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The Marks of a Good Church: Fellowship with God

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You turn in your Bibles to 1 Thessalonians chapter five, we will revisit verse 16, but go from 16 to 18 this morning and see what Paul has to teach us about fellowship with God, as he is in this larger section in chapter five, verses 14 to 22, teaching us about fellowship in the church as a whole. But when you actually break it out between verses 14 and 15, and then 16 to 18 and then 19 to 22, you see a form that reflects our Triune God. When you think about fellowship with God at the level of the Trinity, the Father and the Son and the Spirit, we have fellowship with all three. And we can say something like that and not always understand how it works. What is it for me to have fellowship with the Father, the Son, and the Spirit to truly commune with my Triune God? And there is no passage in the Bible that breaks that down and defines it. But in looking at this over the last few weeks, you do see it described by Paul to this young church and in the history of the church in the book of Acts in early church, where, like we saw in verses 12 and 13 a few weeks ago, Paul didn't come out and talk about the office of elder, pastor or overseer, as he does later in other letters. But the description of what that preacher and pastor and leader in the church does was there in 12 and 13, and so from 14 to 22, which in those nine verses has 14 imperative commands. We could at first glance just look at those and see, oh, there's just a list of 14 things that I need to do to have fellowship in the church and in some ways short sell it, if it only has to do with these horizontal relationships in which we think those verses are fulfilled. But when you look at it through the lens of the Trinity. And think about verses 14 and 15 from a few weeks ago, when he talks about helping the unruly and the weak, and being patient with all and the faint hearted, and how we treat one another, we would talk about mutual ministry, and we do. But that mutual ministry is to a body greater than just the parts. Who's the body? The body of Christ is Christ's very body in a local church that the people comprise. So when we're dealing with one another in the church, when we're doing mutual ministry, when we are urging and admonishing and encouraging and helping and being patient and doing proactive, good and patient with people so that we're not doing them evil. In verses 14 and 15, who are we actually dealing with beyond that person? We're dealing with one of Christ's part of his body as he is the head. Now, Paul doesn't have to come out and say it, because that doctrine isn't meant to be taught right there, but it is seen in practice why it's so important in how we treat each other in the local church. Because when we are dealing with one another, we are part of the same body. So there would be talking about fellowship in the Son, you could call verse 14 and 15. Now I know last week we just took apart rejoice always because I'm a joy junkie and I just wanted to talk about rejoicing. And there were 29 uses of it in the New Testament, and some of you both on your individual basis and devotion and in your life group, got to really unpack the fullness of that, because joy is just such a wonderful theme. I know I've said that love is the birthmark of every true child of God. Well, I think joy is right up there with it. And you can have more than one birthmark, I think. 16 to 18, though, comes as a package deal. As rejoicing and praying and giving thanks all finds itself rooted in Christ Jesus at the end of verse 18. But doing God's will. God the Father. You're only able to do those things to the glory and praise of God the Father when you're doing them in Christ. But it is fellowship with God we're looking at this morning in those three verses. So I don't want us to just merely look at this as a sermon to help stimulate my joy and prayers and being thankful as if I'm just going to list off, okay, here's ten ways to be more joyful, ten ways to pray better, and ten ways to be more thankful. And bada bing, there's your doing sermon. Versus the goal of these three verses is Paul packages those words together. Those concepts goes back to fellowship with God. And you want to ask the question, what is it for me to really have fellowship with God? Well, it starts on the inside that you're in a spirit of joy all the time. In a spirit of prayer, communing with him all the time. And in that prayer, the the attitude of your heart is one of thankfulness to your Father. Not in gratitude. Which goes back to God's will for us. Wouldn't God as a good Father in heaven will for his children to be happy in him? To ask him for what they need and to be thankful. Just like we understand on a human level, what parent doesn't want the baseline of their relationship with their kid to be one of joy rather than one of sorrow, and they're eager and willing to come often to you as mom and dad to ask for help. To seek your wisdom, to know you and in what you give them and provide, even when they don't understand what you're doing. For a baseline of thankfulness to be there. Do you see that fellowship with God that is now permeating 16 to 18? And then you have when we'll see this next week in 19 to 22 in those last imperatives, again, these aren't just individual commands 19, 20, 21, 22. They actually relate to the relationship we have with the Holy Spirit. That when the Word of God is being taught amongst the people of God, whether that could be from a pulpit or in an individual situation one on one, or in a life group that we are to be testing. Is this God speaking? Is this his truth or is this man's opinion? And that will reframe, I think, even the way you look at 19 to 22 next week. So there you see just in as an intro today to how I'm working to show 16 to 18 or about fellowship with God, how 14 and 15 look through the lens of our relationship with one another. And the body of Christ is about fellowship with Jesus Christ the Son. This is about fellowship with God the Father. And next week we will see how we enjoy fellowship with the Holy Spirit as we carry out those expressions. Commanded in 19 to 22. Now today's the drivetrain behind it is doing God's will. Which is something I think that we all...our ears perk up, we all get excited. I mean, we should at least listen up and lean in when any passage in the Bible makes very explicit this is God's will for you. Not to say all of the commands in the Bible aren't God's will for us. But when the Spirit has moved Paul to put rejoicing, praying, and giving thanks as a specific directive of God's will for us. Now he doesn't say it's the will of God, as in, the only will of God for his children is that we be rejoicing, praying, and thanking him. There's other things we've even seen back at the beginning of chapter four that he says, God's will is that you abstain from sexual immorality. So there's more to God's will than just the commands here in 16 to 18, but certainly not less, which should make us really excited to lean in and learn about the will of God, because we talk about it often, don't we? Man, I just wish I knew God's will for my life. I wish he would just make it very clear. There's a story of a farmer who had been for years desiring to be a pastor. He was out working hard in his field one day when he decided to take a rest under a tree. He gazed into the sky and saw what he thought were clouds forming the letters P and C. He got excited. He hopped up. He sold everything he had. As this was a sign to him to preach Christ. Finally, after all the years of wondering, would he be a pastor? It was in the clouds. PC... Preach Christ. It turns out he was not a gifted preacher. And after yet another lousy sermon, a friend came down in front of the church and whispered in his ear, pastor, are you sure PC wasn't just God trying to tell you to plant corn? I think we can all identify with a desire to know God's will and do it. And in this section, if there's ever a time for us to be certain what God's will is for our lives, it's when he tells us explicitly. So let's look at this today. There's three aspects of our fellowship with God that we can be sure are accomplishing God's good pleasure, God's will that we are walking in a way. As for one said, pleasing to him, which is another wonderful way to think about doing the will of God, isn't it? God is not just indifferent to doing his will. It pleases him when we walk in his will, and we see those expressions of our fellowship with God today, that are the believer's joy to do his will.

The first one in verse 16, as we looked at last week. But we'll see it again in a new light this week. We experience true fellowship with God according to his will for us in Christ, when we have consistent joy. You could be sure that you're walking in the will of God in Christ Jesus, when the roots of your joy are in Jesus Christ, not just looking around at the fruits in your life. What makes you happy, and if it makes you happy, then, ergo, I must be doing God's will. That's not how we figure out God's will for our lives. It's pragmatism. That's if it feels good, do it. If I like what the result is. Clearly it was God's will. If I don't like what the results are, then I guess it wasn't God's will. That would be a pretty. Back and forth. Tossed to and fro. Way to live, wouldn't it? But here, with all three of these ideas pointing towards doing God's will for us in Christ, clearly our Father wants us to have a consistent joy in him, and we know we can have that because we are in Christ Jesus. And we looked at that last week thoroughly. That seeking Christ and being saved by Christ, and serving Christ and sacrificing for Christ, and looking forward to the day where we will see Christ again. That's all rooted in the joy we have in Jesus Christ when we discover salvation in him. As we looked at in Matthew 1344, the man who in his joy sells all that he has to buy the treasure found in the field. That's finding Christ, finding your joy in him, that every other joy and satisfaction you have in your life is now a lesser joy. He's the greatest joy. That's what it means to be rooted in him and affection for Christ in our hearts that then does bear the fruit we saw last week in a number of joys horizontal. If our joy in Christ goes deep into our hearts and then it shoots up vertically, it's like a tree that then branches out. And that joy touches other Christians in the body of Christ, sympathetic joys, rejoicing with those who rejoice, suffering and sacrificial joys that we saw in Paul's language in the New Testament, 20 out of 29 times, referring to life in the body of Christ, suffering, joys, selfless joys, all of those expressions of the joy we have in Jesus. But these, as we look at this week in relation to fellowship with God, are joys that are connected to our prayer life. And in that prayer life, being able to give thanks for everything we have in Jesus Christ. And that's where I wanted to start here, going back to verse 16, just to set the table for the other two commands, praying and giving thanks, because the root of it has to always still be our joy in him. Joy at all times. So that when we get to praying without ceasing. That we have a thought life for other believers, that that's rooted in joy in Christ that we have. And when we have gratitude for all things, it's rooted in the joy we have in Jesus Christ. Paul links these ideas together in other letters of his. Just turn back a couple pages to Colossians chapter one. You'll see Paul commending joy at all times in prayer and all thoughts and gratitude in all things. By the way, he talks to these believers at the beginning of the letter to the Colossians. Now this is again just him describing the way he feels about them. He thinks about them, he talks about them. But listen for the connection between joy, prayer, and thanksgiving in this introduction to this letter. Colossians one verse nine. For this reason also since the day we heard of it, we have not ceased to pray for you. Check. And to ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding. Knowing God's will. Check. So that you will walk in a manner worthy of the Lord. Which is another way to talk about doing the will of God to please him in all respects, bearing fruit in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God, strengthened with all power according to his glorious might, for the attaining of all steadfastness and patience, joyously giving thanks to the Father. Check. Right in that introduction of that wonderful epistle to the Colossians. You see Paul connecting these unceasing activities in his heart, giving thanks to God the Father for these people never ceasing to pray for them. But his prayer for them is that they would be able to join that with them. Where he says, at the end of verse 11 into verse 12, that I'm joyously giving thanks to the Father for you, because you also have come under his grace. You are in the inheritance of the saints in the light. Paul connects our joy with the grateful prayers for other people to have that same joy, consistent joy being the drivetrain behind it all. I was speaking at a YMCA event this past Thursday here in Hickory, and, it was on the day of prayer, and they wanted to come and talk about prayer. So it just so happened that I was also teaching in First Thessalonians this week about it. And, I was trying to help them to see those people that are supporting the YMCA here in Catawba County that, you could want to do all the kind of social good efforts in the world. But you can't sustain it without having a deeper joy than just, you know, putting a smile on a kid's face. There's got to be something in you that goes deeper than that. Many good social programs have come and gone in the last 150 years since the YMCA was started. And so I talked to them about a few of those. I said, do you think it's coincidence and I broadened it out... I said, The Salvation Army. Starting I think it was 1852. Over in England was started by William Booth. To meet the needs that were there right in that time period of England growing in their industrial revolution, when lots of orphans were out in the streets being worked literally to death, nobody caring for them, not educated, not being brought into homes and loved and and grown in the fear and knowledge of the Lord. And so William Booth takes action and starts the Salvation Army to minister there in the streets. And he flat out said, look, I am for the preserving of the body towards the greater end of the saving of the soul. So I asked them, do you think it's coincidence that a ministry that was rooted in bringing the joy of Jesus Christ to somebody is still around today? Now, it may not be operating with the same pure motive as it was back then, but its roots went to Jesus Christ. And then I asked them the YMCA. Going back to the same time period, the 1850s in England. Then it came a few years later in the United States, in Boston. The Young Mens Christian Association, I mean, perish the day when we can't talk about Jesus Christ at the YMCA. It's in the name. And so at this prayer breakfast, I said, even the roots of your own service and ministry, 150 years later, go back to be rooted in the joy of Jesus Christ, of why that ministry started for the same end. To give these kids in the street something to live for, by giving them someone who lived and died for them. I told the story of George Mueller, the great evangelist and orphanage operator, and the same time period it was so bad over in England, all these Christians were being led to take action to try to help these children. And so Mueller in his lifetime lived over 90 years. And around 1898, he was aged 92. He had given his life to helping these kids off the street. He started dozens of orphanages, cared for 10,000 kids, and even sent many of these kids hundreds of thousands to schools and raised over, at the time, $700,000 at that time, 17 million in today's standard. Every single penny of it raised, not by him soliciting money from anyone but praying for it. And gave every last penny of it away. And you. If you've read George Mueller's biography, it's a wonderful account of a man who was joyfully dependent upon God. Stories that are accounted for, where he would be in an orphanage. And even that morning they would come down for breakfast and there was no food. But in faith he would pray that God would provide, and by the end of the prayer they would hear. And a baker at the door saying, I have this extra bread. Could you guys use it today? What about something to drink? Same morning. The guy delivering the milk says I've broken down in front of your orphanage. It's going to go bad. Can you guys use it? He was certain that every need would be supplied in Christ Jesus, and he lived his entire life this way. And twice over as he married twice his wife died. Second wife died. Had seen sorrows in his life. How hard would it be to run an orphanage? I mean, multiple orphanages, tens of thousands caring for these kids. And yet he never lost his joy. And so somebody, towards the end of his life asked him, how did he do it? This was his response. He said, the first great and primary business to which I attend every day is to have my soul happy in the Lord. Is that how you wake up? I wish, I just wish that was tattooed across my eyeballs, you know, that I would just wake up and say, Adam, your first business today is not to rush in to all the all the things waiting for you. But rush into the presence of God through Jesus Christ and find your joy in him. That's where it has to start. That's where it's going to be for you to be sustained. So before we move into any talk of your prayer life and how's that doing? And how thankful are you? Is your joy in Christ today? We asked it last week. It's worth asking again. Did you forget that quickly from last Sunday to today? Did it last through Monday and Tuesday, but waned by Wednesday? Welcome to life.

Seek your first joy in him. Make it your primary business is, Mueller said, to find yourself happy in the Lord each day. He went on to say, the secret of all effectual service for God is joy in God, having a close fellowship with God himself. So that's rejoicing always. It's a spirit of joy before there's the fruit of it outward, and then part of the fruit of it outward is going to be a spirit of prayer that is unending.

Our next expression of fellowship with God this morning, fellowship with God the Father, rooted in our joy in Jesus Christ. Rooted in a heart that wants to be in constant communion with him. Sometimes we read that verse pray without ceasing, and we ask ourselves, is that actually possible? Can we walk around praying constantly? Well, Warren Wiersbe in his commentary writes, What Paul is saying here is that Paul is praying without ceasing is prayer that is constantly recurring, not continuously occurring. Which is a good way to differentiate. To pray without ceasing is to have a constantly recurring spirit of prayer in your life. It's always there, right at the quick verses saying, oh, it's a continuously occurring conversation that never ends. Um, for all my non multitaskers in the room, if the case were to be to pray without ceasing and that's the only thing I did, that's the only thing I would do. I wouldn't be able to do anything else. Just ask my wife. Wiersbe says. We are to keep the receiver off the hook. Which for you, Gen Z means you are to sleep next to your phone. Young people don't sleep next to your phones, but there was this phone that used to be on and off a hook. If it was off the hook all the time, you could always be calling. And he says, that's what this prayer life is to be. We are part of a long conversation that's never broken with God. It's consistent with his command in Ephesians 6:18 with all prayer and petition, pray at all times in the spirit. Notice he adds that in the spirit in Ephesians that we don't get here, but it's there, which is just as joy is part of the Holy Spirit's fruit in our lives. Prayer is part of the Holy Spirit's work in our lives. Pray at all times in the spirit, with all perseverance and petition for all the saints. It's just having fellowship with God, your Father, that just moves you to be ready at any moment to pray for whatever it is that crosses your mind. I think that's why you see so often in Paul in his opening letters, and you don't have to turn to these Romans 1:9, Ephesians 1:16, Colossians 1:3, Philippians 1:4, 1 Corinthians 1:4, 1 Thessalonians 1:2, 2 Thessalonians 1:3, and Philippians 1:4 all have some form in the greeting of the same expression. When I think of you often, I'm praying for you all the time. He may say it in slightly different ways. So other than that letter to those Galatians who were distorting the gospel, who don't get I'm thankful for you. We should have the same spirit in us. That we are just quick to pray because communion with God is always on our hearts. And so you hear of a need of a person, and you don't have to say like, I'll write that down and pray for that later. That when you're continually in this spirit of prayer, you pray for it right then and there, don't you? I mean, you probably do this all the time. You're driving down the street, you might see a car accident, and you just offer a quick prayer that God would, in his grace, minister in that situation. It's constant. It's ready. The phone's never off the hook. Or I should say, the phone is always off the hook. See, I haven't used one of those in so long, i forget how it works. One of my favorite Christian dead guys, Jonathan Edwards. Lived in the 1700s, part of the First Great Awakening pastor up in Massachusetts. Brilliant man. Wrote a note to a young lady that had seized his attention and affection and was called an apostrophe. I never knew before an apostrophe was a note, just a short digression, an apostrophe to Sarah Pierpont in 1723. He was 20 years old, and I believe this captures the language of beautiful communion. And if you are an aspiring Puritan in this room, a young, single guy, also listen to this prose. Don't be a weirdo, though, and just watch a girl from across the room just go talk to her. But the language here, I think, summarizes observing someone who is in communion with God often. Edwards wrote this. They say there is a young lady in New Haven who is beloved of that almighty being who made and rules the world, and that there are certain seasons in which this great being, in some way or other, comes to her and fills her mind with exceeding sweet delight, and that she hardly cares for anything except to meditate on him. She will sometimes go from place to place, singing sweetly, and seems to be always of joy and pleasure, and no one knows for what. She loves to be alone and to wander in the fields and on the mountains, and seems to have someone invisible, always conversing with her. Now, husbands, this is the moment that you go. I feel that way about you. To which your wife can say, well, then why don't you write me something so wonderful? But it is a sweet picture, particularly that last line arrested my attention seems to have someone invisible always conversing with her. That's a picture of communion with God. I think it's what the reformers had in mind when they coined the phrase Coram deo, Latin for before the face of God. That when you're in fellowship with God that you realize that all the time you're in his presence. You don't have to get into some special situation and just, you know, come on a Sunday morning and ask the spirit to fill the room. If you're in the room and you're in Christ, the Spirit's in the room. How full of the spirit the room is, is contingent on how full of the spirit you are. Are you full of love? Are you full of joy? Well, that's going to be a spirit-filled service. Are you frowning, complaining, arms crossed, indifferent? Not going to be a very spirit filled Sunday morning for you and maybe for others. I was talking with some people that visited our church for the first time. We got together on Friday and they were trying to explain what it was for them to come the first time. And they use that language if it just, you know, the Spirit was in this place. And I said, you know, I love to hear that. Help me understand what you mean by that. Well, they just then went on to explain what they experienced. How many people loved them? Greeted them from the time they walked in to where they sat. People turning in in their first visit wanted to get to know who are you? Oh, and they just felt so loved. I said, well, of course, that's a spirit-filled Sunday morning because the first fruit of the spirit, the first identifying mark of a true child of God, is love. So why do we need to ask him to fill this place if you're full of the love of God in your heart. Unless that affection of love and affection of joy has grown dim. And when it does in an individual, so it could happen in a church. But I don't need to stir up anything outside of you, rather than through the Word of God and Spirit of God stirr it up in you. And then you can't help but let it be known in singing and praying and hearing the Word of God and then in response to it. Fellowship with God in prayer is not merely then here in verse 17, a command to obey. It's the air that we breathe in our spiritual communion with Jesus Christ. It's life to us. Before the electric organ came along in the 1900s, pipe organs, using a system of bellows pumping air through them, were the standard. The organist would be on stage, but behind the scenes would have been a worker pumping air, nonstop with those bellows into the pipes to produce the sound. One preacher tells the story of how a renowned organist was playing sold out show after sold out show. On one night, after the show was over, the organist went backstage and the young man, who had been working hard that night, bumped into him and excitedly said, we had a great show tonight, didn't we? We did not have anything, the offended and arrogant maestro snapped. I had a great show tonight. The next night. The maestro strolled out to the organ to play. He struck the keys. Nothing. He waited for the moment for sound to fill the stage, but to no avail. And so frustrated he went backstage and screamed, what's going on back here? To which the young man replied, it looks like you are not having a great show tonight. Without the breath of prayer in our soul, our show will not go on. We must never have a one man show mentality in the absence of our dependence in prayer on God. HB Charles said this about prayer. It's an expression of my submission to God and dependence on him. For that matter. Prayer is arguably the clearest measurement of my dependence upon him. The things I pray about are the things I trust God to handle. The things you neglect to pray about are the things you trust you can handle on your own. I don't think we should test the theory of how much we can handle on our own by a lack of prayer. I've got my reasons.

I don't pray as you probably have yours. So this isn't the time in the sermon for me to give you all the, you know, the question. Okay, here's ten diagnostic questions of why you don't pray. I think that the force of the text and the conviction of the spirit should be enough to ask yourself the question, why don't I pray? And receive a clear answer this morning. Why don't you pray? What are the things you think you can handle without God? Just run down the list of things you don't pray about. Donald Whitney, in his book on Spiritual disciplines, writes sometimes a failure to persist in prayer proves that we were not serious about our request in the first place. Ouch. He goes on to step on more of our toes. At other times, God wants us to persist in prayer in order to strengthen our faith in him. Faith would never grow if all our prayers were answered immediately. Persistent prayer tends to develop deeper gratitude, as well as the joy of a baby's birth is greater because of the months of anticipation. So is the joy of an answer to prayer after persistent praying. In as much as a generation that measures time in nanoseconds, hates to admit its need for it, God crafts Christ-like patience in us when he requires persistence in prayer. I imagine Whitney is drawing a lot of what he's writing there from the parable of the persistent widow who prayed in Luke 18:1. Now Jesus was telling them a parable to show that at all times they ought to pray and not to lose heart. And he tells the story in this parable, Jesus does, of a judge who probably shouldn't be a judge, because when it describes him, it shows that he doesn't fear God and doesn't respect man. So I don't know how that turns into a really fair judge. No fear of God, no respecter of men. I don't think you would be quick to want to bring your case to him. But Jesus, in his perfect ability to tell a story, to cut to the heart, to make his point, isn't saying God's like this judge who doesn't care about people. He's wanting to show the contrast. That in this story, if there is this persistent widow who can keep bothering this indifferent judge. And he eventually is worn out. He says in verse four, though I do not fear God nor respect man, yet because this widow bothers me, I will give her legal protection. Otherwise, by continually coming, she will wear me out. Lesson. Jesus said hear what the unrighteous judge is saying, Will not God bring about justice for his elect, who cry to him day and night? And will he delay long over them? The lesson is about persistence. Keep praying you're not dealing with a judge who doesn't care. As Jesus tells Matthew 6 to keep asking and seeking and knocking because you have a Father in heaven who, when you ask for bread, won't give you what? A stone? He's not playing games. He wants to hear from his children. So keep praying. Don't quit. God is growing faith in you. He's growing faith in you. And if you keep wondering why he hasn't answered that prayer. I mean why questions are the hardest to find answers to. At least resolve it with. At the very least, I know he's growing faith in me. He wants me to ask that one more time. He wants me to knock one more time. And if I'm really persistent, this righteous judge, this good judge, this loving judge who just so happens to also be my Father will answer, I believe it. Continuing in prayer.

And then finally, verse 18, the last expression of our fellowship with God is comprehensive gratitude. I use the term comprehensive to convey the message that we want to take into consideration everything around us. To have many reasons to thank God in prayer. Similar to what we saw with Paul commanding us to pray and commending it by his example. He does the same with gratitude. Ephesians 5:20 give thanks for all things in the name of Jesus Christ or Colossians 3:17 give thanks through the name of Jesus Christ and all we do. And then of course, here in everything give thanks, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus and all those verses. The common link is in all things, as in in everything I can look around and consider take into consideration what's going on around me, the providence of God, all that's happening that I can look at everything and find reason to be thankful. If you need a Kickstarter for this. You know I can break down. Psalm 19 into seeing and thanking God for his providence in creation, and then also in his Word. First half of Psalm 19 says, the heavens declare the glory of God. The skies above proclaim his handiwork. And so even just if you feel like the wells of gratitude have run dry in your life, wake up to have your devotions tomorrow but in time to see the sun come up. And at least let that do something for you. God, you gave me another day. And the sun came up because you commanded it. To be able to see God's hand in creation is a blessing to the Christian when you're in Christ, because you see it's all by his perfect divine design. And then Psalm 19 moves on to talk about the not just the world that God's made, but the Word that he's given us. And in the first verse, commending that the the Word of God is perfect, restoring the soul. If your soul has felt out of sorts the last two weeks lack of joy, lack of love, lack of gratitude, the Word of God can restore that. How? Well the next verse says it enlightens your eyes? It brings light so you could see what the world is really looking like around you, what God is really doing around you. When the Word of God informs it, it takes it takes the the haze out of your vision so you could see things rightly. It enlightens the eyes. It makes wise the simple. If you feel like your decision-making lately has been simple, as in not at simple things, but you just keep running into the same roadblocks. Are you really looking to the Word of God to make you wise? Or just check the box. So we want our prayers to be thankful prayers. When we talk to God, when we walk with God, that our the expression of our heart is one of gratitude, not just. And this is the danger we could even have in a sermon like this, wanting just a list of things. Sacrifices we can make for God that would bring us into right standing with him, that he would be pleased with us. Versus what he really wants is our hearts to be thankful to him. And this didn't start with Paul in 1 Thessalonians 15, go back to Psalm 50. You could hear it in the writings of Asaph if you're still tracking. And we're a third of the way through that McShane Bible reading and McShane Bible readers this year. He should have been in Psalm 50 yesterday. Consider that your accountability check. So if you're like, whoa, I'm, uh, Psalm five still time on the clock. But Psalm 50 caught my attention yesterday just thinking about this sermon. It's a Psalm that has to do with this writer being amazed by, first, the grandeur of God, the Mighty One. Psalm 50, verse one. The Lord is spoken, and he summoned the earth from the rising of the sun to its setting out of Zion. The perfection of beauty God has shown forth. May our God come and not keep silent. Fire devours before him. I mean, he is bringing praise to God just for who he is in his, in his glory. And then he speaks for God. Verse five. The Spirit's inspiration. God says to his people, gather my godly ones to me, those who have made a covenant with me by sacrifice. And so right there you see this language of sacrifice. My people are going to come to me and they feel like they have something to bring. What does he say to that? This is God speaking. Verse seven hear, O my people, and I will speak, O Israel, I will testify against you. I am God, your God. I do not reprove you for your sacrifices, and your burnt offerings are continually before me. So the first thing that God is saying to his people that when I'm summoning you to come to me, to be in my presence and bring your sacrifices, I don't have a problem with the action. I'm not reproving you that you know, you just keep getting the sacrifice wrong. There's a deeper problem than the sacrifice. You're looking for something outside of you. I'm about to address something inside of you. He goes on to say, I do not approve you for these sacrifices and your burnt offerings continually before me. Verse nine, I shall not take no young bull out of your house, nor male goats out of your folds. I'm not asking for more. Why? For every beast of the forest is mine. The cattle on a thousand hills. I know every bird of the mountains. And everything that moves in the field is mine. It's all mine. What are you going to bring that isn't already mine? You think you're going to impress me with some sacrifice? You think that's really what moves my heart? I own it all. If I were hungry, then he moves in to really make it sound ridiculous. Oh, these, you know, these birds are bringing these goats. These bulls. You think I'm hungry? If I were hungry, I would not tell you. For the world is mine and all it contains. What a picture i,f God's hungry. He just picks up the whole world and goes. Just a grape. Shall I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of male goats? Here's what I want. Verse 14. Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving. With all the things you've been bringing me, Israel. Bulls and goats and birds and look at all the stuff we're willing to give to you, but you haven't given him the most important thing. You haven't given him your heart. You're not really thankful to him in all this giving. You're impressed with yourself. You think you raised that bull. You think you got that goat. You think it was your hard work that. Now, look, Lord, I'm bringing you this. Bringing you what? The things that I already gave you. When's the last time you've come with a sacrifice of thanksgiving? That's what he wants to know. Gratitude in the heart. Pay that vow to the Most High. And then he goes on to say in verse 15, what I want is your dependence. Once you recognize that there is no independence from me, nothing you have is actually yours. I gave it to you and I could take it back. Right down to your life. Call upon me in the day of trouble and I'll rescue you. And then you'll honor me. When you realize even your own life is in my hands. I'm your father. You're my child. Call on me. That's what I want from you. That's what I've been asking for this whole time. You've gotten caught up on all the outward stuff. Yeah. We're not bringing bulls and goats and birds into the room today. But what did you bring in here today that actually could impress God other than a heart of gratitude? A heart that walks through those doors and says, every spiritual blessing I have in the heavenlies is in Christ Jesus. What else are you bringing in here today? You brought your tithe? I think God would say if I were poor, I would not tell you because the whole world is mine and all it contains. We want you to give. Why do you think in the New Testament that the only instruction Paul gives for giving is to do it with what? With a joyful heart. A heart of gratitude. It's saying, you know what? I'm giving this back to you, God, because you gave it to me. Thank you. Thank you for giving me the ability to work. Thank you for giving me the ability to have that job. Thank you for giving me the ability to excel at my job, and to be able to give more back to you. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. And that's what got lost with Israel. And that's what gets lost with us. We lose sight of. This is God wanting fellowship with us, praying, giving thanks, having joy. That's God's will for his children. He wants to enjoy you as you enjoy him. And you recognize that no matter how much or how little that you have, that you're content, as Paul would say in Philippians 4, in all circumstances. And so even for the littlest thing, you could still say, thank you. For the smallest thing. And for the things you think that are really big in your life, there's a story of a woman who goes up to a preacher after a sermon. And kept coming to him, asking about the same big thing in her life. And she asked, is this too big for God? And the preacher just wisely responds too big. Too small. It's all the same size. However small you think your need is. Assumes that there's something that's actually big in God's eyes. Whatever you're going through in your life right now. So there's no guilt of like, oh, that person over there, they're going through much harder things than me. I feel guilty for asking for this thing. Maybe you're in a life group, and the person that's sharing this prayer request in mutual ministry time, and they're devastated. And you think that's a real prayer request? Here's the small thing I have nothing is small because nothing is big to God. He sees it all as a loving father would meeting the children he has where they're at. The weakest and smallest among them. That may think they have this small thing. Well, in that little kids eyes, it's a big thing. And he says, that's wonderful. Tell me about it. In the most aged saint that's walked with him the longest. That 1 John says, you've known him who is from the beginning and brings this heavy burden. They know that their entire life has been a series of God's answers to their prayers, no matter what size that request has been. And so they keep coming persistently. He pulled this all together. As we transition now to a time of the Lord's Table. As we as we prepare our hearts to rejoice in Christ. As we prepare our hearts to thank God. For his will that put his Son on the cross. As we, even this whole service, have had a heart of prayer, continually seeing wonderful things in the Word of God that cause us to what? Cause us to say. Oh, I had forgotten that. That good thing you had for me. That promise you had for me. Thank you. God. I mean, what is communion other than a time of giving thanks? Even in the bringing of your sin to the table. Examining yourself to take it in a right manner. I mean, you examine yourself, but at the end of that examination. Certainly you're not giving thanks for your perfect month since the last time we took it. Are you? No, you're giving thanks to God for his sacrifice of His Son who paid for your sin. That's what it is. I mean, that's where even the word Eucharist came from. Eucharisto. It was it was a word for giving of thanks. In the New Testament where Jesus in Luke 22:19, it says, he broke the bread giving thanks. Crazy thing is, is he's going to he's giving thanks. For what? That he gets to go to the cross for the joy set before him. To accomplish salvation for you. But we're giving thanks. For what? The work he did for us. Not the work we do on our own. I mean, this is the height of Christ's joy in his life. Even before that, you go back to Luke ten. What brought Christ the most joy was remembering the work of salvation that God was going to do. I get that from Luke 10:17 to 24. The only time in the New Testament in the life of Christ you see, rejoicing, praying, and thanking God all in the same spot in Christ's example is here. We mentioned it last week. It's the 70 disciples returned with joy, saying, even the demons are subject to us in your name. And then Jesus says to them, do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you. Here's what you're to rejoice in that your names are recorded in heaven. Their names were recorded in heaven before salvation was even accomplished. And then it says in verse 21, and remember Luke 10:21 today, and any time you need to remember what it looks like to put together joy, prayer, and thanksgiving following in the footsteps of Christ. Remember Luke 10:21. At that very time, in that very moment, just after Jesus has told those guys, the best thing you could have guys is to know you're found in me. It says at that very time Jesus rejoiced greatly in the Holy Spirit and said, I praise you, O father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent, and revealed them to infants. Yes, Father, for this way was well pleasing in your sight. Joy, gratitude, prayer, and the life of Christ over one thing. Not that they could go out and serve him in the strength that he sent them in. Not that all these rejecters of him were weighing him down. That would have caused him sorrow. If you read Luke ten:1 to 16. The whole thing is about the rejection of Christ, all these pronouncements of woe to these cities who have seen these miracles and it hasn't changed them. They've been rejecting him. And in that moment, in midst of that sorrow, where's Jesus' heart? It's enjoying fellowship with His Father through the Holy Spirit, rejoicing greatly. Everything's not going his way right then and there. And yet he could rejoice greatly because he sees in those disciples God's gift of salvation on its way in him. So what do we rejoice today? What do we have thanks for today as we come to communion, we could have 10,000 things to thank God for as we already sang. But don't leave off the very first one, the most important one, that your name is recorded in heaven. And if it's not? Communion's not for you. Because communion is a time to give thanks and rejoice in what Christ has accomplished for you, and that you believe it and you're betting on it. But he offers it to you today if you're not in Christ. He offers you his joy. He offers you his love, he offers you his mercy. He offers you his forgiveness. He offers you eternal life by believing that it's his righteousness, not yours, that makes you able to break the bread and take the cup and say. Thank you for your sacrifice for me. Not what I do for you. What you've done for me. That's what it's about. Taking communion isn't about that one time a month, you got to remember to clean yourself up again. It's saying, here I am again. Oh Lord. Filthy! Owning my sin. But coming to the covering that your blood provides to wash me white as snow. That's how we rejoice in taking communion today together. We rejoice in the finished work of Jesus Christ. That's the good news of the gospel for you, the unbeliever that needs to call on him. And that's the good news of the gospel that never gets old for those of us found in him. Jerry Bridges wrote the same Christian activity can either be an expression of our own righteousness that we think earns favor with God, or it is an expression of joyful gratitude because we already have his favor through the righteousness of Christ. Which is it for you today?

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Extra Reading

Rm 12:12: rejoicing in hope, persevering in tribulation, devoted to prayer

Rm 12:15: Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep

Rm 16:19: For the report of your obedience has reached to all; therefore I am rejoicing over you, but I want you to be wise in what is good and innocent in what is evil

1 Cr 7:29-30: But this I say, brethren, the time has been shortened, so that from now on those who have wives should be as though they had none; and those who weep, as though they did not weep; and those who rejoice, as though they did not rejoice; and those who buy, as though they did not possess

1 Cr 13:6: (love) does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth

1 Cr 16:17: I rejoice over the coming of Stephanas and Fortunatus and Achaicus, because they have supplied what was lacking on your part

2 Cr 2:3-4: This is the very thing I wrote you, so that when I came, I would not have sorrow from those who ought to make me rejoice; having confidence in you all that my joy would be the joy of you all. For out of much affliction and anguish of heart I wrote to you with many tears; not so that you would be made sorrowful, but that you might know the love which I have especially for you

2 Cr 6:10: as sorrowful yet always rejoicing, as poor yet making many rich, as having nothing yet possessing all things 2 Cr 7:6-7: But God, who comforts the depressed, comforted us by the coming of Titus; and not only by his coming, but also by the comfort with which he was comforted in you, as he reported to us your longing, your mourning, your zeal for me; so that I rejoiced even more

2 Cr 7:9: I now rejoice, not that you were made sorrowful, but that you were made sorrowful to the point of repentance; for you were made sorrowful according to the will of God

2 Cr 7:13: For this reason we have been comforted. And besides our comfort, we rejoiced even much more for the joy of Titus, because his spirit has been refreshed by you all

2 Cr 7:16: I rejoice that in everything I have confidence in you

2 Cr 13:9: For we rejoice when we ourselves are weak but you are strong; this we also pray for, that you be made complete

2 Cr 13:11: Finally, brethren, rejoice, be made complete, be comforted, be like-minded, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you

Ph 1:17-19: the former proclaim Christ out of selfish ambition rather than from pure motives, thinking to cause me distress in my imprisonment. What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed; and in this I rejoice. Yes, and I will rejoice, for I know that this will turn out for my deliverance through your prayers and the provision of the Spirit of Jesus Christ

Ph 2:17-18: But even if I am being poured out as a drink offering upon the sacrifice and service of your faith, I rejoice and share my joy with you all. You too, I urge you, rejoice in the same way and share your joy with me

Ph 2:27-29: For indeed he was sick to the point of death, but God had mercy on him, and not on him only but also on me, so that I would not have sorrow upon sorrow. Therefore I have sent him all the more eagerly so that when you see him again you may rejoice and I may be less concerned about you. Receive him then in the Lord with all joy, and hold men like him in high regard

Ph 3:1: Finally, my brethren, rejoice in the Lord. To write the same things again is no trouble to me, and it is a safeguard for you

Ph 4:4: Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice!

