Good morning, friends. It’s great to be back with you. I have been on a a quick visit to the mothership as I like to call it back into The beautiful country that is England. It’s an unusual time for us to go, but I got to go back for this really special reason. I got to go back for my my, my youngest sister’s wedding.

So I grabbed you guys a little photo to see the whole family gathered together. And that’s my sister Mel in the middle, this incredibly sweet person who somehow managed to find herself serving drinks at our own wedding, which tells you Something about her beautiful character and gift to the world.

While we were there, we got to make one of our journeys down to the coast, the southwest coast of England, one of my favorite place in all of the earth. So I took this photo overlooking the bay. See, it’s not raining. For those of you that always come up to me and say, I guess it’s raining right now back at home.

It doesn’t do that all the time. It does do it a lot of the time, but it is this just beautiful beach that we have. And I just wanted to take a picture of this crystal clear water to say, This is England. Not the Caribbean. So if you get a chance, this is where you should go. If you’re waiting for someone to say this is the next vacation spot for you, I’m giving to you right now.

Go and go and explore the southwest coast of England. You will be so glad that you did. We’re in a series on the Book of Revelation, working our way methodically through this first section, where there are letters written to seven churches in Asia in the first. And as I was processing this book as I was about to re enter the real world instead of that vacation world you get to move to every now and again, I thought it might be helpful if I shared a couple of insights about why.

the book of Revelation. I didn’t pick the book of Revelation for this series because I believe that the end of the world is imminent like in the near future. I don’t get insight into that kind of thing. I just don’t know. In actual fact, reading Revelation as though the only purpose of it is to talk about the end of the world has actually been one of the more damaging things to the church, at least in some ways.

Because what happens if you’re told that the world is about to end? The world itself loses a whole chunk of its value. You don’t move furniture around the Titanic when it’s about to sink. You don’t worry about how things look, you just simply get people off the ship. And if we come to a place where we believe that God has no purpose left for this world, then there’s a whole bunch of things, a whole bunch of avenues we might work in, a whole bunch of ways we might work shalom that suddenly become unimportant, unvaluable.

Now, as we get towards the end of Revelation, you’ll see that the ways that God talks about the renewal of all things, that something is going to happen to this universe and this world that is distinct and special, and we’ll get to that sometime maybe in spring. But right now, I want you to just hold this idea that God is alive and at work in this world.

And in Revelation, And I think trying to help us capture two very important things. Under the overall umbrella of this idea that Revelation provides the end of the story, the end of the story, but not the end of the story. There’s another thing to be written, there’s what C. S. Lewis called the leaving of the shadow lands and entering the real country.

There’s what Tolkien called like swift sunrises and white sandy beaches. There’s this other thing still to take place. Revelation provides the end of the story, but it centers around Jesus. Everything revolves around this Jesus and his work for this world. But in the midst of that, for a moment, just put yourself in the mind of a first century person.

You’ve become a follower of Jesus and you’ve realized very quickly that this Jesus people are a distinctly unpopular people. They’re not loved anywhere. And now you’re wrestling with what you might call hard times. Persecution has begun to hit the church. The Roman emperors have come down heavy on the church.

And you need to know, can I keep going in this season? The book of Revelation, I think, is supposed to form us in this way, not just the first century people, but us too. It’s supposed to keep us faithful, even when times are hard. And there’s something it does to enable us to do that, something that you’ll see constantly throughout this book.

It shows us the world from a divine perspective. If you were to look at the world in the light of the Christian story, you might say, looking at how things seem now, something’s gone wrong here. It’s messy, right? Is evil winning the battle? Is the work of Jesus really as profound and powerful as it was claimed to be?

And yet all through the book of Revelation, what you’ll get is this view of the divine perspective of what’s happening now on Earth. And the message is repeatedly, it may seem that evil is winning and good is defeated. But it only seems that way. And you and I, we are enabled in the light of that view to say we can stay faithful even when times are hard.

