Why Do We Follow Confident People With Bad Ideas?

Notes from the message preached by Nate Bush at New City Church in Albuquerque, NM, on September 6, 2026.

The fourth of the seven letters in Revelation goes to a church that was doing almost everything right — loving, serving, patient, and getting better over time rather than coasting. It's also the longest and hardest of the seven letters, and the thing Jesus corrects them for is not something they did. It's someone they allowed.

Where Was Thyatira, and Why Does It Matter That Nobody Cared About It?

Thyatira was the least impressive city on the list. Scholar Robert Mounce points out the irony: the longest and most difficult of the seven letters goes to the least known and least remarkable of the seven cities. Pliny the Elder waved it off as unimportant. No palaces, no universities, no imperial temple.

It was a working town. Trade guilds ran the place — dyers, wool and linen workers, leather workers, tanners, potters, bakers, metalworkers.

There's a small detail in how Jesus introduces himself that would have landed hard there. Thyatira minted bronze coins carrying the image of Apollo, called the son of Zeus. The letter comes from the Son of God, with feet like burnished bronze. Not that one. This one.

What Was the Actual Pressure on These Christians?

Here is where it stops being ancient history.

If you wanted to work in Thyatira, you joined a guild. Guilds met over shared meals in temples, and the meals opened and closed with a sacrifice to a god. What happened after the business portion often turned into heavy drinking and sexual activity.

So a Christian in that city had a real problem. As scholar Paul Ellis puts it, refusing to participate was commercial suicide. The ones who held out took whatever unskilled work would keep them out of the guild system, and barely fed their families doing it.

You have probably run a smaller version of this. There's the meeting, and then there's the meeting after the meeting — the drinks, the trip, the room where the actual relationships get built and the real decisions get made. And you've noticed that the people who go along seem to move up, and the people who don't seem to stall.

That is the pressure this letter is written into. Not abstract temptation. Your income.

Who Was Jezebel, and Was the Problem That She Was a Woman?

Worth answering directly, because the letter names a woman and the language is severe.

No. Jesus does not correct her for prophesying. Scripture is full of women who prophesied — Anna in the temple at Jesus's birth, the four daughters of Philip, and Peter's very first sermon quotes Joel promising that sons and daughters would prophesy. If her gender were the issue, this would be a one-sentence letter. It isn't.

She's corrected for what she taught.

"Jezebel" also isn't her name. It's a reference. The original Jezebel was an Old Testament queen who pushed her husband and much of a nation into Baal worship — a religion that included child sacrifice — and who hunted down and killed prophets. When the prophet Elijah, fresh off facing down 450 opposing prophets by himself, got word that Jezebel had put out a threat against him, he ran.

That's the association being invoked. Someone so bold that people who were not otherwise cowards found her frightening to confront.

How Does Bad Teaching Get Into a Good Community?

It rarely arrives as an obvious lie. It usually starts with something true.

We can reconstruct roughly what this teacher was offering. Paul had written that idols are nothing — that there's one God, and the other gods aren't real. That's true, and Paul really said it.

But his actual teaching was more careful than that. He told the Corinthians not to interrogate the meat they bought at the market, and not to cross-examine a host who invited them to dinner. Eat it, don't ask. But if someone tells you outright that it was sacrificed, don't eat it — for the sake of the person who told you, and for the sake of your own conscience.

And then Paul says the other half: what pagans sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons, and he doesn't want them sharing a table with that.

So the whole teaching is: the idol is nothing, the practice is not nothing, and the difference requires judgment. That's hard. It leaves you deciding case by case.

A half-truth resolves all of it. Paul said idols are nothing, so relax, go to the guild dinner, it doesn't mean anything. Every uncomfortable call disappears, and it sounds like it has a verse behind it.

This is the mechanism. Not a lie — a truth with the difficult half removed.

Is Feeling Torn a Sign That Something's Wrong With You?

The second thing on offer was relief from internal conflict.

Imagine the pitch: God is gracious, you're saved by grace and not by performance, and he surely doesn't want you living in this much tension with yourself. So stop fighting it.

That sounds compassionate. It's also backwards.

Paul describes the flesh and the Spirit as actively opposed to each other — that what one wants, the other doesn't. If you're a Christian, that conflict isn't evidence of failure. It's evidence that something is working. He tells the Thessalonians plainly that God's will is their sanctification, and that this includes learning to govern your own body.