Ph 4:10: But I rejoiced in the Lord greatly, that now at last you have revived your concern for me; indeed, you were concerned before, but you lacked opportunity

Cl 1:24: Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I do my share on behalf of His body, which is the church, in filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions

Cl 2:5: For even though I am absent in body, nevertheless I am with you in spirit, rejoicing to see your good discipline and the stability of your faith in Christ

1 Th 3:8-10: for now we really live, if you stand firm in the Lord. For what thanks can we render to God for you in return for all the joy with which we rejoice before our God on your account, as we night and day keep praying most earnestly that we may see your face, and may complete what is lacking in your faith?

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The Marks of a Good Church: Joy

In the last five years here I know I've sometimes just preached one verse, but I don't know if that one verse has only ever had two words. So, here we are. Rejoice always. There was no way you were going to be able to get to that before I could even say it, for a lengthy introduction to kind of let you find it in your Bible. I couldn't buy that much time. But, this morning, it is important that we let the Scripture in its simplicity, drill deep down into our hearts to really examine our lives and see where does the joy in our life come from? When Paul gives this short command, he gives it with no caveats, conditions, qualifiers, or as we like to say, no ifs, ands or buts about it. He's able to give this command to this church in this time without having to say a bunch of different things around it that would make it sound as if there's conditions...conditional rejoicing. That if things are going a certain way, you know, then I can rejoice, as in we play this game when we're not going below the surface of our own heart. If life is going the way that I want, I get the job that I want, i have the house that I want, I get into the college that I want, and then of course, I'm rejoicing. Or we can be this way in our marriages. If I get married, you know, I can rejoice. If my spouse does what I want them to do, I'll rejoice. If my kids obey me, I'll rejoice. We can do this in church, you know, if the ministry runs the way that I want. If the elders hire the guy that I want, if the pastor preaches the way that I want, if the music's played the way that I like, then rejoicing. And what you've entered into is a thing called conditional Christianity or relativistic rejoicing or, provisional pleasures, however you want to say it. But then Paul would have to rewrite, rejoice sometimes. Be happy when it's convenient for you. And that's what we have to explore today, because these two verses, in and of themselves, though, they are powerful in their punch, they can be taken a lot of different ways and they could produce maybe more questions than just staring at them as themselves could answer. And so we're going to explore that this morning as we talk about rejoicing always. So I've already said the verse. I've read it many a times. And you're waiting like how does he go to, you know, Isaiah 40, the grass withers and the flower fades, and the Word of God, even when it's just two words, endures forever. Amen.

So let's talk about what it means for Paul to give the command rejoice always. And as I said a few weeks ago, as we have gotten into the end of this letter, and most of it has been Paul telling the story of this church, this good church, as we've explored and he's a good leader and these are good people. And now he's giving them, commands at the end. I likened it that some of you that went away to a summer camp or off to college, mom would write you a letter while you were away. So I know now I'm speaking to the 50 and up crowd because phones and everything else come along since then. But back in the day, if you wanted to hear from a family member, maybe you did have to write a letter. They wrote one to you and they would tell you how grandma is doing and the dog and all that. And then if mom wrote you that letter away at college, she would end with, like, brush your teeth, wash your sheets, wear new clothes to class. If you really want to get married, son, brush your teeth. I'm just going to keep reminding you of that. Otherwise, you got no shot. And that's kind of the staccato-like ending of this letter. Paul is giving these Christians commands. And here we have, after 12 to 13, life in the church amongst leadership. And last week, 14 and 15, the mutual ministry amongst the body. You get this simple command straightforward down the middle...rejoice always. The word for word translation...at all times be rejoicing. So there's no way around it. And it just made me think like, you know, is this Paul kind of just doing a modern number of when we walk up to somebody who looks like they're having a bad day, which is, you know, common whether we do that to other people, they do it to us, especially when it's done to you. "Hey, you having a bad day?" "Yeah. Thanks for noticing." "Well. Cheer up." "Okay, great. You know what? That's all I needed." It's crazy how the world works. My bad day is solved by you just telling me to cheer up. I remember, you know, there are certain people that just seem to wake up always on the right side of the bed. And, uh, maybe in the course of life, I've become one of those. But I wasn't always. In college the Lord deemed it appropriate to give me one of those type of roommates to...and still friends to this day. Miracles can happen. But you know, that first year was a little bit rough. He was just always on. He was always excited, always joyful. He would really embody this verse. And I was me...not this verse. And, you know, in little ways we had differences. You know, I was pretty studious and would try to stay on top of work and balance that with being an athlete. And, you know, his college life was Little Debbies and Mountain Dew in late night hangs with not much homework being done. And I was trying to get to bed early, often; because I'd have to work out the next morning. And in one particular season of football in the spring, we'd have early morning exercises. 5:30 a.m. you had to be out on the field, so you had to wake up at five. And I'm trying to be disciplined. Go to bed at a good hour, you know, drink my protein shake, and he's offering me a Twinkie. And then he stays up pretending to do homework, but he's just hanging out with friends in the room...Hey, man, could you please go to sleep? Well, lo and behold, I'd wake up at five. Alarm goes off. And yes, he was even cheerful at 5 a.m. when he didn't have to get out of bed. He did not play football, so he would turn over. Like the proverb talks about the guy on the hinge, the...I'm not calling him a sluggard, but he kind of. He would just roll over, look at me in the darkness...know that I was scowling in the darkness somehow and say, hey, Ash, have a good practice. So that went on for a few days. And then the Lord led me to Proverbs 27:14. He that blesseth...I'm using the KJV because I want this to really hit you. He that blesseth his friend with a loud voice rising early in the morning, it shall be counted a curse to him. So I went to my friend that evening. And said for my evening devotion tonight, brother, I want you to know about this verse that you have become a curse to me, even though you think you're a blessing because you're so joyful. I mean, is that this? Preacher Chuck Swindoll comments. "Rejoicing always. This doesn't mean you need to be a cheerleader, a clown or a stand-up comedian. It doesn't mean you go through life every day like you're in a scene from The Sound of Music. Or commentator Gordon Fee says, "This is not a sugarcoated call for putting on a happy face. This was a church undergoing severe hardship because of its faith in Christ." And that's important to remember the context of what we've been studying in Acts 17 related to this letter. This church is a good church, and yet it was not a church without problems, especially persecution from the outside. If you remember, in Acts 17, Paul comes and preaches the gospel of Jesus Christ, proclaiming Jesus as Lord and not Caesar, and that turns the city on them, as in jealous Jews who maybe were saying, hey, it's our way, not that way. Because of a different view on God. And so they were running out of town, and then they got some secular people to join in the riots. And next thing you know, Paul's gone and he's sending Timothy back to check on this church because he's worried about their faith. We saw that back in chapter three. So there was persecution and suffering and affliction which he warned them of. But there was also internally, some of them were sad. We learned that in chapter four. Some of them were grieving because they saw believers in Christ dying around them, and they were anticipating the return of Jesus and thinking, what's going to happen to them? So this command comes within the circumstances of grief and affliction. But is Paul just commanding an emotion here or an experience? I think not. You can't command emotions. It's not how they work. They work off of something else. So just telling somebody to cheer up oftentimes doesn't accomplish it. What we might move to though, from okay, if I can't just grin and bear it and turn happy in a moment, then somebody might invite me into some experience they know brings me joy. Right? So if you've been down in the dumps, they might, you know, hey, listen to a song that, you know, kind of helps you through whatever you're going through. And this can be a temporary fix because we are made by God to experience the full range of our emotions. That, yeah, you could turn, you know, a sad song says so much or whoever wrote that one even yesterday in the car, driving with my family, I was thinking about today and then, you know, just, uh, unintentionally, we have the radio on talking with my wife and, you know, in the background, just some songs that are kind of upbeat. "I get knocked down, but I get up again. You're never going to keep me down. I get knocked down, but I get up again. You're never going to keep me down." I could do this all day. You realize when you read the lyrics how dumb the song is, but when you listen to it, in 1997, you were like, man, I get knocked down, I get up again. Tubthumping or something like that. Chumbawumba I forget. You know, the next song comes on the radio...again it's got a good vibe...sunny day. "Now that it's raining more than ever, know that we'll still have each other. You can stand under my umbrella. Ella Ella...eh eh eh . Ella Ella eh eh eh Ella Ella eh eh eh." But yet it can cheer you up when you hear the melody. Left to itself what is cheering me up here? And that's what I mean by Paul's not trying to tell these Thessalonians go straight at the emotion. You know. Aim for the joy. Or aim for the experience that brings you the joy. Because that's not going to get you to the heart of what it is. It doesn't work that way. It might work that way in the world. And in fact, that's a lot of times what the world will tell you to do. Go do the thing that brings you the joy and you'll be all right. But did they get to the root of it that produces the fruit of it? So while Paul is not commanding an emotion or an experience, he is commanding, and this is the difference, an expression of the Christian's deepest affection. Because joy is an affection, as is love. And he's saying, you've got to get at the thing that produces the affection, that brings it out from within. And that affection we all know is Jesus Christ. Joy is an affection like love, found in a believer's heart, and is a visible expression of a Christian's hope in Christ. That's why in Romans 12:15 he could say, rejoicing in hope. Well, what's our hope? Our hope is in Christ. That's what you've seen in Thessalonians all along. Paul keeps bringing them back to this idea of faith, love, and verse three of chapter one, steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ. He is saying, look, believers, if you're going to be grounded in Jesus Christ, that your hope has to reach back to him. And in that hope you can rejoice even when there's very little happening around you in your circumstances that you can rejoice in. And so that's what we're going to look at this morning. I want to kind of take these two words and expand them out into the New Testament and look at how Paul used them elsewhere, because that's what fills out these two simple words...rejoice always.

So let's start at the root. The fruit of our rejoicing comes from the root of our joy being in Jesus Christ. And where we get that is just two letters earlier. Turn left in your Bible to Philippians, because he also gives the command to rejoice, but he grounds it or roots it, if you want to use that language, if you want to picture the tree in Psalm 1, for the person who is prospering at all times because they meditate in the Word of God day and night, and they have fruit that comes in its season and their leaf does not wither. Where does that come from? It comes from being rooted in Christ. So Philippians 3:1, where he tells this church, "Finally, my brothers and sisters, rejoice...not always. He says, rejoice in the Lord. He says later in chapter 4, rejoice in the Lord always. Same language as in 1 Thessalonians 15 and 16 but he's saying, where is the center of that joy? Where is the fountain head of it? It's your relationship to Jesus Christ. You are in him. He is in you, as we already sang this morning, abiding in him and he in you. This is where the joy is going to come from. And if it's not coming from there, you're latching on to something else, even something that can have the impression of, well, that brings me joy. But it's not necessarily joy that comes from your relationship to Jesus, the source of our joy. He also says, then even in, Philippians 4:10...talks about himself. I've rejoiced in the Lord greatly, as in this isn't Paul just prescribing this for other people. He's saying, that's where my joy comes from, as I can rejoice because I am in Christ. It's bound up in my relationship with Jesus. And as we start down the path of saying, hey, I want to understand what it means to rejoice always. You can't leave behind what is going to produce it, which is the root of your relationship to Jesus Christ. And when you go through the Gospels, you will see that wherever you find Christ from the beginning to end of his life, and all parts in between, when he has been revealed to people for who he is and what he's come to do, joy comes with it. As in, you can't separate a true relationship with Jesus Christ from rejoicing.

Let's start just I'll give you a few of these. I'll give you five roots of our joy in Jesus Christ when people encounter him..when they know who he is and what he's come to do. From the beginning of his life, Matthew 2:10, the wise men are going after Jesus. They've heard that the star has come. They go to King Herod. They're trying to find where it was. And it says, after hearing the king, they went their way. And the star which they had seen in the east, went on before them, till it came and stood over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy. As in from the start, seeking Jesus even before they have met him, and been able to see him face to face, just following the star that was leading them to find him. In seeking Christ every true follower of Jesus is on a path to joy. That's important to know from the start of whatever your experience with Christianity is, to whatever degree you're familiar with it, that if somehow you have adopted a view of the Christian faith that says, you know, hold up on telling people about the joy in Jesus Christ, wrong motivation. It's duty, then delight. I don't think so. Just the approach to hearing who this Christ is, what is he like, what did he come to do? You start to hear the melody, the faint sound of joy being played, and you follow it. You seek it out, and that's what you find with these wise men coming to find him. And then whenever everybody arrives, the angels show up, Luke 2:10, and say his arrival was good news of great joy, the gospel message. Even before you understand the fullness of it, it's good news bringing great joy to people. Even in just seeking Jesus Christ. It moves from that to Luke 10:20. Jesus has sent out his disciples, and they've been given borrowed authority to preach and to do miracles in his name. And they have seen some pretty amazing things, and they come back feeling pretty good about themselves. And, there's a little admonition Jesus has to give them here in Luke 10:20. He tells them, nevertheless, do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you. I mean, they're feeling that borrowed authority from Jesus, Luke chapter ten. He says, don't merely rejoice that spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are recorded in heaven. So the highest joy, the greatest rejoicing that a believer has in this life is going to come from knowing that what?...you've been saved by Christ. You seek Christ. And it's a pursuit of joy. You're saved by Christ. It's a relationship with joy. And then we see serving Christ brings joy. John 4:36 when he is talking with the woman at the well, he tells her, look, I am water that's springing up to eternal life, and he who drinks from me will never thirst again. And she's understanding he's the Messiah. The disciples come back. They think you're so hungry, boss, can we get you some food? He says, I have food you know nothing about. I'm here to do the work of the will of the Father. And then he tells them this in John 4:36. You know what will bring greater joy? He who reaps is receiving wages and gathering fruit for life eternal, so that he who sows and he who reaps may rejoice together...serving Christ, partnering with him as a follower of Jesus. That privilege brings joy while we're still here on this earth. So it's seeking Christ brings joy. It's being saved by Christ is the highest of joys. Serving Christ is joy. But not just the good side, not just the side of, I should say, the pleasant side. All of it's good, you know, serving Christ and, demons being subject to the disciples. But listen to what he says in Luke 6:10. It's the Beatitudes in Luke, not in Matthew. And he's using joy language. He's talking about being blessed in verse 22, which is another word for happy. For those of you who are like, listen, joy is for Christians. Happiness is for the world. No it's not. I mean, don't try to pull apart pleasure language in the Bible when it doesn't...happiness, joy, pleasure, delight all the same thing. Now I get we can say, well you know, happiness, it comes from hap luck...happy, I get it. But that's not how the Bible uses it. It's saying if you're happy and you know it, if you got joy, joy, joy, whatever you want to say. We get what it's saying. To be happy, to be joyful, to be glad is related. In Luke 6:22, Jesus says, blessed, or some translations...happy are you when men hate you and ostracize you and insult you. Wow, that's pretty bad stuff. What happened to when like, demons are subject to us in your name? Isn't that good? He says. But when you are scorned, your name is evil for the sake of the Son of Man. Here's your response. Be glad in that day and leap for joy. For behold, your reward is great in heaven. So whether it's serving Christ that brings us joy, partnering with him in ministry, or when that service brings us into some suffering, some ostracism, some rejection, being insulted, being even scorned, being called evil for our following Jesus Christ and serving him. When that suffering comes, he says, be glad in that day. Rejoice in that day. Jump for joy, actually. Why? Because you're rooted in Christ. You're taking that suffering and rejection on because of following him. Not because of something about you...because of him. So these roots of joy, whether it's seeking Christ, being saved by Christ, serving Christ, suffering for Christ, and all the way to the end. John 16:22, in the upper room, the night of his betrayal, the day before his crucifixion, he's comforting the disciples, offering them peace, telling them it's going to be okay even when he goes away from them. And he tells them this in John 16:22, therefore you have grief now, but I will see you again and your heart will rejoice, and no one will take your joy away from you. I mean, do you see the bookends of the Christian life when you're rooted in him from the beginning of seeking him to being saved by him, serving him, suffering for him, and the longing and desire and the joy of seeing him again, it all goes back to what?...joy. Joy is inescapable. It all points in parts of your relationship with Jesus, from the encountering of him the first time you heard the gospel, until you will see him face to face one day. No one can take your joy from you. Which is why then going back to the beginning, rejoicing always isn't a conditional thing, is it? It's not based on circumstances. Because circumstances can change...the conditions of your life day to day. But he's saying your joy can never be taken from you because I will never lose you. Nothing can separate you from the love of God in Christ. So the believer that thinks they are losing everything around them and they very well might be. Goes back to one taproot that brings life to the fruit. All other routes shriveled up, gone. What's the taproot that's going to keep feeding the prosperous man or woman of Psalm one? When there's no circumstance left on a human level, a horizontal level to rejoice in...its vertical. Are you grounded? Are you rooted in the love of God, in Christ? That's the believer's joy. That's where it starts. The root of rejoicing always...seeking him, seeing him, saved by him, suffering for him. All different reasons, but all one root, Jesus Christ. It puts you in good company of the saints of yesteryear. John 8:56, Abraham the father of faith. Jesus says this about him. Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day. He saw it and was glad. How about King David? Psalm 16:11 wrote, at your right hand are pleasures forevermore. Psalm 21:16 you make me joyful with gladness in your presence. Was it good enough for the saints of old...Abraham, David? How about John the Baptist, even before he was born, leaps in his mother's womb when he's in the room with Jesus. But he says this in his life when his disciples are saying, hey, man, is it kind of is Jesus's ministry cutting into yours? Is he taking away some of your glory? Here is John's response John 3:29...he who has the bride is the bridegroom. That's Christ, the groom. But the friend of the bridegroom me...I'm the best man who stands and hears him. And I rejoice greatly because of the bridegroom's voice. This joy of mine has been made full. You're in pretty good company. Through the history of men and women of faith. When you are rooted and grounded in joy in Jesus Christ. Joy that comes from one root...him. Joy from God. Joy through the Holy Spirit. Joy in hearing the Word of God. Joy in joining the people of God in worship. Joy in serving God. Joy in suffering for God. All of it still comes back to this. Are you in Christ or are you not? Because if you're not. There is no rejoicing always. That's it. That's the great dividing line. That's why at the end of John 15, we sang abide this morning, John 15:1-11 abide in me and I in you. Apart from me you can do nothing. You have nothing, spiritually speaking. You could have everything else, but if you don't have me, you have nothing. And you can do nothing unless you abide, remain, stay with me...union with Christ. So John 15:11, then he says, these things I have commanded you. I've taught you that my joy may be in you, and your joy may be made full. Whose joy is it, then? It's not found in you. It's found in him. And when he's in you and you're in him, then you have it. When you don't have him, you don't have the joy. Period. That's the root.

Now let's talk about the fruit. The root of our rejoicing is our relationship in Jesus Christ. That's how we can apply 1 Thessalonians 5:16. Starting off, am I rooted and grounded in Christ in a saving relationship with him? Where does that move to? Well, again, studying the rest of the New Testament, the fruit of rejoicing always doesn't stay vertical, as in it's not just about you and Jesus the rest of your life. Because when you study Paul's use of rejoicing, the rest of his 13 letters 29 times, I looked up every reference 20 out of the 29 they're horizontal relationships where he's talking about rejoicing. As in when Paul's talking about rejoicing in the New Testament, in his letters to churches. 20 out of the 29 times he's using it, it has to do with life in the body of Christ. So those vertical dimensions of your relationship with God, the root that goes down deep, that then is going to spring up, needs to broaden out in the fruits of your relationship with other people. Or else you're not experiencing that joy to the full. If you're just keeping it to yourself, living an isolated Christian life. And this is from the example of Paul. So I took those 29 references this week. And I tried to categorize them, sort of like I just did with the roots of seeking Christ, being saved by Christ, serving Christ, suffering for Christ, seeing him again. There's five dimensions of our horizontal relationships that we see Paul talk about...our joy related to other's joys. And so let's start with the most basic one, Romans chapter 12 that we already read this morning. But I'll read it again. Romans 12:15, rejoice with those who rejoice. The first dimension of horizontal fruits in our life related to rejoicing is sympathetic joys, we'll call them. They all begin with us. Sympathetic joys, as in one way that we can see the application of rejoicing always in our life, is when we sympathize with our Christian brothers and sisters by rejoicing with those who rejoice. That we get involved in other's lives. It's hard to rejoice with a brother and sister in Christ if you have no investment in anybody else's life but your own. I mean, if it's just you and Jesus and you think, hey, I'm happy doing that. It's then impossible to rejoice with somebody who's rejoicing. And just as we see in this verse, you don't just enter into their joys. Look what else you do. You weep with those who weep. That's not by accident that Paul pairs those next to each other. He's showing the full range of the Christian experience. We're going to walk with people through their joys, through the high fives, through the peaks, through the heights. But we're also going to what? We're going to weep with them in the low times, in the valleys, in the darkness. We're there for both. Uh, we don't get to pick and choose based on our personality. As I talked about last week, you know, when you see somebody hurting and you're going to encourage the faint hearted and you become faint hearted and you say, no, you know what, Ashoff, I'm here for the joys. You got sorrows, email Kurtis. We're a great tag team that way he comes in, I tag him in. He's good for weeping with those who weep. I'm here to rejoice when things are good. That's just not how Christianity works. I mean, I look back to my last week a handful of times, hanging out with brothers in Christ, getting together with them. You know, I can't run a pre-screening. Hey, friend, we're going to have lunch today. By the way, I'm only here for the rejoicings leave behind the sorrows. It happens in a single conversation, and that's the real thing. You know, I'm getting together with these guys. They're telling them about how life is good and God is kind and all this. And then it just can pivot so quickly into this moment of sorrow and this moment of brokenness. And that's just what it is. But it's built on this idea that when we enter into others’ lives for the highs and lows, this is what we signed up for...sympathetic joys. That in the midst of our lives as believers, we have to be at all times able to go there with somebody. And it doesn't matter how our day's been, if God has lined us up in some sovereign way to meet with somebody for a lunch, or to call them on the phone, and they've got to pour their heart out over the phone and like you're there for them in it. It's a sympathetic joy that also could be mixed sorrow. So that's the first fruit of rejoicing always. Sometimes it's in sympathetic joys, Paul says. Now let's talk about sacrificial joys. Go back to Philippians for a moment. Philippians 2 shows this. These Macedonian churches, one in Thessalonica and one in Philippi, have a lot in common that Paul has to encourage their joy because he's talking about it in both of them. But Paul rejoices in sacrificing for others joy. Philippians 2:17-18 listen to what he says to this church. Even if I'm being poured out like a drink offering upon the sacrifice and service of your faith, I rejoice and share my joy with you all. Now that's coming at his cost, isn't it? He's pouring himself out for them. He's sacrificing and serving them for their faith. And what is his response? Oh, you guys are such a drag. No, he says, I rejoice and share my joy with you all, but it's reciprocal...notice that in verse 18. And I want you, I urge you to rejoice in the same way and share your joy with me. Sacrificial joys, as in when we sympathize, we rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. This moves into the category of I'm serving people to the point of sacrifice, and that's a joy for me. And one we should be joyful recipients of it is what he's saying here. But also he wants them to, I guess, mimic what he's doing, imitate him as he imitates Christ, that they should be rejoicing in the same way and sharing the joys with him. So that's a sacrificial joy. And you also can hear that in Colossians 1:24, Paul says, now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake. There's lots of ways Paul embodies this. Philippians 1:25, I know that I'll remain and continue with you for your progress and joy in the faith. Why? Because he loves them. He takes joy in them. So that's sacrificial joys. How about strengthening joys? Go back to 1 Thessalonians...that he takes joy in seeing this church made stronger. Look at chapter three. Remember at the beginning of chapter three he was saying, man, I couldn't endure it. I had to know how you were doing. I was worried about your faith. Thessalonians. Uh, those jealous Jews and those rioters were coming in trying to discourage you. And so, verse eight, he says, I've heard out of your distress and affliction that you were still being built up in faith and love. And he goes in verse eight, now we really live if you stand firm in the faith. Your life is my life. Verse nine, what thanks can we render to God for you?, listen to the joy language, in return for all the joy which we rejoice before our God on your account as night and day we keep praying most earnestly that we may see your face and complete what's lacking. He has strengthening joys, as in when he hears about a church being stronger in faith and he gets to participate in that, he takes joy in it...their maturity in Christ. That's the real Christian life. Do you understand that? Do you look for that in your own life? Do the things you rejoice in in our church, are they just merely conditional, circumstantial joys for you? Or are you in the long haul with people around here? That you're going to take your time and get to know them and pour into them, and they pour into you and you're it's like your own kid. You want to see them mature. You want to see them grow physically, mentally, emotionally, all that good stuff. So it is spiritually. It's rooted in Christ. But the fruit of it is man. I rejoice when I see my...that's why it's crazy to not connect in a church, to think coming Sunday alone is going to do that for you. Because you're not in anybody's life. What do you have to rejoice with? What do you have to rejoice in if you don't make relationships and rejoice in them being strengthened in Christ? And then on the opposite end of that, at least on a human level, the fourth one is sorrowful joys. You have sympathetic joys, sacrificial joys, and serving people, strengthening joys in helping them be built up in the faith. But you also have sorrowful joys. Turn to 2 Corinthians 7:6-9. And by the way, in pulpit curriculum this week, if you download that from our website next to the sermon. I'll list...I'll give you the sheet of all 29 uses of rejoicing in Paul's letters. And you can look these up on your own. But I'm just I've tried to bring them down to just a few categories. This one is sorrowful joys. Why do I use that language? Because there are times that our joy is mixed with sorrow, when we're leaning into somebody's life, admonishing them for their sin. So Paul says this to the church in Corinth. Chapter seven, verse eight. For though I caused you sorrow by my letter i don't regret it, though I did regret it. It's wonderful how that mixes right there. Why did he not regret it, but he regretted it? For I see that the letter caused you sorrow though only for a while. You know, as in, maybe at first you were just I was rejoicing because repentance was going to happen, but then it was just short lived. Verse nine, now I rejoice not that you were just made sorrowful, but that you were made sorrowful to the point of repentance, as in, it wasn't enough for the people in this church that were living in sin to hear Paul admonish them, to tell them, turn around, stop going your own way, sinners. But then he sees, oh, they weren't just sorrowful. He just doesn't get a report like, Paul, that was a really heavy letter. Like everybody was crushed by it, but nobody changed. Well, what good is that? There's no rejoicing then. Just making them sorry for their sin. The rejoicing comes in when he says, you were made sorrowful to the point of repentance, for you were made sorrowful according to the will of God, so that you might not suffer loss in anything through us. For the sorrow that is according to the will of God produces a repentance without regret, leading to salvation. Sorrowful joys, what are those? That's when we actually expect life in the body to care about when we're in sin. And come to talk to us about it. And yes, there can be tears involved. We talked about that last week when Paul said in Acts 20, Ephesians, I went house to house with tears admonishing you...your tears and mine. It's painful. That's real. But look what it produced. Look what fruit is in it now. The fruit of joy of seeing you walking in Christ again. So there's sorrowful joys. That's why John could say there's no greater joy than to see children walking in the truth, because the whole Christian life is marked by our continual repentance. Seeing our sin, turning from it, remembering the promise of the gospel. God loves us in Christ. So there are sorrowful joys, and then lastly, their selfless joys. Uh, flip forward to Philippians chapter one. So what's a selfless joy? As in, you're so caught up in your joy in Christ and in the good of others that even when it may lead to people maligning you, you being passed over, others being picked instead of you, that you can rejoice in that when Christ is being promoted. That's what Paul is saying in Philippians 1:12-18. He talks about being thrown in prison, verse 12, Philippians 1, I want you to know, brothers and sisters, my circumstances have turned out for the progress of the gospel. So that my imprisonment in the cause of Christ has become well known through the whole Praetorian Guard. As in look, because I'm locked up, Christ is being preached, so I'm happy about that. But also he gets a report...listen to verse 15. Some, to be sure, are preaching Christ from envy and strife. So while Paul's in prison in Philippi, there are people around Philippi saying, ah, that Paul, he must have done something wrong. He's in jail. What is his response to that? He says, verse 16, some are doing it out of love for me and love for the gospel. Verse 17, the others are proclaiming Christ out of selfish ambition. They're trying to make themselves look good and make me look bad. Thinking to cause me distress in my imprisonment. But listen to the selfless joy of Paul, verse 18. What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, if Christ is proclaimed in this, I rejoice. That's a selfless joy. That's saying, like, look, I like this isn't about me. It never has been about me. So if Christ is being preached and somebody gets picked over me for some ministry opportunity, some position, some promotion. I'm okay with that. My ego can step aside for the advancement of the gospel of Jesus Christ. That's what I take joy in. And even if they're personally attacking me and saying things that aren't true about me. Now again you have to say, where does this rejoicing always come from? It comes from Paul's identity in Christ. But where do we see its fruits? Well, you've seen it in selfless joys, sacrificial joys, serving joys. I mean, all these different ways that you look in your life and say, hey, if I'm going to apply this application, if I'm going to take rejoice always and see where it's going to land now, you can kind of have a way to look out on your life right now and say, hey, who are all the relationships I have? Am I making any sacrifices for others? Am I serving other people even in things that may not be turning out the way I want? Am I okay to be selfless and still rejoice that Christ is being promoted? Do I see other people being strengthened in Christ...coming to Christ? Well then that's where the joy should come from. Now, all that being said. The roots of our joy being in Christ, the fruit of our joy being seen in relationships with others. You may be sitting there today saying to yourself. I don't feel like I'm experiencing joy in Christ. Adam, I don't disagree...clearly from the scriptures, Jesus Christ is the root of my joy. I'm good with that. Bibles make it very clear it's not an experience to seek out. I'm not just relying on my emotions to get to it, I get it. It's an expression of the affection in my heart for Jesus. But what if I don't feel it? What if I don't feel the affection? What if I don't feel the joy? I think a lot of us go through those seasons and for different reasons.

So I took some time to think about that and come up with some categories for where there could be a famine of rejoicing always in your life. And again from the scriptures we'll have a few of these categories. But really, when I use that language of famine, I'm thinking of the parable of the soils; Matthew 13 and Mark 4, where Jesus talks about, hey, the soil in those parables, Jesus explains later, is the human heart. And the condition of the heart, determines a lot of how the effectiveness of the Word acts, as in there can there can be a soil that it just hits. It goes nowhere. It's a hard heart, it's a dead Heart. There's some soil that's shallow. It gets in there, but when things come, it chokes it out. So kind of using that as a baseline. I just want to give you a few different categories for where you might not be experiencing joy in Christ today.

Category number one. The first category for why you may not feel any joy for Christ in your life. And this is all heart language because it's on the inside. Category one is a dead heart. It's number one on the list. And though it certainly could be more than this. It certainly may not be less than this. What I mean by a dead heart is if you're sitting there and you say there's no joy in Christ in my life. I can't remember the last time I had joy in Christ. You might say I've had joy around people I've admired, but like to actually say, my joy is in Jesus Christ. I don't know what you're talking about. Then my first question for you is, are you sure you're in Christ? You have to start there. You have to start with...do you know that you are in Jesus Christ today? Meaning, have you been born again? Are you united to Christ? Have you experienced the new birth? Something that you can't conjure up from the outside no matter if you were in church from the time you were born. I mean, really, when you think about it, the church people probably have the most to fear in this department. Why? Because you could be buying into false joys, peripheral joys, if you've been raised in the church. That's a good ride from the time you're a kid, right? I mean grow up, go to Awana, summer camps, youth groups and good reason to be joyful. Like why would we not want the church to be a place where a young person grows up and says, man, being a Christian is the greatest thing, and seeing people model that joy in their life. That's a good thing. But you have to sit there and ask yourself, though, have I bought into all the peripheral stuff but never the center? Is my joy in Jesus Christ this morning. And if you find yourself questioning that, here's the solution. Matthew 13:44, the kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and hid again, and from his joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. The discovery of who Jesus Christ is and how precious he is, how priceless his life is, was, and always will be to you is what makes you out of joy be open to that exchange, as in, I'm willing to give it all up, whatever it is I'm holding on to this morning. Whatever hopes, dreams, ambitions, desires, I've had. But I don't have Christ and I don't have joy in him. Jesus teaching in this little parable, saying, finding me is like, you're not even looking for it in this parable. This field doesn't belong to this man. Otherwise he wouldn't have to go back and hide it. Somebody else's field...he is wandering through it, comes upon a treasure, wasn't looking for it, recognizes its value, hides it and in joy over it goes and sells out everything...no holding back, because of how valuable the treasure is. That's a relationship with Jesus Christ. And it's nothing less than that. So are you in Christ today? Have you rightly appropriated the value of the person and work of Jesus Christ that would make you want to trust him with everything you have? Precious just in his person...who he is as the Son of God. If he did nothing else besides that, the fact that it's God makes him precious. Makes him infinitely valuable because he's God. But then, unbeliever, think of what he's done as God. He comes down from heaven in the incarnation takes on the form of a man, born in a manger, just in his incarnation He is precious to us. When we think of what he gave up to come and to live in the world like we live it in every way, tempted as we have been tempted. How precious is he in his perfection?...never to sin once: never in thought, never in word, never in deed. Precious to us in his perfection. Because then he's precious to us in his forgiveness, that he could actually take our sin away on the cross, precious in the atonement. That God could receive his perfect life as a substitute for our sinful life. And then precious in the resurrection. To come back from the dead, to defeat death, to show that death is no longer ruling and reigning over those who sin. But you can be forgiven forever. How precious is Christ to you today? I mean, that's what you need to draw from this morning if you find yourself with no joy in Jesus Christ, you have to see him purely and perfectly and who he is and how infinitely valuable he is. And if you've seen him for anything less than that, you haven't been born again. It's all in, because then you look at your life and say, what? What do I have that I would want to keep if I can get all of that? So Christ, take my life. Make it yours: all of your forgiveness, all of your grace, all of your perfection for all of my sin. That's the great exchange. But you won't make it if you don't see its value. Toss it aside like it's not worth anything. People do that every day. But don't do it today. See Christ for who he is and what he offers you, and trust in him for salvation. First reason you may not have joy in Christ is because of a dead heart for the unbeliever. For the believer, you may have a calloused heart, a hardened heart due to a season of unconfessed private personal sin. Hiding it, keeping it, holding on to it. Thinking you can't let it be known. Can't go get help. It's too great of a sin. It would ruin your life. But it's ruining your life to not say anything about it. It's making you unhappy. It's making you miserable as a believer. Psalm 32, David went through this. And he was a man of God, loved God. No one loved God like David did, passionately from the heart. And yet listen to his testimony. Psalm 32, when I kept silent about my sin, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long, sin will make you weak. Spiritually, physically, mentally, it'll break you down if you keep it private. Day and night your hand was heavy upon me. God was putting that hand on him. Why? He wanted to break him. Not as a bruised reed that snapped completely, but to say, David, you've got to break at this point. You can't keep hiding it. So what does he say in verse five? I acknowledge my sin to you and my iniquity I did not hide. I said, I will confess my sin to the Lord, and you forgave the guilt of my sin. Therefore, let everyone who is godly pray to you in a time when you may be found. When is that time? It's right here, right now. Stop hiding your sin. Psalm 32 says at the beginning, how blessed is he whose sin is forgiven, whose sin is covered. If you keep trying to cover it you're basically saying, then Christ can't cover it. But if you uncover it, then you realize he does. As a believer, he already has. So what game are you playing hiding your sin? It's making you miserable. Confess it to him now. Go to someone else for help as we saw last week. If you're that weak in your sin, you need help. Go seek it out. So then in Psalm 51, the joy of your salvation could be restored. It's dangerous to play with sin as a Christian. Because you don't know how far it will take you. You don't know how hard it will make you. Hebrews 3:12-13 take care brothers and sisters, that there not be in any one of you, an evil, unbelieving heart that falls away from the living God. Encourage one another day after day, as long as it's called today, so that none of you will be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. If sin is deceiving you this morning as a Christian, it's also hardening you every moment you keep it in. Every moment you continue to bury it and hide it. What's to hide if Christ died for it? What's to hide? To go and let somebody else know that you've been doing it is the humbling you need. Maybe because you've struggled being so self-righteous, keeping such a clean slate. How could anybody possibly know you're not perfect? None of us are. Otherwise we wouldn't need the Savior. So let your sin be known because it'll rob you of your joy. It'll steal your happiness, but Christ can restore it. Last category from a hard heart. We'll call this one a cold heart. You're not necessarily in a state of spiritual hardness because of hiding your sin, but maybe you're in a state of spiritual coldness due to a season of personal isolation from church fellowship. The warmest place for the Christian is the church. And that's where it's going to be gathered in, with the most light and the most heat gathered with the body of Christ connected to one another. That's why Hebrews ten gives the admonition. Right after saying, hold fast the confession of our hope, our hope in Christ without wavering. Yes, individually, we must hold on to our hope, our confession. Christ is all, of course. But right after that, he says, and let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another all the more as you see the day drawing near. Do you see how quickly he moves there? So if you're saying I'm not experiencing much joy in the Christian life right now, and it isn't a hidden sin in your life, and you are in Christ, but are you at a distance from the body of Christ? Where it can be cool on those fringes. There's nobody warming you up when you're cold. Nobody bringing you light and heat when you need it for your own growth, and they need it for theirs. Proverbs 18:1, he who separates himself seeks his own desire and quarrels against all sound wisdom. Isolation can rob you of joy. Because as we saw already this morning, Paul's joy, though rooted in Christ, bore fruit in what?...life in the body together. To rejoice with others, rejoicing in the Lord too. So you put all this together this morning and you see how much more there is to rejoicing always than at first meets the eye. But how wonderful it is that we have a God who is our everlasting joy, and has designed life in Christ for us to be one of joy when we're connected to him and connected to one another.