Today we move to the fourth letter, the letter to the Church of Tyre. If you have a text in front of you, I’m gonna invite you to open it to Revelation chapter two. I’m gonna recite it for you. I’ll be moving through the NIV version throughout the course of the sermon. But for a moment, let’s just enter into this text.

To the church at Thyatira, these are the words of the Son of God, whose eyes blaze like fire and whose feet are like burnished bronze. I see your works, your faith and love, your service and perseverance, and you do more now. than you did at first. But I have this against you. You tolerate the teaching of the woman Jezebel, who claims to be a prophet.

By her words, she has taken many of my servants into sexual immorality and into eating of food sacrificed to idols. I’ve given her a chance to repent, and she will not, so I will lay her on a bed of sickness. Those who listen to a teaching will lay on a bed of sickness with her. I will remove her followers from the face of the earth, so that all churches might know that I am the one that searches hearts and minds.

To those of you that have had no part in her teachings, to those of you that have been faithful, I say only this to you. Stay faithful, hold on to what you have learned. And to the end, to the one who holds on, to the one who is faithful, I will give the morning star. This is the letter to the Church of Thara.

I gave you most of it. There’s a couple of parts that we won’t have time for today, and as always, especially in this series, I highly recommend a podcast to you. The fact that I’m part of the podcast is not the reason I’m recommending it to you, but it is a great chance to clear up any of the ground that I might have missed and to catch up wi with some of the conversation.

This fourth letter is to a church that is one of the more insignificant. churches in the book of Revelation. It’s tucked away. I’ll show you a map in a second. The letters are written to a horseshoe of churches that follow roughly like this track. You’ve got Ephesus that we’ve covered, Smyrna, Pergamum that Aaron covered last week, Thyatira, and then to follow Sardis, Philadelphia.

It’s not an original name, just so you know. And Laodicea, it kind of moves around in that arc. Thyatira is tucked up there in the north of what is modern day Turkey. It’s a kind of insignificant place. Peripheral but important because it was deeply Roman as a town. It was a deeply patriotic part of the world.

I tried to think of an American equivalent for you, and the best I could throw out was maybe something like Omaha, Nebraska or something like that. Those, one of those honest, good working places. Something that you might say to a foreign visitor. If you get to Omaha, You’re going to see the real America.

You’re not going to see it in New York. You’re not going to see it in LA. You’re going to see it in places. Like that. If you were to go to England, I might say the town of Windsor, this was like, we just happened to fly over it on the way in. That made me think of it. But Windsor’s like the home of kings and Queens, it’s this place that is deeply English.

If you go to Italy, people say, go to Naples. It’s like the real. Italy. And Thyatira is this this corner of empire that is deeply connected to the Roman empire, deeply passionate about being Roman. Which seems to influence the way that this letter is introduced, or at least the person addressing the letter.

We read to the angel of the church in Thyatira, verse 18, these are the words of the Son of God. Maybe you’ve picked up by now that each of these letters is pulling out a specific part of the view we were given of Jesus in the first chapter. We were given this view of Jesus that doesn’t look like Jesus as he may have looked on earth, but seems like this real Jesus.

perhaps. And each of the letters picks out one of those qualities. In one, he was the one who walks amongst the seven lampstands. Cryptic, I know. In one, he was the first and the last. In another one, he was the one that holds the two edged sword. And now in this one, these are the words of the Son of God.

A lot of writers on the book of Revelation believe this is a specific message to this town that is distinctly Roman, and a message to the church who’s operating perhaps in a way that might be considered too Roman for a Christian to act. If I can give you, just for a moment, a little bit of Greek mythology background, and Roman mythology is connected to that.

The Romans and Greeks both worshipped a pantheon of gods. They had different names at times, but they were essentially the same characters. And so this is a statue of Zeus was one of the seven wonders of the world. Zeus was the head of the gods of the Greek and Roman world. And then this is Zeus’s son Apollo.

So you’ve got the God who is the head of the gods, and then you’ve got Apollo, who is his son. Apollo just happens to be the patron guard. of the city of Thyatira. He was the one that they had a temple to in the city. He was the one that the good Romans would go and worship, would pay homage to. Keep tracking with that.

