Thyatira: Conquering or Caving? / Greece & Turkey 2026 / Rock Bottom

For the audiovisual version of the bulletin (YouTube, about 3 minutes, read by Chase Mackintosh), click here. 

Good morning! It’s been a wonderful week, in so many ways. For now let me share just one thing we appreciated this week: Levens Hall, dating back to the 13th-century. Even though we’ve lived near it for the better part of two years, we discovered it only a few days ago. (See the photos below!) Sort of like the Scriptures: even if you have read the whole Bible dozens of times, there’s always something new, something inspiring, something important.

In todays’ issue:

• Rock Bottom: The Place Where God Meets You (by Ray Ortlund).

• Seven useful links at our website.

• Insightful Os Guinness quotes on Christianity and culture.

• Thyatira: Conquering or Caving? A message urging us not to capitulate to social pressure, but to keep the faith no matter what the world thinks of us.

• Details of the 2026 Biblical Study Tour to Greece & Turkey.

Key Links

Here are seven useful links at our website:

• Top 1000 books—Looking for reading ideas, or study resources? Check out this lengthy and constantly-revised bibliography.

• The Living NT Commentary — This rich resource is always “under construction.” In last week or so over 30 updates have been made to these chapter commentaries. (Note: the NT has 260 chapters.)

• iFaith messages—15-minute video sermons through every book of the Bible!

• Douglas’s podcast—Podcasts are added every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday.

• Vicki’s podcast—Follow Vicki as she ponders anew the women of the Bible, the well-known and also the little-known.

• Premium membership—Gain access to 100s of additional articles and audio yielding 1000s of hours of fruitful biblical study. Also included: the Living New Testament Commentary—explaining every passage in the NT—plus free (or highly discounted) webinars, and 3 books.

• Newsletter subscription—The free newsletter of IBTM, with fresh biblical content every week.

Quotable Guinness

”No other faiths have rivaled the record of the Jewish and Christian faiths in facing up to evils and oppressions and launching recurring reforms in the name of God and justice. [This is also] a formidable task to which the next generation of Christians must commit themselves. They will know that they are standing on the shoulders of the giants who have gone before—grateful for the prophet Amos and his stand on behalf of the poor, for Telemachus and his life given to end the horror of the gladiatorial games, for Bartolomé de las Casas and his outrage against the conquistadores for their treatment of the native Americans, for William Wilberforce and his lifelong struggle to abolish slavery in the British Empire, for Lord Shaftesbury whose tireless compassion and industrial reforms made him the ‘poor man’s Earl,’ for Florence Nightingale and her revolutionary contributions to the rise of modern nursing, for Martin Luther King Jr. and his costly triumph in the Civil Rights Movement, and for all the nameless host of Jewish and Christian social reformers whom they represent” (49-50).

“… Genuine seekers who are not simplistic and who are searching for adequate answers will often conclude that those who have no interest in their wider questions will have no answers to the meaning of life. They therefore walk away from the presumed childishness of the Christian faith” (54).

Thyatira: Conquering or Caving

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