Let's pray. Father, we thank you this morning for your Word. Thank you for its clarity. Thank you for its simplicity. As we've been saying the last few weeks, these are not difficult commands to understand, but they certainly are to apply because they get down to the deepest parts of our heart. Even this morning they force us to ask the hard questions like, why am I not rejoicing in you, Father? Why am I not rejoicing in the Son? Why am I not rejoicing in the Spirit? And to be able to examine that question and go deeper than maybe we're used to going. We pray that you would bring the good fruits of a restored joy in you. We know joy is from your Spirit. It's a fruit of his. But we also know rejoicing always is something commanded. So, Spirit, move our hearts closer to the love of God in Christ this morning to bring us the fullness of joy you promised. We ask this in Christ's name. Amen.

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The Marks of a Good Church: Mutual Ministry

Please turn in your Bibles to 1 Thessalonians 5, and we'll be in verses 14 and 15 today...just two verses. And you may have already noticed if you grabbed one of the pieces of papers on your way in there is no outline for today which may cause some of you fear and trembling. Will it ever end? Will there be any destination in mind? And it's because I didn't write a sermon this week. I just thought I'd wing it. No, I'm kidding. When I looked at these two verses and tried to see how it lays out, really what you'll see in verses 14 and 15...it's just an array of commands, one after the next. And they do relate, but not in a way where you could say, okay, let me take these two verses and summarize it with this and take these three and put it there. It's really where Paul is at in this letter to a real church that had real problems. But we also know at the beginning of the letter that they were a very good church. They were an 'excel still more' church. They had done a great work from the beginning of the letter where he says, your faith has sounded out, we don't need to say anything. You guys' are doing it. And he just commends them and encourages them all along. And then he gets to chapter four and says, there are a few things I do need to talk about. And really now towards the end, it's in some ways, a style of letter where I don't know if you've ever written to someone, brother and sister in Christ or family member where you kind of, you know, you review. Uh, what's been going on in your life. And maybe it takes on a little bit more of a narrative form, and then towards the end, you just kind of whatever thoughts you need to get out, you fire away with. And so it can seem a little unconnected towards the end of this letter you've received or written to somebody else, because you're kind of just emptying all your thoughts out and, uh, whatever comes to mind, you put it there and, and that might be a little bit of what Paul's doing here. Why, uh, from 12 to 28, it looks and sounds a little different from the rest of the letter. It's just, uh, one rapid fire command after the next. And really, between verses 14 to 22 alone. I counted as I was looking over this, 14 different imperatives, commands. And so I was just going to give you a 14 point sermon today. Two people would have enjoyed it. The rest of you would have been like, ease up. Seriously! Uh, but I wanted to limit it today to these two verses 14 and 15. And I'm really excited to teach them because as I do, they really embody the fellowship that we are to enjoy at its highest level when we're truly involved in one another's lives, not keeping each other at arm's distance, but really, um, opening up and opening our lives to other people, not trying to hide behind any mask. Or as friend and I joke, um, you know, in being transparent with people, we talk about it in regards to life group. You know, there's some people that they are just comfortable in their own skin. You show up to life group, which is a major ministry of our church for discipleship. And when it comes time to do mutual ministry, which is a portion of life group, where it's accountability, it's being honest and open and transparent. There are those who it's like they come in their jammies, you know, they some would if you let them. And it's just, this is who I am. I'm just here. You see exactly the way I am. We talk about the jammy person. Maybe moving along the lines. Maybe somebody comes a little more buttoned up that they're not, as, you know, just open. They want to look put together. And then you got the turtleneck person that you don't see anything on them up to here. And then my favorite is the hazmat suit. They just come and you can't see anything...are you breathing in there? And they just kind of keep you at a distance. And this section really challenges that. Because it says, if we're going to be the church that Christ has purchased with his own blood and paid for your sin, and yet we still are finding ourselves in the struggle of life. You've got to obey these commands, because this is how the church builds itself up in love; Ephesians 4:11-16 16 would say. That unless you get this real with other people, uh, speaking into their lives and letting them speak into yours, uh, we're not going to grow. We're not going to become all that God would have us to be in Christ. And that's why I'm excited to teach it. Because though last week, in a self-serving way, I got to talk about leadership and the loving relationship between sheep and shepherd...people and pastor. This week is not about leadership; it's about fellowship and myself included. That we're all in the mix of these two verses, because this is how we're going to enjoy the richest fellowship in Christ. When we can speak into someone else's lives, the truth and love, and we can also receive it from them. In the same way, last week that I said there was a word for me as a pastor and the elders here to learn about our leadership. And then there was, of course, commands for the people to follow. This week, it goes both ways. On one level, you need to listen to this sermon with an ear towards...am I doing this towards others? These commands I'm given. But then you're listening with the other hear saying, and am I receptive to when other people are doing this to me? It's not one or the other based on oh, am I a leader here? Do I lead a small group? Do I lead a life group? This is beyond that because this is discipleship in the raw. This is letting somebody really know who you are and it's reciprocal. And if we're going to be the church, God wants us to be in fellowship, sheep to sheep, there's commands here for us to keep. So, follow along with me as I read these two short verses that have a lot to say.

1 Thessalonians 5:14-15, We urge you, brothers and sisters, admonish the unruly, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak. Be patient with everyone. See that no one repays another with evil for evil. But always seek after that which is good, and for one another and for all people.

Father, your word is perfect, so use it to renew our souls, make us wise, rejoice our hearts and enlighten our eyes, we ask. Amen.

As we begin this today, thinking about the church and really this section brought to my mind Ephesians 4, equipping the saints for the work of the ministry. As in when we're going to study this today, how to do mutual ministry within the church. This is really something that isn't just for us to sit idly by and we'll talk about the idol here and say, you know, that was a great sermon for someone else. Versus saying no, this is directly applicable for every person in every situation here if you are a follower of Jesus. Because this is about life in the body together in a way that's not meant to be in isolation. Like, of course we're going to need to apply these verses in a way to ourselves personally, but they are lived out corporately as we're on a mission together for the gospel of Jesus Christ. So we're taking care of the church on the inside. As we look at these two verses today and what they command us to do. But we can't lose sight of the greater good in this, that it's not just that we become better Christians, more Christ like in the process. It's that as our church grows in its Christ likeness, we grow in our ability to be a better witness to the people around us. It's for the greater mission of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to make disciples of Jesus Christ, and to do it in a way that we are able to see our lives individually and collectively as a church, so that we don't go out there into our community or elsewhere and are accused of being hypocrites. You know that we want to tell everybody else how to live their lives, but we don't do it ourselves, collectively as a church. And this is also applicable personally, that for me to receive the instruction in these verses is so that I can rightly see the log that's in my own eye in order to help someone else take the speck out of theirs. So I want us to think about moving through these verses as a unit. And even I want to give the image of the church as a military unit, as a platoon, because as we'll talk through some of these, uh, types of Christian in the church, there is this language of, of a group of people moving on mission together. And yet it's easy for soldiers to fall out of line. It's easy for soldiers to get scared. It's easy for soldiers to get weak and need to be helped along, because the mission is greater than any individual person. The mission to tell the world of the good news of Jesus and how they can find hope in him. We need to help each other in the process. So let's talk about mutual ministry. The mark of a good church. How did the believers relate to one another and build each other up in love? Because we are just a bunch of imperfect people following one perfect savior. Like, yeah, that always has to come to our minds immediately in any sermon that is going to lean into us in our Christ likeness, talking about our sanctification, talk about repenting of sin and growing in him.

It's because we're imperfect people, and there's only one perfect Savior and Lord, and he's the one that we trust. He's the one that we follow. The rest of us were just a collection of former rebels, now redeemed, rescued by Christ. And so that's the heart we need to receive this with.

So let's jump into mutual ministry method number 1, in verse 14. We urge you, brothers and sisters, admonish the unruly. Now we urge you is applicable to all the following verses, as in Paul is moving away from in verse 12 where he said, hey, we request of you. And we told you that was like a gentle pastoral nudge. Uh, this is a shoving you out of your seat, not just like, hey, listen up to what he's going to say. It'd be good for you. This is him...this word urge has urgency to it. It's a more forceful word. Uh, it's not that little nudge. This is not a knockout blow. But I would say it's a body shot. It should take the wind out of us. And wake us up and say, this is serious Christian living. And if I take serious what I believe, it should affect how I behave, or else what is it? So let's start with his first urging mutual ministry method number one um, admonish the unruly, warned the straying sheep, the disorderly disciple, the frivolous follower. He calls this group the unruly. And he could, some believe, who have studied this text inside and out, be connecting it back to, if you look in chapter four, verses 11 and 12, and even later in 2 Thessalonians 3:6-15, there were idle people. And that's why some of your versions have admonished the idle. He could be thinking of the people back in 4:11-12 who he has to tell them to excel still more; make it their ambition to lead a quiet life. Don't just be hanging around loitering as a Christian waiting for Jesus to return, quitting your job, banking on...why work?...if Jesus is coming back. He says that in verse 12. You want to be able to behave properly to the outside world and not be a burden to those in the church as best as it is possible. So that could be the admonition to the unruly here...could be. But I would say it's broad enough to encompass what this word means and why I used military imagery. The unruly was a word Paul took from other Greek texts or used in the vernacular of his day, speaking to a soldier who falls out of line. Who's not keeping up with the pack. Not because necessarily they're weak falling behind. They just want to do their own thing. And that's why they're called unruly or undisciplined or disorderly or disruptive. And the damage it does to a group as a whole, whether you want to talk of a military unit, it drags the group down. It drags the church down when this person is insistent on following their own path. And he says to get them back on the path, you need to admonish them. And that was a word we looked at last week talking about elders and pastors and teachers who give instruction. It's a word for trying to set something in a person's mind. This is a speaking word. To admonish the unruly isn't just I'm going to pray for that brother or sister. Of course we should be doing that. I'm going to speak up because I care for the progress of the gospel, moving through our church as individuals, and then collectively, I've got to say something. It's a jackknife word in the New Testament...admonish, as in, it can be useful in a lot of different situations. And though it might sound harsh, the idea of admonishing and trying to place something in a person's mind in that placing truth in a person's mind is either one of two things...to correct bad beliefs, or to correct bad behavior, or a combination of the two. When we admonish each other in Christ, it could be because of some erroneous belief...maybe not heresy. Not all error is heresy. All heresy is error. That you're saying, hey, brother, I the way you're handling that text or that thing you're reading right now, I'm just. I'm not so sure of it. Can you tell me more about what you're exploring there? And that may call for an admonishment, a correction. Or it could be bad behavior. Hey, brother, the Bible says this and you're doing that. Um, I've been around you a few times, and your speech has really been, uh, down in the sewage, you know, the way you're talking around your friends, but you say you're a Christian. Uh, that the Bible just speaks directly against that. Let no unwholesome word come out of your mouth...bad behavior. Sometimes a bad belief can lead to bad behavior, as in this letter, that their erroneous beliefs about the return of Christ had led some people to quit their jobs and just mooch off everyone else. So sometimes what you believe will have that implication on your behavior. And honestly, we should expect that, shouldn't we? If we really believe what we're trusting in here, we should live differently. Paul's commending to do it in the right way. And so he's saying you're going to have to admonish unruly people, those falling out of line, stepping out of line, not keeping up, wanting to do their own thing. But lest we say that sounds heavy, harsh, judgmental, I want you to think about, um, just that all purpose word of admonition in the New Testament how when we look at it elsewhere, it actually isn't harsh. It's not overbearing. It has three qualities that if you trace it through the New Testament, I think you could summarize this way. Admonishing other believers is common, as in it's part of our everyday life. It's compassionate as opposed to harsh, and it's communal as in, it's for everybody to do not just the exclusive property of the teachers.

So first, um, admonishing is a common or normal or standard part of Christian living. Colossians 1:28, we proclaim him speaking of Christ, admonishing every man and teaching every man with all wisdom, so that we may present every man complete in Christ. The end goal of that is to present people mature in Jesus, and the way you get there is through admonition. Right after he says, we proclaim Jesus as in we preach Christ and Him crucified. Just like Paul did when he went to Thessalonica in Acts 17, he moves into what?...teaching them the council of God. Jesus says, go, make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the father, Son, and the Spirit, teaching them to obey everything I commanded you. You teach by way of admonition, instruction, and correction. But note this is common to Christianity. We admonish every man, we teach every man we want to present them complete in Christ. I would venture to say that it's one of the most essential speaking aspects of our fellowship in the body of Christ. That if you're not one for admonishing, instructing, correcting, whether receiving it or giving it, you're missing out on a vital portion of how Christians exist in the body of Christ. We all are like sheep who tend to stray and are going to need a correcting word now and then. So it's common.

Second, it's compassionate...that as we do it, it should come out of a heart of love, care, mercy for some sinning brother or sister, not judgmentalism...compassionate. Acts 20:31, Paul is saying farewell to these Ephesian elders that he really loves dearly, and he says this to them. Therefore be on the alert, Acts 20:31. Be on the alert, remembering that night and day for a period of three years. I did not cease to admonish each one of you with tears. How does he admonish them? Stoic? Unmoved? You know, it's just the truth, and they needed to hear it. No, he said, I didn't cease. So he was responsible to his task to teach them, to give them instruction, to bring correction. But how did he go about doing it? Because it's really tempting for us say, oh, yeah, I want to admonish, I want to teach, I want to correct, and then have the line like...well, they just needed to hear it. And that's just the way I am. You know, what's sad to me is, you know, when we think about that and we think about the times we've admonished other people, and we think about Paul's example here and we say, you know, what's the ratio between the times I've admonished somebody and caused them to cry versus the amount of times it's brought a tear to my eye? Has it ever? In your zeal to instruct and correct...when's the last time you cried over the situation of the person that you were admonishing versus made them cry? It happens. I mean, when we're really having to bring the truth to somebody and they know we love them, they could produce that in them...tears might flow. But did they ever flow from you, the one delivering it? Or do the arms cross and the face scrunches up and the brow furrows. And that's the face of admonition that that person knows...parents with your kids. Is it admonition with tears? Or is it an admonition that they would say, yeah, I cried a lot. Never saw my parent do it. Making them question did it come from love? Or did it come from legalism?...judgementalism. You've broken the law again. How could you do that? That is instructive and it is corrective, but it's not reflective of Paul's compassion in Acts 20:31.

So it's common, it's compassionate, and then third, it's communal. Romans 15:14, Paul's ending a wonderful letter to this church. And, they've been doing well, you know, similar to the Thessalonians, there's some instruction he's giving, and especially in 14 and 15, a lot of instruction of how the stronger bear with the weaker. But he says this to everyone in Romans 15:14, wrapping up. Concerning you, brothers and sisters, I myself am convinced that you yourselves are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge, and able also to admonish one another. What does he commend there? Well, he commends their knowledge. They're full of it. They know what they believe. He commends their goodness as it's coming from the right place. And then he says, because of that, you know what it is to say you're doing it in the right way. You are able to admonish one another, as in, it's not the exclusive property of the teachers and preachers and pastors and elders in the church. All of you should be doing this. So you kind of put those three things together and you say, is an admonition really a harsh thing? Is it a heavy thing? Should it be something that we run away from, whether we're the one receiving it or the one having to give it, or if we really see it as the New Testament presents it. It's common, as in, this is normal. Deep breath. I got to go talk to this person. Don't just take a deep breath, but take a deep look at your heart. Is this coming out of

compassion, out of a love for this sheep? Remember we talked about back in chapter three when Paul said in verse eight, now we really live if you stand firm in the Lord. He could endure it no longer. He had to hear from them. He had to send Timothy to them. Their growing in Christ was life to him, and their falling back in Christ would have been death to him. That's that heart of compassion...an earnest pastor loving his sheep. Is that how it comes out from you? Now, I guess I need to put a disclaimer here in your zeal for admonition. I want to deputize you today, but not to be...Walker, Texas Admonisher. I want you to think about a particular thing as you would want to be faithful to admonish. And so I'll use the picture of Chuck Norris. You know, when you're moving in with the warrant and you're going to search the premises of this person's spiritual life and issue the summons and make the arrests...are you sure you got the right person? I mean, are you positive that you have perfect vision to evaluate where that sheep is at? Or maybe, are you seeing things mostly correct? But is your subject...are you absolutely sure they're guilty of unruliness?...as in correcting their bad beliefs? This person that you're talking to and maybe they're new in the faith, or maybe not, and they're reading something and they're trying to work out their salvation with fear and trembling, and they're trying to define or understand or describe the Trinity to you, and it sounds suspicious. Is that the equivalent of them denying the Trinity? But if you just move in so quick with that admonition. You know, sliding across Grudem's Systematic Theology. Versus saying, hold on, let me understand a little bit more of what you're saying there because the Trinity is a very vast subject and nobody's got it perfectly nailed down. But I want to hear more of what you have to say. Is that going to be your first instinct, so as to draw them out rather than what?...shut them down. That might be just on the level of belief. But think about it on the level of behavior this person you've been around, um, and maybe you sense a little bit of pride in their life. Is it a pattern?...that you have to now admonish. Or could it just be, um, you know, the way they said that thing in life group the other night sounded like they were, um, contradicting you, and you sensed that, and it was a particular situation. But you're certain that they're the arrogant that needs admonished. How much did that have to do with your ego? Are you seeing it rightly, is all I'm asking? That's part of this as well. Sure, we don't want to, you know, qualify everything with, okay, die the death of a thousand qualifications on admonishing. But we do want to say, am I seeing it rightly? I understand what it means to admonish. But do I understand what the unruly person really looks like, what they really sound like, and then move in because I have a proper perception of the situation? And once you understand them accurately, Biblically, you've identified the issue. Then you proceed with confident caution in admonishing them. So that's mutual ministry method number one.

Mutual ministry method number 2...encourage the faint hearted, the sad sheep, the disheartened disciple, the crestfallen Christian. This category of person could relate to 4:13-18...we talked about them already a couple weeks ago that they needed comforted with what?...new information about Jesus's return. They knew about his death and his resurrection, but they didn't know...have those Christians that have already fallen asleep, um, will they be second hand when Christ returns? So that had some of them dismayed, faint hearted, if you will. And other ones might have felt that, well, those that died are with Christ. Maybe he returned already, maybe we missed out and that has them down. And he says in verse 18, comfort one another with these words...we're going to be with them in the air. So that could be the audience that he has in mind when he reminds them to encourage the faint hearted. This isn't the unruly soldier who's doing whatever they want to do, either being idle kind of moseying around, or being rebellious, just taking off on a mission on their own. This type of soldier in the platoon is...the bullets are flying and they're scared. And so you look back in the pack and they're huddled together in the middle of it, afraid to do anything. The word fainthearted here is the, uh, word for small soul. It's a good word picture for what's going on the inside of them, which is a good clue to how you need to handle them. Right? Whatever you see on the outside that you're now deciding and discerning...how do I speak to this person? Because they're not moving along with the pack. We're moving the mission forward. What's wrong with you, you wuss? Did you read them rightly? There could be something causing their knees to knock on the inside. Not just fear of what's happening on the outside. Hebrews 12:12 says we should strengthen the hands that are weak, and the knees that are feeble. Part of discerning this person is understanding, Hey, are they timid by nature? Does this go back way before this situation? Have you taken time to get to know them, to understand that. It could be this is just part of who they are. They have a timid nature, a small souled nature. They're easily fainthearted over things. Or it could be a situation that they're going through that normally they're really brave, courageous and strong. But this trial that they're going through has really shrunken their soul. It's small spirited, it's a broken spirit, and you need to help them in the healing process rather than make it hurt even worse by questioning their loyalty to Jesus. Come on, get up and march. What are you so afraid of? Isaiah 35:3-4 is a nice description of how he is trying to help these people who feel lost in the wilderness...little to rejoice in Israel at this time that Isaiah writes it. And he says in Isaiah 35:3, encourage the exhausted and strengthen the feeble. Say to those with anxious heart, take courage. Fear not. Behold, your God will come with vengeance. The recompense of God will come, and he will save you. That's not pointing somebody to the maybe empty well of their own heart, and they can't draw any courage out of it. It's telling them to look up to the God of the heavens, who rules and reigns, who calls the sun to set and calls the rains to come. And they need refreshing from him. That's our job...to be encouragers. I think of David on two levels. One, I think of David in the Psalms and how he is just so open about where his strength comes from, where his trust is, even though he's this mighty warrior. I mean, he is, as was called, a man of bloodshed, raged into battle, conquered enemies, but his trust and his hope was in God. Psalm 34:8, 0, taste and see that the Lord is good. How blessed is the man who takes refuge in him. Psalm 40:4, how blessed is the man who has made the Lord his trust. Psalm 84:12 O Lord of hosts, how blessed is the man who trusts in you. But I also think of David in his weak moments. I think of first Samuel 23. I mean, it's in the midst of him being on the run. Uh, things got real bad in chapter 22, where David feels responsible for the for the wiping out of an entire city, out of Nod because David had went and met with Ahimelech and, um, Doeg the Edomite, who's like one of the worst characters in the Old Testament. You just want to punch him in the face. Uh, he was the one that was spying on David's meeting with Ahimelech. And that leads to, uh, Saul ordering the execution of 85 priests of Nob. And David says in verse 22 at the end of that sad chapter, I knew on that day when Doeg the Edomite was there that he would tell Saul, I've brought about the death of every person in your father's household. I mean, he's starting to feel small souled. Chapter 23 comes and he's on the run. And in verse 14, he's living in the wilderness and the strongholds. He's in the hill country of the wilderness of Ziph. And verse eight says, Saul has summoned all the people for war to go down to Keila, to besiege David and his men. Verse three says David's men, his mighty men. They're afraid. They say to David, we're afraid here in Judah. We can't go to the Philistines. We can't stay here. So I think David was potentially a little bit fainthearted. How was God going to help him? Well, God, in verse 14 it says, Saul sought him every day, but God did not deliver him into his hands. So God was the one protecting him. But David doesn't always see that. He doesn't know what God's doing behind the scenes to keep him protected. So God sends him help in another way. Verse 15, now David had become aware that Saul had come to seek his life while he was in the wilderness of Ziph at Horesh. And Jonathan, Saul's son, arose and went to David at Haresh, and encouraged him in God. That's an awesome verse. It doesn't tell you the details of what Jonathan was doing. What did he do? He showed up. He put his own life on the line, his own well-being. He went to see his friend. But he didn't strengthen him with his own hand as son of King Saul. He took David's shaking hand and put it in

Yahweh's. He strengthened him. He encouraged him in God. That's what it means to encourage the fainthearted. There's not this master plan of every perfect thing you need to say to be able to encourage somebody. It starts like David had with Jonathan, a friend who was just willing to show up when the chips were down. What did he tell him in Verse 17? He said, don't be afraid. The hand of Saul, my father will not find you. You'll be king, and I'll be next to you. There are some things in that statement that were true. And some things that weren't because Jonathan was dead by the time David took the throne. But his own well-being didn't get in the way of the well-being of David, did it? He said, I'm going to go and see this guy. He needs my help. One commentator wrote... What an oasis of encouragement in the desert of Ziph. You may think you have little to offer somebody who's faint hearted, who's ready to give up. Because you might see that timid person who's gone through this hardship. Who's lost a loved one, who's found out they have cancer, who's lost their job, and you know, they're fainthearted and they're weak and they're timid. And if you're like me, sometimes, rather than go to see them and try to help them, you yourself become timid. Because you don't know what you're going to say. Right? I mean, it just. I'd like to go. I'd like to do something, but I don't know what to say. I don't know what to do. And so you're stricken by your own timidity. Isn't that ironic? And I could say from experience, which is instructive, though not infallible. My biggest regrets are the times I didn't say anything because I was too shy, timid, scared to try to help that person. And I could honestly say that the times I have just shown up and tried to say maybe not even said anything, but just say I'm here. Is there anything I can do to help? Give him a hug. I never regretted that. I might have fumbled over my words. I might have felt like, I don't know if that did anything for them. But at least I showed up. At least I tried. So let's be on the lookout for the faint hearted followers of Christ and give it our best to strengthen them in. you? No, who are you strengthening them in? You're strengthen them in Christ. You're doing what Jonathan did. You're putting their hand in Yahweh's hand. He's the one that holds them, right? He's the one that can ultimately help them. You're just trying to remind them of that.

Mutual ministry method number three. Help the weak, the scrawny sheep, the devastated disciple, the fragile follower. Now, how does this differ from the last group? Well, we can be again, maybe instructed by going back to chapter four. And again, like I said, some who have studied this far more than I see these three words: the unruly and the fainthearted and the weak relating back to chapter four. Well, who would the weak person be? The weak person struggling in sin. Who can't help themselves out of that ditch they're in. Well, who was that person? At the beginning of chapter four the one that he needed to say, this is the will of God, your sanctification. Abstain from sexual immorality, that each of you know how to possess his own vessel in sanctification and honor, not in lustful passion. Well, that's a weak person. Why are they weak? They need admonished. They're unruly. True. There is an element of correction to a person who is willfully engaging in sexual sin. He does need to be instructed. But again, if you're diagnosing their situation correctly. In that unruliness, could the root of it be weakness? That they need help and nobody's ever tried to help them before. Come alongside them, walked beside them in their struggle with sin. Maybe they've always just been admonished. You just need to stop. Why can't you just get over that sin? How long you been a Christian now? But has somebody ever come alongside to help them. Helps a beautiful word. This word Paul uses here in the New Testament. It's the image of somebody clinging to someone else. Holding on to somebody for dear life. It's the picture I have in my mind when I go out with my kids hiking, and when they come to the age where they're strong enough to walk on their own, but not smart enough. And we're up on Rough Ridge, and we get near the top of it, and there's that rock that we shouldn't go out and take a picture on. But, you know, it's the selfie age. We got to do it. And of course, everybody wants to see me with my toddlers up on a rock. You know how many thousand feet up in the air?...especially my mom. But, you know, we could be having a good old time hiking up the safe part. But the moment we get around that part, the cling comes out, the holding on for dear life, Dad comes out, and Mac and Davey aren't going anywhere because I got them. And that's the way we're to help the weak Christian. When you come alongside them, they may be slippery and squirmy. And their feet are dragging. But you're going to hold him. You're going to drag them if you have to, to get them back where they need to be. This isn't the soldier huddled up in the middle, scared. It's not the unruly soldier moving away from the pack. This is just the battle weary soldier who's lagging behind. And you say, I'm going to carry you for this next mile if I have to. To get you to the spot where we can find some rest. Is that how you deal with the weaker Christian in your life? Because if it's anything it's draining. We can all admit that. Trying to help that weak brother or sister who seems to be stuck in that same sin pattern over and over again, and you feel like you've tried everything. And you might have. And you say, so what do you do when you've tried everything? Um, Paul tells you. Be patient. Comes right after help the weak. Be patient, not just with them, with everyone. They could have a little bit of unruly, a little bit of faintheartedness, a little bit of weakness. Whatever it is, be patient with them. Don't drop them if they're weak. Don't leave them if they're scared. Don't let them wander if they're going to go off and say they'll get what they deserve. He says no, be patient with them. Try one more time. However you need to do it. Admonish them, encourage them, help them. But be patient with them. They're in process.

For those that lose patience I think verse 15 is there intentionally. Because I'm just wondering where that fits in. But then when you read it, in light of what we just read, you know, our patience can be tried in being helpful to the weak, can't it? Galatians 6 says, we're to bear each other's burdens, but watch that we don't get tempted ourselves. And so maybe Paul puts this timely verse 15 in saying that you could get so frustrated, irritated, worn out, worn down by a weaker Christian who just can't seem to get it together. So see that no one repays another evil for evil? What do I mean? Maybe they're the unruly brother or sister that when you try to help them, what do they want to do back to you? They want to bite you. I mean, as a sheep. Sorry. I moved the image. As a soldier. They're being unruly. And you go to bring them back in and they turn around and try to punch you. Again, hopefully they don't really do that. But he's saying, look, somebody might test you to the point you want to retaliate and give him evil for evil. He doesn't specify what that evil is. He's just saying, how are you going to return to them when they come at you like this or just run the other way? He says, don't retaliate, repay them evil for evil, but always seek after that which is good for one another and for all people. John Calvin writes about this verse, how these things connect. He said, "Patience contrasts with a feeling of irksomeness." What a great word. "For nothing tires us out more than trying to apply the correct cure to the different spiritual diseases our brothers and sisters suffer from." Amen. Apparently not. Nobody gets irked in here. Wow. I mean, we should be the strongest church in history. Either we're all perfect, or we just could give a rip about everybody else and we just go along our own way. But he is saying, like, when you are trying to patiently help the weak, encourage the fainthearted, admonish the unruly, at the very least, at the very least, we can become irked. But I think verse 15 shows at worst we can sin against them in response. It can provoke something in us. And we need to deal with that in our hearts. Sometimes it could be evident on the outside. Sometimes it's grumbling and murmuring on the inside that turns into gossiping somewhere else with somebody about where that person's at and why they're such a drag. And I mean, like, of course you say it with the purpose of prayer. So I think that's why 15 is there. I mean, generally speaking, that's the way of the Christian is to not return evil for evil, but seek after the good. But I see, especially when he's saying be patient. And I think back to 1 Corinthians 13:4. We studied that last year. And the first two aspects of love that Paul comes out with in verse four are love is patient and love is kind. And we said, how do those work together? We said, well, patient love is that long suffering love that sees the evil coming in the distance, coming up in our own hearts, and we keep it at bay as long as we can, and we counteract it with kindness, which is proactive, quick to do them good, slow to do them wrong, quick to do them good. And those things can work together.

Well, that's what you see in verse 15. He's saying slow to not repay them. That word, see that, is a word for take extra caution. Be extra aware that no one repays another evil for evil. When what?...we're ministering to one another, things go bad sideways taken the wrong way. But he says, be quick to seek their good. Be kind in your love. Be. Be patient in your love, and be kind and let those work together. So you kind of step back now, take a deep breath and say, you know, practically speaking, how do I put this all together? Well. Back to the beginning. We are moving on mission in one direction. We're striving to be all that Christ would have us to be. And I think these two verses show us that we are going to have challenges on the inside, not just the outside, but it's not just the culture being corrupted that's a challenge to the church. But within here we still have sin in our own hearts we have to deal with, and that's what we're here for one another to deal with. So level with that. The standard of the Christian life is going to be admonition, encouragement, helping, patience, not returning evil, proactively doing good. That's just part of what we signed up for. If we really believe the gospel's that good; Christ is that worthy, the church has a mission, then we will believe we need to carry these out. So on one level, just know this is part of the norm.

I would say on another level, let's take our focus off of, okay, because sometimes we want to take the words like what does it mean to admonish or encourage or help? And I'm like, I don't like that. What it means to help is to do the opposite of it. You know, don't be unhelpful. Like actually try something. It's a very general word, just like I said with admonish. But I would say what really helps us to apply these is to actually today take some time and even in life group this week, or just as you run this back, uh, try to distinguish in your mind or discern if you want to use that phrase, how good are you at categorizing people that you want to help? There is an emphasis on the action of what we say and do here, but I would equally challenge us not just to apply the commands, but discern the categories. How good are you? How accurate are you at diagnosing the categories of conditions for the sheep you minister to? Because a misdiagnosis can make the matters really worse. If you admonish a faint hearted person, you're going to crush them. What you thought was them being rebellious was them being small souled. Likewise, the small souled person that you're not getting a good read on and or the unruly person that maybe has the ability to make you think they're really down and out and struggling, and it's just a cover for their sin and you encourage them. Or maybe out of timidity, you just can't admonish. So the person that is being unruly in your life, you're always just like, ah, just let me hug you and keep at it. And you're just basically signing off on them, staying on the path of sin they're on. This doesn't come back to not maybe understanding admonition and encouragement and help. It's misunderstanding the category of sheep you're dealing with. Think about this in relation to life group. If some of you are new here and don't know what I'm talking about, it's our small group ministry. Out of 700 or so people that attend here on Sundays, about 400 or so are in a life group ministry, which we praise God for. We'd like to see it, everybody in it. That'd be an awesome problem to have, because Life Group is one of the key places where we get to live this stuff out. That's why we do it. We invite it into our lives. Or at least we try to. Unless you're in the hazmat suit. Thank you. But think life group leader about or even just life group member when you're in mutual ministry time. How are you doing at diagnosing someone properly? If I were your flock leader and go to ask you. Hey, how's that person doing? You say...not faithful. And I say, oh, sorry to hear that. Why are they not faithful? They're not coming. Why are they not coming? Because they're not faithful. Oh that's brilliant. Not faithful because they don't come. Don't come because they're not faithful. Man, you nailed it. Another scenario. Okay. Why are they not coming? Well, you know, they say they're just really tired. Really tired? Could that be weak? It could be helping the weak. Okay, so why do they say they're really tired? It's just a lot to get the kids ready each week for life group and this, that and the other. Oh is there a way we can help that? Well, you know, they have a new baby and it's up all night. And by the time they hit 5:00, like...oh, what if we provided a way for mom to get a nap? Like, you're trying to actually help the weak rather than be like, suck it up, man. Everybody gets tired. World's run by tired men...tired moms. Why aren't you coming? Well, just, um. Yeah. We're busy. Why are you busy? Uh, kids are in sports. Oh. How many days a week? And they tell you how many days a week. Okay. You're not faithful. No. Why is sports such a priority? Is it being unruly? Or maybe there's faint heartedness in there. Maybe that person thinks that you know that kid's future success rides on them playing six games of baseball a week. And you being a non athlete, just read that as unruly. And you don't get underneath it and say, like what? That's a lot of baseball. And your kid is six. But you unpack it because you're being patient with all and you understand, you know, growing up, getting a scholarship was everything to that guy and his dad. And his dad drove him so hard that in his mind, somewhere deep in his heart, he thinks if he doesn't set his kid up for the most success scholarships and sports or scholarships in academics, he's failed. Is that being unruly? Could be. Could it be faint hearted about it? And nobody's ever really dug into it. But, you know, you read the thing perfectly. Don't show up...unfaithful...admonish. It could be a combination of things and I think we'll be a better church, better life group leaders, better small group leaders, better disciples. I mean parents with your kids. How easy is it for us to misdiagnose our kids condition? You hear a scream in the other room. You know who's the usual culprit. You walk in ready to make the arrest, but you don't slow down enough to say hey, for the 50th time. What happened again? But you just immediately move into crushing them. Without saying, oh wait, this situation happened and it actually this time it wasn't your fault. You still responded wrong. But you're not just heavy with that, it's immediately your fault.