You’ve got Zeus, and then you’ve got Apollo, a god, and then the son of a god. And then as the Roman Empire became established, as they moved from having a Senate to being somewhat like a democracy at least, there was this moment where the ruler Augustus Caesar decided to make his father, Julius Caesar, a god.

So Julius Caesar had died and Augustus son said, He’s now a god, he now is worthy of your worship. With what personal benefit to him, you might ask? Suddenly he is now Augustus Caesar, the son of God. You’ve got Zeus, who is a god, you’ve got Apollo, he’s the son of God, and then now you’ve got Julius Caesar, who is a god, and you’ve got Augustus Caesar, who is a son of God.

The people of Thyatira, the people that were loyal to the Roman Empire, worshipped Apollo, the son of God, and then, by extension, started to worship the emperor, whoever that may happen to be at the time. It was a place where emperor worship was a significant part of the way that they saw religion, the way they saw the world working.

So when you see these characters back in their history, when you read the words, this message is from the Son of God, it means something. The inference is that you may claim to worship a Son of God, but there is only one true God. And he has only one son. And this letter from is from him who holds all of that authority.

And he write says this, the Jesus that is presented to this town is the one who is the son of God and whose eyes blaze like fire and whose feet are like bronze in a furnace. As we get into the letter, we see that the first part, as most of the letters are, is distinctly positive. There’s a reference to their love and to their faith in verse 19, their service and their perseverance.

And then an interesting note at the end. And you are now doing more than you did. at first. If you can track back all the way to the beginning to the church of Ephesus, you may remember that the critique of the church of Ephesus was what? You’re doing less than you did. You’ve lost your first love. You’re no longer the church you were.

As we looked at exactly what that meant to that church of Ephesus, it meant that you used to be a church of outreach. You used to be a church that cared for the world around you, a church that was deeply concerned for those not yet part of you. And somewhere you lost that. They lost it because they were deeply interested in getting every little detail of theology right.

This church, Pergamum from last week, is the anti type. of the church of Ephesus. Ephesus got all the details right and lost what it was to love the world around it. And what we’ll see with Thyatira is they were no longer concerned about details, like Pergamon, but just a little bit different.

But they were more focused on love. It seems like the narrative we’ll pick up is that Jesus wants both of those things for his churches. So the compliments that are the part of every letter, every church that we’ll read about of the seven churches is doing something right. And this church is doing these things right.

It’s a loving church, a faithful church. They are interested in service, perseverance, and they are doing more than they did when they first begun. It’s a church that’s growing in healthy ways. But behind the scenes, something is emerging. John Stott says of this church, that in that fair field, the church, Thyatira, a poisonous weed was being allowed to luxuriate.

Everyone good with the word luxuriate? It’s not a grammar class, it’s okay if you didn’t pass that one, but you can look it up and it means something. In that healthy body, malignant cancer had begun to form. An enemy was being harbored in the midst of that fellowship. There’s only one church out of all the seven that is apparently doing nothing wrong, that is getting everything right.

This is not one of those churches. As we press into verse 20, we read this. Nevertheless, I have this against you. You tolerate that woman, Jezebel, who calls herself a prophet for the second week in a row, we’re given, or the second letter in a row, we’re given a reference to a somewhat obscure Old Testament character that is supposed to tell us something.

about the way this church is off track. So maybe a natural question jumps up. Who was Jezebel? Jezebel was a queen back about a thousand years before the book of Revelation was written. This is her introduction in 1 Kings 16. Ahab, son of Omri, did more evil in the eyes of the Lord than any of those before him.

This is not a good introduction. That’s, ouch. He not only considered it trivial. to commit the sins of Jeroboam, son of Nebat, but he also married Jezebel, daughter of Ethbal, king of the Sidonians, and began to serve Baal and worship him. He set up an altar to Baal in the temple of Baal that he built in Samaria.

Apab also made an asherah pole and did more to arouse the anger of the Lord and the God of Israel than he did all the kings of Israel before him. Ahab is an unsavory king, an unsavory character, and what we read in the narrative is Jezebel is the power behind the throne. She’s the one that pushes him in that direction.

