sentence at the end of the verse. Acts 16.14 says, the Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what was said by Paul. Isn't that amazing? Lydia is described in Acts 16 as a seller of purple fabrics. Likely she was a member of one of the many trade guilds in that city. Thyatira was filled with trade guilds and likely she had some type of a fabric guild of which she was a part. So the church in Thyatira began with a lot of people just like Lydia. They were common people. They were average people whose hearts were opened by the Lord. They believed unto salvation on the Lord Jesus Christ. They were baptized as believers and added to the church. That's the pattern that we see throughout the New Testament. Common people here, tradesmen and women, who heard the gospel were enabled by the Lord to respond to the truth about Christ. Now keep in mind the timeline. This all took place in Acts about 40 years before Jesus sent this letter in Revelation to the church at Thyatira. Now the second generation of believers are running the church. After Lydia and her contemporaries had been faithful and had submitted to the Word in reverence and in humility, another group was running the church. It's 40 years later. People pass off the scene and new generations rise. And like the previous generation, the church was still thriving with some good deeds. They had love and faith and service and perseverance. And Jesus even says those deeds are on the increase. So things are apparently getting better, we would think. But things were not all well in the church at Thyatira. In fact, they were in serious trouble. Because in spite of their good deeds, they were being tolerant of ongoing sin and were now facing swift judgment from Jesus Christ. Even though Thyatira was the smallest of the seven churches, it was the smallest city, they received the longest letter from Jesus. So much was wrong. The biggest problem had to do with an influential woman in the church who was an idolater and was leading people into immorality. So last week we looked at verses 18 and 19. This morning we're going to move ahead into verses 20 and 21. And I want you to consider with me what Jesus says about the corrupt leadership in Thyatira. And then we're going to apply those lessons to ourselves and to our church, the church that we love here. Let's listen as I read verses 18 through 21 so you can have it from the start of the letter through verse 21, and then I'm going to focus on verses 20 and 21. And now because this is God's Word and we are submitting to the Word of God as a symbol of that submission, I invite you now to stand with me for the reading of these verses. 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 I have this against you, that 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 her sexual immorality. Father, I pray that you will take these words and show us how relevant and close they really are. And I pray that you would, by faith, enable us to put those enemies of sin to death. We ask it in Jesus' name. Amen. Please be seated. Now in verses 20 and 21 we have really a specific warning to the church leadership in Thyatira, and the warning is about a woman who is named or called Jezebel. And in this warning we'll see that really the whole church is culpable for tolerating corrupt leadership and immorality. You know, there is always a relationship between the leadership of a church and the body of Christ. We see that throughout the New Testament as well. It's not just that the leaders are solely responsible. There is an accountability and a charge to the body of Christ to not tolerate sin or corruption among the leadership. And the Bible holds the whole body accountable for upholding the truth of the gospel. Now listen again to verse 20. But I have this against you, that 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 sacrifice to idols. Now here's the first proposition we need to understand. When a church is tolerant of corrupt leadership, it breeds apostasy and rampant immorality among the people. Apostasy and rampant immorality. Now, in a lot of the churches that we've studied, they had heavy persecution, right? Outside the church, and the persecution was making the church inside grow closer, even though they had doctrinal problems in some places. But here, that's not the case. The problem in Thyatira was not outside the church. The problem here was inside the church. It was corruption within the church. They were tolerating disobedience to God's word and they were doing it in the name of peace. Peace. Jesus says, but I have this against you. And the you here is singular, and it refers to the angel we would refer to as the messenger or the pastor of the church in Thyatira. It was the pastor, along with the other elders who were supposed to be the protectors of the flock. They're the ones who are charged to guard the flock and to feed the sheep. Jesus holds them accountable. He holds us accountable. What were these elders doing? Well, they were permitting everyone in the church to have their own way, all for the sake of peace. If a man or a woman didn't want to submit to the elders under God's word, if they didn't want to submit to scripture, if they didn't want to believe the truth that the apostles had given, well, the leaders just looked the other way. All because they didn't want anyone to be upset. Don't want anyone to be upset with the leadership. Don't want anyone to be upset with apostolic teaching or truth. They didn't