I mean, this applies in hundreds of ways. Just taking these three ideas, applying be patient to all and saying we could be much better disciplers in the church because at any given moment, and this is on the receiving end and the personalizing it, we could be in any one of these categories, not just us trying to help others, but looking into our own heart and realizing I get faint hearted. It doesn't help me when somebody just comes and skips right over, finding out what's going on in my life to admonish me. Why would I do that to somebody else so haphazardly? So understanding the categories we're in is maybe one of the most important things about applying this text today.

But I do want to speak to one last category of person, because Paul is speaking to brothers and sisters. Verse 14. He's speaking to Christians, and there are unruly Christians and weak Christians and faint hearted Christians. But if you're not in Christ today, you're in a different category. You're in the category of the lost. That's the most devastating category to be in in here. To be a lost sheep. To be a lost soldier. To be fighting on the wrong side. And what's amazing about this passage today, and should come as encouragement to you...it is because before any person could speak into your life to help you in the situation you're in...Christ comes to you. Christ comes to you in Isaiah 42. Where it says, behold, my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen one, in whom my soul delights. I have put my spirit among or on him. He will not cry out or raise his voice, nor make his voice heard in the streets a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not extinguish. Can I introduce you to the greatest admonisher and the greatest encourager, and the greatest helper that you can ever find. It's Jesus Christ. He's the one that if you find yourself lost or unruly today, he comes straight to put a truth into your mind this morning. He admonishes you to turn from your sin and to trust in him. He's the way, the truth and the life. He wants to set that thought in your mind today by way of instruction and correction. Christ says to you, you need me. I am that servant, the one in whom God delights. And I have come to bring justice to the nations. This great God, who would come to save the world from its sin, is speaking to you this morning, telling you must repent and believe in him for eternal life. And yet, you might receive that truth, but there could be a small souled, broken spirited part of your heart that feels like, well, why would he want to save me? I'm busted. I'm worthless. But that same one who can

bring forth justice to the nations says, if you're a bruised reed as in if you're this twig that snapped but it's hanging on by a thread. He doesn't finish the job. It says he will take that bruised reed and he won't break it. He'll restore it. He offers you his grace and his mercy. He died for sinners just like you. And if you were this smoldering wick that's down to that. What? You see it in a candle it's down to its last spark. And just the slightest gust of wind from anywhere miles away could put it out. And he says, no, I'm going to, in my perfect life on your account and my sacrificial death, I will cover you. And I will bring life back to you. That's who you need to meet today. You need to meet the great admonisher and the great encourager and the great helper, who in your weakest says, come to me, you who are what?...weary and heavy laden, weak and faint hearted, maybe even unruly, and I will give you rest. That's the Christ who calls to you today. You need to call on him to be saved. He offers you forgiveness of sin, and all he asks of you is to cry out to him for mercy. Save me, the sinner. That's the good news of the good Shepherd. He calls you to turn back and flee to him. To call on him to be saved.

For those in Christ today, I'll close with a quote from Richard Sibbes. He wrote, he was a Puritan, of whom it was said that heaven was in him before he was in heaven. And he wrote a little tract called The Bruised Reed, an Exposition of Isaiah 42 fulfilled in Christ. And this is what he says to the believer.

"That though we may think we have moved on from that state of being a bruised reed or a dimly burning wick, we really haven't. It says bruising makes us set a higher value on Christ, for then the gospel becomes the gospel indeed, as we see, the fig leaves of immorality will do us no good. Even after our conversion, we still need bruising. So that reeds may know themselves to be reeds and not oaks. There must be conformity to our head. Jesus Christ, who was bruised for us, that we may know how much we are bound to him."

Let's pray. Father, we thank you this morning for your son, the Savior of the world. Who came for the first time to save those who are perishing. Not to snuff them out. Who will return a second time in judgment. But in between that time, even today, he calls sinners to himself. And we pray that you would do that saving work in here for the person who finds himself away from him, away from you...rebellious, living life by their own design, trusting in their own righteousness that's shadow righteousness. And they know it's not the real thing. But would you reveal yourself to them as their Savior this morning, the great Shepherd, the guardian of our souls who calls his sheep and they hear his voice. They turn and are saved. We thank you that you minister to us this morning, Spirit, through pointing us to Christ so that we can be the encouragers, the admonishers, and the helpers that he saved us to be. We ask this all in his name. Amen.

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The Marks of a Good Church: Loving Leadership

This passage is near to my heart, talking about leadership and the relationship between the pastor and his people. Uh, speaking on that subject, being one of your elders and preaching pastor is a unique joy to me. And, um, it's also near to my heart today because I get to tell you what you can do to make my life better. It's just wonderful sometimes how these things shake out. Really, I mean, two verses could be a one week sermon. I'm going to turn into a three month series...hopefully name, image, likeness, deals, book deals. My Instagram account may go from the dozens to the millions, all because I can just camp out here for a long time. However, upon studying it this week, what you see there is that these verses are not very complicated, they're not complex, and I don't intend to make it that. We want to see what is so wonderful and glorious this morning as perfectly designed, God has the church between leadership and membership, between pastor and people, between shepherd and sheep. So I'm excited to get to speak on this today for reasons other than self-serving. For a few weeks, we've been in the return of Christ, the rapture of the living, the resurrection of the dead. And now, as you look at 1 Thessalonians 5:12 to the finish, it can seem a bit scattered if you look at all the different phrases, seemingly independent thoughts that Paul has, it just seems like everything maybe he's been sitting on to tell this church now comes out rapid fire and it could look a little bit disjointed...might be the word. And as I looked at it this week and tried to think how we want to finish this letter out, and is there a way to kind of lump together some of the ideas rather than just really say, okay, I mean, one pastor that preached this section took about 20 sermons because instead of finding the connectivity, just saw one phrase, one imperative, one command, and just spent a week on each one of them. Whereas when I was looking at it this week, what it seems and I don't know if it was Paul's intention or not, that he is dealing with what he would see as the preeminent virtue in the church...love...in three different fashions. In 12 and 13 loving leadership goes both ways. Love from the shepherd to the sheep and vice versa. And then in 14-22, which might seem the most varied, really just the love that exists between the flock. The mutual ministry that a church has to one another is rooted in, grounded in love. And then the last section, the benediction in 23 to 28, is really highlighting the great love of God towards his sheep. How it's the work that he does in us and through us that allows us to be everything that we can be. And so really, that's the way I'd like to end this wonderful letter in the spirit of the Great Commandment. As we call it around here, part of our mission statement that we want to fulfill the Great Commission, go and make disciples in the spirit of the Great Commandment. And what's that?...well, that's Matthew 22:37 to 40. Teacher, what's the great commandment in the law? And Jesus' response is, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. So if I had my druthers...how would I say Paul is thinking and trying to finish this letter out? Is it scattered thoughts that he's just, you know, pulls the dump truck up and puts it all on the people versus saying, well, maybe going back to the beginning when he remembers their what?... their work of faith and labor of love, that that thought has never escaped him. That really, it's the love that God has shown this church by his grace and their great beginning, and that is what's going to carry it to the end. 
So today's verses in dealing with church leadership, uh, he will deal with this essential ingredient...loving leadership. And it was then and it is still today...it's right up there with anything else that you would say what's necessary, what's essential for a healthy church body, a good church. And absolutely at the top of the list must be the loving leadership in that church. And I chose that title for today because it functions in two ways. Loving leadership first speaks to the idea that a good church needs loving leadership, from its shepherds to its sheep. As much as it needs sheep who love their shepherds in return. So this sermon, according to its title, wasn't meant to just be a one way street. When you read it and think, oh, loving leadership, it means the the leaders must be loving towards us. Yes, it does mean that. And we'll see that in the text today. But it also means the same. How do the sheep exert love, I should say, to the leadership. What does that look like? And that's also addressed today. So it is this two way street, this crucial relationship of love between a pastor and his people. And you know this. That loving leadership is where good health in the church starts. And without it, how bad health in the church spreads. Loving leadership that goes both ways is where good health in the church begins, and the absence of it will be where a healthy church ends. And many of you know that sadly, by way of experience. Some of you have seen the fruit of a good, loving relationship between the leadership and its membership. And some of you have also lived through when that has gone by the wayside. If that relationship gets damaged, begins to deteriorate, and becomes detached outside of a miracle, outside of a work of God's grace, that church is doomed to die. Because that's what's at the heart of the leadership, of the direction of the church, is understanding that Christ, when he said, I will build my church and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it, also immediately did what?...commissioned his disciples to go and spread that message, and to plant those churches and to raise up others that could teach and preach and model and shepherd. And so when there becomes a fissure in the relationship between shepherd and sheep there's very little hope for that church to survive. Which is why it's such a vital topic today. So follow with me as I read 1 Thessalonians 5:12 to 13...so that we can be at HBC all that God would have for us to be. 
"But we request of you, brother and sister, that you appreciate those who diligently labor among you and have charge over you in the Lord and give you instruction, and that you esteem them very highly in love because of their work. Live in peace with one another." Father, your Word is a lamp to our feet and light to our path, so lead us, Holy Spirit, into your truth and into your love today. Amen. 
Well, as I said earlier, it's a pretty straightforward word from Paul to these people, and I hope it can be for us. Now, as you see right out of the gates, he begins with a gentle word. So let that be our guide, as it was Paul's guide here, when he says, we request of you, this is him moving on to a new subject matter. But he's making a request. And not this heavy handed command. This is a pastoral nudge, not a knockout punch...is the tone of Paul with these two verses. He's basically writing as he moves in to talk about the peace down in verse 13, the peace that needs to exist amongst the church body. He's saying that, look, you've already been practicing this. You're excelling in it. Keep it up. He's not writing this to correct a bad problem. There's nothing we can find in 1 or 2 Thessalonians or Acts 17 that would suggest that there was fomenting, some revolution. Some anti-clericalism against some authoritarian despots in this church. There's nothing for us to surmise that from the text. All we have is that as Paul was going to close this letter out, and want this church to focus on some important things and excel still more. He doesn't want this opportunity to pass to remind them...request of them...a gentle nudge. Not a harsh word on the wonderful potential there is for a relationship between pastor and his people.

So the first thing he wants them to know, our first point today in verse 12 is know who your leaders are. We request of you, brothers and sisters, to appreciate those who diligently labor among you. Now, this is on the heels of Paul reminding these Christians, if you just look from last week's text, the focus we had there was Paul trying to help them remember the defining mark of their lives as the end approaches...between light and dark, between day and night. And so he gives them that, identity reminder. You're children of the day, you're children of the light. And so you should be living like it. And maybe the end of this letter from 12 to 22 especially, is him filling in some details on how to live as children of the light. And first on his mind is the relationship between sheep and shepherds. Now, at the time Paul writes this and we've mentioned this before AD 50, we have to be fair to what these people would have known and not known. And even the language of leadership that is not present here tells us something about how leadership was seen in the church 20 years after Christ left, and with only a few years of Paul's missionary endeavors. We're only a few years past his first missionary journey. Well, most believe approximately AD 46, and that he made it to Thessalonica somewhere around maybe AD 49. And this letter is maybe less than a year later. That in Acts 13 and 14, and you can go back and read that later this week. He and Barnabas are preaching in the regions of Syria, Cyprus, Galatia, Lycia and on the end of that trip is the first time we get a mention of Paul intentionally going back, visiting some churches to appoint leaders. That is referred to in Acts 14 as elders. I'll read it for you. So this is the end of the first missionary journey before Paul heads back to Jerusalem. And it says this...after they, and he's talking about Paul and Barnabas. Verse 21, Acts 14. After they had preached the gospel to that city and had made many disciples, they returned to Lystra and Iconium and to Antioch. They had already been at these places planting new churches, establishing new believers. But they couldn't stay forever. They were on a mission. They were taking the gospel to Jerusalem, Judea, and eventually to the ends of the earth. Verse 22, strengthening the souls of the disciples, encouraging them to continue in the faith. Which is exactly what we're hearing in this letter, isn't it? It's a strengthening letter. It's an excel still more letter. And then verse 23, when they had appointed elders for them in every church. And there you see, there was a time gap between when they first were at these churches in Lystra, Iconium and Antioch. And then on a return trip, some time had went on. They appointed elders for them in every church. So it seems we could put together that why Paul might not be saying, brothers and sisters, appreciate the elders is because elders haven't been appointed yet...the office that is. What he probably still has on his hands here are what we're going to read, which is you have some who have emerged from the pack, shown the capacity to do the things we're about to talk about in verse 12. But time and truth need to go hand in hand. He didn't leave this church without some idea of what leadership should be, what it should look like. Uh, first and foremost, because he modeled it to them. But from what we can put together from 1 and 2 Thessalonians, he's not talking about an office or a title here, is he? You find no mention of the word elder or deacon or overseer. Words that are going to come along later in the New Testament. Right now in AD 50, a decade before some of those words are used by Paul, particularly in 1 Timothy. He's just saying, there are those among you. You know who they are, but I want you to know them in a way that goes beyond just names and faces. When he says, I want you, brothers, to appreciate those who diligently labor, why I keep using this word know and why I titled this section that is because really, that word appreciate comes from a root word in the Greek that was for knowing someone, but knowing them beyond just the facts. It was an intimate knowledge. It would be a word in the New Testament for appreciation, acknowledgement, respect, as in you've gotten beyond the surface with this person. You know what they're about. It doesn't mean you're best friends with them. But he's saying that there should be recognition of this person's life to the degree that you can appreciate them accordingly. And if it was about the title, then he might have said that you appreciate those elders. But instead of talking about titles, he focuses on task. How are we going to know those who we are to appreciate and honor and respect? Well, I'm going to give you three characteristics of them. And you see those in verse 12 defined and described by what they do. Not some title that Paul has bestowed upon them yet. They diligently labor among you, they have charge over you in the Lord, and they give you instruction, and that's all the same person. This isn't dividing out between there's some who do this, some who do that, some who don't. No, the sequence of this is for Paul to say, I'm going to describe this person to you, and that's who you should know. Know them by their labor. And as I tried to kind of take those three descriptions, and this is why this sermon is for both you and I. Because you should be able to identify these types of leaders amongst you. And those who have been identified as these type of leaders get their what?...they get their marching orders from us. Even though this was written to the sheep; this is also for the shepherd. And so let's look at those three qualities in verse 12. If you want to call them sub points. What are the marks of a spiritual leader for you to appreciate? I'll give you three words as they relate to the task of a shepherd...caring, leading, and feeding. Caring, leading and feeding are the three marks of spiritual leaders. And they are these marks in early form. That's what's so important to know this passage as it relates to knowing what to look for in a pastor. This is ground level...grass roots. No title or office being mentioned here. This is, you will know this man by his fruits. He's a shepherd. And shepherds care and they lead and they feed their sheep. So let's break those down. Let's talk about caring for the sheep. That's the phrase diligently labor among you. It describes the work overall, the work of caring for sheep. It's a wearisome toil, as you would expect, the work of a shepherd to be. On a very literal level, a shepherd guarding against dangerous threats...wolves. I mean, David talks about back when he was a shepherd fighting off a bear. I mean, that's dangerous work, toilsome work. And then chasing down the sheep, trying to keep them with the pack. I've never hung out with a shepherd. I'm purely guessing at this, but I imagine it's hard work rounding them all up. It's hard work rounding up my own five little sheep at home, and we're on a barely a half an acre. And I was driving through the hinterlands of a distant land called, I think it was Taylorsville this weekend. And, I mean, it was the hills were alive with the sound of music. It was lush and green, and I looked over as I was taking my son to a birthday party, getting lost on the roads because there were a couple different Icard Ridge roads. But eventually we just come upon to the left was this awesome area with a bunch of goats in it, and now I'm going, I'm not calling anybody goats here, I'm just saying instead of sheep, goats. But it was a big area. And as I'm thinking about this text, If the guy was like, hey, Adam, get out there and round those goats up, I would have no idea what to do. Like, am I supposed to take a rope and...they're just going to scatter everywhere. And that's the toilsome work. That's the diligent labor that a shepherd's to be doing amongst his sheep. Its sweat, its tears. Fortunately for me, it's never been blood. Let's keep it that way. And it can be argued, I mean, this was what Paul thought of when he thought of the work of the ministry as a shepherd. The idea of work, that word labor there is one of his favorite words in the New Testament to describe the work of the ministry. 1 Corinthians 15:10, by the grace of God, I am what I am. His grace toward me didn't prove vain, but I labored even more than all. 2 Corinthians 11:23, are they servants of Christ? I speak as if insane, I more so in far more labors. And then he goes on to explain specifically all those labors he had for the sheep. Galatians 4:8, I fear for you that perhaps I have labored over you in vain. Philippians 2:16, holding fast the word of life, so that in the day of Jesus I have reason to glory, because I did not run in vain, nor toil or labor in vain. Colossians 1:29, for this purpose I labor, striving according to his power in me. 1 Timothy 4:10, for it is for this I labor and strive because we fixed our hope on the living God. Are you getting a flavor of how Paul thinks about his ministry?...it's diligent labor. My life verse 1 Timothy 5:17. Elders who rule well are considered worthy of double honor...just joking about that. Especially those who work hard at preaching and teaching. 2 Timothy 2:6, the hard working farmer ought to be the first to receive his share of the crops. You might have thought that was a long walk for a short drink of water, but I read all those to reinforce Paul's first point. It could seem like, oh yeah, diligently labor. Yeah. I mean, he breaks a sweat. No. Loving leadership from the shepherd to the sheep is first and foremost defined by this care...that is effort, that is sweat, that is toil, that is work. And if it's anything less than that, it's not shepherding. So for the shepherds here, my fellow elders, hard work should be obvious and evident as we labor among our sheep. Don't lose sight of that little phrase among you. Remember that back in the beginning of this letter, how Paul talks about, you know, verse five of chapter one, the kind of men we prove to be among you. And then how many times he kept saying in chapter one and two, you know, you know, you know, when he had to defend his ministry against those who tried to discredit it. How do they know? Because he was among them. And was he just standing around among them? No, he was laboring. As puritan Matthew Henry writes, pastors be laborers, not loiterers. Growing up I would see those signs around town. No loitering. You know, you don't really understand what that word means as a ten year old, and then you figure it out. You understand that word, and you're like, what's so bad about loitering? If I just want to stand next to this wall, what's so bad about that? Well, i don't know still to this day, actually. I'm just now I'm contemplating it. Is it so wrong for a person to just want to stand on a sidewalk and do nothing?...not hurting anything. But for a pastor to be a loiterer is a crime. A shepherd that just stands around as if there's no work to be done as if there's no labor to be done. And yet, like any fallen individual, it's tempting. It's tempting to loiter as a pastor, as a shepherd, but to not labor or to make it look like you're laboring. And so that's a call to the shepherds to roll up their sleeves or shepherds, whatever he wears. Get your hands in the wool and smell like sheep. Exegete that, brothers. Smell like sheep. If you don't, you're not a shepherd. For the sheep loving leadership begins with appreciating those you see in the work, having a greater awareness of the work of the leaders. If you are new to HBC. We are an elder-led church and there's passages that talk about that structure. 1 Timothy 3, 1 Timothy 5, Titus 1, 1 Peter 5, Acts 20, Hebrews 13. But we're not here to preach those. We're just here to focus on this first sub point of point number one, to know your shepherds is to be able to recognize and appreciate the ones who are working hard among you. Now that might beg the question, hey, if you just take it at that. Like, aren't all Christians to be striving? Aren't we all to be workers? And the answer is yes. So what differentiates these leaders from others? And that's actually as the next two words come into view. We all are to work hard. We all are to read Colossians 1:29 and want to strive. But now look where he goes to take their diligently laboring. But there's two particular ways in which they labor in which they care. So if you're thinking, when I'm looking for the qualifications by way of work of a pastor. They care for the sheep, its work, its labor, its effort, its among. And then it kind of can break out into these two next phrases have charge over you in the Lord and give you instructions. So that's where I get the idea of leading and feeding, having charge over you in the Lord. he next phrase is leading the sheep. Caring goes into those two categories, leading the sheep a greater spiritual responsibility than the rest of the church body. By way of that charge over you in the Lord. It's a word that charge over you that is a compound word meaning to stand in front of. It evokes the image of that shepherd because of the dangers and the need to be guided towards green pastures and still waters, he has to be out front. He can't be lagging behind loitering, if you will. And that's what that phrase charge over you means. It's not about lording over, but it's leading in front. It literally means to stand in front. It relates in 1 Timothy 3...just a few pages over to the calling of a man who aspires to the office of overseer. That's the word also for elder. And one of the qualifications for an overseer, verse four. He must be one who manages his own household well. Why? Because verse five, if a man does not know how to manage his own household, how will he take care of the Church of God? That word for manages is the same exact word here of have charge over. It's the word for stands in front of. And it gives the simple qualification that if a man does not stand in front of his family well and lead his family well, what would you expect him to do if you put him in charge of the church? Is he suddenly going to know how to turn it on, if it's never been on? He won't. And so that's the first level, one of the first qualifiers for a man who aspires to the office of elder. And that's why elders in this church have to be examined in how they lead their little family before they would be entrusted to a larger family. George Whitfield, for whom this room is named, said this, "For every house is, as it were, a little parish, every family of flock. And if any of the little ones perish through a leader's neglect, the blood God requires at their hands." It's a weighty call, first and foremost to the fathers among us, to the leaders of homes. And to never want to discourage a man from aspiring, but to let them know the high calling that it is. And that that first level of qualification is not that he could sit amongst a group of pastors in a church and impress them with the doctrine he knows. But to ask that man, what does this look like in your home? How have you led what you were entrusted with however many years it was ago that you got married? What have you been doing to lead and labor there? Before, we would entrust you to lead and labor here. So that's the point Paul is making in...have charge over you in the Lord. Now, it's important that we see the phrase in the Lord. It's important as among you connects to diligently labor...charge over you in the Lord is the most important part of this verse, because that's where spiritual authority is derived. All authority is from Christ and to Christ and through Christ for the Shepherd. As in he does not at any moment misunderstand that his authority is delegated authority. It's borrowed authority. He is a stand in. For the what? ...authority of Jesus Christ over His church. Jesus's church. It's not the pastor's church. It's not the elders' church. It's Christ's church. And so when we know that all authority is from him and for him and through him, and that as Hebrews 13:17 says, obey your leaders and submit to them, for they keep watch over your souls, as those who will give an account. That I have no higher level of accountability as a spiritual leader than that. The account I will give is to the Lord Jesus Christ, and any and every charge I have to the flock is under his charge. So in a strange way, as I was thinking about this this week, I am a servant to the sheep here, but you're not my master. Because servants tend to have masters, right? Oh, who are you the servant of?...there's your master. It's not how it works. You might say that sounds kind of prideful. Could, but it's very dangerous if I think you're my master. Because then who am I going to be working to please? The temptation to become a yes-man. The temptation, on the other hand, if I think it's just you I answer to, and I have enough sway and charisma and charm to woo you. I laughed myself thinking about that because it's a joke. But if I don't understand that my master is the Lord Jesus Christ and my charge is under him, the fear of man becomes a pretty big temptation. But if I understand, I am absolutely your servant. This is what I exist for. But I answer to him. That's where the weight comes. That I give an account to him for how I served you. Not to mean I'm not above feedback...people asking questions. My own son...Dad, do you try to get better at preaching? Yes, son. Please don't ask that on the drive home. Wait till Monday. 1 Peter 5:4 says, when the chief shepherd appears, that's why we know we're under shepherds, because the only chief shepherd in the New Testament is Jesus. 1 Peter 5:4, when the chief Shepherd appears, you'll receive...you under-shepherds...will receive the unfading crown of glory. So just as there's no greater weight of accountability, there's no greater anticipation of reward than that...to receive the unfading crown of glory from him for how I shepherded. So if a pastor loses sight of that, if he forgets who's head of the church, he's done. He's done, and he could still, for a time being, have a following of acolytes who drink Kool-Aid of charisma, but he'll eventually be shown for who he is. More importantly, and this is the daunting thing, that guy that buys his own hype and thinks he's in charge. He will be shown eventually for who he's not. He's not the chief shepherd...never will be. None of us will be. And God in His grace may give him some time to learn that the hard way, or he may shortcut it. He may speed it up. But leading the sheep, that second idea having charge in the Lord comes down to giving spiritual guidance. If you're like Adam, what's the definition for having charge in the Lord? I would define it this way. Leading the sheep comes down to giving spiritual guidance according to the doctrine of Jesus Christ as head of the church. Like, I need to know that if I'm going to give any spiritual leadership to this body or any elder is, I need to know good doctrine. Who's the head of the church?...Jesus. And then direction through the Holy Spirit in the Word of God. So it's no authority is from me, to me or through me. It's from him and to him and through him, guided by his Spirit and the Word. So that's the second one which leads into the third...feeding the flock, giving instruction. So the diligent labor is carrying, the charge over you is leading, and to give you instruction is feeding. Good shepherds of the flock are defined by their teaching. They keep the sheep healthy through a steady diet of good doctrine. Now that word for instruction, you know, it's a pretty plastic word in a New Testament. I mean, it's malleable. It's used in a lot of different contexts. It's admonishing, it's exhorting, it's explaining. But the word itself actually isn't so much about how you do it. It's what you're trying to do. Instruction here...this word is what the shepherd is trying to do in feeding the flock is this. And this is the literal word to place something in the mind. So, what am I trying to do this morning with you all? I'm trying to place something in your mind...the truth of the Word of God. That the weight of the Word of God is explained and applied by the preaching of the word will leave you with some weight of implication of how you should live your life. I'm driving for something not to again, and especially in this text, achieve some agenda of my own. But actually, if I can explain it and instruct it and inform you in the right way, the Word of God through the Spirit of God will do the work for me if I've done it right. Try to place that in your mind to put it in there. The inescapable reality that this is something I must obey today because God says it. That's what it means for the shepherd to feed the sheep. Paul trained others to do this, to proclaim it publicly, to teach it from house to house, to pour into individuals. And so in our church, it's not just what I do up here, but it's what we're doing all the time and trying to train others to put the Word of God in people's minds through Bible studies, life groups, counseling one on one. This past weekend, raising up men in this church to be able to teach at the men's retreat. Now there was Kurtis teaching, but then there was three other men that we have worked with to grow in teaching the Word of God, to be able to put it in the minds of the hearers. It's something that I and other elders here are called to equip the entire church to do on a regular basis, but then we want to see you take it and do it as well. We don't want it to stop with us. And we rejoice that we see it happening around here all the time. But don't get caught up in the how as in is it, you know, is it straightforward? Is it from the side? Is it this heavy thing? Is it. No. It's what he's saying is it's the end game of it. What do you have to do to get that in the mind of the listener? However you can do that without compromising the integrity of the message itself. And so that's why we even train our teachers and children's and youth to not teach the same way that I do. One, because they're their own teacher, but also they need to know their audience and the way that a young mind or a young mind can receive the truth isn't the same way that you're going to receive it. That's the important part of this thing if we're going to get it right. So in feeding and leading, pastors are caring for the sheep. And kind of wrapping this first verse up. If you're to know us and appreciate those who diligently labor and have charge and give instruction again to my fellow elders, can the sheep see in us the fulfillment of these descriptions? If you're friends with a pastor, maybe you have a buddy who's in the ministry and he struggling in his church. Maybe sometimes wondering, what am I there to do? Maybe you could encourage him in this this week what you just learned. Say brother, don't overthink the thing. There are a lot of other things you could think you're supposed to do, but if you're not doing this, you're not pastoring. For the sheep...what does it look like for you to appreciate those who are leading you? I guess simply said, do you know your leaders? And I'm not talking about our likes and dislikes. Although hey, I will not refuse a pie if you catch on. I drop those hints about sandwiches and other things, but it's far more than that. Do you understand us by our work, by our leading and feeding? That's first command of Paul today is to appreciate those by knowing what it is they're called to do. 
 And then point number two today, verse 13, not just know what they do, but love what your leaders do. That's the thrust of verse 13. That you esteem them very highly in love because of their work. What's the work? We just talked about the work. We broke it down. It's caring, it's feeding, it's leading. And because of that work that they do, you have an esteem and a respect. But it's not just lip service. It's a love from the heart because you can try to tell people to respect you by the way they talk to you. But they could say it and not mean it. Yes, sir. Yes, ma'am. And there's no love behind those words. So Paul's not just looking for "yes, elders. Thank you, elders." It's, what's the love behind it that causes you to esteem them very highly? He says it's because of the work. Which means you need to know what that work is in order to love them for it. And then when you see that work done, that love grows, because that work is directly related to your life as the sheep. And in what that shepherd is trying to do in my life. He's trying to love me. He's trying to lead me. He's trying to care for me. He's trying to feed me. So this other request, this godly nudge, is to honor them not for some platform or position, but for the pains of their labor. There's a fine line between worshipping the man versus appreciating the work. Nobody's calling for pastor worship here. Just calling for people to recognize the work that's being done among them and then in love, esteem them for it, honor them for it. Honor them for the right things, the shepherding things. There's pastors today who call themselves pastors, but they do no shepherding. One way to recognize that is some ways in which they describe themselves in ways that pastors would have never described themselves. Pastors today are visionaries, influencers, thought leaders. They don't work like they've been in a pasture or smell like it. They don't preach like sages of old, but pop culture experts of today. They're a shepherd to screens, but not to sheep. They're known to followers, but not to a flock. They're captivated by the numbers, but not captive to real names in their own congregation. They might be known to many online all around the world, but they're not known by their own church. They're there, but they're not among them. And that's more prevalent today now than ever. That's not a pastor because the pastor's title defines his task. He belongs to a people. And his people belong to Christ, and he's been entrusted with them. The sheep don't exist for him to build some platform to be known and noted. He exists for them. As Paul says earlier here in 1 Thessalonians 2:20, you are our glory and joy. Do you get that?...how that relates to this. You don't exist for my glory. You don't exist for me, so I could have something to do every week. I exist for you. And I exist for your good. And when you're good flourishes in Jesus Christ because you ultimately belong to him, and I'm just an under shepherd then I can say, like Paul, this isn't about me. Chapter two, verse six, we didn't seek glory from men. You're the glory. Like, that's the most amazing thing about being a pastor is to see the glory of God that we're being transformed into one degree to the next, Paul says. To see that happening in a people's life. Why would you try to steal that? Why would you try to get in the way of that intercept that when it's all for him? But it's tempting to do, and it can be tempting to do if you don't know what you're actually called to do. So the point Paul is making in verse 13 here is that the love from a sheep to the shepherd is proportional to his loving labors for his sheep. If a pastor is wondering why there's no love from the sheep, maybe he has to step back and look at his labors for them. There should be an affectionate admiration, because the sheep know the work that the shepherd is doing for their good. And they understand the calling he's been charged with. So what are shepherds? They're like Moses helping Israel to make it out of the wilderness, across the Jordan, into the Promised Land. They're like Hopeful in Pilgrim's Progress at the end, trying to help Christian get across the river. The best work I get to do is to help you get to heaven. It's the best thing I get to do...to help guide you to the gates...back to your chief Shepherd. And anything I can do here to help that...that's what I exist for. I don't define my identity by it. But it is what my job is. And if it ever stops being my job here or any of the elders here, it stops being their job. They're not pastors. They become something else...decision makers, bean counters, board members, whatever. The title that matters most is the one that describes us most thoroughly...Shepherd. And you don't have a shepherd without sheep. And when you do that and the sheep respond in love, it's heaven on earth. So maybe today as we apply this to our lives, Verse 13 for you. What's the nature of your love to your shepherds? Maybe it's difficult because you've been burned in the past, maybe here or somewhere else. But consider today's text. God's reminding you, if that's you this morning, if there's some angst, if there's some distance between you and church leadership. God's reminding you, sheep, that's not the part of the pasture he wants you to live in. It's not healthy there. It's not life giving there. The Word of God says to love them for their work. Esteem them...even in spite of their flaws. Speaking from experience, there are no perfect pastors to follow. That doesn't excuse me or others from the charge to be your example. But it does give us the ability to lead this church in the way God designed. And for a good church to flourish, good leaders need good followers, just as good followers want good leaders. We can't do it without you, and you're not to do it without us. That's the way God designed it. It's wonderful when you think about that as a pastor. What am I going to do without you? Nothing. I could resort to becoming a TikTok pastor. I don't think I'd have anybody watching. What can I do without you?...any of our elders here...without sheep? And likewise, you're not to do it without us. And so those ditches, those man-made ditches that we make, the anticlericalism ditch. We don't need leaders. We can figure it out. We're all a kingdom of priests. Or the other ditch of authoritarianism. Just, it's all on that, pastor. He's the man. Let him do it all by himself. You don't go in those ditches. You stay on the path that was plowed by the Lord Jesus Christ, which is today, is to say that it's a pastor and his people working together, trying to fulfill. Why do you think live in peace with one another comes at the end of that? He's not having to say that because they're not living in peace. He's just saying, look, if you understand the beauty and wonder and joy of this relationship between people and pastor. You'll be living in peace with one another. And that's how it's meant to be. That's how the gospel moves forward. How does the gospel get hindered? Church division. Right? What slows the church down more than division? Nothing. What stops the gospel from making progress more than a divided congregation? People against their pastor, the pastor against his people. What a waste of time. What a waste of money! What a waste of effort. So live at peace with one another isn't just Paul kind of throwing a shot in at the buzzer. He's saying that's that's the great spot to live when you get how this all works together. A pastor with no people following in love will get nowhere on his own. Stuck, stymied. Like a stagnant pond with no life. It's a dead church, but a people with no pastor leading is like a wild river with streams flowing in all directions except straight ahead, full of sound and fury, accomplishing nothing. It's fierce and flowing, but it's chaotic and confused...a Disorderly church, but a pastor and people together, loving leadership from the shepherd and sheep loving their leadership produces what Paul is hoping for here...a glistening lake teeming with life to the edges, full of enjoyment for all that are in it, living in peace with one another. 
Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your word this morning. We thank you for the hope that it calls us to. We thank you for the joy that it brings our hearts. We thank you that as it works on our lives and especially a text like this, that can be so easily forgotten. Just two verses tucked away in 1 Thessalonians gives us such clear direction for our day to day lives here in this church. Do its work in me. Do its work in our leaders. Do its work in our people. We pray. We thank you and praise you in Jesus name. Amen.

