Hold firm even when others are weak

Revelation 2:24-25 (The Message)
24 -25"The rest of you Thyatirans, who have nothing to do with this outrage, who scorn this playing around with the Devil that gets paraded as profundity, be assured I'll not make life any harder for you than it already is. Hold on to the truth you have until I get there.

In these verses Jesus is speaking to the Thyatira church. He notes there are many who are doing impressive work and are persistent in their love and faith for Him. Yet there are some who have allowed immoral acts to be brought into the church. Jesus tells those who are faithful to hold on.


In his book The Unexpected Journey, Thom Rainer shares the story of Kathi, a woman who left behind a life of witchcraft and Wiccan paganism to become a follower of Jesus Christ. Immediately after her decision to become a Christian, she describes to Thom how God delivered her from the powers of evil in her life, as well as her physical deafness (Kathi had been suffering progressive hearing loss for years).

That next day [after I accepted Christ], we left on our family vacation, camping on the beach. I found a small … church for us to attend. Most of the time when I lip read, I am able to follow less than half of what someone is saying. But I was able to understand every word of the preacher at this church.

When the service was over, I spoke to him and asked him how he was able to speak so well for lip readers. He was puzzled, as he had done nothing special. I explained to him my condition of deafness, and he asked to pray for me. No one had ever done that before, but he did pray for my hearing to be restored.

After Kathi and her family returned to their camp site, Kathi fell violently ill. She was confined to the camp site's bathhouse for hours, vomiting to the point of dehydration. "It was at that point that I sensed God was speaking to me again," she says. "He told me that the other gods I had been worshiping had to go. Up to that point, I had seen my conversion as a lateral move. I still had my other gods. I wasn't convinced they were evil or that paganism was wrong. But now God said they had to go. I hesitated at first because I had become so comfortable with these other gods. They had been with me for many years."

Thom writes an account of what happened next for Kathi:

Kathi soon obeyed. She started calling each of the gods by the Egyptian names she knew and telling them in Jesus' name they had to go. There were many of them, because the ancient Egyptians had a deity to represent every facet of life. Kathi also told anything she had worshiped as a Wiccan and anything she had remembered from the folklore of her childhood that it had to go, too. "They resisted at first," she said. "But once they heard the name of Jesus, they left. As each god left, I saw them as they were, no lovely masks anymore. Instead, they had horrible, evil faces. It scared me witless. I knew then that these were no gods at all, but demons."

Immediately after they were gone, Kathi felt better. She left the bathhouse and went to her family and began to tell her husband what had happened. When he responded, she heard every word he said—but she did not have her hearing aids in her ears. She was able to hear everything—the ocean, the birds, and her children's voices. Kathi has never stopped thanking God for what he did for her.

[Thom S. Rainer, The Unexpected Journey (Zondervan, 2005), pp. 121-122]