In this season of their history, the nation of Israel becomes a nation that practices what’s called syncretism. They pull in the worship of other religions. If you can think back to what you may know of the history of the nation of Israel, what was central to them. The Ten Commandments, right? There is one God, worship only Him.

And suddenly that standard, under Jezebel and Ahab, disappears. Now there’s a note that I’d love to make on this. Because some of you have been around church for even longer than I have, and perhaps you’ve picked up certain bits of language based on this text. I grew up in a culture that would regularly talk about something called the spirit of Jezebel.

They would see someone operating in a particular way, and they would say, See, this is the spirit of Jezebel in operation. The text never mentions that. That doesn’t seem particularly to be a thing. And in my experience, what it usually was there was a group, primarily of men, who didn’t like the tone that a woman spoke in, and so they said, Look, here you go, spirit of Jezebel.

And what you might note about this text is the fact that Jezebel is female is no more important than the fact that last week Balaam was male. It’s not an important part of the text, it’s just information. There’s a danger when we take what’s called a correlationary binary. We say there’s good and there’s bad and there’s male and there’s female and in some reading of this text, the inference has been that primarily women, female is connected to bad and male is connected to good and that’s just not in the text at all.

It’s not really the message we’re supposed to be getting. Nevertheless, I have this against you. You tolerate that woman, Jezebel. We’re given Jezebel as a type. It may not even have been the woman’s name, but somewhere there is a woman who is in this church who is pulling the church off track, pulling them into distinct practices that God says no to.

This isn’t the way the church is called to operate. She’s a woman who calls herself a prophet. Notice for a moment what’s different here in comparison to last week. Last week the example we were given was a guy called Balaam who was not part of the church community. He was not part of the community back in a thousand years ago and he’s not part of the church community in the first century in the book of Revelation.

Here we see something different. This is someone who is a part of the church. She’s involved. She’s in the center of it. It’s what happens when church leadership goes wrong, when no one is able to say, this isn’t the way of Jesus. No one’s able to call out a pastor, an elder, someone who’s operating with power.

And some of you may have been in some of those situations, you may have seen some of what it is for power to get out of control in a church community that operates with a completely different standard to this world’s standard of power. By her teaching, she misleads my servants into sexual immorality and the eating of food sacrificed to idols.

Now, there’s a possibility that the sexual immorality is just it’s not distinctly a practice, but it’s unfaithfulness to the God of Israel, it’s unfaithfulness to Yahweh. But we’ll get into that in just a moment. I always think it’s interesting when we read something like this that seems so out of touch with our modern world to ask, given that they’re practicing something that’s not right, what do we learn?

It’s information, right? Hopefully you’ve got some information about the historical context of Thyatira. But this is supposed to form you and I. This is supposed to help us walk in the way of Jesus. So what is it trying to tell us? What might we be learning? What actually is happening in this church community?

Maybe you’d phrase it like this. What does this mean? What does it mean? And somewhere, what we’re seeing here is a group of people that have a desperate need. The primary way of making money in the area of Thyatira was to make money. was to make statues. To make statues, you needed to be part of a special club.

It was called a guild. I tried to translate this into modern speak, and the best example I could come up with was the example of qualifications. If you want to do certain roles to take on certain challenges in this world, you need some kind of qualification. If you want to build houses, you usually need to learn how to do it somewhere.

You have to pass some kind of test before anybody is willing to let you build them. Maybe this works as an example. If you were to decide, let’s imagine together. If you were to decide, I really want to own a plane. It’s the imaginary world, so you can do anything you want. Let’s imagine that you decide to go and find someone who will build you a plane, and you travel down Littleton Avenue, and you just happen out of convenience to run into a sign that says, we build planes here, and you walk in to this place, and you say, I need a plane, I need a jet.

And the guy says, no worries, I have you covered. And then you have this moment of realizing, like, how do I know what’s what this guy is capable of doing. Can he safely build me a plane? And so you say to him, after beginning to sign the contract, you say, can I just ask what are your qualifications for this?

