The Church at Thyatira

"Nowhere, perhaps, is there a more deeply interesting story; nowhere longer and more unwearied patience; nowhere truer, or perhaps so true, hearts for Christ and for the truth, and for faithfulness to Him against a corrupt church, as in the saints of the Middle Ages.

Through toil and labour, hunted and punished; in spite of a system far more persevering, far better organized, than heathen persecutions, violent as for a time they surely were; with no fresh miraculous revelation, or publicly sustaining body, or profession of the church at large, clothed with universal acknowledgement as such, to give them confidence; with every name of ignominy that people or priest could invent to hunt them with, they pursued their hemmed but never abandoned way with divinely-given constancy, and maintained the testimony of God, and the promised existence of the church against the gates of hades, at the cost of rest and home and life and all things earth could give or nature feel.

And Christ had foreseen and had not forgotten it. Weakness may have been there, ignorance have marked many of their thoughts; Satan may have sought to mix up mischief with their good, and sometimes succeeded but their record is on high, and their Saviour's approbation will shine forth when the books ease-loving questioners have written on them will be as dust on the moth's wing when it is dead. . . . This the Lord owns in Thyatira. It made no part of the church for men then; it makes none for many wise people now. It is the first part for Christ."

~ J.N. Darby