want anyone to be upset. But someone was very upset. And that someone was Jesus Christ. And apparently these leaders had forgotten to please the one person who matters most in the church. Jesus. the one who died for the church, the one who ransomed the church with his own blood. They had forgotten that truth must never be sacrificed on the altar of unity or false peace. Let me say that again. Truth must never be sacrificed on the altar of unity or false peace. Oh, brothers and sisters, we love unity, and we love peace, and those are cherished things in the body of Christ. But there is something that trumps unity and peace, and that is truth. And when there must be a sense of separation, let truth be that dividing sword. Let it not be personality. Let it not be preference. Let it not be opinion. Let it be truth. Truth is supreme in the church. Whenever church leaders confront sin, the ungodly are always going to be upset about it. Always. But listen, the sheep of Christ will repent. They will be grateful that someone stepped in and loved them enough to get involved in their lives. The true sheep of Christ love that intervention. It may hurt at the beginning, but over time they say, I'm so grateful that you stopped me when I was going that way. I'm so grateful that you called that to my attention and made me to know it. It was a great burden that was lifted from my shoulders about ten years ago when I learned from a godly advisor that not everyone in the church has to be pleased. I think a lot of times people graduate from seminary and they think it's their job to please everyone in the church. I remember Spurgeon saying that once you think that everyone's opinion is to shape how you're supposed to look and talk and sound and teach, you'll start to look like one of those characters in a house of mirrors at the carnival. You look in one mirror and they see you as too tall and skinny and the other mirror you're fat and wide and your head is misshapen and you start to get this view of yourself that is twisted and distorted. We are not to live by the opinion of man. We can't. It would kill us. We are to live by the Word of God. We are to live by who we are in Christ. Yes, we have to forsake our sins. Yes, we have to grow. But we cannot twist ourselves and try to conform to every view that someone has in a church. And it was a great day in my life when I realized that I only had to please one person in the church, and that was Jesus. That was so freeing to me. Everything we teach, everything we do, and everything we say should be for his pleasure, for his glory. Because frankly, if Jesus isn't pleased with the church, it matters not who is. And yet if Jesus is pleased with the church, it matters not who isn't. When church leaders forget that Jesus Christ is the head of the church, the consequences are disastrous and eternal. Because then the sheep aren't fed. Or they're fed something that is false, and that's poison, that's spiritual, doctrinal poison. Now here's what Jesus has against the pastor and the members in Thyatira. Look at verse 20. He says, you tolerate. You tolerate the woman Jezebel who calls herself a prophetess. Notice that the name of the sin cited by Jesus is the sin of tolerance. The Greek word athiemi. Athiemi. That word means to tolerate. It means to let something go. It means to send away in some contexts. This suggests that this woman called Jezebel was allowed to lead the church astray without any accountability. No checks and balances. No one in the church among the leadership or in the body apparently said, hey, wait a minute, this is wrong. She's teaching falsehood. She shouldn't be teaching like this at all. They just let her go. They let her go. There are leaders within the visible church throughout the land who don't even meet the barest of biblical qualifications to pastor a church. And in some cases, it is reported that there are even pastors who have openly committed adultery with the full knowledge of their congregations. And in some cases, members did nothing about it with full knowledge. They just let it go. Jesus calls this aphemi. It is the sin of tolerance. Now Jezebel called herself a prophetess. Don't you like that? She called herself that. She gave herself this title. This was not conferred upon her by ordination. This was not given to her by an institution. The church never said you're a prophet or a prophetess. She called herself this. It was self-designated. Listen, all false prophets are self-designated. All false prophets are self-designated. This is reflexive, the way it is grammatically. It's reflexive. She bestowed the title upon herself. That means she claimed to speak for God in the church. And yet, the official leaders, the pastors or elders, where were they? They didn't confront her when her teaching as well as her gender role contradicted apostolic truth. You know, there's always a direct link between beliefs and behaviors. There's always a direct link between our beliefs and how we live. Now, it's believed that the woman called Jezebel had been influencing some in this church to join the local trade guilds, without which a tradesman could not work in Thyatira. Now what you need to understand about it is that being a member of a trade guild meant participation in what is called the guild feasts, and that included immoral acts and the worship of idols. It was mandatory. You could not be a member of a trade guild without participation in these feasts and in these worship of