And the guy says I don’t have any. I just figured it out. I put some pieces together, it seemed to work really well, I’ve sold a bunch of planes, never had any complaints from anybody, it seems to be going well. Do you trust the guy to build you a plane, or do you not? Now in the first century there weren’t qualifications, but to build something for someone, to create a piece, you needed a stamp of approval, and that stamp of approval came from what was called a guild.

So you had to sign up to be part of this group of people with one specific problem. That guild was a distinctly Roman thing. And to enter into it, you had to do something. Wasn’t a test. But you had to enter into the worship of a Roman god, you had to attend the temple, you had to eat at the feast where they ate food that was sacrificed to idols, you had to participate in some of the rituals.

Some of the writers on this would say that sexual immorality was not always connected to these rituals, but it was most often connected to these rituals. See you’re left with this challenging question as a first century person who wants to provide food for his family. Do I do that or do I not do that?

Do I enter in to the rituals of the day so I can feed my family? Or am I going to trust that God will provide for me? It takes bravery to take an organization into that place of faith. It takes bravery to take a family into that place of faith. It takes bravery to take anyone into that place of faith.

So as a first century Christian What do you do? In the church of Thyatira there was one woman, one teacher whose name was Jezebel or she acted like Jezebel who said, just go along with it. It’s going to be fine. Attend the temple. Do the sacrifice. Eat the meat. Do whatever they ask you to do. Because you’ve got to provide for your family.

You’ve got to earn what you need to earn. This is the context that we’re working here of this process. In the first century in Tiva, one writer says that to not be part of a guild was economic suicide. So to give it some context today, imagine yourself in a steel town where the only jobs are in a steelworks and you need to provide for this growing family.

What do you do? Do you do what you asked to do? Or do you live by faith? As I read this story, it reminds me of an encounter I had some years ago. I got to work with a wonderful organization called Central Detroit Christian. This was their mission statement. Our mission is that through education and employment and economic development, Central Detroit Christian strives to transform individuals, to reach their highest potential, while transforming the community to be a place of hope.

of shalom, peace and wholeness. Their vision is in line with part of the text of Isaiah where they say, we just want in this community that’s been beaten down, we want to see men and women grow old and sit on the street side of the streets telling stories. And we want to see children playing here again.

It’s a wonderful community that brings real transformation. But when you begin to experience transformation, the question. Is what am I willing to let go of to follow in the way of Jesus? In the midst of this, we had a conversation with one of our discipleship mentors who’d just been meeting with one of the young guys connected with the community.

He came with a question that reverberated around my heart and mind for years and still does if I’m honest to this day. He came to Nate and said, I have a question for you. I’m absolutely convinced that Jesus is who he said he is. I’m absolutely convinced that I’m supposed to follow him. But, I left school when I was 13.

I make 800 a week selling crack. I have a family of four kids and a wife. For me to keep them in our house, to keep feeding them. I’d have to go and find a job that pays me 40, 000 a year. And there are no jobs for guys like me that make 40, 000 a year. what does Jesus want me to do? What does he want me to do?

That question just reverberated, as I said, around my heart what do you do in that situation when you know your family’s livelihood are on the line? Do you just say, I’m just gonna trust, I’m gonna hope that it somehow turns out fine? Or do you just keep doing what you’re told to do? You need to do that question is just as relevant to a first century bronze merchant in the town of fire Tyra as it is to a young drug dealer in 313.

It is just part of figuring out what it is to follow Jesus. What does Jesus want me to do? Either of them could have asked that question, and you’ve probably wrestled with it, too. Maybe not to that extreme. But my guess is, like me, you’ve wrestled with it somewhere. Bruce Metzger says this. Every generation of Christians must face the question, how far should I accept and adopt contemporary standards and practices?

What does it look like to live healthily within the world that we happen to live in right now? And if we’re honest, many of us wrestle with this too. We wrestle with that same question of, what am I willing to do to provide? We find it hard to trust that God will show up in our situation, just as this church of Firetire did, and just as this young man in Detroit did.