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The Marks of a Good Christian: Aware

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Last week in 13 to 18 the focus of Paul talked about the return of Jesus Christ was on comforting those who had lost loved ones who died in Christ. And yet they were still a grieving going on related to not knowing exactly, what would become of them when it came to the return of Christ, if they were going to miss out, if they were going to be left behind as those who had died in Christ and not gotten to see his return. And so the topic really last week was bereavement. It was how we should think and feel about the loved ones of ours who die in Jesus Christ. And we came away without any shadow of a doubt that there is hope, not just hope for those who die in Christ, and they are with Christ and will be forever. But it turns to this week, now to the topic of judgment, how those who are alive Christians think and feel about our own and our own mortality. And in both cases, as we saw in Colossians 1:27, Paul said, Jesus Christ is our hope of glory. So whichever way you want to come at it, if you want to come at it from those who have died in Christ and wondering what their future is when Christ returns and how they'll be raised and where they'll be, their hope is in Jesus Christ. Because with him in life means with him in death and with him again in the great resurrection from the dead. Now this week, our anchor and our hope is in Christ for those who are alive and what becomes of us. So it's no longer about bereavement, it's about judgment. And maybe if last week's main emphasis was the hope we have the anchor we have in Christ...this week, for those who are alive, Paul wants them to know you need to be aware of what the future holds. And the focus of today's section is being aware most of all of what already has been said rather than speculate on what hasn't been said about the future return of Jesus Christ. And also turning our attention to ourselves and saying, as we think about the return of Jesus, rather than speculate on calendar dates and try to predict, we prepare best by focusing on our own conduct, on our behavior, on who we are in Christ, not focusing on everything outside of us. But the best way to be prepared, Paul is going to teach these Thessalonians today is to be anchored in the truth of God's Word and what it says for us. Curiosity about the future and where it's headed for our own sake and others sake is not unbiblical, but it can be, if taken to far unhelpful or even spiritually unhealthy. Fixating on trying to predict and lose sight of that which has already been said and needs no prediction. This church clearly had had false teachers come in and taken what already had been taught and start to twist it. And the beliefs that these believers once held too closely now, might have been getting filled with doubt. And so Paul has to address this matter. He addressed last week those who are asleep. This week he is addressing those who are awake, but he is going to use sleep language, not in the sense of those who are dead asleep, but saying if you're awake, then live like it. Act like it, because our beliefs are ultimate in determining our behavior. And if we really do believe that Jesus Christ is coming again, and we are to be aware of how we are to act, then there's a certain way we should be living. The main truth he wants us to be aware of is not the date of a return, but the state of our soul when he returns. 
So let's read 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11, and then we'll see how Paul gives three exhortations for our awareness when it comes to the return of Christ. "Now, as to the times in epochs, brethren, you have no need of anything to be written to you. For you yourselves know full well that the day of the Lord will come, just like a thief in the night. And while they are saying, peace and safety, then destruction will come upon them suddenly, like labor pains upon a woman with child, and they will not escape. But you brothers are not in darkness, that the day would overtake you like a thief. For you are all sons of light and sons of day. We are not of night, nor of darkness. So then, let us not sleep as others do, but let us be alert and sober. For those who sleep, do their sleeping at night, and those who get drunk get drunk at night. But since we are of the day, let us be sober, having put on the breastplate of faith and love, and as a helmet the hope of salvation. For God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep, we will live together with him. Therefore encourage one another and build up one another, just as you also are doing." He who has ears to hear, let him hear, O Lord. And with the measure we use, may it be measured back to us accordingly and abundantly in Christ. 
As I mentioned, there's three movements to this passage; verses 1 to 3, 4 to 7, and then 8 to 11. And you can see that as Paul's use of conjunctions. He starts...now as to the times, verse 4 then...but you, brethren, and then verse 8...but since we each one of those times. He uses that conjunction, he's moving slightly to a new topic of awareness overall, still wanting them to get the big picture, which is the best preparation you can have for the return of the Lord is to be aware of your own state. 
 So his first admonition in verse 1 to 3, section one is you need to be Listening Up Rather Than Looking up. Listen up is Paul's exhortation to these somewhat worried, kind of nervous biting their nails Christians thinking about the return of Jesus. He says, listen up. Rather than be so fixated on looking up, get your head out of the clouds and into the Bible. When he's saying, listen up, he is in verse one and two, referring to there are some things that you already have been written. There are some things that already have been told to you, but clearly you have forgotten them. So let this be a reminder to you. Now as to the times and epochs, brothers, and you have no need anything to be written to you. Somewhere along the line, when Paul was at this church in Acts 17, the few weeks or few months that he was with them, he preached Christ and Him crucified, and he also taught on the return of the Lord. And even that phrase he uses times and epochs should maybe trigger in our minds perhaps the exhortation...slight rebuke that Jesus had to give to his disciples when he was about to go back to heaven. You could turn to Acts chapter 1 to see it. That Jesus is standing there with the disciples and hey, they're feeling pretty good about themselves. Their Messiah died, rose again victorious over sin and death. And they're probably thinking, what's going to stop the kingdom from being right now? So they ask him, Acts 1:6, Lord, is it at this time you are restoring the kingdom to Israel? This is what we were getting behind. We lost hope. You died. You rose again. We have hope again. So is now the time? And what was Jesus' response in Acts 1:7? It is not for you to know the times or epochs which the father is fixed by his own authority. Your job is to go be my witnesses. So instead of being so worried about my future plans, you need to be focused on your present duties. And one of them isn't for you to try to figure out the 'unfigureoutable'. Only the Father knows. He's fixed it by his own authority. What's interesting to me, if you put your Bible together, your New Testament...the book of Acts, hasn't been written yet. So Paul is not quoting Jesus in Acts 1:7 as if he's quoting the scriptures. Paul somehow understood the teaching that Jesus had given, both in Matthew 24 and Mark 13, about only the Father knows when the Son of Man will return in judgment. How did Paul figure it out? When did he learn this? Well, you actually, on your own this week can read through 1 and 2 Thessalonians, read through Matthew 24 and 25, and you'll be struck by the literary parallels between the actual literal phrases Paul is using, though he wasn't around to hear them directly from Jesus. And you might be asking the question, well, then, you know, was it just direct revelation that Jesus gave to Paul? We know that's possible because last week he says in 1 Thessalonians 4:15, I'm saying this to you by the way of word of the Lord. Could be. But also we understand that Paul spent some time with the disciples after his conversion...Acts chapter nine. He goes to see Ananias. Acts 9:18...immediately there fell from his eyes something like scales. He regained his sight. He got up, got baptized, got food, he was strengthened. And then it says in Acts 9:19, now for several days Paul was with the disciples. So right after his conversion, he got some time to spend with the disciples and potentially had a lot of questions about, hey, I met Jesus. I repented of my sins. I've trusted to him. Clearly, I was on the wrong side of history. What else can you tell me about him? And maybe in those few days that he was with those disciples is when they started teaching him immediately about the return of Christ. We also know from Galatians chapter 1, if you want to look there quickly, that in Paul's abridged autobiography, when he talks about after his conversion, he says in verse 18. Then three years later, after I went away, I went up to Jerusalem to become acquainted with Cephas...Peter and stayed with him 15 days. I didn't see any of the other apostles except James, the Lord's brother. So perhaps it was also in that time that Paul spent with Peter for 15 days, that he learned directly about some of the things that Jesus taught about his return. This is all sanctified speculation. But what Paul is teaching as authoritative here goes back to one important point that he wanted these Thessalonians to know who were looking into the skies like the disciples in Acts chapter one, speculating on...when is the time, focusing on calendars, focusing on times and seasons. And he's saying, look, you're not going to know. Because it's not for you to know. That was the clear teaching of Jesus in...Matthew 24:36, Matthew 24:42, Mark 13:33. That the Son of Man's return is going to be unexpected, unforeseen, unpredictable, without warning. And then Paul borrows the language that Jesus used...just like a thief in the night. Well, what's that image doing? Well, you know, the great thing about when you get a biblical image to use, there's nothing I can say to like, make that image better. He uses the perfect illustration of how do you be prepared for something that could happen at any moment, but you don't know when that moment is going to happen. I was racking my brain trying to think about it, and then I was like, Adam, you dummy. Like, the perfect illustration of that is right in front of your face in the Bible. It's like a burglar who doesn't give you advance notice of when he's going to decide to come. So every night I say to Shannon. I love you. I always say that. But I also say, did you lock all the doors? I'll go back down and lock them if you didn't. And that's our thing. Every night...we are prepared for what?...the unexpected. My candelabra is at my bedside...ready. Because you're trying to prepare for something that doesn't let you know it's coming, even though it can come at any time. So he uses the illustration of a thief in the night for the unforeseen, unexpected nature of the return of the Lord. And then verse three he says, and when they...the world is saying peace and safety, so don't be lulled to sleep by just the world feeling like, hey, times are good. Maybe Paul borrowed this language from the Romans in this time, the Pax Romana, that there is peace across Rome and that everybody's thinking things are hunky dory. He goes, just when everything looks great, then destruction will come upon them. How swiftly?...suddenly, like labor pains upon a woman with child. And I will not exegete that. Let the reader understand...what maybe he's saying to add to this sudden, unexpected nature of labor pains on a woman is not so much what he's already established with the thief in the night, but what he says right after that they will not escape, as in when the labor starts for a woman to give birth, there's no stopping it. There's no escaping it. It's inevitable. It's unavoidable. It's going to happen. So you put those two illustrations together. It's unexpected, unforeseen, unpredictable. You're not going to know the time and the season, but when it does begin, there is no what? Coming to an end. It's going to be to fulfillment. It's done. The father's fixed it. There's no slowing it down. And so Paul gives this idea of those times and seasons that you guys are worried about. And just for the person who's like, yeah, but you know, what about the passages say, well, we can't know the day or the hour, but maybe we can know the year. No...those two words he uses in the Greek...times and epochs...the word for chronos and kairos. They're to be all inclusive terms. They're the forest and the trees. When Paul uses those terms, times is chronological time. He's saying whether it's seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, you will not predict the particular time. Okay, fine. Maybe I'll know the season. I'll be watching what's going on... No, that's epochs. That's a word Paul would use for time marked by an event that begins a new period of development. Either way, he's saying, stop trying to predict the unpredictable. It's not for you to know. Back to Acts 1:7. It's fixed; it's set. It's known in its entirety, but only by who?...God the Father. Fixed...no doubts, no surprises to him. And when he starts it, it will run to completion. So if you are one of those who are on a quest to predict the time or season, you're on a fool's errand. You cannot know the time. You're not meant to know the time. You will not figure out the time. The Bible is clear on that. But in case the Bible doesn't convince you, anybody in church history that's made an attempt at it, they've all failed. Really good ones too. People that knew their Bibles really well. Back the second century...Irenaeus, disciple of Polycarp, who was a disciple of John. You think if anybody's going to know it, it's going to be a guy that was that close to the action. He formed his calculations for the return of the Lord using the specifications...numbers related to the Ark. This was a guy that wrote against heresies. He was defending the heart of the faith, and he goes and throws out a number AD 500 because of how the arc was written about and designed...bad idea, wrong. My guy, Martin Luther, loved the Protestant Reformation. I mean, recovers the heart of the gospel...justification by faith. Had some bad interpretation on Daniel. He thought he was living in the end in the 1500s. And listen, if you survived the plague, maybe you would think the end was near. If you thought the Pope was Antichrist, there you go. But he also was doing faulty calculations on when he thought the world began, and that he was living in the sixth day and the seventh day borrowing language from Genesis. He was in the middle of the sixth day, in the middle of the 70th week in Daniel. And so he thinks the end of the world is going to happen sometime around 1600. He was wrong. John Wesley, by some wacky interpretation of Revelation 12:14 of all verses...living in the 1700s, picks 1836 to be exact. He was wrong too. The list goes on up until our modern day...Hal Lindsay, Harold Camping, Pat Robertson...wrong, wrong, wrong. And when guys are wrong, what do they usually do? Oh, you know, I counted one too many toes on the statue in Daniel. I forgot to subtract one of the marks of the beast. Here's my new calculation. You think math is going to solve it? In the wisdom and brilliance and goodness of God our Father, who has fixed that time...you're going to bring some math into it and predict the unpredictable. I asked myself the question this week, though, you know, why wouldn't God want us to know? I mean, he wants us to be prepared. You could come back to me and say, well, why does Jesus continue to say, be on the alert, be ready, be aware. So I was kind of just running through that. And maybe you can right now. Why wouldn't God the Father want his children to know when he was going to return? The first thought that came to mind is, you know, God is a father. In fact, I take my cues from him. And sometimes when dads say...it's just because I said so. That should be good enough for our kids, right? We play that card. So baseline...if God just doesn't want us to know, we should be okay with that, right? Okay. Moving on from that baseline of it's just not for us to know the exact time or hour, but what would be the downside? And this is where maybe you do some heart work. If you knew in your lifetime the return of Christ...the exact hour, the day. Do you think it would really make you more active?...or possibly more apathetic for a season. Could knowing the exact day, hour, time, season, whatever lead to more apathy rather than gospel activity? And you're like, of course not. Why would it? Well. You ever procrastinate on a term paper?...on a test? You can't procrastinate on the pop quiz, can you? You just have to be ready at all times. Pop quiz happens any day. You better know your material. But when you have that final exam coming at the end of the semester and all the reading you've supposed to been doing for it and all the studying, what is our tendency?...cramming. Thank you. Vicky. She's with me today. The rest of you, I know. Oh, no, I would be if I knew it was 20 years from now...evangelizing 24/7. Would you?...Would you? I'm just saying knowing my own heart, what could happen to me is if I knew. If I knew it was 20 years from today and I knew I was going to live that long. I could say, you know what? I got some things I want to get to. I'll be telling people, you know, here, there, everywhere. But would I be committed to, like, nonstop preparing for it? I don't know, maybe I would get, you know, uh, that's a long time now that I think about it. How about five years before I'll really ramp it up. And then five years turns to four and then three and then two. And, you know, the last year I'm selling it all and going all in...gospel preaching, okay, ten months because kids birthday. And I wanted to go one last time to the beach...eight months...five. And you get what I'm saying. One month before his return, I will preach the gospel nonstop. I will drink all the coffee I can get and that'll make up for it. You see, what our hearts could do with that?...is we could think we would be gung ho, knowing the day, hour, time. But in reality, if we look at the way we live our lives on a day to day basis, we might see that more time, as more time to get busy with something else. And then, you know, save it all up for the end...the ultimate rededication. Could be one reason why our Father knows best and doesn't tell us that exact moment, but instead wants us to live with a sense of urgency because we don't know. The day of the Lord...Verse two. You know that it's coming. You know that it's going to be a surprise. But this day of the Lord, which is Old Testament language from the prophets about the 'already and the not yet' says in the Old Testament prophets who talk about the day of the Lord, they're seeing the Messiah come the first time. And his judgment at the second time all at once, because they're looking at it like this. We get to turn our Bibles sideways, and we see there was that gap of time in between. So we know that there was a first coming of Christ, and then there's this time in between for the church to be getting the gospel out to the ends of the earth. And it says, you know, the Son of Man won't return until the gospel reaches the ends of the earth. If you're looking for one sign, which I don't know how we'll ever know if it's been preached to the ends of the earth, as in, has every person heard? I don't know how we could track that...possibly. We just keep sending missionaries out to do it. But those prophets would have seen the day of the Lord as both doom for some and deliverance for others. If you want kind of an encapsulated definition for what is the day of the Lord in the Bible? 19 times it's used in the Old Testament. By the way, if you use our pulpit curriculum for your life group, or you just go back and study it, I'll list. I'll give you all the cross-references. You can go study it on your own this week...the 19 times it's talked about. The majority of the time, it's talked about the words associated with the day of the Lord, the return of Christ are: doom, destruction, desolation, darkness. I'm not alliterating those because I'm a preacher. That's the actual words the Old Testament prophets like Amos, Ezekiel, Isaiah, Joel...they were all using those same words: doom, desolation, destruction for some. But what we learned last week. Is that before that time comes, we who are alive will be caught up together in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. It's destruction for some, but deliverance for others. So those two words. When you want to know what is in summation, what's the day of the Lord?...for the wicked, for those who have not been delivered by Christ's first coming. It will be desolation in a second coming. But the hope that we have in Christ is it is deliverance for us because we've been delivered the first time. Now he just comes to rescue us out of this world before his final judgment comes. So that's the first point Paul's trying to make in is to listen up, look down, read what you have in front of you rather than be looking to the clouds. 
 And how could we be sure of where we stand? Well, that moves him to his second exhortation in verses 4 through 7, Wake up rather than sleep in. Now he's going to move from illustration of suddenness, unexpectedness, the idea of a thief, the picture of a woman in labor. Now he's going to use imagery of darkness and light, daytime and nighttime to say, listen, some of you Christians in Thessalonica need to wake up. Because you're falling asleep. You might be getting lax. If you're dozing off, now's the time to be alert. Verse 4...we're not in darkness that the day. What day is he talking about in verse 4, the day of the Lord, he just mentioned that it would overtake you like a thief, that you would be surprised. You would be unprepared. Now he's speaking to a church. He's calling them brothers right there in verse 4. But Paul would know, as we all know, that there could be unbelievers make believers in the midst. The true believers in this church needed to wake up. The make believers in this church needed to be shaken, stirred, and asked themself the question, am I a son of light? Verse five...a son of the day. Or am I of the night and of the darkness? I mean, he's putting that image in front of these Christians at this church, some he's already called out in chapter 4 saying, look, God's will for you is sexual morality, not immorality, that you live differently from the world. Don't act like the Gentiles who don't know God. And then he gets into and you also should be working, supporting, loving one another. So he's getting into their lives, teaching them how they should excel still more putting before them ways in which they can examine their lives. And that's the ever important question...am I walking in the light or walking in the dark? The question is the same for us today. I mean, there's no mixing up if you are asleep or awake. Look around at the people. I mean, if you're sleeping right now, you're going to wake up. But if somebody were snoozing right next to you in the service, you wouldn't be confused by it. You know exactly what that person looks like. I in particular, do. I see the guy sleep on me every week. I keep a chart at home, I keep tabs, I'm working on him. Not looking at you right now. I'm just going to blankly stare at the back of the room. But just like he's saying, he's giving this illustration, look, somebody's either asleep or they're awake, somebody's either drunk or they're sober. There's no confusion in between those two types of people. And he's saying, now, to these brothers and sisters, these Christians. Likewise, there should be no confusion in how you're living. Somebody shouldn't be looking at your life, Christian wondering, is that person awake or asleep? Are they in the light or are they in the dark? The New Testament doesn't paint anything in gray. 1 John, I mean, if you want to turn there, if you think, well, maybe that's just, you know, Paul trying to draw these lines of sons of light and son of darkness. No, 1 John, he gets right into it. Verse 5, this is the message we have heard from Jesus and announce to you that God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all. And now he's reasoning with them. If we say we have fellowship with Christ and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and don't practice the truth. There is no gray. But if we walk in the light, as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His son cleanses us from all sins. Aren't those very helpful pictures? That somebody is either in the light or they're in the dark. Somebody either is on the narrow path to eternal life because they're in Christ, or they're on the wide path to destruction because they're in their sin. You're a child of God or a child of the devil, 1 John says. And how do you know that? Are you a child of righteousness who acts righteously like their father, or a child of wickedness? This is the clear paths to put before us all the way back to Psalm 1...the path of the righteous, the path of the wicked...two different paths, two different destinations. And that's what Paul was trying to do to get the attention of some of these professing believers in Thessalonica to wake up. Not just him coming up with like a little spray bottle as they're sleeping and trying to get...no, he got he has the entire cooler filled with ice cold water and dumping it on them while they're in bed and saying, you need jolted back awake. You need to see the dividing line between your life and the world, because it's two different worlds. It's two different kingdoms, it's two different kings. And it really does come down to those whose king is Jesus Christ, who died for them, and those who are still king of their own life in their own sin. And that's the two colors to paint in this morning...black and white, light and dark, night and day. Where do you stand? Where do you stand this morning? Are you found in Jesus Christ and His righteousness alone? Righteous because of the perfect in the light life that he lived. Or are you still trusting in some type of righteousness in yourself, thinking that you'll be good enough to stand before the God who is light, in whom there's no darkness at all. If Christ hasn't removed every spot of your sin at the cross, you will not stand before that God of light in his perfect holiness and righteousness and justice. But if you are in Jesus Christ and have his righteousness, have his perfection and holiness and light, you stand before him complete. No fear, no worry, no trembling, nothing to be afraid of because you are clothed in the righteousness of his Son. Eph 5:8 says you were children of darkness now your children of light. But Ephesians 5:14 says, awake, sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Jesus Christ will shine on you. It's very clear for those of you this morning that aren't in Christ. This passage makes absolutely clear two things...Jesus Christ is coming again in judgment this time. Hebrews 9, not for the removal of sins...now for the judgment of them. And the other thing he makes crystal clear is there is no time to delay for you. There's no time to deliberate. You have the information you need to make a decision. Do I think I could stand before God right now, this day?...or don't I. What's he going to evaluate you on? Works...whose work is it going to be?...yours or Christ's. And if you're found in Jesus Christ, all of his goodness, all of his righteousness, all of his holiness given to you by faith. Or else you're standing before him with your own. Which is it going to be for you? The good news of the gospel is he offers it to you today. God the Father provided a way for your sins to be forgiven, your judgment to be removed, God's wrath to be taken out on his Son instead of on you. Do you believe it? Do you trust it with everything in you?...that all of your righteousness is found in Him and Him alone. Paul says later in Corinthians, now is the day of your salvation. Don't drift off to sleep again. If God has woken you up this morning to the sin in your own heart, the guilt that you have. Don't fall back asleep. Because there's no promise you'll get to wake up from it. This could be his final call to you today...to wake up and hear the call of Jesus Christ. To come to him, put your sins before him. Let him remove them as far as east is from west. But don't drift back off to sleep. Don't think you could decide another day. Today is the day of salvation...to call out to him, to cry out to him, to ask him for mercy. And when you have that hope your life's entirely different. 
 Verses 8 to 11, he moves into the final admonition of examination. He says, now that you are different, believer. But since you are of the day, there's a certain way you are to dress now. Take off those old clothes. And he's not talking about plaid or preppy clothing. He's talking about armor. He's saying in verses 8 to 11, you need to be dressed up ready for war. Verse 8, since we are of the day, we are children of the light, we are children of God. Then let us think sober mindedly. Let us be serious about where we stand. And what's the first evidence that you are serious about your life right now living it for the glory of God and the sake of Christ, wanting to be pleasing to him? You put on two pieces of armor. Ephesians 6 has a lot more, but that's not going to come along for another decade. So in early form, Paul thinks of three visible attributes of a true follower of Jesus Christ. The attributes, the virtues we've seen before. What are they? Right there in verse 8?...faith, hope and love. I mean, from the beginning of this letter, 1 Thessalonians 1:3, when he remembers them... their Christian witness. He remembers their work of faith, labor of love, steadfastness of hope. And really, when you go back and you read this letter with eyes of looking for faith, love and hope, you see that that really in Paul's mind in this time, this early church, those are the three virtues of a true Christian. But now he's going to take those attributes, and he's going to associate them with armor to try to give a visual picture. Why are faith, love and hope so important. Well, think about the armor of a soldier. You need something to cover your internal organs...a breastplate. Because your heart keeps pumping the blood through your body. And if that gets damaged, wounded, you're done. And what does he put behind that breastplate? He puts faith and love. The mark of a true believer...faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, not faith in yourself. Faith in him. And then the first fruit of the spirit of a true believer is love. Understanding the love that God has shown you first from him, demonstrated to you, and then love for God and love for other people. That should be no surprise. Remember, we're thinking about a baby church, a church of Christians less than a year old, so they just need it simply put. And some of us need reminded of the simplicity of the gospel when it changes us. The heartbeat of our Christian life is faith and love. It keeps us alive. And then he moves to another picture of a piece of armor...the helmet...the hope of salvation. Protecting our minds from an attack of the enemy. Satan's attacks in the middle of a furious battle. When life gets hard, that you don't lose your head because you don't lose your hope of salvation. Those are two different things. He puts them in separate categories. Faith and love...yes, that's the heartbeat of our life. That's what's going on on the inside. That my faith in Jesus Christ is alive and well and beating because of the love of God for me. But I can't lose my head by losing my hope of where my salvation ultimately rests...not down here. He's saying, you Thessalonian Christians who are being persecuted. I've already been driven out of town. If you start to think about your temporary hopes, what you might have here and now in this life, you're losing the ultimate picture of salvation. It's for deliverance. It's not for staying here forever. You're on your way to somewhere else. And salvation is ultimately our hope in heaven, not down here. And you need to have that on your mind at all times or you'll lose it...christian. You'll lose it in very subtle ways down here. Right? You lose the hope of your salvation being an eternal life. What are you going to get sucked into down here if you start thinking...like the world. You name it, it could pull your attention off of living for Christ. You can think of anything. You can lose hope. Whether our hope is in our physical health, material wealth. Takes away from our hope being singularly in our salvation. And that's what this passage is. It's an eschatological passage. It's wanting us to think forward to the end, not be consumed in the present. And so we think about how to apply that. How do you take a passage like, well, first off, you know that the anchor of that hope of salvation, verses nine and ten, is that you are not destined for wrath. So the first thing we can rejoice in, in renewing our minds is we as believers are not destined for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through Jesus Christ who died for us. I mean, that really is the high point of this section in the sense that, okay, if I just remember the hope of my salvation is there is nothing that can separate me from the love of God in Christ, then I have one, most importantly, no wrath from God to fear. Even though the world can be caving in around me. That gives hope. Because you look beyond whatever the doomsday preppers, predictors, prophets and preachers are saying today. You get sucked down into it and you lose your hope of salvation. As in where am I ultimately headed? What's this life ultimately for? And he wants them to be thinking about a higher life then, so they can live a more holy life now, motivated because they're not destined for wrath, but for obtaining salvation. And that has to do with ultimate salvation when he comes to rescue his church. And all of this, look at verse 11, leads to us being able to look around and encourage one another and build one another up. I mean, you might be wondering today a passage on the future, the return of Christ...real practical pastor. Thank you. Well, think about leaving today in the conversations over lunch, in the car, later at night. I mean, we can be so sensitive and jumpy in every way we think that our God hating culture wants us or our kids or our grandkids to have a godless future. We rail against it. They're indoctrinating us into a godless future. But we have to ask ourselves the questions. Are we indoctrinating ourselves into a hopeless future? Are you? Do you talk to your kids about the future as if everything is going to cave around us. Everything's going to come to an end if the wrong guy gets elected this year. Where's your hope? We want to point out everything around us in the culture that's going bad and gets us all up in arms. What are you communicating at that point?...a Christ-less future. Why? Because if you think it's hopeless, then it must be Christ-less. Thank you. If the way we talk to people around us, other believers not encouraging and building one another up, but the sky is falling all the time. You're indoctrinating the next generation into a hopeless future when we have a Christ filled future. Amen? That's where our hope is. That's where Paul's hope was. That's what he was pointing them to. That's why he could say at the end of this, we're not destined for wrath, so we can leave talking about how encouraging it is to be alive today. We can build each other up. Why? Because we're not trying to build anything down here. Should we be thankful for the freedoms we have?...100%. I'm like first in the list. But I need to wake up…wake up sometimes and realize providing for my family or whatever future I might have down here is a preacher is not contingent on any kingdom down here. It's contingent on the kingdom to come. That's what I've been called into. Maybe that's something we need to think upon a little bit longer. Do we really speak to one another because we believe with everything in us that we do have a future hope of salvation. In anything less than that, we can be teaching the next generation to put their hope in something less than Christ. When I want my kids, I want this church, I want us to walk out of here saying...our hope is in Christ and Christ alone. Do we care about other things? Absolutely. As Luther said, if he found out Christ was returning tomorrow, he would plant a tree today. Why? Even though he was wrong about the return of Christ, because we're still called to love and good deeds. We're still called to spread the message. But all around us we can be told, you know, the world's coming to an end. I mean, I was in the gym this week minding my own business. Friend comes up to me, I'm doing some kind of move to try to build core strength. He comes up and says, hey, core strength guy. You know about April 8th. What about it? Solar eclipse And? Cicada Armageddon...300 trillion. It's the end. He didn't actually say it like that, but he went on to tell me about all the things that can happen tomorrow. I like this guy. I even used it as an opportunity to invite him to church. Guy, if you're here, thanks for coming. I mean that. Because it was providential. He was indoctrinating me on whatever might happen tomorrow. And I said, you know, providentially, I'm actually preaching on the end of the world a day before that. I think you should come. I think you should know how it really is going to go. That's how we should be. I mean listen to people, opportunities to witness to people. Let them tell you about whatever theory they have. Why not. It's fun. Enjoy it. I mean, know when that opportune time is, like, okay, man, I've got to get back to my lift. But, honestly use it as leverage. You have the hope. You know the most important things about tomorrow. Don't you? So tell other people about it and say, yeah, I mean that that would really be crazy if all those cicadas came and I'm out there catching a ball with my kid and they carry me away. Sorry, Shannon. I was a terrible husband. Remember to lock the doors. My farewell words to you will be something stupid like that. Get Davie to eat his breakfast. But that's just the thing. We can look to the future. God set eternity in our hearts, Ecclesiastes tells us. But not face it with fear. We face it with faith. We face it with love, and ultimately we face it with hope. The hope that we have in our Lord Jesus Christ. 
Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your word this morning. We thank you that it gives us so much hope. Lord, there's so many things that weigh heavy on our hearts today. Real things, painful things, trials of life in a fallen world. And really that dark cloud that could be hanging over us this morning. There is only one sliver of hope that pierces through it, and it is the hope of our salvation. There may be for some in here no other hope besides that. But behind that cloud is an eternity of unending light. Where we are in your presence: glorified, delivered, full of joy forevermore. So I pray that that's where our hope would be this morning. As we think forward to that now as we turn our attention to the Lord's table, I pray that you would help us to see that all that is offered to us today because you first offered us your Son. In his name we pray. Amen.

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The Marks of a Good Christian: Hope