idols. It's really similar to the sin of Balaam that we saw in the previous letter to Pergamum. Now the title Jezebel is probably not her real name. I take it to be symbolic. I don't think that was her actual name. I believe that she was a type of Jezebel. This is a reference to the wicked Queen of Israel who was married to wicked King Ahab. Remember that story in the Old Testament? The original Jezebel was a daughter of Ethbaal. That was her father's name. He was referred to as the High Priest of Baal. Now according to Josephus, who wrote a history of Israel for Rome, the original Jezebel's father, Ethbaal, was also a priest of the idol Astart. This Ephbaal usurped the throne by murdering Phileas, who is the last king of Hiram I's descendants. Now the only reason I'm telling you all of that, and you don't have to remember that, but I just want you to get the flavor of her family. I want you to get the background that this reference to Jezebel is about a woman who led Israel to worship Baal and to commit horrible acts of immorality. And what I want you to remember is that the reference to Jezebel in a Jewish historical context is a reference to a murderous, wicked, idolatrous, and satanic woman. Not a compliment. Now, in that sense, this influential woman in Thyatira was leading Christians astray, just as Jezebel led Israel astray. And by calling herself a prophetess, what was she doing? What does it mean when someone says they're a prophet or they're a prophetess? Well, it means they're speaking for God. And by doing that, she was claiming to speak for God, meaning, my words have authority in the church and you need to listen to me. And in that way, she was ruling over the church at Thyatira, which violates God's Word in multiple areas. All the lies and heresies and falsehoods she was teaching in the whole church were being taught as if they were the actual written Word of God, the apostolic Word. And as a result of her teaching, the Lord's true bondservants were being led astray. It wasn't neutral. False teaching is never neutral. It always has a bitter fruit when people believe it. Jezebel was really a kind of Nicolaitan. Remember what we studied about the Nicolaitans? Here she is. She is a type of a Nicolaitan leader. She's living out her Nicolaitan values now in the church, and no one is saying anything about it. Now based on this description it doesn't seem that the woman titled Jezebel was an official leader in the church. By that I mean she didn't have a church title, she didn't have an office in the church, it was not an official sanctioning. She is what we would refer to as a de facto leader in the church. But don't disregard that, because if you've ever served in church leadership, if you've ever been in congregations, you know that de facto leaders have great influence in the body of Christ. Sometimes the de facto leaders, the people who have been around a long time, wield far more influence than the people who preach and lead and who are paid staff of a church. Now, in every church, there are always some people who have great influence without regards to official titles or roles. And listen, when those people obey scripture, and when they follow the Lord Jesus Christ, and when they live a righteous life, they can influence more people for good, for Christ, than the finest sermon in the pulpit. They really can. It's amazing. But when those same influential people do not follow Christ, do not submit to His Word, it can have the opposite effect. That's what we have here. Those who are weak in the faith will yield to the powerful influence of strong personalities and emulate their sins regardless of what the pastor or elders teach from God's Word. The Bible refers to such rebellion as a cancer in the church. 2 Timothy 2.17 uses the word gangrene. It's like a gangrene that will spread and destroy an entire church if it's not stopped. What stops it? What is the one thing that can stop the spreading of doctrinal error? Present the truth. Believe the truth. That's how doctrinal error is stopped. And by the way, that's true when cults knock on your door. The best thing to do is to not try to answer all of their errors. The best thing to do is to take them straight to the Lord Jesus Christ. Talk about Jesus. That's where the error is central. Bring them back to the source of authority. Talk about Jesus. Talk about what is true about Jesus. That He is the incarnate Son of God. That He is worthy of worship. Deal with Jesus and you will save yourself hours of frustration trying to deal with every error that a heretic that knocks on your door might have. One New Testament scholar writes, the sin apparently involved the majority of the Thyatira Church's members, and it was twofold. He says, first, they violated the biblical teaching that women are not to be teachers or preachers over the whole church, 1 Timothy 2.12. And that violation led them to tolerate the woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess. Then they compounded their error of permitting her to teach by allowing her to teach error. So it was bad enough that they were allowing her to teach, and now they're letting her teach heresy and error to the body of Christ. And because the official leadership at Thyatira was tolerating this woman Jezebel to teach error and to lead the church into idolatry and into perversion, it was now breeding apostasy, which means drifting from the faith. It means going away from the truth, apostasy. And it has rampant