The educator Parker Palmer says functional atheism is the godless belief that the ultimate responsibility for everything rests with us. It’s hard for us to trust that God will provide, because we believe we’ve seen so many times when he doesn’t. There’s a couple of questions that you might relate to this question.

It’s the question that floats in our mind, what will I do to get ahead? What practices am I willing to enter into? What corners am I willing to cut? What ways am I willing to bend the rules to get what I need to get? Maybe another related question would be what will I do to fit in? What am I willing to do to look like everybody else?

There’s so many little ways that you might see this in the world around us. I’m just gonna show you a few I’m not giving you an answer to any of these I’m just throwing them out there and you get to wrestle just a little. I’ve wrestled with this over the Participation in Halloween. I came from a church that used to run light festivals It was all like different and now I take my kids trick or treating with my neighbors, but I don’t know that I’m right I wrestle with this every time I drive down a road.

My dad is convinced that you should drive at the speed limit, and I’m convinced that you should drive at the speed limit. We wrestle with this with sexuality in the modern world. And if you think you have concrete answers to any of these things, let me just poke at those concrete answers for just a moment.

Halloween started as a Christian festival. Should it just be co opted by the rest of the world? I don’t know. I had a professor in seminary that told me that when you speed, when you go over the speed limit, the angels on your car they fly off and disappear. And I had another professor who said, has this guy never heard of grace?

When you go over the speed limit, there’s more angels. Everything will be fine. If you are married and you spent time alone with your spouse before you were married, if you made out sitting on the couch, then you lived a sexuality that was wildly different to anybody in the first century. One that they would find to be unbearable.

horrific. These are all lines that we’re figuring out how to work in, how to navigate this question. What does Jesus want me to do? And what we’re trying to ask is what is essential, what is so similar to what the Church of Thyatira is experiencing, where it seems like Jesus said, this isn’t the way to practice living in the way of Jesus.

And what is figuring out matters of conscience? What are we supposed to do? Because in this situation, Jesus gives some of the harshest words we might hear him speak. Of the woman Jezebel, he says, I’ve given her time to repent of her immorality, but she’s unwilling. So I cast her on a bed of sickness and suffering.

I will make those who commit adultery with her suffer intensely, unless they repent of her ways. I will strike her children dead, or, in another vernacular, another version, I will remove her followers from the face of the earth. Then all the churches will know that I am the one who searches hearts and minds, and I will repay each of you according to your deeds.

And that searching hearts and minds stuck with me. I long to live a life where I’m honest with Jesus about the life I am living, the way I am practicing following him. Where I’m open to him challenging me on what I participate in and what I don’t. That I’m with whole heart pursuing that question. What?

What does Jesus want me to do? But I run into this challenge. It’s one that’s brilliantly unveiled by the writer Jürgen Moltmann, one of the greatest theologians of the last century. He says this, in our prosperous bourgeois Christian society, we are afraid of open enmity. We prefer to avoid conflicts. We prefer to avoid them.

And there’s one aspect of theology just like there was for this church that I think I see in the church that I wrestle with all the time. It’s our discomfort in a modern world owning to the fact that Jesus made exclusive claims about who he was. We’re deeply uncomfortable saying that Jesus is the only way because he said he was the only way.

Not because we’re smart and we know that, but because we simply trust the rabbi that we have chosen to follow. In a world that is tolerant of everything except intolerance, that claim seems obnoxious to the rest of the world. How can you say Jesus is the only way? This is a statement that drove missionary activity for 1, 900 years, and about a hundred years ago, we recognized this discomfort.

As a group of people that might describe ourselves as unacademic, we just said, it’s going to get figured out somehow. There’s a great Costco in the sky, and somehow everyone will get there. And as a bunch of theologians we started to say this can’t be right, there must be a way of getting around this fact, and yet Jesus was decidedly exclusive in his claims.