Happy Easter, brothers and sisters in Christ. Thank you. Vicky and everybody else. Please turn in your Bibles to 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18. We'll be picking up where we left off last week, and maybe some of you are surprised by that thinking, is this supposed to be a special sermon on the resurrection and all that goes with that. Well, just so happens that sometimes where we are going through a book of the Bible as we preach verse by verse...I look ahead a few weeks and then I look and say, wait, actually, we possibly could be studying the resurrection and return of Jesus Christ on Easter Sunday, so we kept it at that. And that's where we'll study today and see another mark of a good Christian...hope for those of you that are here and then those that are not, you'll be able to catch up quickly just by a recap. This letter written to a baby church 2000 years ago in a place called Thessalonica. It's still around today in modern Greece. It's on the north side of the Aegean Sea, and this was written around A.D. 50. So only 20 years removed from when Jesus rose and went back to heaven. And Paul and Silas and Timothy went there in Acts 17. They preached Christ and him crucified, that he lived, died, and rose again, and that he was Lord...Caesar wasn't. And so on those two foundational pieces of who Jesus is and what he came to do, people came to Christ. He is Lord, he is Savior. And because of that, Paul had a church on his hands. And it was a young church. They were a mixture of religious Jews and irreligious pagans. And he had a lot to teach them in a short amount of time. So short, because it got cut short whenever the jealous Jews in Acts 17 formed a mob and ran them out of town within a few months. You can imagine if you were at a place like that and somebody came in and preached the gospel and you got converted, how much you would have to learn that you didn't know anything about. Whether you were a Jew, who had to basically unlearn what you thought was true from the Old Testament about a works-based salvation. And then if you were a pagan who had all those different religious ideas going around, all the new ideas, particularly one idea that there is only one true God, Jesus Christ the Lord, and that all the rest are false gods. So Paul had his work cut out for him. He taught on Christ and Him crucified. And then he probably started to teach on the ethics of the Christian life. And we saw that the last few weeks in chapter four. So all of you can be caught up to speed if you've not been here for a while, if this is your only service here. But why we're going to be in 13 to 18 today as it comes next is also because it addresses what we're here 2000 years later, celebrating, which is Jesus rose from the grave and we can have hope for life eternal as well. That because Christ rose, we will rise. And whatever is our promises that we have in him, they are forever. That never ends, not even for a moment between our death here and our life after death. And that's really what Paul is addressing. And we'll see that in that first verse when he says, I don't want you to be uninformed. He's saying, listen up, Thessalonians. Uh, maybe I didn't get to this subject before, but I've been told by my friend Silas and my other friend Timothy, that some of you are wondering about what's going to happen after we die. We believe that Jesus Christ is ruling and reigning right now, and you taught us that he's coming again. But what if we die before he comes again? We're not alive when he comes back. And they would have really been living in that time of thinking he's coming back right now, because all the teaching they would have had passed on by the apostles is be ready, be on the alert. He could have come at any moment like a thief in the night. And so they're really thinking it could be any moment now there's persecution going on around them. And they are wondering, well, okay, we can be ready. But if we die before he comes back are we going to be like a second class Christian? I mean, how long will we stay dead? They didn't have teaching on the bodily resurrection of saints. So they might have been thinking, hey, for those who are going to pass away, who have already passed away since Paul left, what becomes of them? And you'll hear that concern they have for those who have died in Christ. Now he's not addressing those who die outside of Christ. You'll see that here. He uses the same phrase asleep in Christ multiple times to address what hope does a Christian have for life after death. And I think that's the most pressing question we could be wondering about today. We could be celebrating the resurrection today, as we should. But it hits home in a very personal way when you ask yourself that question...am I sure of where I'm going to be when I die? Or the loved ones you have that you're here with today? What's going to happen to them when they die? That's where it brings it right home to your own very heart. And that's a question that a lot of people wrestle with, believe it or not. I happen to be reading this week an article in Good Housekeeping. Don't ask me why I'm reading Good Housekeeping. Shannon does a great job keeping our house, but I came across the title of an article that caught my eye in light of this...What happens when we die? Believers from four major religions guided me through this emotional process. It was an anonymous article by a 28 year old former Catholic. She was in the prime of her life, she says, having the best time. But she thinks back to when her dad passed away unexpectedly when she was 11 to cancer, and one...that makes her sorrowful thinking about his death. But more than anything, it makes her worried about her own. This is what she writes in the opening paragraph. What scares me isn't so much how I'm going to die. It's the fear of what will happen afterward. Will I go to heaven? Will I be reincarnated? Will my spirit die with my body? I start feeling sick when I think about that last one. My heart pounds and I can feel the blood pumping through my veins. I think the truth is, a lot of people out there feel the same way as this woman. They try to avoid thinking about death at all costs. But she alludes to in the article, she could just be driving in the car having the best day. She's in the passenger seat, the sun's out, the windows are down, and all of a sudden she gets that striking fear. What is going to happen to me when I die? And so she goes on a quest in this article to find the answer. But we have the answer in front of us right here today. We've already sung of it, that we have hope in Jesus Christ, that because he lives, we'll live. But that may not answer all the questions we have about eternal life. So we'll get a few of them answered today. Follow with me as I read 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18. 
"But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, so that you will not grieve, as do the rest who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus. For this we say to you, by the Word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with a voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words." Thus reads God's living and active word. May he bless the preaching and hearing of it today. 
As we walk through this passage to talk about the hope that we have in Christ as Colossians 1:27, Paul calls it...Christ in you the hope of glory. What is that glory that we're hoping in in Christ? Paul is going to get to that question today, but he's going to walk us through a series of questions to get there. And that's how I kind of framed this out. I want you to be thinking these questions as we walk through this passage. The first question is, Why do we talk about life after death? Second, we'll talk about, How do we talk about it? Then we'll get to Who is our hope in life after death. And then finally, What is the truth about life after death? 
 But let's think a little bit on that first question. Why do we talk about life after death? Well, the short answer is because we're curious. We want to know. As a lot of people call it...it's the great Unknown. And in verse 13, Paul starts out by saying, we don't want you to be uninformed, as in there's information you can have if you're interested in learning about it. And beyond just being curious like that article went on to say, there's those that struggle with it. They wrestle with it; they're anxious about it. Because they don't have hope. And everybody needs hope. And I think that's a common thing throughout all humanity. People want to have hope. They want to have answers. They want to be comforted. So Paul starts by saying, hey, listen, Christians. I want to talk to you about those who are asleep, and here's why we talk about it, so that you will not grieve, as do the rest who have no hope. That's the need that Paul understands behind their questions about what's going to happen to those people who die, who are believers. And then Christ comes back. He knows what's underneath, that there's a certain level of anxiety, there's a certain level of they're grieving. And notice that he doesn't correct them for grieving. He's not saying it's wrong to grieve. He says, don't grieve, as the rest of humanity grieves. That there's a grief that the godless have that's despair, because there is no foundation for them to stand on when it comes to eternal life. It's a guess at best. And that's what some of these Thessalonians were coming out of, coming out of backgrounds, whether it was Judaism that didn't really have an answer of what becomes of the body. They had some expectation that there is this Messiah character who is going to come to rule and reign on earth, which would be great for the people that are alive. But there were very few that had a full understanding in Judaism of what that means for the regular individual. Do we just have to be really good people and hope that God is pleased with us, and then maybe we'll be part of this Messiah's kingdom? But if you are a Jew that came out of that thinking, and the Messiah has already come, and he's died and gone back to heaven, and you die, the people that are left behind going, well, now, what's in it for them? Or you might have been a pagan coming out of a Greco-Roman culture, some that in that Greek thinking especially, would have had just this idea. And we've talked about it before in Thessalonica, that the body is bad. But the soul and the mind are good. That's the higher living. You want to live at that higher level. You want enlightenment. And you know, actually your whole life living in a body is just a time of futility until you die and you're released into kind of this great mass of nothingness, of souls being united together. And that wasn't very hopeful. And so Paul comes along and says, you know what? There is a hope we can have that we don't need to grieve like everybody else grieves. The unbelievers who have no foundation for their hope and eternal life...it's a bottomless sea of grief. It never rests down upon the floor. It keeps spiraling into greater darkness. And he's trying to address that. And he does it by just coming right out and saying, we're going to talk about this because, Christian, you have a hope that no one else in the world has. And that's his starting point. That's why we talk about it. But then he moves...not immediately, but actually he addresses this later on. 
 How do we talk about it? Well, we talk about it in the way Paul does. We learn from him here. Verse 13, he hits it head on. He answers it directly by saying, you need information. But notice verse 18 at the end of this section, we also are to talk about it in a way that is sensitive. That the goal of the instruction isn't just rebuke and correct and say, oh, you have wrong views about life eternal. It actually is to comfort one another with these words. So you put all this together before we get into the actual content of it in verses 14 to 17, we talk about it because we don't want to grieve as the rest of the world grieves a godless grief. But there's a hope the Christian has that allows your grief to be rightly placed and trust in Jesus Christ. But then he says, let me just tell you that as I'm giving you this information, where this is going to end up in verse 18 is that you're able to be a comfort to someone else. So just think about that as we kind of get into this passage today. Really what you see that framework about starting with the truth and being informed rightly and then ending with the goal as comfort really does wrap up Ephesians 4 nicely about speaking the truth in love. That it's never just one or the other. That you know, if somebody is grieving what you would call excessively over the death of a person. A Christian, even, who they know they're with the Lord. But there's just this still this anxiety or grief or whatever going on that it's not just, well, you know, look what Paul did. He just instructed. But don't forget the aim of his instruction being love, being comfort, being strengthening. And you put those two things together that the facts about life after death do care about our feelings. Even you notice that in the language Paul uses, he's informing them in verse 13 and 14 and 15, he talks about being asleep in Jesus. Now he's not using that to be kind of a euphemism, as in, to soften the blow. What he's saying is the truth of the resurrection. The power of the resurrection is that Christ transformed the entire concept of death. It goes from this eternal hopelessness of knowing when would it end? It would go on. You're just done...to what he says later, at the end of 1 Corinthians 15, that death has been swallowed up, the sting of death of sin has been removed. And so he can equate what we would just see as, oh, somebody died and it's over for them...to what does he call it? He calls it being asleep. And it's not the way we try to use phrases like rest in peace, or they look so peaceful there in that casket, or however we talk about it in those terms, he's saying, no, actually, the best way to think about death is being asleep. You are going to wake up...your body like our bodies go to bed at night. They wake up. He's saying, when a Christian dies it's not just done for them. It's not just lights out. They are what?...absent from the body...immediately present with the Lord. There's not a moment they're away from the Lord from the time of our salvation, brother and sister. When you are united to Christ, Romans 6, you're united with them in life and in death, and one day in the resurrection, the great resurrection. And so that's the truth. That's the hope he's trying to bring...Verse 14. That's the crux of his argument. If we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus. So his words are words of truth, but they're words of truth that bring comfort. And that was really my hope today in getting to talk to you about the great joy it is to celebrate Easter and the resurrection. The fact that the Lord would have a passage like this for us, that would help some of you who are grieving, who have lost somebody that you love, and they are with the Lord, but there's still something that hurts. And Paul is saying, there's hope for you when you understand the truth of their situation right now. I was on Twitter last fall, and there's a pastor I follow named Conrad Mbewe...He's one of the professors at African Seminary over in Zambia. And he's a pastor of a church there, and he's been at some conferences I've been to, and he's a wonderful preacher. He's nicknamed the African Spurgeon. Uh, he's in his 50s or 60s, a wonderful preacher, a godly man. And he has a son, 32 years old last November, dies unexpectedly of a sudden illness. His son was in ministry with him. His son, you could tell by what he posted about him was his pride and joy. And I remember coming across that post just randomly that the day after he died. And and this is all Conrad posted for others to know and to be in prayer as a picture of his son. Just the biggest smile on his face. And this was his dad's tribute to him. Good night son. See you in the morning. That's the heart behind the comfort of this. Saying they're asleep in Christ isn't trying to avoid the issue. When you know the hope we have in Jesus Christ for those that we lose, even though we know where they are in Christ, it gives us that ability to fight through the tears and through the sorrow and say, good night, son. I'll see you in the morning. And that doesn't mean even months later that it's still not the hardest thing he said he's ever been through. The greatest test of faith he's ever had in his 45 years as a Christian. But what's that rock bottom foundation that he's finding comfort in? It's that he will see his son in the great resurrection. And so that's how we talk about it. We talk about it in truth, and we talk about it in love. Because the goal, the aim of our instruction is love. It's comforting one another. So now that we've talked about talking about it, let's actually talk about it. Verses 14 to 17 who is our hope in life and death? I asked that question that way in particular, because those of you that know the Heidelberg Catechism, it's question number one...what is our only hope in life and death? We sing it here often that we are not our own, but belong both body and soul in life and death to our God and Savior, Jesus Christ. He is the hope...that's right there in verse 14. The hope for anyone who falls asleep in Jesus, Verse 14, is that when Christ comes back, they will come back with them because they are in him, and they will never be apart from him. That's part of the promise even at the end of Matthew, I'll be with you always, even to the end of the age, whether you live or whether you die. If you're in me, you're with me. And that's what Paul is instructing them on...that our hope in life and death is not in just a statement or a proposition. It's in a person. Verse 14, if we believe that Jesus really died and rose again, and these people did believe it. He's saying, since you guys believe that you have been with me from the beginning, believing in who Jesus is and what he came to do, so can you also trust me now that I'm teaching you on what's going to come next? Notice in verse 15 he backs it up with not just apostolic authority from Paul. He says, we say this to you by the word of the Lord. That which gives us the idea that this would have been some form of a new teaching to them. They did not have the answer of what happens to believers when they die. So he's saying, look, this isn't just the apostle Paul saying this. I'm saying this to you by the Word of the Lord. And because it was something that they didn't already know, this is going beyond what Paul would have already been teaching them from what he knew of what Christ said when he was alive. The teaching that the Holy Spirit promised to bring back to the disciples and the apostles. Sure, he could teach on Jesus, saying, you know, the Son of Man is going to come with the clouds, and you'll see him, and he'll flash across the sky. They get all that. But he adds this Word of the Lord to say, I'm teaching you something now that you didn't know. I want you to inform you with something new about how it's going to go down. And when you think about Paul saying, I'm saying to you this by the Word of the Lord. The Word of the Lord is coming from the only person that's ever died, and actually come back to tell about it. So there's not just the authority of the Word of God behind it, but the one person who has the single authenticity, authority, whatever you want to call it that says, I died, I came back. I'm going to tell you how that goes. There's no one else that's ever lived that has that type of authority to talk about it. And you just have to think about that in our moment in 2024, when again, we constantly hear people want to talk about their truth. Nobody has any idea what life is after death outside of God's Word. Nobody has any idea of what the end is going to be like outside of God's Word. Nobody has any idea how and when it will all work outside of God's Word. That's just the facts of the matter. No one else's life experience, whatever movie you watched or book you read has any authority behind it. That's what Paul is saying here. I'm saying to you this by the one person that has authority to speak on it...God very God. And the God-Man, Jesus Christ, who died and rose again. And now he's telling me how it's going to go. Everything else falls aside at that point. Any preconceived notion of it and all we have are, I mean, people come up with some crazy ideas about how people come back from the dead. And I mean, just on the Hollywood level alone or the book level, all kinds of ideas that somebody can die. And by the power of love, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White or whatever, you know, give them a kiss, they pop back to life. Or, you know, Spock dies and he goes into the Genesis machine and he comes back out. Or Harry Potter's magic wand and resurrection stone. I mean, the list goes on. I was just trying to cover every base of a nerd in this room. Okay. You can continue to find how is it that somebody can die and then come back again? We have the answer right here. They have to be united to Jesus Christ. They have to be born again...found in him. That's the only answer to that question. That's our only hope in life and death. What the Word of God says...goes. And so we tie this to thinking about the resurrection from Friday night. What did Christ's death have to do with his resurrection? Well, you put those things together. What Christ's death did on Friday was paid the way. Paid for our sin. But him rising on the third day, one fulfilled the prophecy. What the Scripture said was going to happen, what he said was going to happen. But what Friday paid...Sunday paved the way. As in, he rose, so we will rise. Romans 4 tells us that he was raised for our justification, as in our salvation, we can be sure is complete. Not just because we have witnesses. We have the Word of God telling us he died on the cross. But the proof that he broke the power of sin and death fulfilled God's law. And the punishment for those who die breaking God's law...death from Adam on. He's now broken that power. And he proved it by coming back from the dead. So that's how we relate Friday to Sunday. That on the cross he conquered sin. And Sunday he showed that he conquered death. And so he could say, oh, death, where is your sting? Where? Where is any of it now? Because Christ has conquered it. And that's what gives us hope, the word of God. 
Which then moves Paul to now address the matter of life after death. He gives us our security. Who's our hope in it? He's told us how we should talk about it, why we should talk about it. And now the fun part in 16 to 17. What do we need to know about it? What is the truth about life after death? Well, he talks about it from three perspectives. From Christ's, from the dead, and then from those who are alive. First, we'll talk about the return of Christ, verse 16, for the Lord himself will descend from heaven. Okay, that matches up with what?...Acts 1. Jesus goes back up to heaven. The disciples are standing around wondering what they should do. And what do the angels say to them? Why are you guys standing around looking into the clouds? He's going to come back in the same way that he left. But now your mission is go into Jerusalem, Judea, just like he just told you and be my witnesses to the ends of the earth. So Paul is corroborating that teaching from that Acts chapter one, to say he's descending from heaven just in the same way that he left. He's coming back that way. Now what we get added to whatever we already know from the Gospels is this, cataclysmic event that Paul is trying to make very clear in this new teaching or expanding teaching, that this is not going to be a secret. For these people that were worried that they might have missed the return of Jesus Christ. You're going to see it and you're certainly going to hear it, verse 16. If there's anything that's emphasized here, besides you'll see with your own eyes the Lord himself. So it's not going to be a projection, an image, a ghost or something. No, it's the Lord himself. He's coming back in the way he left. But the emphasis is on...it's going to shock you, wake you. It's going to get your attention. With what?...a shout, the voice of the archangel, the trumpet of God. Are those all specific separate things? Or is he just trying to kind of collect language from throughout the scriptures and say, hey, all these different ways that God would get the attention of his people through noise. That's how loud and, aware you will all be of what's going to happen when Jesus returns. Nobody's missing it. A shout...that word used in the time of Paul that he uses for this is like a commander to his army, a chariot driver to his horses, a hunter to his hounds, a shipmaster to his rowers. Whatever you could think of for the person that's in charge saying, this is now the time and wakes everybody up from their slumber...that's the power of this shout. With the voice of the archangel...does that mean it's the archangel doing the shouting? Is Jesus the one shouting? And then the archangel is singing backup vocals? We don't know. I mean, this isn't the kind of thing Paul is writing for us to, to get into the weeds of and get in debates over and write me like a three page email because you exegeted this passage. And well, the shout is clearly Jesus and the archangel is clearly Gabriel, and the trumpet is borrowed from the guy that played the shofar back in the Old Testament. Like, we don't know. It could just be Paul trying to lump all those things together, saying, you're going to know it. When God wants to get the attention of his people, he can make a noise loud enough to get everybody's attention around the whole world at the same time. In the Old Testament when you think about that trumpet of God, what's that like? Less thinking about the instrument, more thinking about the sound. Exodus 19 when God was visiting Moses on Sinai. Verse 16, it came about on the third day when it was morning, there was thunder and lightning flashes with a thick cloud upon the mountain in a very loud trumpet sound, so that all the people who were in the camp trembled. So that's what we're talking about here. It's the sound of a trumpet, the trumpet of God, that everyone is going to know that Christ has returned, and it's time for him to bring his people to himself. So that's the return of Christ. What do we learn about the resurrection of the dead? Verse 16, and the dead in Christ will rise first. So this is now answering the question some of them were troubled about is, hey, somebody that is a believer in Jesus Christ is trusting in him for salvation. What becomes of them when Jesus comes back? Are they second class Christians because they missed the whole thing. They got in late to the show. No, he says, they're actually going to rise first. He says in verse 15, we who are alive and remain will be here until the coming of the Lord. Paul includes himself in that. But we won't precede those who have fallen asleep. So the resurrection of the dead, those who die asleep in Jesus, verse 14, they...however, it is in the timing of God in the way that he can unite body and soul in the return of Jesus. They're going to beat those of us who are alive. I mean, talk about a photo finish. I mean, it's all going to happen at the same time. Verse 17, then we who are alive, and he uses then to give just however much millisecond of time that is, we who are alive will remain, be caught up. But I want to take you to 1 Corinthians 15. Now remember this...these believers didn't have 1 Corinthians 15. So, we're cheating right now. If I were going to be true to this text, I would just tell you only the facts here. But later on, these Corinthians were actually doubting there was a resurrection. So Paul has to teach this church. Let me get you some more details on how cool this is going to be. And so 1 Corinthians 15, we get some details on everybody being changed in this moment and the return of Christ. But those who are dead in Christ will rise first. How fast does this happen? 1 Corinthians 15:51 behold, I tell you a mystery. And notice he says a mystery. As in, it's not something that there's not teaching on. He's just saying in your own minds, it's going to be hard to fathom this. So prepare for that. We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed, which is kind of the theme verse for every nursery worker. Those babies that...thank you. So we will not all sleep. We know that's Paul's talking about some of you will still be alive when Christ returns. We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed. So across the board at the return of Christ, if you're in Jesus Christ, alive or dead, you're going to get that transformed, glorified body like he had. How's it going to happen? Verse 52, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. The word for that in Greek is super duper fast. It's a really cool word. None of you would recognize it if you saw it, but it's really the word for a blink of an eye. And just like I blinked a millisecond ago, that's what's going to happen when Christ returns and the shout comes and the dead hear it. Now remember when I say the dead hear it, they're actually alive in Christ. So this kind of helps us to have a sanctified imagination about...am I going to, you know, if I'm walking by Oakwood Cemetery, I'm going to see a bunch of corpses fly into the sky...in the blink of an eye. Well, truth be told, dust to dust. If anything you're going to see, it's a bunch of dust. If that's even going to be something visible because the person is with who?...he's with, Christ. We're always going to be with Christ. So how in the perfect work of God, he unites that person with their glorified body is totally up to him. He created everything we see out of nothing. He's going to know how to go shrink, put it back together. Now, on the other hand, hears us down here. We've got to get from down here up there. Which brings us to the rapture of the saints. Uh, go back to Thessalonians. We've talked about the resurrection of those dead in Christ. Verse 17, then we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with them. At least we can all agree on the place. We don't always agree on the time in Christianity, but we will be in the clouds meeting the Lord in the air. There's no arguing with that. Now, why that's so awesome isn't just because we get to hang out in the sky, but we shall always be with the Lord. This is the first great reunion of all God's children past, present, future together. It's amazing. Tongue and tribe and nation hanging out in the sky. Glorified bodies. No longer arguing over the timing. We all made it. And that's the rapture of the saints. Where we get the word for rapture is that caught up together with them in the air. It's a Greek word rapere. And that's kind of this idea in the word there. And it's used elsewhere in the New Testament by Paul of somebody being removed quickly from something. In John 6:15, when Jesus was teaching to the crowds, he withdrew to the mountain because he perceived the crowds were going to try to take him or snatch him away by force...sweep him up. Or Matthew 13:19 when Jesus is teaching on the parables of the four soils, and he scatters that first seed and it says, the enemy, like a bird, comes down and snatches away from the heart that which was sown...same word. So when we think of the rapture again, it is what the scriptures say it is. We're alive. We're down here. He gets us up there. And just by the blink of an eye, we get beat there by those who are already dead in Christ. Now some of you get really geared up wanting to talk about when this rapture is going to happen. And I'm happy to report you have to come back next week, because chapter five starts talking about times and epics. But that's not where we are this week. So there's your invitation to come back, and we'll talk about it. Now, in between now and then, I approach it with fear and trepidation. I'm going to be hoping that the rapture happens before next Sunday. If God really has an amazing sense of humor, at least in my life, right after I've studied all week to get it right, I'll open my Bible and you guys will see me go shink. I mean, you'll be doing it with me, hopefully. And I told first service we should play a prank on you guys. Is that they bring an extra set of clothes to 9 a.m. and leave them in the seats. So when you guys all come in. And of course, I walk out because Kurtis goes and I'm like, you know, who would have guessed Ashoff didn't make the cut? And everybody else here is like, well, of course we we knew all along. So that's next week. You have to come back for that one. But Paul's aim in all this, he was he was looking at the big picture. He was trying to say, hey, these believers who love those who have gone ahead of them, who have died in Christ, they really are broken over this and they have grief over this. And so his whole goal was to bring them comfort. And I pray that even for you, wherever you are today, brother and sister in Christ, if you have thoughts about life after death and you know you're in Christ, but there's still some anxiety, some despair, some grief when you think about it, I hope understanding just this idea that if you trust him for your salvation now, you trust him for it forever. Wherever that's going to...however, whatever you're with Him, you have Him. He's never going to leave you nor forsake you. Now there's the grief that comes for those who have loved ones who died in Christ. And yet you still think about what's it going to be like for them? What is it like for them right now? And Paul just says, look, the only thing I can give you that is the best thing. And the most important thing is that they're asleep in Christ, wherever their body is, here, there with Him. And you're going to be with them again. What greater comfort can the Christian have? But it does leave one category of person today. And it's like the young lady that we met at the beginning. It's the person that doesn't know if they're in Christ or knows you're not in Christ. At the end of that young lady's article, what was so sad is she went to a Muslim, to a Jew, a Hindu and a Catholic to try to find truth. She went to leaders in those religions...local priest, local rabbi, and she asked them, what is eternal life and how do I get it? And all four gave her the same message when it came down to it. Just keep doing your best. Just keep trying to be a good person. And this is how she concluded her article after getting that advice. I wonder if I'm a good person. Or if I'm doing everything I can. Maybe that explains why I still get panicked when I think about dying. But I think, I hope I have time to continue growing as a person before my last day comes. When you don't give somebody the truth about really what's coming next, they can't have true comfort. At best, they can hope to keep growing as a better person, to keep trying to do good works. But every religion outside of Christianity leaves you with that same responsibility. It's ultimately up to you and how good you are. Which is at the heart of the lie of every false religion. False religion says, if I give to God my best moral effort, I'll just have to hope it's enough to save me. But what does the gospel tell us? The gospel tells us that God gave me Jesus Christ's perfect record. And because of that, I want to serve him because I've been given his perfect record. I want to please him. I want to love him. I want to live for him. He's not making you earn anything. How could you possibly earn anything? When you think about how the gospel works, when you think about what we just celebrated Friday, for those of you who are still trying to put it all together. Where were you 2000 years ago when he hung on the cross and died for sinners? When God accepted his perfect sacrifice. When he said, it is finished, what did you contribute to that?...absolutely nothing. You weren't there. You had nothing to do with any of the good that Christ accomplished on the cross. So what did you have to do with what he was doing up there? What you contributed to what he had to do on the cross was everything bad you've done...all the sin you've committed. That's how you were there. He was dying for sin on the cross. He was removing the penalty of the sinner on the cross. And so the sin I committed yesterday and I'll commit tomorrow...that's what I contributed 2000 years ago. But nothing good I do today had anything to do with what he did. Everything he accomplished on the cross that Friday was from him. How could you possibly put your own good deeds into that when you didn't even exist? And since we've all come into existence sinners by nature and by choice, what possibly could we contribute?...absolutely nothing. And therein is the good news of the gospel. That the gospel isn't you just trying harder, working harder, and hoping God accepts it. It's absolute abandoning of any hope in yourself, any trust in your own religiosity. Because I'm not just calling out right now to the sinner in here who, if we put your sin on the evening news, maybe it would shock some people. I'm actually more concerned for the really religious sinner in here, the self-righteous who you've been under the illusion your whole life in the church, that you're doing enough good things to keep God pleased with you. And maybe you do a pretty good job. As in, you're pretty good at keeping the law. That's not what gets you to heaven. You get to heaven by the work of Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ alone. He says, I'm the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father except through me. You accept my offer of forgiveness of sin. Entirely and completely without any thought of anything you can contribute. You say, be merciful to me, the sinner. That's the most hopeful thing you could hear today if you're not in Christ. I don't have one thing to tell you that you need to do to make God more pleased with you today than he could already be pleased with, than when you just call upon Jesus Christ to save you because you're absolutely helpless to do it on your own. And maybe up until this moment, you've been hopeless on your own. And now you've been given the good news, the good hope that you have in Jesus Christ. For those of us in Christ, the good news for us is that now we get to use the rest of our lives looking, watching, and waiting for the return of Christ. I like how Paul says it in Titus 2, that because we have been saved, because the grace of God has appeared to all men. Titus 2:11. That's Jesus Christ. He appeared once. The grace of God appeared in him. He brought salvation to all men. What's there for us Christians to do? Verse 12, it instructs us then to deny ungodliness and worldly desires to live sensibly, righteously and godly in the present age. Looking for the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from every lawless deed. That's what we're doing waiting for his return. We're saying, look, you died for me. You didn't die for me to just wait around for you to come back, but to live a life to your glory. To see the possibility all around me, to bring that good news to other people, to invest my life into other people. When you think about what Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians 15, about that which is perishable, becoming imperishable, and how glorious it's going to be to see the saints one another with each other, with Christ. That's why we live for him now, because you're going to see people in heaven, brother and sister, that you invested in, and you'll see them in a way you would have never imagined, glorified, not just will be looking like it's our best like look ever. I mean, whatever that's going to look like for you and I. I don't know...what age will be, how much hair will get back if we lost, will be in our best physique ever. Age 26.5 for a man you know, it's far more than that. What's going to be truly unrecognizable in us is the change from within. All the ways we just can't keep it together. To love God perfectly with our heart, soul, mind and strength. To love others perfectly. And it's whoa. That's you? The great thing is we have to do as believers now, we help people get there. We help each other in that process. And so we get to see a little taste of that even now, as we help each other to grow in our love for the Lord and our love for one another. That's the charge we can get from this passage, is it gets us excited to comfort each other with the truth of this, but then also to say, hey, let's be zealous for good deeds. We take this idea and we turn it into actual, encouraging living to live for the Lord Jesus Christ and denying all the things that we want to do that serve ourselves and rather to serve other people. 
Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your word this morning. We thank you that it tells us who we really are, who we are now in Christ, and it gives us the hope of glory of who we are going to be one day in Christ. Lord, that we are not left to ourselves to make change in our own lives. Lord, but you bring it day by day, week by week, as we sit under your Word, as it does its work in our hearts as it transforms us from one glory to the next into the likeness of your Son. So take your Word and use it mightily in us now. We thank you we've had this day now to worship you, to bring glory to your name through the Word, through prayer. And now, in this final song, let our hearts be lifted up so high thinking of the great gospel that saved us and the opportunity we have to move forward in service to you, Father. We pray this in your Son's name. Amen.

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The Marks of a Good Christian: Holiness