immorality among the people all tied up with it. The bride of Christ is now at risk in Thyatira. That's why Jesus said she is teaching and she is seducing, note that, seducing my servants to practice sexual immorality and to eat food sacrificed to idols. And by the way, the word servants is actually the word slaves, doulos. It always means slave in the New Testament, but English translators are afraid to use the word slave because it has so much cultural baggage. But that word always refers to a slave. We are free in Christ as slaves of Christ. We are only truly free when we are slaves of Christ. He is our master. And whatever our master says we are to do, we have a loving, gracious master. We have a master who never errs. He never makes a mistake. And he loves his slaves dearly, so dearly that he shed his blood for his slaves. That's our relationship with Jesus. The only thing worse than the immorality of the woman Jezebel was the compounded sin of tolerance committed by the leaders in the church. This is the majority of the people here. It's really the major problem Jesus addresses in the letter. Like the words that are often attributed to Edmund Burke, who said, the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. That's what was going on here. The leaders in Thyatira sinned by doing nothing. That was it. And that opened the floodgates of sin and the floodgates of corruption in this church. Now, Jesus knows how to deal with the Jezebels. He does it in his own way. He does it in his own perfect timing, as we'll see. But that does not excuse the cowardice or passivity of church leaders when sin is molesting the purity of Christ's bride. Jesus is blood earnest about the church, even if many people within the visible church seem uncommitted or passive about the church. Jesus is not. Pervasive sin that impacts the whole body must always be confronted. It should never be confronted alone, but with a plurality of united godly elders. And so Jesus is writing to warn them and us. But now let me ask another question. When there is sin like this, where is the problem located when an influential member refuses to repent of public sin? Where is the problem? That's our second point, and it's found in verse 21. But here's the proposition. When the immoral refused to repent, the problem is in the will. It's in the will. According to verse 21, Jesus has already been dealing with this woman Jezebel for some time. He says in verse 21, I gave her time to repent. Note that, that's past tense. That's something that has been going on in the past. I gave her time and then it says she refuses to repent of her sexual immorality. Now that's present tense. That's a present progressive. That means I gave her time, I gave her time, I gave her time, and up to this point she is still refusing to repent. The NIV says she is unwilling. That's really a good translation. She is unwilling. Now this is the tie-in with the Nicolaitans. The Nicolaitans, we've learned, were a sect within the church who practiced sexual immorality under a twisted view of God's grace. They took some doctrine of the grace of God and they turned it into license. They said, well, because we're washed in the blood, that means we're free to sin as much as we want. You know, it's great. I love to sin. Jesus loves to forgive. It's grace. Grace! That's not grace. That's licentiousness. That is immorality. That is sin. The Lord says we are to put that to death. Jesus said he hates the deeds of the Nicolaitans. Now here in verse 21, the word for immorality is the word porneia in the Greek. Porneia, from which we get our English word pornography. Porneia refers to any kind of sexual immorality. It's always serious. There's never a positive connotation of porneia. The focal point of her immorality was a luxuriant bed. And Jesus is now warning her about another kind of bed when we get into verse 22. He has another bed for her. If her sin was done in the context of a bed, which is done in the context of idolatry, by the way, they had beds where the idolatrous temple prostitutes would go The bed of sin becomes a bed of judgment. Jesus says, I have another bed for you. But think a minute about the timing of the letter. Think about how long these sins have been going on in Thyatira before Jesus said, that's enough. You know, a good while before this letter was written, we don't know how many years, but the fact that Jesus says, I have been patient, I gave her time to repent, that's really key. That means Jesus has been patiently, patiently working with Jezebel. Jezebel! I'm giving her time to repent. Every person who ultimately denies the gospel, every person who ultimately rejects Christ and goes to hell will stumble over ten million graces of God to get there. Every person who will go to hell will stumble over millions and millions of graces every day in their lives on their way to hell. blind. But God is gracious even to the unfaithful. God is gracious even to those who will never come to Christ. And here this woman, Jezebel, is an illustration of the patience and the tender grace of God. The patience of Christ reveals the true orientation of our hearts. It's like the hot sun in the sky. The same heat that softens the wax also hardens the clay. It's the nature of the substance that determines its response to the sun. Romans 2, verse 4 asks, do you think lightly of the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that the kindness of God leads you to repentance? Isn't that