Craig Kinnear of this passage said, like the Thyatiran Christians, we may tolerate some who falsely claim deep teachings that directly undermine the gospel or Christian ethics. As noted above, few evangelicals today are tempted to question some cardinal Christian teachings, like Jesus deity or resurrection, but because relativism has become increasingly popular in our culture, the absolute necessity of faith in Christ for salvation has become a more uncomfortable position for many to hold.

Now, here’s my problem. Here’s my struggle with this. I actually don’t mind the theological wrestling. I’ve been there myself. I’ve seen the wider world. I’ve seen the huge mass of souls that have never heard of this Jesus and have been brought up in religions that would say this thing is just wrong. In the same way, I, growing up as a Christian, may say of multiple things.

I get the wrestling with things like eternal conscious torment, wrestle with those things, struggle through them. But here is the great risk to that process. And I’ve seen it in my own soul. It diminishes the value of what Jesus did for you because you don’t actually, if you’re honest, need it anymore.

I’ve been in that place, friends. I’ve been through that process and I’ve seen Jesus become another way amongst many ways. And yet, what I’ve had to cling on over to the, over, cling on to over the years is this. He said there was no other way. And he did everything he could to save my soul, to bring me to a place of life.

The whole of the New Testament is wrestling with what did Jesus do and how did it work? And the answer is, we don’t know. Paul gives loads of different metaphors that he says it’s like this, and he it’s like this, but his big thesis constantly is simply this. Jesus is the center of everything.

And without him there is nothing. He is everything. And the moment that I lose that as the centerpiece of my soul, that there is no one but him, something has changed in me, friends. When I come to this table, to come with a sense of, it’s just one amongst many, I’ve lost something. To come without the fact that this costs infinitely more than I can imagine, I’ve lost something.

So in amongst your wrestlings, for those of you that sit in places of deconstruction, sitting in places of asking hard questions, ask the hard questions, yes. But hold on to the fact that this table changes everything. Because there is no one but him. There’s no one but him. That seems to be what the Thyatiran Christians lost.

They stopped believing that this Jesus was center, and they stopped believing that He could provide everything that they needed. As a church, somewhere we are called to walk the tightrope of love and truth, to be constantly present in this world around us, and constantly hold on to the fact that revelation is the end of the story, and Jesus is the center of revelation.

Jesus, as we come to this table that you provided for us, in this room there are a lot of us that love to wrestle with stuff.

We see a world around us with so much brokenness, so much hurt. We believe you are the answer, and yet our hearts and minds wrestle for those that are far from you.

We see those that are brought up in specific patterns and wonder how they can ever see you for who you are. We trust you with this world because you love it in a way that we could never grasp.

But for us, help us to hold on to how central you are. That you restore all things. You redeem all things. You have gone to unmeasurable levels to redeem us. As we come to this table and take the bread and the wine, as we take your body and your blood, rekindling us a new way, a joy of our salvation, a love for the God who provided it for us.

And

the night that he was betrayed, Jesus gathered with his followers, breaking bread and he handed it to them. said, this is my body broken for you. It took the cup said, this is my blood shed for the sins of the world. As long as you gather together, do this in remembrance of me. Today, we remember Jesus. We acknowledge there is none like him.

None that could make a way, none that could do what he did. For a moment, I just invite you to practice gratitude.

Remind yourself of perhaps that first moment you heard of Jesus. First moment you experienced his transformation. First taste of new life.

Perhaps you would describe yourself as someone who would say, My love feels diminished. So diminished. Centered on wrestling with every question, wrestling with everyone, fighting everything. That Jesus feels distant in my mind.

And yet he’s present. Present with you like he always was. For you. Here for you. Not far. Stands ready to welcome back any from the far country who will come.

And now as you’ve practiced gratitude. You should begin to say your thanks to him. I’m going to invite you to now surrender some of the things that maybe have come up. Maybe there’s a couple of things that you’re like, Ah, this is the question I keep answering. This is the thing I keep saying. What does Jesus want me to do here?

In this space, we’re going to surrender. So I’m going to ask Aaron to sing over us. And when he feels the time is right, he’s going to invite us to start to come to this table.

May you experience new transformation because of Jesus. Amen.