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The section of Scripture we're going through in 1 Thessalonians 4 as we saw a few weeks ago, last we left off in verses one and two, how Paul turned the corner from talking about our Christian identity to our activity, that who we are in Christ precedes and defines, determines what we do for Christ, and we do it for him and through him and to him. And that matter usually comes back to a matter of obedience, a matter of wanting to, as verse one says in 1 Thessalonians 4:1, live in a way pleasing to God and excelling still more. And I was encouraged because the first sermon of the conference two weeks ago that I went to was on obedience, and how in the day and age we're in, the church has, in its own small ways certain denominations or tribes or whatever you want to call them, responded in great measure to defending the doctrine of God and Christ and the Holy Spirit and justification by faith alone. But the opening sermon was on what happened to sanctification, what happened to calling the church to obedience, to wanting to live a life pleasing to God and not everything dying the death of a thousand qualifications of well, make sure you remind people of the grace of God and looking to Christ. And that is important. And it's not just important. It's the heart of our faith that we stand in Christ and in Christ alone. As Paul says in verse one, we request and exhort you in the Lord Jesus. But verse two, he can also say, now we command you by the authority of the Lord Jesus. And really, that's what we're looking at the rest of the way in this letter, in chapters four and five, it is an exhortation to excel still more and living a life pleasing to God. I would commend to you verse one of chapter four as one to memorize. When you want to think of what does sanctification and obedience and growing in Christ and living the Christian life, really come down to, verse four has it for you because it grounds you in Christ. And then it says, and you received instruction, remember, its teaching. That's what we need. We need to sit under the Word of God. I need to sit under the Word of God. That was refreshing for me the last two weeks, because often I'm the one up here, not out there. And no matter how many sermons you can listen to online, it does not replace sitting under the Word of God. In person, letting the work of the spirit from the work of the W ord through the mouth of a preacher hit you. Now those sermons you can listen to online and the studies you do on your own. They're wonderful for helping you to understand more of who God is and what he expects of us. But there has been and never will be a replacement for the live preaching of God's Word to his people. And you see that and hear that in verse one. They're being requested and exhorted in Christ, and they received instruction. And here's a word on our obedience, our response, how you ought to walk and please God that you excel still more. That's what you need to have memorized. What does sanctification come down to? How? As in, it's instructive. It's not pie in the sky. You ought...as in this is expected of you, Christian. This isn't optional. To walk, it should be something not just instructive that you are expected to do. But to walk means you can walk it out, you can see it. You can live it. But what drives it? How you ought to walk and please God. The devotion that drives your sanctification. Your obedience is everything to you. It's not just creating rules and regulations for us to follow when we talk about obedience. Yes, the instructions are important, but as we saw preaching through Mark years ago, that the love of God could get buried under the law of God, when you just start to relate yourself to instructions only and you lose the motivation of wanting to please God. That's the drive train of our growth in Christ. It's the relationship we have with God in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit. And so it's not merely a matter of the things we distance ourselves from. This word sanctification that we'll hear three times this morning. Sanctification is is not merely, though it does include what you separate from, but really the center of it, the heart of it...what gives it life is what you are devoted to. More so, who you're devoted to. And this is where Paul starts in chapter four. And we saw the first mark of a good Christian is wanting to please God. So that being the drivetrain of our sanctification...now let's read three through eight and see what's first on the list in the Christian life. What shows up immediately in a person who lives a life wanting to please God? The first mark of a good Christian is holiness. I'm going to read all of one through eight just to set the section in our minds, and then we will look at verses three through eight. 
"Finally, then, brothers, we request and exhort you in the Lord Jesus, that as you received from us instruction as to how you ought to walk and please God, just as you actually do walk, that you excel still more. For you know what commandments we gave you by the authority of the Lord Jesus. For this is the will of God, your sanctification, that is, that you abstain from sexual immorality, that each of you know how to possess his own vessel in sanctification and honor, not in lustful passion like the Gentiles who do not know God, and that no man transgress and defraud his brother in the matter, because the Lord is the avenger in all these things, just as we also told you before, and solemnly warned you again. For God has not called us for the purpose of impurity, but in sanctification. So he who rejects this is not rejecting man, but the God who gives His Holy Spirit to you." 
This is God's holy Word to us, given through His Holy Spirit to produce holiness in his children. May he do it to his glory today. 
You saw that word sanctification three times. If you have the NASB, in verse three and in verse four and in verse seven, and that is the theme. That's why the second mark is we're going to talk about the marks of a good Christian in the rest of this letter. The second mark is holiness. There is a plan that God has for us to become more holy, more devoted to him, more separated from the world, more separated from sin. It's the mark of every and any good Christian. It's not an option. It's not an add on. That's right immediately out of the gates, as Paul is talking to this church, he wants to establish that sanctification, being devoted to God. That is what God desires for his children. You might question what's the relationship between the word holiness and sanctification? Some of your Bibles say holiness. Really, holiness is the aim of our sanctification. Sanctification is the process, and our holiness is the direction we're headed in, not just here and now, but ultimately when we are glorified with him, when we will be perfect and pure, spotless, undefiled, and we in this lifetime are in a continual process of that holiness being produced in us from the inside out. That's why we never lose sight of verse one, that we are to be pleasing to God. That's where it starts. Today, we'll walk through this passage and answer three questions about sanctification. That process of holiness in us: what it is, how God expects it, and why we should do it. What does God want his children to know about holiness? Well, how does God want his children to act in regard to it? And why does he want his children to abstain from all forms of immorality? That's the way the Spirit has laid this out in these verses from 3 to 8. And as we enter into this study, I do want to stop and speak to the issue of sexual immorality to two groups in the room. As we get into this, I want to speak at my vantage point at age 43 to some in this room as a father, because there are many now who attend here in this main service, that I'm the age to be a father and want to have a moment to speak to you as a dad. And then I want to speak to a portion of the people in the room who I would say I could be a son to and who this may seem like this is something behind you. Whereas the other group, it's something right now in front of you. First, I want to speak to you as a father, to the young, to the impressionable. And I want to say this, that God wants you to know about holiness. He wants you to know about this issue. He wants it to be first and foremost in your mind when you think about what it is to have a relationship with him and the general subject of sanctification or holiness in verse three does move into the particular subject of sexual immorality, sexual purity. And God doesn't avoid talking to us about that because he is a loving father. God created sexual purity as good, holy and beautiful. And if the subject is unfamiliar to you, that's okay. Um, it was a subject that was probably unfamiliar...sexual purity to these people when they were saved. This is a young church. They were less than a year old. This was an impressionable church. This was even a naive and a weak church. And the first thing that God intended for Paul to talk to them about their sin is sexual purity. So let me give the young in the room a simple way to think about it. I'm not calling it a definition. I just want to give you a way to think about it, young people. Sexual purity is a word for the thoughts, feelings, words and actions that God made to be good, holy and beautiful between a husband and a wife, and only for a husband and a wife. That's how I want you young people to think about this. Sexual purity is a word that encompasses the thoughts and feelings, the words and the actions that God made to be good and holy and beautiful between a husband and a wife...your mommy and daddy...and only between them. So you can picture dad coming home from work, and what's he do? He gets on the ground and he wrestles. And that's maybe the way he relates to his sons. And then he goes into the kitchen and he sees mom, and he goes up to her and gives her the biggest smooch and hug he can conjure up after a long, hard day's worth of work. And that big smooch and hug is only for her and absolutely for her. Devoted to her and no other her out there. That's what sexual purity is about. That's what I want you young people to think about. There's a hundred other things that could be included in this. But I want that to be what's in your head. This is God's good design. Sexual purity between one man and one woman, a husband and a wife. It tells young people that this is not for a boyfriend and a girlfriend. This is not between a boy and a boy or a girl and a girl. Anything in those categories is sexual immorality, but sexual purity by the good, holy and perfect and beautiful way God designed it is for two people committed before God for as long as they both shall live. So that's my word to the young in the room, and I hope that helps today as we get into this. The second group is to the older and more mature. The people that I could call a parent in here. And I don't want you checking out because you think you've arrived. May not have been a struggle for a while. And it could be easy to think this is for everybody else. And the first warning scripture would give you would be what? Take heed lest you fall...if you think that sin is put to death. Second, I would say in relation to that, and I praise God if you would say, hey, it hasn't been a weakness for me in a long time. Then I would say, you know, you can take the same vigilance, and holy violence that you are to wage war against your lusts with, and do so against any other sin in your life. This was brought to mind at the conference I was at this past week. You may have heard of John Piper, big arms when he preaches. And if you think I lean over this a lot, you should watch him so I restrain myself. Can't watch him, I usually just have to listen. And I know when he's getting dramatic. But he said this point. They asked him what have been the things you've had to fight with and fight in your own life of holiness? And he talked about, you know, he waged holy violence against lust, his entire pastoral ministry. And by God's grace, he ran that race. But he said, you know, it was sad was it took him until 30 years in, 2010. He started at his church in 1980, he said, for some reason, all those passages, like in Matthew where Jesus says, you know, if lust is from the inside and thinking about a woman who's not your wife with a lustful thoughts is adultery, he would attack that with holy violence and vigilance, and yet he would give a pass to sullenness, to bitterness that leads to anger, that leads to isolating himself from his family. And he said, so whatever you might apply that same excel still more with all your might to lust. If lust isn't your issue, then what is today? What principle can you learn from sanctification today to apply somewhere else? That would be my word as a son to a parent in here. So let's start with what does God want us to know about holiness, in particular sexual purity. 
And the first thing he wants you to know in verse three is that sexual purity is possible. God's will, verse three, your sanctification, that is, that you abstain from sexual immorality. He works from general to specific. A comprehensive opening phrase...the will of God, the desire of God, the plan of God for every single Christian's life is to be sanctified, to be devoted to God, and set apart from sin. That blanket statement then leads to a specific, that is, to abstain from sexual immorality. Now that word abstain doesn't need a ton of defining. Abstain means abstain. It means stay away from...avoid at all costs. Don't ask the question how close can I get? Because that's revealing. But how far can I stay away? Stay away from what? Sexual immorality in the time of Paul in the New Testament, that word is the most general word. for sexual immorality. It's a catch all word. It covers every kind of sexual sin when Paul uses it in the New Testament. He has other words more specific. You'll hear those in 1 Corinthians 6 or Galatians 5...impurity, sensuality, homosexuality, adultery. Yes, those are specific. But when Paul pulls this word out...in the KJV, fornication, it is his junk drawer word for sexual sin. You know what a junk drawer is? What do you find in a junk drawer? Everything. Exactly. You find your keys there. You find your wallet. You find one of your kids there. It's a junk drawer. And that's the word he has here for abstaining from sexual immorality. So why do I emphasize that? Because there are no loopholes around this, brothers and sisters. Oh, you know, but that one sin...no. If you're talking about any deviation from behavior that brings honor and glory to God. With your thoughts, your attitudes, your words, and your actions in regards to sexual purity, there are no loopholes here. Abstain. Absolute purity. No compromise, no caveats, no cop outs. Is that clear? So it's going to be tempting on the issue of this that before you hit 70, whether in your mind or in a conversation. You go, yeah, you know, I know it says abstain. And then you what? You try to qualify it. You take that word and try to make it something it's not. But come on, it's. Look at the era that we live in. It's harder now than it's ever been. No it's not. It may be more ubiquitous. It may be more available. It may be more accessible. But it's no worse than it was when Paul wrote this. What could stay out of sight in anonymity today...phones, screens. It is more available. But what was in the sight of plain day was the immorality rampant in Thessalonica. You could join a religious cult where they had temple prostitutes. So it is just as awful, if not worse in this time, because the heart of man doesn't change. All that's changed now is it's wider, it's broader, but it's no deeper in the heart of man and the sin of man. Gordon Fee, who's a expert on Pauline epistles, wrote a 300 page commentary on this Thessalonian letter, wrote, "In order to appreciate why sexual immorality is the first matter up, one needs to be reminded that what the Jewish and its offspring Christian community regarded as immoral, was not considered to be so among pagan Gentiles." What's this expert on Pauline literature saying? He's saying, look among the Gentiles, those people that got saved in Acts 17, in Thessalonica, hearing about who Jesus is, that he is Lord and not Caesar was all they knew. But the ethics that came with following Jesus Christ, they had no idea. And if they came out of the darkness of some cult, some false religion that associated sexual pleasure with a religious experience...that had to be separated out now. So that's why it's first on the list. The culture that he came preaching Christ and Him crucified to was debauched. And just because they trusted in Jesus Christ, their mind wasn't immediately back-filled with all that they were supposed to do. But what Paul wanted them to know, first and foremost, right out of the gates, is that sexual purity is possible. The spirit of his age would have been, if it feels good, do it. Which is nothing different than what we hear today. In the spirit of their age, because of Gnostic dualism, this idea that the spiritual life is good...the Greek philosophers believed. And our whole existence is to escape the bounds of our evil mortal flesh, because it's weak. And Greeks believed in strength, strength of the mind, strength of the spirit. So they had a dualism that just said, you know what? Because that's that separation you could do whatever you want in your body. It doesn't matter. Treat it however you want. Enjoy pleasure. Just, you know, think like the stoics and resist for the greater good of your own preservation. So there was a feels good...do it mentality. But Paul says God's will is clear, Thessalonians...you abstain. Don't test it. Don't try it. Don't follow your feelings. Don't give in to your flesh. Abstain. And that's the root of the command here. And it sounds strong and it is strong and it's rooted not in the voice of a preacher. It's rooted in the authority of Jesus Christ in the preceding verse, Verse two. You know what commandments we gave you by the authority of the Lord Jesus. That's why later on he says, I have to tell you this again. I'm solemnly warning you. How clear do I have to be about what God expects in regards to sexual purity? He can't say anything greater than...this is God's will for your life. All the mystery that we sometimes talk about surrounding God's will for our lives. What does he want me to do today or tomorrow? Where should I go? What should I do? Who should I marry? Where should I get a job? And oh, if I only knew God's will. If he would only show me. But yet we give a pass to the things that are patently obvious. How should you? How should you really? I mean, if you think about wrestling with making decisions, God's will for your life, but you have an ongoing, unchecked, unrepentant sin in your life, how would you have the discernment to know what God would want you to do? Because your thinking is not clear. You're not seeing things straight. So Romans 12:1-2 told us a few weeks ago, we have to be transformed by the renewing of our mind. 
Which leads us to the second point. How does God expect us to do this? He gives us this standard absolute purity abstain from immorality. So point two in verses 4 to 6, how does he expect us to remain sexually pure? He wants you to make it personal. Purity is personal, and it's personal in three ways. He wants you to know something about yourself, something about the people it affects around you, and ultimately something about Jesus Christ. And he talks about these three realms of relationship. 
First is, how am I supposed to fulfill this command to be pure? Know something about yourself, verse four...that each of you know. So this doesn't even really start with a specific to do. This is something to know. I need to know how to possess my own body. That's the word for vessel in sanctification and honor. Opposite of the lustful passions of the Gentiles, the pagans who don't know God. I need to know something about myself that I know God and He knows me, and I'm to live differently. But he's not just leaving that out in the atmosphere, something just purely on the spiritual level. He's saying practically, how can you have self control? It's at the center of knowing how to possess your body. He wants you, Christian, to know yourself, to know your ears and eyes and brain and mouth and hands and feet, heart, lungs, guts, all of your inner and outer being. That's step one to living a pure life. Know what tempts you. He's contrasting them with their old life, how they used to live, the lustful passions...the live and let live philosophy. The do what feels good philosophy of lustful passions. What are these lustful passions? Well, John Piper says it this way. "That lustful passion he's talking about is any good desire, minus personal holiness and honor to God. Go back to verse four. That's what he's saying. What does it mean to have a lustful passion? It's when you take a good desire and you subtract God's honor and your personal holiness. What are you left with?...sexual immorality? And he's saying, that's the thing you need to know about yourself first. Have some self control. Go to Galatians 5, walking in the spirit and you won't gratify the desires of your flesh. What are you feeding your spirit? Versus what are you feeding your flesh? What are you putting before your eyes, ears, all of that? He's saying that's your first step today. You got to take an inventory of everything in your life, a circumspect view of your life. And see every angle that the temptations come at you from the outside, but also the inside. Because that's where it lands. I mean, it's going to eventually land in your heart and lead your heart astray. Paul wants you to have self-control over your body. Your new mentality is, if it honors God, then I'll do it. If it doesn't, I won't. And I need to know how I work. So let me give you some practical application here, just from some things that as I was listening and reading and thinking about this, that maybe some starting points, starting points to live in a way pleasing to the Lord. Knowing how to possess your own body. And we're talking holistically. First application is this. You need to break free from old patterns of thinking about sexual sin. You want a practical way to apply this? Start with the renewing of your mind. The hardest thing for some people is to do what? It's not to delete the pictures off the phone. It's not to unplug the computer. It's not to, cancel an account. You can do those things, but you can't do that to your mind as easy, can you? It's much harder to delete memories. It's much harder to cancel thoughts that could come back into your head. And so the scriptures would tell us to start fighting at the level of the mind, because that's where your old life comes back to life first. I heard it in a sermon this week, and I had to stop and replay it about five times for the poignancy of this statement. "Old sins recycled in our minds become tomorrow's temptations". That's what it means to fight at the level of your mind. Old sins recycled in your mind become tomorrow's temptations. That's why you can try to put all the boundaries and guards around everything around you. But can you guard this? What are you going to do for that? Because nobody could see into that. Nobody could break into that. The only one sees that is the Lord. And so the moment that thought that old sin wants to recycle in your mind, what are you going to do with it? Because you got about, as Piper would say, five seconds to decide. And if you give that lustful thought, that tempting thought, anything more than five seconds, it'll lodge itself with such a force that will be immovable. And some of you know that by experience, painful experience, and the damage that leaving that thought life unchecked can do for the rest of your life until you start taking every thought captive immediately to the Lordship of Jesus Christ and his design for you to be holy. Anything less than that will not cut it. First Peter 1:13, prepare your minds for action. Keep sober in spirit. Fix your hope completely on the grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. That phrase keep prepared your minds for action. It was an idiom, a literal saying of gird up the loose ends of your thinking, preparing your mind for action as a Christian to fight against temptation. In first Peter 1:13 is the image of a Roman soldier who's sleeping at night, and he has his long gown on underneath his weapons. He's ready for battle at any moment, but when he wakes up and charges into there, he has to take that long flowing toga and tuck it back into his belt. Otherwise it will be his demise. He'll trip over it and he'll die. So Peter borrows that image and he says, that's what you have to do with your thought life, Christian. You have hope for future grace coming to you at the revealing of Jesus Christ. But in the meantime, how sober minded do you have to be about sin? You got to be like that soldier that takes that and tucks the fringes of the gown back in. And you, Christian, take the fringes of your thought life where it can just play out in that danger zone and you tuck it back in. You take the fight to it the moment it comes to you. Colossians 3:5, it's easy for me to turn to in my Bible because it's a lasting memory for me. Colossians 3:5...it's one place in my Bible I had to tape up. Therefore, consider the members of your earthly body as dead to immorality...first on the list...that same word. Why is it taped up? Because I was preaching this to teenagers about a decade ago, and I was using a cheap old music stand, and I had my Bible up there, and I was trying to give the sense, the power of when Paul says, consider the members of your earthly body as dead to sexual immorality. That's the word. John Owen, the Puritan who wrote Mortification of Sin, that's the word for mortify. And I was trying to give them an example of what does it look like to mortify our sin. And so I told them a story that there was an evening. Shannon and I, we were watching a movie, and I had a Spidey sense, not because I'm a superhero. I had a sense of a spider being near us. I don't know why I'd been reading about spiders. I had found them in our basement, and I just had a sense that as the lights were out, there was a spider in the room, and I was right. I flipped the light on and there it was. It was kind of just along the baseboards. And it was a wolf spider, you know, those kind that when you walk out in the morning and the dew is set on your grass, they, they hide in those burrows and then they come out and snatch something up and pull it back in there. They are baby tarantulas...hate those things. But as the man of the home, it is my duty to kill them. And something that I actually hate, I really kill. I mean, if I'm neutral towards it, an ant, I might pick it up, flick it back outside. Have a nice day, ant. I don't do that. But a wolf spider in my house is getting mortified, because that word meant to kill something beyond death. It really did. When Paul says consider the members of your earthly body as dead. This word was to take extreme measures to ensure all life ceases in the object. You've seen the movie, the action movie, the thriller movie where they want to keep the plot going. And so they think they kill the guy, and then they turn around and talk about how the world saved. And then they see his arm move and reaches for. That's not mortification. Finish the job. And that's what Paul is saying in Colossians 3:5. How do we deal with sexual sin? You kill it beyond killing it. John Owen, in Mortification of Sin said, "be killing sin or sin will be killing you." And we know that line. But here's what he next said, "let not that man thinks he make any progress in holiness, who walks not daily over the bellies of his lust." Got that mental image in now? Don't think you've made any progress in holiness in this area unless daily you walk over, you tread over, you squash down the bellies...the hungry part of your body, the lusty part of your body. I want to eat that snack. And he says, you got to walk daily over that. You got to crush it. Put it to death completely. Because anything less; that sin will come back to life and what?... kill you. Because what does the enemy want to do?...steal, kill and destroy. So if there's no quarter for the enemy towards you, how should you feel about it? You mortify it. You take all measures that you can to fight that battle of the mind. 
Second application...break free of old patterns of living that lead to sexual sin. The first one was break free of old patterns of thinking. Immediately crush it, mortify it, get rid of it. The second one is are there any old habits, any old patterns that you can recognize? Another preacher talked about fighting the near battle, not the far off one. He said, the vast majority of Christians don't fight the battle up close of avoiding a prostitute, but they will face it at the ad at the bottom of their beloved Fox News page. You know what I'm talking about, don't you? Unless you don't read Fox News. The ads that they want to pop up to get you to look. That's what he's saying. That's the near fight. That's not the far off fight. You know, we could sound sanctimonious, pious about the far off fight. I'd never drive through that part of town. But just mindlessly scroll. That's the near fight. That's the one that will plant the seed for that old recycled thought to come back. To get you right back where you've tried to not go. I remember thinking that it dawned on me when I was in high school. I loved reading the sports section and this thing young people don't understand called a newspaper. It was made of wood pulp, and I distributed them through my neighborhood. And in the sports section is where first that near fight dawned on me that at the bottom of the sports section had those ads for the gentlemen club in town. And all it took was that spark right there to be a thought for later on that day. Fight the near fight...not the far off one, because the near fight is the one that what?...it tricks you. It makes you think, oh, that wasn't so bad. I'll get it out of my head. If you know that's where it is...That's why I stopped reading the sports section in the morning. It wasn't worth it. You take some measures. Those measures aren't the thing ultimately, that's purifying me. The Spirit through the Word is. But it sure helps to put some boundaries in your life. So that's what we need to know about ourselves. How to control our own body, verse four and five. Back to first Thessalonians. But now he wants you to know something about others. Sub point number two under point two about what we need to know how to win the fight. Verse six, and that no man transgress and defraud his brother in the matter. Just that right there. Paul says it's not just about you, it's about the people around you. That your sin doesn't just affect you, it affects others. Now, we don't know from that one line if Paul got some report from Timothy that there was adultery going on in this church. It seems to suggest that. But we can certainly see how the phrase brother, sometimes some translations talk about brother or sister, and this wouldn't be something only for men. But it's for men and women, brothers and sisters, to not what?...transgress, which means to break God's law. Go beyond the bounds. Step out of bounds. Here's the line. You don't just walk up to it, you willfully cross it. That's what it means to transgress. That's an issue you have with breaking God's law. But then there's the issue of defrauding your brother or sister. What's that word, defraud? It's about taking advantage of someone, usually in the writings in the New Testament, it's about being greedy, gaining something at someone else's expense, taking what's not yours. Paul says, Christians, we don't take what's not ours. That person's not your husband or wife. It doesn't matter if they're your boyfriend, girlfriend. They're not yours. When are they yours? Right there. (holding up wedding band). That's when you found the one. How do you know when you found the one you want? Do you want Ashoff's dating advice? If this is on your finger, you found the one. And that's your one...you're only one. And if you don't have that, you don't have the right to anyone else. Because that's where it'll head. You'll think, but I can compromise. No you can't. You won't be the exception to the rule. Not in today's climate, not with the temptations around you. Abstain from sexual immorality. Don't defraud your brother or sister in the matter. What does God demand in 1 Timothy 5 for how young men are to treat young women in church... absolute purity. Young men, how do you treat your sister? That's how you should treat the girl you're pursuing, and nothing less than that. And if you go any less than that, you've compromised the Scripture. You do what Paul is going to say later on, you reject the Word of God...who's given his spirit to you. God is pretty serious about this, but the most serious thing comes next. The third relationship when it comes to who you need to know...know something about yourself, know something about your brothers and sisters. But here's the one that you need to pay attention to at the end of verse six. Know this because the Lord is the avenger in all these things. Is he being comprehensive enough for us?...any matter related to abstaining from sexual immorality, the Lord is the one who will judge you, the Christian. How serious is Paul about it? He told them before; he solemnly warned them. Clearly, the message wasn't getting through. So this same Lord Jesus, who in 1 Thessalonians 1:10 will rescue us from the wrath to come. Look, if you're a Christian and you sin, you are not destined for wrath. That's not the point of what he's saying about Jesus being the avenger here. 1 Thessalonians 5:9 says, God has not destined us believers. He could say this to the same people He's warning here. He has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ. So rather than say, oh Adam, it sounds like you're saying that, hey, if I sin as a Christian, then I thought...you are absolved from ultimate judgment. Praise God. Your salvation is secure. Your glorification will come...your deliverance. So what's the warning here?...the avenger in all these things? It's a warning to say that there's some judgment that the Lord Jesus can carry out on us as believers, as chastisement to prune us, to make us more fruitful. He's talking about Galatians 6...reaping what you sow. The damage that you don't think you're doing because you're keeping it private. You will reap that. Some of you know that, some of you don't. And he's saying the Lord is the avenger. He has perfect justice, perfect righteousness, perfect love, perfect grace. He knows exactly when and where and how to do it. But know this, Ephesians 5, when it talks about Christ and His bride. He will fight for the purity of his bride, the church, by any means necessary. Do you believe that? When Ephesians 5 says he wants to wash his bride in His Word, he presents her as sanctified before himself and the Father. You don't want to mess with that. He is fighting for the purity of his bride. And the implication then is we should be solemnly warned in how we treat one another. Because of the judge...that same one who delivers us from the wrath of God. There is a consequence to our actions all through the scriptures. There's a consequence of physical sickness, even a sickness that can lead to death when we don't obey God's prohibitions for sexual sin. Psalm 32, David talks about God's hand on him for his sin. His vitality drained away as with the fever heat of summer, he wasn't talking figuratively there. It's God's disciplining of him. Romans 1:27 speaks about the sins of a homosexual lifestyle that receive in their own persons the due penalty of their error. You know that's impartial right there that doesn't discriminate between Christians and non-Christians. You transgress, you cross the line of God's boundaries of sexual sin that could be you...receiving in your own body the penalty of your error. The reality of sexual sin causing physical consequences, even ones that lead to death. It doesn't separate out Christians from non-Christians. The latest estimate from the World Health Organization, estimates a million STIs are transmitted a day and hepatitis B alone still kills a million people a year. There's the evidence to that. And there would be more. You could go down the list all day. Warnings...Proverbs five, six, and seven, each one of those chapters warning against a sexually immoral lifestyle ends with really the same warning in all of them, it's a warning to back up, because you will what?...Proverbs 5:23, die for lack of instruction. Chapter six, the one who commits adultery with a woman is lacking, sense; he who destroy himself does it. Chapter seven, many are the victims she has cast down, and numerous are her slain. Her house is the way to Sheol, descending to the chambers of death. There are no loopholes around those warnings in the scriptures. Second, the Bible talks about losing blessing. A loss of some experience of God's good gifts in this lifetime. Psalm 51, David lost the joy of his salvation. He didn't lose his salvation. But he lost the joy of it...in his unrepentant, unconfessed sin. And what does he say?...restore to me the joy of my salvation. Take not your Holy Spirit from me. I mean the blessing that he knew he was losing, that he experienced by his sin. Then his own son Solomon, 1 kings 11, you read to the end. After his 700 wives and 300 mistresses, God's judgment for him was that the kingdom would be taken from his hand. He lived a long life. Lived for his pleasures. Ecclesiastes 2 said he didn't hold back from himself any pleasure, but what did he lose? He lost God's blessing. And then last but not least, the Bible can talk about a professing Christian whose salvation can be called into question. When unrepentant sexual sin becomes the defining mark of his or her life. 1 Corinthians 6:9, do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Don't be deceived...as in you could be deceived into thinking somebody could just profess Jesus and go on unchanged untransformed and just live the life they want to live. And what does Paul say? Don't be deceived. Neither fornicators nor adulterers, idolaters, effeminate, homosexuals, thieves, covetous, drunkards, nor revilers swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. Now here's the hope. Such were some of you. But you were washed. You were sanctified. There's the expectation that there's the change and when that change is not seen there's reason to question it. Which is the most serious warning there is...eternal judgment. What's the motivation behind this all after we've talked about the what and the how, the last one third point back to 1 Thessalonians 4:7-8, why does God want his children to abstain from immorality? 
Because purity has a purpose and that's God's purpose for your life. Look at verse seven. God has not called us for the purpose of impurity, but in sanctification. That's where it ends. That's where it ends. God's holy purpose in saving us is to set us apart, to be his shining lights in a dark world, Philippians 2:15. Salt and light in a world that we can all look around and say, yeah, it's as bad as it's ever been. Immorality, its availability, accessibility, anonymity, accountability for it, all of it could be harder than it's ever been. And he says you were saved to be set apart from that stuff, not to be sucked into it. He's not called you to that impurity, and he wouldn't call you to something that you couldn't do. If his will for you is sanctification, his purpose for you is toward sanctification, then if you're fighting against that, if you're pushing it aside, if you're questioning it right now in your heart, verse eight tells you about yourself right now. He who rejects this is not rejecting man, not the word of man. He says chapter two, verse 13. You didn't receive the Word of God which you heard from us, as the word of men. You heard it as it really is the Word of God, which if you receive it by faith, if you believe it's warnings and it's promises, it performs its work in you who believe. The starting point for some of us to change this morning is just believing what God is telling you right now. It will change your heart. It'll move you to action more than anything I can do. And so he says, if you, verse eight, reject this, you're not rejecting man, the preacher. You're rejecting the God who gives His Holy Spirit to you. This is talking to Christians saying you're digging your heels in right now if you're fighting against this, against the God who gave you His Spirit, his Spirit that should transform you and change you from the inside out. So for the Christian, you know that God has given you His Spirit. He's given you His Word to know what to do as a result of it. And you have to believe the promise of this section is it unfolds that purity is possible. Because it's God's purpose for you. But it starts with you taking it personal. It starts with you taking it personal today, doing an inventory on your own life. And just coming back to that starting point, this is what God has for me because he loves me. Now, some of you, it needs to go beyond this room to some level of accountability, because in the world that we're in, the anonymity with which some people could be sucked into sexual sin, namely pornography and its wide accessibility and availability, you cannot win on your own. It's too prevalent. The access that people could have to it today. It'd be like expecting an alcoholic to get over drinking when all the while underneath his jacket he has an IV of liquor going into his veins that he can get any time he wants. Would you expect that guy to get over his alcoholism? How do you expect somebody that's sucked into pornography in that addiction to get over it on their own without some level of accountability, because it's so private, it's so anonymous. Accountability is the friend of integrity, and anonymity is your enemy. It's everywhere. You can get it in every way. If you need accountability, that's what we're here for. And there's help that's available. Guy or girl, no matter what your age is... Email me, email Kurtis who heads up our counseling department. We'll get you the help we can give. We'll do our best to fight for you, to walk beside you. But we don't want to leave you behind. You got to let us know you need help. You need accountability. Deepak Raju, he's a pastor of counseling at a church up in Capitol Hill. He has an acronym for accountability. If you're already in an accountability relationship and you want to get it better, remember the word HOLD. This is the type of accountability you need. H is for honest. You, the person struggling in the sin, have to start with yourself and be honest with yourself. You can't hold anything back. That person needs to know everything you're struggling with. It starts with honesty. Second letter O, often. You can't be when you feel like it, or when you think you're about to sin. If you're stuck in that ditch of sexual immorality sucked in by it, can't get out of it, you need it often. How often?...as often as it's going to take to get you out. L is for local. It can be easier to stay in it when your accountability is on the other side of the country. It may be a great old friend. It may be a family member. It may be a pastor. You need it locally. You need somebody face to face, eye to eye, sitting down with you. Asking you the hard questions, which brings you to D. It needs to be direct. That person you pick needs to be direct with you. No sugarcoating the questions, no dancing around them. You come up with the set of questions to answer and regularly, often, directly and person to person. Get the help you need. Romans 13:14 says, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, clothe yourself in him, and make no provision for the flesh. Yes, you're putting on the Lord Jesus Christ as a Christian in this, none of our power to be holy and walk in holiness comes apart from him. But it does say make no provision for the flesh, as in there's something we have to do as well. What provisions are you making? That's for the Christian in the room. For the non-Christian, you may hear these warnings of sexual sin and its consequences and want to live a better life. But that will fall short in two ways. One is if you don't come to Christ and he doesn't change you from the inside, all the external things you can try to do will only get you so far, because you haven't removed your sin problem. It's still in your heart. It still has power over you. No matter all the boundary lines you can put up. So it'll fall short there. And even if you succeed for a while the second problem with you, if you're not in Christ today, is the eternal. It's the wrath that is to come. You can find ways to walk in purity externally and then find yourself outside of Christ eternally. So the solution to that is to look to Christ today for salvation. Jesus Christ Himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that we may die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you are healed. Do you believe that in faith today? Do you believe that his wounds are what heal you?...more than any habits, more than any helpful hints. The only way your sin problem is healed is by the what?...body and blood of Christ broken for you that you trust in faith. Do you believe that he bore those sins on the cross? Do you believe that his death is your life? And you can look to him for salvation because he's the only person that never sinned?...never once. You think of all the ways we're tempted to sin and we give in to sin, and never once did he sin. And that's why Christ is your hope today. So call upon him and be saved...for any sins you've committed past, present, or worry about in the future. Look to the Lord Jesus Christ and be saved. 
Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your word this morning. We thank you for the promise it holds...the power it has to transform us, to change us. We're saved only by the body, blood, the work, the righteous work of Christ, his sacrificial death raised by his justification to life. And we trust in him entirely and completely. We need your help, Spirit, to take this word from conviction to application. Don't let it just be something we did today and we walk away from. But let the word have examined us as a mirror shows us what we're really like. That we looked into it. It shows us, us back. We see where our true help is needed. It's in you, Christ. It's in your words. It's by your spirit, we ask. Help us, we pray. Amen.

