View source for Stand Steadfast

{{Message Ideas Box
|chapter=Revelation 2
|verse=18-29
|occasion=General
|audience=Adults
|theological tradition=General
|topic=Compromise, Steadfast
|author=Dick Emery
|direction=If we accomodate and compromise we will rot away. As a Church we should standfast and practice tough love.
|how to get there=*Thyatira did not have a lot of Emperor worship, or pagan temples. There wasn't a lot of persecution so it was a fairly good place to be a Christian.
*But this led the believers to complacency, as it often does, and they became weaker and weaker.
*The believers began to lose their ability to stand fast. 
*The Christians were showing a lot of love and good works, which was excellent. But they apparently only practiced a weak form of love, they didn't know how to stand firm.
*We can easily lose our ability to give tough love through sentimentality and accommodating little things that aren't so bad, time and time again.
*We can have love and good service, but if we let people keep sinning without stopping people, without saying anything, we're still missing a big piece of the Christian life.
*Love does not mean being weak or accommodating to everything that comes our way.
*Sins needs to be confronted where we find it, and help people realize it is wrong and what they can do to stop. 
*If we keep compromising, turning blind eyes to the sins among us and around us, eventually we will rot away from the inside.
*We are to stand steadfast in what God has told us, and hold each other to that standard.
**Toughness without love is legalism, judgmentalism.
**Love without toughness is sentimentality.
*And if we do, the promise here is that we will have intimate fellowship with God. That's a reward worth working towards.
|things to watch for=*A good illustration for this is a tree, rotten to the core that looks fine on the outside but snaps when the first wind comes.

}}

{{MI Series
|series=A Unified Church
|number=4
}}