So the tension you feel when you're about to click the thing, or go to the place, or say yes to the trip — that is not a malfunction. That's the point of contact. The lie is that a healthy spiritual life feels settled.

James makes the same argument from the other side: faith that produces nothing is dead, and demons have excellent theology. Believing correctly was never the finish line.

Why Is Confidence So Persuasive?

Because certainty is easier to follow than nuance, and it doesn't need to be right to work.

Set the two offers side by side. Paul's teaching on the guild meals is careful, conditional, and asks you to read the room. The competing version is bold, simple, and delivered by someone who is not the least bit unsure.

Churches are especially exposed to this, because churches have platforms, and platforms attract people who want them. And confronting a big personality costs something. Most of us would rather absorb the tension than create it — which is exactly how a church ends up tolerating something it would never have chosen.

Is It Ever Loving to Be Intolerant?

We hear the word as a straightforward vice. But every real commitment produces intolerance somewhere.

Nate made the case from parenting. Raising a child is a sustained practice of intolerance for that child's benefit — no throwing toys, no biting, no getting out of bed to breathe on your parents' faces in the dark, and later, no driving recklessly with the family car. Two lines he used on his kids: Sorry you didn't get the parents who don't care. And: I'm fine with you disliking me now. Your future self will thank me.

Same in a marriage. Cheating, lying, secret spending, going silent — a good marriage is intolerant of all of it, and the intolerance is not the opposite of the love. It's a function of it.

Tim and Kathy Keller make this point about the gospel in The Meaning of Marriage: love without truth becomes sentimentality, which affirms you while leaving you in the dark about yourself, and truth without love becomes harshness, which hands you accurate information in a form you can't receive. What Christianity claims about God is that he holds both at full strength — completely honest about what you are, and completely committed to you anyway.

That's the frame for why Scripture repeatedly compares idolatry to adultery. It isn't that God is touchy about competition. It's that he describes the relationship as a marriage, and marriages are supposed to be exclusive.

What Does It Mean That Jesus "Gave Her Time to Repent"?

That line is the strangest part of the letter. The most notorious name in the Bible is invoked, and then Jesus says he gave her time.

Nate's honest reaction: he wouldn't have. And that's the point — God is more patient with people than we tend to want him to be, including with us, and the delay is not indifference. It's an opening.

There's also a line that reads brutally in English: I will strike her children dead. In context this is almost certainly not about actual children. Elsewhere Jesus uses "children" to mean the fruit of a teaching — as when he says that wisdom is vindicated by her children. The claim is that this teaching will die out with the person teaching it. It has no future.

Which points at a useful test for any philosophy, including the ones you're currently running on. How is it actually working out?

The letter says Jesus searches minds and hearts, and describes his eyes as flames of fire. You are not going to out-argue that. He knows what the teaching was, and he knows who was drawn to it, and he knows why.

What Is Jesus Actually Asking For?

Notice what he doesn't do. He doesn't respond to a church that got confused by handing them a longer list of rules. To everyone who hadn't gone along, he says: I'm not putting anything else on you. Hold on to what you have.

There's no hidden tier. No advanced teaching you haven't unlocked yet. Anyone who shows up with a new word that contradicts the one you already have is worth ignoring on those grounds alone.

The promises at the end are for people who hold out under real cost. Authority — a share in the rule of the one who actually has it. And the morning star, which turns out to be Jesus's own name for himself at the very end of Revelation.

That's the whole offer. Not a reward on the other side of him. Him.

And every one of these seven letters opens the same way: I know. At the end of things, John's gospel says, eternal life is knowing him. The letters are just that sentence, sent early, to people who were paying a price for it.

Life Application

This week, name your guild meal. Find the one specific place where getting what you want professionally, socially, or financially would require you to be someone you've decided not to be. Don't resolve it yet. Just name it out loud to one person you trust, so it stops being something you're negotiating alone in your head.

Ask yourself these questions as you reflect on this message:

Where have I accepted a simple answer because the honest one was going to be complicated?

Is there a confident person whose ideas I've stopped examining?

What have I been treating as a spiritual failure that might actually be a sign of life?

What would it cost me, concretely, to stop going along?