beautiful? Romans 2.4 tells us that God's kindness is to lead his true people to repentance. But what does it say about a person if God's patience and kindness does not lead them to repentance, but is rather taken as a license to just keep on sinning? Well, that's what Jezebel did all while Jesus was being patient with her. Her ungodly will was the problem. Because of our fallenness, our will and the will of every human being without Christ is only free in the natural realm. We're free. We're free in the natural realm. But we're not free to do what we don't want. We're not free to do what we have no desire to do. We must live according to the strongest desire at that moment. And if God is not our strongest desire, if pleasing the Lord Jesus is not our strongest desire, then something else will be. Something less. Something sinful. Now apart from grace, the will of man is carnally free, absolutely carnally free, which the Bible calls enslaved to sin, but free in regard to the natural realm. But there is no freedom in the spiritual realm unless God changes the heart. And so, like Adam and Eve after the fall, sinful man, in his own will, flees and hides from God, the true God of creation. That's what's happening with Jezebel. For whatever reason, she is unwilling to repent. Jezebel's heart was hardening, just like that hard clay in the sun. She was her own God, she believed her own stuff, she believed her own prophecies, and not the Word of God. She disregarded apostolic truth. By the way, the word for will, the word for desire in the original Greek is used in verse 21. That's one reason I like the New American Standard translation, where it says she does not want to repent of her immorality. She doesn't want to. Why don't sinners repent? They don't want to. That's why. No sinner repents unless they want to, and no one wants to unless God enables their will to do so. He has to engage the will. Now what must happen before a person can repent? Listen. We must be born again. That's it. Unless a person is born again, said Jesus in John 3, he cannot see the kingdom of God. We're blind unless we're born again, unless he gives us the gift of life, we must be born again. Everyone here, everyone in this city, everyone in this world must be born again in order to repent. Jezebel was not willing to repent because she was not of Christ. Oh, she was in the church. Absolutely. But she was not of the church. She even had power. an influence in the church, but she was not of the church, because she was not of Christ. And His patience and His kindness and His forbearance only proved her unregenerate condition. Brothers and sisters, this is a powerful example of the necessity of grace. Grace to be converted and grace for the need of biblical leadership at every level in the church. We must have grace to be converted and every church must have biblical leadership. Now we'll begin to look at the deadly consequences of unrepentance next week. This is very critical. But as we close this morning, I want to just lead you in a time of searching your own hearts. I want you to think about your own heart and your own will. I want to ask, what has God's patience and kindness and forbearance been doing in your own life these recent days? Just think about it. How has God's Word been working in your own heart these past few weeks or months? As you listen to God's Word week after week, is your heart softening? Is it softening to the truths of Scripture, like the wax? Or is it getting harder, like the clay? Well, if you know you're living in willful, unrepentant sin, and if you know your heart is growing harder with every hearing of God's Word, my prayer is that you will take the warning to Jezebel to heart this morning. This is for you. Men as well as women can have the spirit of Jezebel. Men as well as women can have hearts like Jezebel. This is not a gender thing. The answer is always immediate repentance. Repent. And the only way to repent is you must be born again. If you want to talk to me or to an elder after the service, we are always here for that reason. We're always available. And the church exists to spread a passion for the supremacy of the Lord Jesus Christ over all things, and the magnificence of His grace through the preaching of His Word. That's the chief thing a pastor is to do, among other things. A pastor has many different things that he must do, but the chief among those things is to feed the sheep. Feeding the sheep, the truth of God's Word. And we do that so that the lost may be saved, and so that the redeemed may be strengthened in their faith. Oh, Christ's bride needs this word. Christ's bride needs this life-giving, life-changing, revolutionary word of salvation through faith in Him. There is hope, and that hope is only in Jesus. Let's close our time in prayer. Would you bow your heads with me? Father, You have been so, so patient with us, not just today, but for weeks, for months, for years. Enable us now by faith to humble ourselves and to submit to Your Word. Enable us to submit to the authorities You have lovingly placed over us. Make us willing to repent so that when we are walking astray and someone has the courage and the faith to tell us in love that we need to turn, may we be turnable, may we be intreatable, and may we be gentle. I pray that you would be glorified in our joyful obedience beginning today and going into the next days and weeks and months and years. May we conform to your word. We ask it in Jesus' name. Amen.