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Be Holy People

We've been in 1 Thessalonians. Great epistle, great preaching that we've heard here at our church from that passage. And I want to go somewhere different today, but similar in thought. We've been thinking about what it means to be a healthy church, what a healthy church is, how a healthy church grows. But you need to understand today that a healthy church consists of holy people, holy people. And that's what we're going to see today. From the text this morning in 1 Peter chapter 2, verses one through three. And I would invite you to turn to that passage in your copy of the scriptures. 1 Peter chapter 2, verses one through three. And we're going to look at this morning what it means to be holy people. As you're turning there, I want to speak very candidly about our walk with Christ. You see, the Bible speaks about being content. We should find contentment in all things, every circumstance and situation. We're to be content. But I do believe that it pleases God in one area of our life that we can be discontent. And before you check out on me for the rest of the sermon, thinking that I'm going to be preaching heresy. Let me explain what I mean. I believe that it pleases God for us to be discontent with the current state of our spiritual development. To be dissatisfied with the current state of our sanctification process. And not to be content to where you are in your personal holiness. Not to be satisfied with being in that place, but to continuously say Christ is the goal and I need to get there. Not to be, you know, you talk about this not content. We don't mean that this means that you should go down a path of despondency or or apathy or indifference, but that discontentment should drive you to strive to pursue Christ in all his fullness. It should never be satisfied with where you are. It's similar to what Paul said in Philippians chapter 3: 12 through 14. He says, not that I've already obtained it or have already become perfect, but I press on. He says, I press on so that I may lay hold of that which is also laid hold of by Christ Jesus. He says, I don't regard myself as of having laid hold of it yet, but this one thing I do is I'm forgetting what lies behind, and I'm reaching forward to what lies ahead. Paul wasn't satisfied as to where he was in his sanctification process. And that's the apostle Paul. If he wasn't satisfied as to where he was in his faith, where do you think we should be at? We should constantly be pursuing Christ. Sometimes we can have a tendency to to come to Jesus and salvation, born again, loving it and say, Jesus, this is about as good as it's going to get. I mean, this is what you got to work with. This is it right here. And we stop right there in our faith. We see others around us growing. We see others with a with a relentless pursuit of holiness. And we like man. I wish I had some of what they got. But guess what? If you are in Christ, you got what they got. Amen? You have everything that you need for life. And godliness is what Peter tells us. You've got it. You don't need to get more of it. You've got what they have. You have a work to do, and that's to work out what God has worked in you. And that's what this is about today, is being the holy people that God has saved you and called you to be holy. We need to be holy. And Peter is going to help us to see that, so that we can live a life where we're pursuing the holiness and the righteousness of Christ. I want to read the text, and then I'm going to pray and ask God to help us as we seek to understand its meaning. 1 Peter 2: 1-3, reads as follows. 
"Therefore, putting aside all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. And like newborn babes, long for the pure milk of the word, so that by it you may grow in respect to salvation. If you have tasted the kindness of the Lord." Bow with me in a word of prayer. 
Gracious father, we are just so thankful that we have your Word. We're grateful that we have the opportunity to open it up freely in this nation. And even in this hour, Lord, I pray that you would grab our attention from anything else that may be on our mind. Harness it such that we might be able to receive this truth and plant it. Give me clarity of mind and thought, boldness to be able to proclaim this truth so that it may edify the body of believers here present. And I pray that you use this to help us all to exalt the glorious Jesus Christ. And we ask all this in his name. And all God's people said, Amen. 
You know, Peter was one of the two most influential apostles in the early church. You know, Paul had a mission to the Gentile believers, and Peter had a mission to the Jews. And he went out and he's writing this letter to saints who had been scattered abroad. And even in verse one of chapter one, he says, they're residing as aliens scattered throughout Asia Minor, throughout the persecution that they were experiencing as believers. They turn away from their Judaistic practices. And now they've turned to Jesus Christ and they're getting persecuted. They're out, about, and scattered abroad. And Peter is writing to them. And you know what he has? He has a single purpose in mind how to conduct themselves in a hostile world. I think Peter had in his mind when Jesus told him, guess what? When the world is going to hate you because they hated me, that's why they're going to hate you. He had all of this in his mind, and he's writing to the saints how they ought to conduct themselves in a hostile world, and he's constantly pointing them back to the example of Jesus Christ. It's because of Christ. It's because of Christ. It's because of Christ. Peter is going to show them in this text how both God is working and the believer must work, so that we might pursue a life of holiness. And so the title of this morning's sermon is Be Holy People. We're to be holy, even as he mentioned in chapter one, verse 15 and 16. He says, but like the Holy One who has called you, be holy yourselves in all of your behavior. Not some of it. He didn't say, you get to pick and choose. He didn't say, do it on Sunday morning when people are looking. He said, in all of your behavior. In verse 16, it's written, you shall be holy, for I am holy. The predication of all of our holiness and what we do to pursue holiness is based on the holiness of God. He says, since I'm this way, you need to be that way, because you're my people. And we're going to see in this text two ways that we need to pursue holy lives and thus be holy people. 
 And the first way is this. It's live for the Lord. Live for the Lord. Look there in verse one, if we're going to be holy people, we need to live as if God is our constant audience. It's living life before his presence in light of what he's done. We just sang about it. What he's done, what he's done. I mean, y'all even clapped. Move side to side. This is a time for us to live for the Lord because of what he's done. And as we're going to live for the Lord, we see the first way that we can live for the Lord is being be reminding ourselves of your faith in Christ. You constantly have to be reminding yourselves of this precious faith that we have in Jesus Christ. Even in the second letter that he wrote, he said, I want to stir you up by way of reminder. It was no pain for Peter to constantly help them know that these precious and magnificent promises that have been delivered to God was to stir them up so that they would be all that they could for his holiness. And he reminds them by using a simple word therefore in verse one that therefore points back to chapter one, verses 23 through 25, when he says, for you have been born again. He's letting them know that you're not the old person. You've been born again. You now have a spiritual birth that has been born from above, literally is how that that term means in the original language. You've been born from above now. God gave you new life. You had an old life, now you have new life. Remember that. Be reminding yourselves of that new life. And then he told them how they got it. He said, you've been born not by a perishable seed, but a imperishable one. You think about things that perish. Some of you have those perennials, those flowers that blossomed a few weeks ago. Have you looked outside lately, what's happening to those flowers? Are they still blooming? Some of y'all are good and some of us probably not. Anything dies when it comes to our house. But all that being said, flowers fade, right? But he says no, no, no, no. You've got an imperishable seed. One that's going to going to last forever. Your salvation wasn't going to initially sprout up and then fade away. It's imperishable. It's going to last. And he said it came through the living and enduring Word of God. Verse 23 of chapter one. So it's enduring. It doesn't taper off. And our physical life, we taper off. I'm in my latter 40s. You know, I think I'm seeing a decline physically. But that's not what happens to us spiritually. We should constantly be growing, but reminding ourselves of that we should be renewed day by day. But that's the living hope and the enduring word. And we have to be reminded of that, because there are going to be some things that are going to be impossible for us to do by human standard, if we're going to be living for the Lord and being holy people. So we've got to be reminded of this birth that came from above, reminding of this word and God's infinite power that he's displayed. If you're going to be holy, you've got to remember that you've been born from above. And if you've been born from above. You got to live like you're from above instead of from below. And in addition to reminding yourselves of the faith that you have in Christ, you need to also be ridding yourselves of the sins of the flesh. Look there later in verse one when he says, be putting aside all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. You see, as believers, we're called to make a decisive break between the former manner of life and the new life that we have in Christ. If we're going to live for the Lord and be holy people. You've got to say, man, it's a difference. I'm set apart. Set apart for God's holy purposes. And so therefore, I've got to rid myself. That word putting aside it really is, is is laying aside, putting aside, ridding oneself. It's almost a it's a word picture that reminded them of taking off garments, taking off garments that were filthy and putting on ones that were that were new. And even in the early church, there were times that as a new believer was baptized, what they would do is they would come up and they would they would come to the baptistry and they would have their old garments that they used to wear, that everybody knew them before they got saved in, and they would take those old garments off. Then they would be baptized. Then the church would give them new garments because they said you're new in Christ. Now you've got new life. Go live in that newness of life. And so every time they looked at their clothing, they thought about the new life that they represented, now that they have been cleansed in Christ. That's what Peter is trying to help them to understand. He says, you got to rid yourself of those things that used to mark your life before Christ. And then he goes on to, to to give a list of vices. And these vices are ones that would really separate believers from one another. The New Testament is filled with lists of vices. You can see it in in 1 Corinthians 6, Ephesians 4, Colossians 3, multiple places that that show list of vices that you've got to put aside or kill. But in this one, he's talking about those that would ultimately jeopardize the health of the church, because he's getting ready to help them to understand what it means to be holy people so that they can be together as living stones to a spiritual temple, and to be a royal priesthood for God. The togetherness and unity that can't be rivaled, but it will be rivaled if they're not holy. And so he says, you got to be holy and rid yourselves of these things. And love how he does this. And he says, you've got to rid yourself of all malice. He uses this word all three times in one verse, because he's emphasizing that it needs to be comprehensive without exceptions of any of these sins. You know, somebody might say, well, I'm not really all malicious. You know, I'm not all to see. I don't got all that stuff going on. Well, the question for you is, do you have any malice? Do you have any deceit and envy? Slander. And that's what Peter is trying to help them to see, is that you've got to lay this all aside. And he starts with the first vice, which is malice. All malice. This term characterized the lifestyle of of us before we were born again. We were malicious in nature. It was just how we were. And sometimes we think of malice as in like the most grotesque form of wickedness. But it can just be anything wicked, anything evil, anything that's contrary to the nature of God. That's what we were. We were malicious. And it really serves as the umbrella for all these other vices and sins that Peter has on the list. Having a a malicious attitude towards anyone. It could be just issues that you allow it to come up. In our Christian vernacular, we like to say, oh, it's I was just disappointed with my brother in Christ. I'm a little frustrated. We use these buzzwords. The Bible calls that anger. And then anger leads to to bitterness, and bitterness turns into malice. Before you know it, you might not have all malice, but you'll get there pretty quickly if you don't deal with it. Malice is what happens. He says you can't have any of those malicious thoughts towards brothers or sisters in the body of Christ. We're called to be a holy people. It's no way you can have a single offense. You shouldn't be that way. And you think about it. God in Christ. He's separated our sins as far as the East is from the West. At Psalm 103, verse 12. As far as the east is from the west, so has he removed our sins from us. And if God has done that for you, brothers and sisters, we got to do that for one another. It should be nothing that should separate us from each other's love. That would cause us to have malice growing in our hearts. God's forgiven you. We should forgive. He says all deceit. The next one there, this deceit is a cleverness to get even or a cleverness to make a false impression on someone. You know what it is. It's using, uh, sort of guile or something that's inaccurate to try to present yourself differently than you really are trying to be clever, sneaky, crafty is what that is. That's what deceit is. Satan is father of deceit. But, you know, this is really detestable in the eyes of God because, you see, it's not like error when you got error. Error is the opposite of truth. But you know what deceit is. Deceit tries to hide in the middle. It says, I'm not going to be error. Imma have a little bit of truth, just enough to fool everybody. But I really got something else brewing on the inside. That's what deceit is, deception. He says that marked you when you were an unbeliever. You can't have that in the body of Christ. None of this deceit, get rid of it all. It's detestable in the eyes of God. And even in Psalm 101:7, it says, he who practices deceit shall not dwell within my house. He said, he'll get you out. You won't be named among my people if you have deceit. He'll cleanse his people. He who speaks falsehood shall not maintain his position before me. That's God speaking. He says he'll get rid of it. No deceit. As I started thinking about deceit, I said, how can we be deceitful in our interactions with one another? You know, what about those moments that you have someone come up to you and whether it's a serious illness or an accident or the death of a loved one, and you come up to them and you say, I'm going to be praying for you. But then weeks later, you don't. You don't pray. You don't pray. It would have been better if you had just even prayed in the moment. But you try to give them a surprise. I'm going to be praying for you. I'm going to be praying for you. Do you ever pray? What do you want them to think? That you're holy and you are praying person constantly on your knees. That's just a simple way that we can dwell in deceit. You see, it doesn't have to be this wicked extreme in. It could be just subtle. But you do enough of those subtle things and it can become a part of you, and you can be just like that old person that you're cleansed when Christ came in. Or maybe it's the person that isn't trying to get you to think highly of them. They're maybe just saying, I'm too low. I you say, hey, you know, there's some ministry opportunities to serve in, oh, you know, I'm a little too busy. I'm a little too busy for that. I can't I can't serve in that. That's, uh. Yeah. I'm just kind of busy. I'm busy. And. What are you doing, brother? Well, I, uh, me, me I I'm, um, I got I got to go home and, uh, I mean, I'm busy, I'm busy, I'm busy. We've heard a brother life group that was sharing that this week. He said, you know what? Busyness is the new laziness. People like to hide behind the word busy and make it seem like they're doing a whole bunch of things when they're really, they're storing up time to fulfill their pleasures in this life. Making the time for the things they enjoy. I'm busy, I gotta, I gotta, you know I got things to do I got stuff I got, I got stuff, stuff, stuff I mean, it's just so much stuff I can't even name it all stuff... that could be deceitful. You know, you would be better served to say, you know what? I'm just going to have to politely decline that ministry opportunity because that's going to cost too much. And I'm not willing to pay that price right now. You see how that's just truthful. Not deceitful. Just speaking the truth. That's what we should be. Truthful people not dwelling in deceit. Those are ways that we can subtly allow this in. Hypocrisy is the next one on the list. Present the truth instead of being a hypocrite. The hypocrite wants to appear a certain way in one setting, but then he changes when he gets into another. This came from the person that would be in a play, and they would wear a mask and they'd have a face underneath, but then they would have this mask that was a smiley face, right? It literally means to judge under you're judging under this face of smiling, but inwardly you're judging someone else or presenting yourself as higher. And that was something that even the Old Testament was rebuked about even before the Pharisees came about. Isaiah 29:13 it says, because this people approaches me with their words, and they honor me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. That was what was happening. They were going through the religious activity, but their hearts were far from God. He says that the reverence for me consists of the commandment of men instead of the Word of God. That's what happens. They like man's rules because man's rules, they can keep man's rules, but then they duck and dodge God's Word, and then they hold you accountable to doing God's Word. That's why people outside the body can talk about Christians for being hypocrites. Because they're one way, one way, and one way another day. We shouldn't be that way. All hypocrisy should be laid aside. One theologian wrote this. He said, it is when we claim to be sinless that we are guilty of the charge of hypocrisy, claiming to be sinless, like, oh, we ain't got no sin. You can see that happening in life group in mutual ministry. I've seen some moments in mutual ministry where everybody in the room got sin except for this person. They spouse got sin. They boss got sin, they dog got sin. They like man, my dog need to repent. We need to give him a Bible study, you know, third Philippians or something. The dog have third Philippians. I don't even know. It's not even the third Philippians, by the way. Just the dog needs it. But everybody around the room is in sin except for them. That's hypocrisy. That's hypocrisy. Come and you've got nothing. Got nothing. Do people around you know the real you, or do they know the you that you put on a Sunday or in spiritual settings of brothers, brothers and sisters in the church? That's hypocrisy. That's got to be laid aside. If we're going to be holy people, we've got to lay that aside. And even envy. Envy is a jealousy that's caused by a desire to have something that another person possesses. You know what the root cause of envy is? It's a jealousy on the heart. And jealousy comes from when you're just blind to the multitude of blessings that God has given you. But you can vividly see the blessings that he's given somebody else. That's what that is. It's like we just. I'm missing. I'm blind to all these things that God has done for us in Christ. All these things. And even just to be here in America, where we can freely open the scriptures and read it, worship collectively so much we blind to all that. It's like, what can I have? What do I need? What does somebody else have that I need to have in my life? That really is a life that's marked by a lack of gratitude. Lack of gratitude cultivates envy. Even James 3:16, it says we're envy and self-seeking exist. Confusion and every evil thing are there as well. Confusion. It'll be chaos if everyone is envying one another here. But he says, lay that aside. That's what you did when you were unsaved. You have to have a new frame of mind. Can't be envious. You see, before we were saved, we envied everything. You looked on television. You started envying. You looked at a billboard I got a hat at. You saw people at your work. I got to have that. You went to church. I got to have that everywhere you went. It was an opportunity to get something. But when you got the gospel of Jesus Christ, you say, I have enough. I have enough. If I have Christ, he is sufficient. Everything else is plus. It's like the one who got the great, the one pearl of great value. And he went and sold everything else because of what he had. You think he was envious of what everybody else had at that moment. He said, no, I got the gospel of Jesus Christ. And I'm content. I got everything I need, kept him from envy that can kill relationships. If we allow that to stir in our church. The last sin that he lists here is slander. He says all slander. This is speech that overflows from an envious heart, a heart that wants to speak evil about another person. It wants to bring them down. Because ultimately, if you bring them down, it'll put you up. That's what happens in slanderous speech. And people do that sometimes they do it on the slide. Well, let me tell you about brother such and such. Oh, you ain't heard about sister such and such. Hey, hey, let me tell you. Slander, slander. It can tear the people of God down. Slander. And you can sneak it in the way out and try to sanitize it a little bit. But you know how we prevent from slander. You can turn to Ephesians. Go left in your Bible. You can go to Ephesians chapter four. Ephesians chapter four and look at verse 29. This was in a situation in this context that Paul is just writing and telling them to lay aside all falsehood and and we you need to speak truth to each other, but they're going to be moments that you're going to be angry. There's going to be moments where there's going to be genuine offenses. Issues are going to happen. We're sinners. It's got to happen. But you don't have to slander. And how did you prevent from that? Verse 29 says, let no unwholesome word proceed from your mouth, but only such a word that is good for edification according to the need of the moment, so that it will give grace to those who hear. It talks about unwholesome. That's rotten speech, that's rotten words. One little negative word can spoil all of the things that you want to say to someone, even if you're giving them a loving rebuke or a correction, you throw a bad word in there. It can spoil everything. Like superlatives. I found that out and trying to correct people. You can't give superlatives. You always do this. No I don't, no I don't. And then before you know it, you go tell somebody. They don't never do this. I mean, it's just superlatives. That's an unhelpful word. Just give them good feedback. Don't have to slander them around the church. Think about wholesome, not unrotten words. And he says, don't let any of those leave your mouth, but only words that are good for edification. That means that they can build somebody up. Even if you give someone corrective, you should be able to edify them to the point where they say, thank you brother, I needed that. Thank you sister, that was helpful. You see, that's how we don't slander. We go right to the person and then build them up by giving them feedback. Because, you know, if you've been offended, sometimes it's a tendency to tell everybody else except for the person who needs it. Paul says here, let it be for edification. And then he says, according to the need of the moment. Sometimes it's just not the time to give feedback. It's not time to say something. But he says when you do, it should give grace to all those who hear. Everybody ought to be built up in truth based on what you say. That's the opposite of slanderous speech, and that's what you do because you're trying to be holy people. Let's turn back to 1 Peter 2. All of these really is what Peter is trying to help us to understand that you had this formal way of life, but you've got to put it aside because of your love and devotion and affection for Jesus Christ. That's the old man. He can't exist now with his new born again life that you have with Jesus Christ. You think about that. It used to be like Romans one said that people that were wickedness and greed and evil and envy and strife and deceit and malice, gossiping and slander, used to identify us. But now we've been sanctified and we look more like Christ. And so let's keep walking in holiness and not in the deeds of the past. Yeah. Think about, you know, uh, people, some of you like to work out here in the church. And some of you don't. That's okay. But, you know, after a workout, sometimes for me, on occasion I get to work out. What I love about the workout is the other side of the workout. After the work is done, the muscles are still twitching and I'm sweating. I'm tired and fatigued and I'm like, it's over. All that agony and work, it's over. I like to jump in a cold shower and then get a warm towel. Because I'm a skinny man with a skinny plan. I need a warm towel. That's what it is. I cold shower, but a warm towel I need to need to warm up a little bit. But the last thing on my mind after cleansing myself after a workout is to think about going back and getting some of those old, dirty, filthy workout clothes and and putting them right back on. That's the last thing from your thinking. You know, worked out. Some of them clothes are sticking to you. You shower and cleanse yourself. Do you want to put them back on? The answer is no. The same should be true of the life that you had before Christ. That should be so filthy for you that you are putting it aside, laying it off. You've been cleansed by the blood of the cross, by the precious fountain of Jesus Christ. Don't go and put that stuff back on again. Lay it aside and keep laying it aside. That's how we are to be holy people living for the Lord. Amen. Let's live for the Lord. Lay those things aside. That's the first step in being holy. Is realizing that you've been born in hope, called to holiness, and that should allow us to walk in harmony with one another as one body. Be holy people living for the Lord. The first thing is living for the Lord. 
And the second feature that we see here to be holy people. Is to long for the Word. In addition to living for the Lord. You want to long for the Word. And Peter says this in verse two, like newborn babes, long for the pure milk of the Word, so that by it you may grow in respect to salvation. He says, you ought to do some living, but you also ought to do some longing. You ought to have some craving. Something should be going on. There's a sense in which you've got to have the Word of God. We should be craving spiritual nourishment as a believer. And I love how Peter, he doesn't tell the Christians to stop doing these things and start doing these things. I got this other list because, you know, us, we'd be looking for that list. But he says, stop doing these things that used to identify you as an unbeliever and then long for the Word of God, and he's going to tell you everything you need to do. Amen. It's the Word that's going to tell you what you need to do that's going to drive your motivations. It's going to dictate your desires. It's going to give you new cravings, even. You long for the Word. It'll give you new longings. That's what Peter is saying. You know the desires, not just behavior modification, but it's spiritual transformation. And that comes to the degree that you pursue the Word of God. Brothers and sisters, long for the Word of God. There's four features that I want to point out as he talks about longing for the Word that will help us this morning. And the first one is this we need to long for the Word desperately. Who need to long for God's Word desperately. There ought to be a a level of desperation when we're longing for God's truth, a sense of urgency. You get some people that they like to get a little verse a day to keep the devil away. I mean, that ain't going to get you much. You need to have some urgency. Like, I need the Word of God today. And it gives us an illustration. He says, like newborn babes long for the pure milk of the Word. You see, just as the baby reaches for the bottle, you ought to be reaching for the Bible. That's what the believer is. He gives an illustration right there before us. You think about a newborn babe. You can't stop a babe from desiring milk. Try to keep them away from it. What happened? That was a little bitty babies. But they turned into muscle men at that moment. They moving around. They will snatch you up. They will grab you. Feed me. They can't even talk. But that's what they say. Feed me. We've had a child that was like that, even as a newborn would stand up on top of the crib, feed me milk. Now I'm just playing. He didn't do that. He didn't do that. But it felt like that. It felt like that. And it was good for me to be like, babe, that's all you. That's all you, girl. Go ahead. That's all. You roll over and go to sleep. Okay? I'm sorry. I supported at times. I supported at times, just not in the night. But you can't stop a baby from longing milk. And that should be the same craving that we have. There should be a level of desperation. You see that newborn babe every 3 to 4 hours like clockwork. Need feeding, needs milk, needs milk. Baby does two things. Eat and sleep. Okay. Maybe you know something else, but it comes after the feeding. But all that being said, they. They need food, they need food, they need food. And Peter is saying, recall that believer, God has bought you and you're born again. Crave and long the pure milk of the Word. Make it a sense of desperation, urgency. Don't do it haphazardly. You know, some people say, man, I got the latest tweet is my devotion for the day. I needed that Word. That isn't the craving that you need is to get somebody else's tweet. Long for the word personally, privately, yourself. Dig in because you need it. You won't take another man's food. You go get your own. This is what you need is is craving the Word of God. And he's not talking about new believers here, as some suppose. As he's talking about new babies, he's really making a comparison to their former manner of life. And to say, like babies long for this milk. He's not saying it as if they're immature. This isn't a rebuke. Because it doesn't matter how mature you are in Christ, you need to still have this desperation of longing for the Word. Some of the older saints, seasoned saints, I'll say in the room said Amen. No matter how seasoned you are, you still need to long for the Word in desperation, almost like you did the first day you found the light of Christ. And again, it's the babies are reaching for that nourishment. We should as well. The Bible talks about the Word as nourishment. First of the Word is bread, and Matthew 4:4 man should not live by bread alone. But what by the Word of God? Every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. You can't live on bread alone. The word refers to it as meat in 1 Corinthians 3:2, even it refers to the Word as honey in Psalm 19:10. Love what he says sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb. Is that the Word of God is just good. The psalmist is letting us know. That is necessary. Job 23:12 he says, I have not departed from the command of his lips, and I have treasured the words of God's mouth more than my necessary food. Job said I got necessary food, but this Word is even necessary. It's even more necessary. I know I have a daily ration that I need, but this is my portion. I gotta have it more than the food that I need. I need God's Word. Do you act like your life depends on your next feeding from the Word of God? Are you wired that way to where you have that type of desperation for the Word? Now you make it your joy to to long for the Word because you crave it desperately, like a babe. Speaking of craving, it's like Psalm 42: 1-2. It says as the deer pants for the water brook. So my soul pants for you, O God. He says, my soul, it thirsts for the living God. That's a that was what the psalmist is teaching us. It's a it's to crave the Word because you're craving God. The typical deer. It needs 2 to 3 quarts of water per day per 100 pounds of body weight. And then when the temperature rises, guess what? Their need for water increases. Trials rise. We need more water. We need more of the Word. We should be thinking about that. It's it's an urgency, a desperation. Some of you, you need to take the reading of the Word of God out of the optional category and put it in the vital category of your day. It don't need to be one of those things that's occasional. It needs to be essential. It don't need to be the the thing that if you get around to doing it, but it needs to be the thing that everything else is centered around. It's the Word of God. I need to feed on that, because that's going to influence the rest of my day. And we're not talking about just the person whose life is falling apart. We're talking about the person's life who's even held together because the the Lord and His Word is holding them together. Reminded of Charles Spurgeon when he said, A Bible which is falling apart usually belongs to a person who isn't. He said, you know what? There's a person that that's going through their Bible so much, they know where all things are at for every moment of need, that their life is held together because the Word is keeping them together. I know a brother he can't even find his book of Ephesians. It's sometimes missing in the Bible because he doesn't work the Ephesians backwards and forwards that it's almost out of his Bible. He's got to glue it back in to keep it intact. Did you work your Bible with that type of urgency and desperation? That's what Peter is saying here. I hear some people say, well, you know, I'm not really a reader, preacher man. I'm not really a reader. I'm not a reader, not really a reader. You know what I hear that it's almost like I liken it to a person that's in the desert. Hadn't eaten for about three days. You know, on their last breath. And someone comes with water and said, hey, hey, come take this water. And they look up to him. They say, no, I'm not a water person. I don't like water. I don't like water. Well do you like death? I mean, that's the alternative. Because death is pretty imminent right about now. We've got a long for the Word of God. Even if you're not a reader, read the Word of God. It's not the eloquence that you need to have afterwards, it's the devotion that will come as a result. Read desperately. But you also need to read discerningly later in this verse. He says, long for the pure milk of the Word that pure milk. He says, there's a there's a purity. This word purity. It's the only time that it appears in the entire New Testament. And we translate it really pure because it has no deceit. It's the opposite of that word that was used deceit in verse one. It's the opposite. There's a unadulterated, it's uncontaminated. He says. You need to be seeking and longing for that pure Word of God. Unadulterated. It's not been tampered with. It's unmixed. And that's how God's Word, it comes in its purity. Even the psalmist in Psalm 19: 7-8, it says, the law of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul. The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoice in the heart. And the commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes. He said, that's a purity that comes from the Word of God. You need to be seeking that Word it to be trying to determine good expository preaching from healthy people that you know and trust. Get good commentaries. Get a good study Bible. We can help you with that. A lot of people that have been built up and strengthened, they have a MacArthur Study Bible. They're reading the Word and they can see the notes and understand because they see purity there. They see the the truth that's there. They're able to have discernment as you grow and understand the truth. God wants us to have discernment and grow as we long for this pure milk of the Word. But growing in discernment starts with growing an appetite for God's Word and having a a craving and a desire for that truth. Warren Wiersbe talks about this, he said it's sad when Christians have no appetite for God's Word, but must be fed with religious entertainment instead. That's what happens. And he wrote this like in the 80s. And we don't. We don't have an appetite for God's Word. We want to get entertained. We just want sound bites. We want somebody to illustrate it for us. We don't even want to hear preaching no more after that. You just want, hey, act it out for me. What I should be doing today for the Lord. That's what happens. A lack of discernment can happen in the church, but we've got to long for the Word discerningly, have discernment in it. You see, if we don't seek discernment, we could be tossed to and fro by every word of doctrine and every wind. As as Ephesians 4:14 says to and fro, the doctrines will come and go. But you need to be steady in the Word of God, sitting under good truth and seeking it with good resources that we supply. You see, false teachers will abound. Paul even told Timothy in 2 Timothy 4:3. He says, there's going to be a time that's going to come where people are not even going to endure sound doctrine. They're going to want to have their ears tickled, and they're going to accumulate teachers in accordance to their own desires. What's going to happen is, is people say, I like to hear these kind of words instead of the Word of God. So, preacher, preach these kind of words and they'll hire pastors to preach those things so they can feel good about themselves. That's what happens. But you don't need to be that way. You need to long for the Word in a discerning fashion to detect that and say, no, I need truth. I need truth, I need truth. Then go pursue it and have discernment in it. We got false teachers out there. But there's also false feeders out there. They love it feeding on that false teaching because they know that it'll never hold them accountable to the Word. Have some discernment when you're longing for that Word. So long for the Word desperately long discerningly. But you also need to long for the Word diligently. You need to strive in this. And the reason that we know this is that he says later in verse two, so that you may grow in respect to salvation. You're literally growing up in salvation. When Peter is talking about salvation, he uses a past tense, a present tense, and a future tense. He says, you've been saved from something. You're being saved. And then there's a future salvation that is yet to come. But he's saying right now, you want to grow up in that salvation that you have. And as you long for the Word, that's what the result is, is that you grow up just like that baby. When they get the nourishment, you hope that they grow. A mother would be sad if they were still having to give a bottle to their 9 year old, 15 year old, 20 year old because they never grew up. The purpose of of longing for the Word is so that we will be able to grow up in our salvation. And the goal is to look exactly like Jesus Christ. And that's God's goal. And the way that we get there is by the Word. And Peter is diligent to say, hey, you need to add these things to your faith. If you turn right to 2 Peter, you can look at chapter one. And as he's saying this in verse 3 of 2 Peter chapter 1, he says, look, if you're going to be these holy people. He says, seeing that his divine power has granted us everything pertaining to life and godliness, you see, God is the one who supplied you with the power to even long for holiness. You say, how did I get this? Well, it's the next phrase. It's through the true knowledge of him, aka the milk of the Word that called us by his own glory and excellence. And for by these he has granted to us his precious and magnificent promises found in the Word. So that by them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that's in the world by lust. That was in chapter 1 of 2 Peter 2. All those things that was the lust. And then he says, now for this reason, applying all diligence in your faith, supply what?... Moral excellence and moral excellence, knowledge. That's the Word of God, longing for the Word. And then the knowledge, self-control and self-control, perseverance, godliness, godliness, brotherly kindness, and then love. You see what happens is, is your longing should lead to growing. And that's what Peter is saying that you should get when you've got the precious and magnificent promises of God. You start with milk, but you'll move on to the meat. And before you know it, you've got a complete meal. Getting the whole counsel of God. You know what growing in Christ does? It allows you to have a desire for truth. That desire for truth. It allows you to grow in obedience. You start to obey God from the heart, not doing it just because you have to. But you do it because you get to. Because you're longing for that Word and you're growing up in salvation. Then that obedience leads to perseverance. Peter is writing to these saints that are in all these trials, and he's saying, look, as you're in that Word, you're going to look just like Jesus Christ, because he is the one that went through his trial. And yet he said, forgive them. They know not what they do. Perseverance. You persevere like Christ does because you're in the Word. Your prayer will grow. Prayer life. It'll be enhanced when you grow spiritually in the Word. Your character. People that see what you say and do you will grow because you're longing for the Word. Your service to Christ. Your witness to unbelievers. All of that will grow as a result of you longing for the Word. Are you longing for the Word so that you can check it off a list? Are you longing for the Word so that you can grow up into the full character of Jesus Christ? That's what Peter is saying, and this is what we have before us. You could turn back to 1 Peter 2. We need long for the Word desperately, discerningly diligently, and the last thing we need to do is long for the Word devotionally. We need to long for the Word devotionally. There was a loyalty, a fidelity to the Word of God that comes because you've been personally impacted by the author of the Word. You know him personally, and so you just you can't get enough of him. And that's what he says in verse 3. He says, if you have tasted the kindness of the Lord, that word" if" it really is a first class conditional statement, that means since so that you can render this verse. Since you have tasted the kindness of the Lord. This kindness is both God's kindness and his goodness. He says, you go after this Word in a devotional fashion because you've tasted the goodness of God. I had a brother in life group earlier this week said, man, I know what it's like to be in the Word. It changes my whole day because I got joy in my heart and a smile on my face when I done started in the Word of God. It's that joy because he's tasted the goodness of God gives him joy throughout the whole day. That's what Peter is saying here. He would do a devotion because you've tasted it like what David writes in Psalm 34:8. Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good. He's even challenging and provoking and pleading the people of Israel to taste themselves and see that God is good. He's good. There's blessing and protection from trusting in him. He's given over and over again his kindness to his people. He distinguished himself from all other gods with that kindness. Isaiah 54:8, I hid my face from you for a moment, but everlasting loving kindness I gave you compassion day by day, because I am your Lord, your Redeemer. That's God. Was kind to them even when they were fickle and frail. God extended his kindness and David tasted it. You know what? We know the kindness of God that led us to salvation. Titus two and three and even three. It says, but when the kindness of our God and Savior and His love for mankind appeared, he saved us. God saved us through that kindness. Don't you love it when you taste the kindness of God in salvation? You knew where you were and you now know where you are in Christ. You can say, I tasted the goodness of God. That's what it means to to long for that Word in a devotional fashion. You see, it's the kindness of God that led us to repentance. Romans 2:4. And that kindness of God is found in the Word. It's like why the psalmist says, oh, how I love your law. It's my meditation all the day. It's because he tasted the kindness of the Lord. How sweet are your words to my taste. Even sweeter than honey to the mouth. Man, I can remember where I was when I had my first Krispy Kreme doughnut. I remember where I was, I can remember what I was wearing. I can remember what time of day it was when I bit into that ooey gooey goodness for the very first time and tasted how good it was. But you know something i can remember more? Is the day I tasted the kindness of God. It's the day that I knew that I was a sinner that was worthy of his wrath. And he saved me when I tasted the goodness of God. I can't go back. I can't go back to that old life. I look in the Word each day because I want to discover this God who has saved my soul. That's the goodness of God. Believer, that's how you need to long for the Word of God. When you've tasted his goodness and you want it over and over and over again. People can't tell you enough to be in the Word because you're already there, longing for the Word, because you've tasted the goodness of God. Long for his Word devotionally because you know the author of the Word. I might be speaking to someone here who doesn't know God, and I'm mindful of that. And the truth is that naturally, you might be sitting there thinking, I hear your preacher man, but. I really have a different view of God. I have a different taste. Have a taste of that God is rigid and severe. He's judgmental. Wants me to do all these commands. We all were that way. We all were that way before God. But today you can change. You can set your affection on God and allow him to make you new on the inside. That will give you new cravings. And you'll be able to taste the kindness of God. You see, you'll realize that you're a sinner who falls short of his glory. You have wayward ways because that's your nature. But he wants to make you new. And he can do that. By giving you his Son, Jesus Christ. Said that he all of us are like sheep. We've gone astray. Isaiah 53 but you know what God did? He didn't leave us that way. You know what he did? He put his Son on the cross so that you could have life. And you can have that life today. We'd love to be able to share that with you. Caused all of our sins to be placed on him, and he gave us his righteousness to live. Out. And you can do that too today and taste the goodness of God. Urge you strongly. Cling to Jesus Christ. You can have a new taste of God. Have that bitter taste out of your mouth and it'll be sweet and it'll be good for the rest of your days, even leading through eternity. But for the rest of us, we're going to be holy people. Let's live for the Lord and long for His Word. You know, as you think about this, would encourage you to take some time this week to examine those items in verse one. Examine your thoughts and speech and actions. Maybe write down in your notes a personal relationship that you want to improve based on putting aside these sins and go do it. Be immediately obedient to the Word. And then when it comes to longing the Word I pray that you would just make at least one goal. Maybe it's a goal you've been putting aside for the longest. Adhere to that goal and do it, and then delight in it. Grow in your delight and affection for the Lord of the Word as you, as you pursue it more and more. Some of you might be saying, man, that was a heavy sermon, preacher man, that was heavy. You don't know me, man. It's hard for me to get into the Word. But there was a young believer who said this very same thing. He was discouraged about his attempts to read and remember the Bible. And he said, it's no use. No matter how much I read, I almost always forget what I read. But then there was a wise pastor that replied. He said, take heart, because even when you pour water over a sieve. You may not collect much water in that sieve, but you'll always end up with a clean sieve. You'll always be clean. If you're living for the Lord and longing for His Word, you will always be clean because you're constantly being cleansed by the Word of life. Let us endeavor together that we'll live together for the Lord, and that we'll long for His Word to be holy people. Let's pray. 
Gracious father, thank you so much for all that you've done and just allowing us to be here in the Word. And I just pray that you would help us to see you high and lifted up in this passage. Help us to see ourselves as to where we were before Christ, and to realize that we've been saved to a new and living hope. Help us to put aside those deeds that used to identify us before Christ and long for the Word so that we might grow up in salvation. We love you and praise you for this time. Be glorified in it and we ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.

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The Marks of a Good Christian: Pleasing God

Good morning Saints of HBC. Please turn in your Bible to 1 Thessalonians 4 as we move into some new territory in this study, in this wonderful letter of Paul to the church in Thessalonica. It was a young church. AD 50 had only been there a year or so, and Paul had only been there a few months. But God had done an amazing work there by his grace. And it was a good church. It was a church that was going through its own trials, sufferings, persecution. And Paul was hearing a good report about this church and wrote a letter to encourage them and build them up. And so we have seen in the last three chapters how a good leader builds up a good church, even though they were in suffering and persecution and affliction, and probably a lot of people were wondering what they should do, where should where they should go, what should happen next? Paul writes to comfort them, and he does that in the first three chapters by reminding them of who they are in Christ. And that's the beginning of this letter. For three chapters it's been about the identity of the Christian...who you are as a believer in Jesus Christ. Your identity in him being saved by faith in Christ alone, so that now as he comes to chapter four, he can turn, if you will, to a new direction instead of looking back to encourage them in the present, chapters four and five, he's actually now going to try to encourage them in the present by giving them an exhortation towards the future. Now that he's established their identity, who they are in Jesus Christ, he's reminded them of that. Now he wants to then move them on to love and to good deeds, to exhort them, to urge them, to implore them...all those words for action, all those words for activity. Now you will get a lot of in chapters four and five. And that's really Paul's formula in a lot of his letters, where he will write to a church, and he'll first want to remind them of who they are, telling them who they are in Jesus Christ, re-establishing a good foundation. We saw that last week when we talked about 1 Timothy 3:2 when he sent Timothy, he sent him as a worker in the gospel of Jesus Christ, verse two, to strengthen them. And we said that word for strengthen was his foundational word, an establishing word. If you're going to see these people you haven't seen in a while and you've heard differing reports of how they're doing, establish them in the gospel of Jesus again, before you just rush right in to telling them what to do. And again, that's a pattern of Paul, whether the book of Ephesians lays it out in some ways symmetrically...three chapters of identity, three chapters of activity, Ephesians 1 to 3, 39 times talking about who they are in Christ, in the Lord, in him. And then Ephesians 4-6 talking about walk worthy, walk in the light, walk in love, walk in wisdom, stand in the Lord, fight the good, fight. All those action ideas come after identity ideas. And that's how we live our Christian life..no different today. We don't just rush people into as soon as they have any interest in Christ and the gospel. A bunch of do's and don'ts, but one did. What did God do for you in Jesus Christ? Whose righteousness is it that justifies you by faith? We need that message at all times, in all places, in all situations and circumstances, to be reminded of who we are in Jesus. As much as we're going to see now, today, and then moving forward in this letter, how important it is then for us to get instruction for how to live the Christian life. Because it's a both/and. It's not an either/or. To understand your justification is the foundation from which your sanctification arises. Those two words shouldn't scare anybody off. They're the two words that describe our Christian life while here on earth. Glorification describes our life once we're in heaven and with Christ. But while we're down here, justification means what God has done for me in Jesus, his perfect righteous life, given, credited, counted to my account by faith in him alone. He perfectly fulfilled the law of God in every point possible. He did what seems unbelievable to our ears what Jesus said the commandment can be summed up in...love God with what?...all your heart, all your mind, all your soul, all your strength. You do that, you'll fulfill every command there is. Perfect love for God. Only one person did it...Jesus Christ. And that's why our faith is in his perfection, his righteousness not our own. That's you being justified. But now what of this sanctification...that word sanctification, sanctified, has the word Sanctus in it, in the Latin. It's a word for being holy. We're to be holy as God is holy. We don't have holiness in our own selves. We need to be made righteous in Christ. But then there is the expectation for every Christian, every person in Christ, to now become who you already are. As in if you are in Christ...now you start to walk like him, look like him, talk like him, live like him. That's what it means to be a Christian. If somebody were to ask you, you know what is the essence of the Christian life? Now, when I'm saying that question, I'm not saying what's the essence of the gospel, because the essence of the gospel is all of what Jesus did for us. What's the essence of the Christian life? How do you go on living it? The answer is found in today's section in verses 1 and 2. The essence of the Christian life is nothing less than pleasing God. You can't please God apart from Christ. In fact, you said it. You read it this morning already, didn't you?...in Romans 8. Those who are in the flesh are not in Christ without the Spirit of God. What did it say?...cannot please God. That's the great divide in the world. No matter what you see of people's religiosity on the outside. If they're not in Jesus Christ name whatever religion it is, however devout they are trying to keep whatever holy book they say they ascribe to. If you are in the flesh, living in your own power, trying to do enough good deeds for God to be pleased with you. Romans 8 levels that. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. It's not able to do so, not able to subject itself to that perfect submission to the will of God, to love him with everything in you. You can't do it. So flip that around. Can you be pleasing to God? Do we have it drilled in our minds so much that we're totally depraved sinners, and all our deeds are filthy rags? Why even try to please him? Well, if that's the case, what's the difference between us before being a Christian and after? If we can't please God, what's the Christian life for? There has to be some way, if it's possible, to please God, that we would be told. And we were. A few weeks ago, and similar to where the pivot point is in 1 Thessalonians 4, when Dave preached on Romans 12 and you had 11 chapters of identity, 315 verses in Romans 1 to 11, only seven verses give you any type of command. Every other verse is telling you who you are, who you are, who you are. But then you hit Romans 12:1 and what did they say? Therefore, in light of God's mercies, offer your life a living sacrifice which is pleasing to him. That's the start of the Christian life. What's the essence of the Christian life? It's to offer your life as a living sacrifice, pleasing to him. So I say all this by way of reminder that as we get to the...we want to call it like the Continental divide, the watershed moment of this letter. It's 1 Thessalonians 4:1-2, because it's now not talking about who you are in Jesus anymore. It's talking about what he expects of you and the fundamental priority of a good Christian. As we've labeled the series, what's a good church? What's a good leader? Chapters 4 and 5....the rest of the way. No ducking in any of it. Chapters 4 and 5 are what are the marks of a good Christian? But the fundamental piece of that is there in verse one...pleasing God. That's the aim of our life. If somebody were to ask you, what's the aim of your life as a Christian, you could say it's to please God. If you want to sound confessional, it's the Westminster Shorter Catechism, question number one...what is the chief end of man to glorify God and enjoy him forever? Well, you know, you could smash those two ideas together into the purpose of my life is to please God. I exist for him. I exist through him. 1 Corinthians 8:6, there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things, and we exist for him. And the Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we exist through him. There's the purpose of your Christian life. You exist in him and in him alone. And you do everything through him. John 15:5, abide in me and I in you. Apart from me, you can do nothing. So your Christian life boils down to pleasing God. And that's the turning point of this letter. All the commands for you to keep as a Christian the rest of the way in this letter start with this first one. How you ought to walk and please God. So let's look into it today. 
Read with me 1 Thessalonians 4:1-2. "Finally then, brethren, we request and exhort you in the Lord Jesus, that as you received from us instruction as how you ought to walk and please God, just as you actually do walk, that you excel still more. For you know what commandments we gave you by the authority of the Lord Jesus.” This is God's word to us. May he plant it deep in us and it bear fruit through us. 
 Well, right there in that first verse we establish as Christians, the purpose of our life. What are we here to do now? What do we exist for? Why did he leave us here? Why didn't he take us to heaven? Well, because Paul tells you. You in the Lord Jesus we request and exhort you. He's kind of warming them up to move towards some exhortation, some commands as a good pastor does. He doesn't, maybe he's meeting with people and talking to them immediately blast them with the command cannon and blow them away. But he revs them up a little bit. He primes the pump by saying, hey, we request of you. Which was it's a word for a kind urging. We exhort you that's a little bit stronger. It's almost as if he's saying, hey, um, you know, guys, um, what I'm trying to say is what I'd like you to do is, you know, I want you to walk and please, God. And you're doing it, but you need to excel still more. I mean, I've already let you know in this letter where you stand. You stand in Jesus Christ and in fact, look at his request and exhortation in 4:1 is that they are in the Lord Jesus, is it not? I mean, that levels any idea of...where are you coming from, Paul? Who are you to tell us what to do? Maybe they were cool with being told who they are. We all don't mind being talked about, especially in glowing terms as Christians. But what do we do when somebody then leans in on us with some commands, brings obedience into the conversation? We might get defensive. And so Paul, being the good pastor that he is, says, look, we request and exhort you in the Lord Jesus, as in whatever we're going to command of you, implore you, uh, ask you to do. It's in Christ. I'm Paul in Christ. You're my brother and sister in Christ. That's where this exists. It's actually possible for you to do these things. If you're not in Christ, it's impossible for you to please God as we said before. If you're not in Christ here this morning, anything that I'm going to say today that has the force of a command to it should just hit right off of you. Not that you might not be receptive to it if you think you have something to gain by it. I mean, we might come to the Bible and think it is some magic lamp like a genie, that if I do these things, then God will do this for me. And I don't mind how that works. I mean, if you're into that, that's basically karma. I do something good, I get something good back. But if you're not in Christ today, that's not how it works. None of what I would command you to do makes any difference, because if you're not in Christ, you don't have his righteousness, and you can never do enough good, holy, righteous deeds to please him. Because one sin and one sin alone, let alone the hundreds and thousands and millions of sins accumulated in a lifetime, could our good deeds ever overcome. And that is why it is true that all our righteous deeds are as filthy rags, Isaiah says. But he's saying that about the self-righteous person that thinks they can earn their way to God. So if you this morning come in here and maybe that's been your background. In religion, or even in some form of Christianity, where there was this idea of you had to earn God's favor, you have to behave in a certain way for God to accept you. All your good deeds have to outweigh your bad deeds, and that'll get you to heaven. Listen, that's wrong. The gospel, and first and foremost, above all things, is what God has done for you, not what you do for him. And so if Paul were to meet a person like that and know that, you know, they come to him busted. Their life's upside down. They don't know why things aren't going the way they want. But they've been in church and they've attended and they've read their Bibles, but nothing ever makes sense. He wouldn't just jump right into giving them a bunch of commands to keep. He would say, listen. Let me ask you a few questions. What is the gospel? He'd go back to the foundation. As I would with any of you today who seem to not be able to make sense of you profess to be a Christian, but you just. There's no fruit in your life. There hasn't been for as long as you can remember. The only thing you know to count on is you have this old Bible that somebody wrote a date in, that you said something, you mimicked a prayer of a parent. And I'm not saying those things can't be legitimate. But if that's the only thing you got and there's no fruit in your life, Paul would say, and I would say, do you know the gospel? Do you know the foundation? A holy God, your creator, he rules in righteousness and holiness and dwells in unapproachable light. And we, the sinner, can do nothing to earn our way back into a relationship with him. So he had to send his Son to earth to die in the place of sinners, to take his wrath. And then I would ask you this morning, well, I've explained that part of it, but do you know who God's Son is? It's Jesus of Nazareth, born of a virgin, meaning he had no sin inherent in him from birth, and he committed no sin willfully by his own volition his entire life. Meaning he is the only perfect person ever. And will be the only perfect person ever. And if you try to smuggle in any idea of your own righteousness and right standing before God, then you put yourself before Christ. But he alone was able to go to the cross and receive the wrath and take your punishment so that you, understanding where you actually stand before a holy God, would say, be merciful to me, God the sinner. I need Jesus Christ. I need to be saved. There's nothing in my life that I bring only to the cross I cling. What do you need to do to be saved? You need to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and trust him. Repent of your sins and turn to him. And when you change from the inside like that, when that works on the inside of you, then the idea of pleasing God actually becomes pleasing to you. Because you see him in a whole different light. It isn't this idea of seeing a God who just lays commands over top of you and you would say, kind of grumbling in your heart, there is no pleasing that man. You know, sometimes if you've worked for a hard boss or been around a heavy handed person and their expectations of you far outweigh anything you could ever do for them, and you would say something like, there is no pleasing that person. Well, when you in faith leave trying to please yourself and put yourself up as the God of the universe, and you turn and bow down to the one true God, then there is the ability to please that God. He's already been pleased by Christ's perfect sacrifice, and by faith you accept that and now you actually can live a life pleasing to him. And that's the joy of the Christian life. Pleasing God, as the reformers would call it, in the Latin phrase coram deo, all of our life before God. But rather than be in fear of God like Adam in the garden, knowing he sinned and trying to hide from him. When you understand that, you are now seen as righteous before him, accepted by the work of his son, then you do want to live all of your life before him. You want him to know all of you open before him as you would want to know all of him. That's the joy of wanting to please God. And that's how Paul is trying to move this church toward understanding how to obey. It's in the Lord Jesus Christ. It is receiving instruction, that word for instruction there. How you ought to walk is a word of authority in the New Testament. But notice the locus of that authority in verse 1 is in the Lord Jesus, and then the locus of the authority in verse 2 for keeping commands is by the authority of Jesus. So pleasing God is sandwiched right in the middle of that...in the Lord Jesus we urge and exhort. Under the authority of the Lord Jesus, we give you commands. What do you do in between that?...you live to please God? And you can do it because you're doing it in him, not in your own strength. So verse 1 establishes we exist in the Lord Jesus Christ. But is that enough just to exist in him? No. He says, you ought to walk and please God. And you do that. He softens the blow by saying, you guys are doing well. But then he moves from just saying, hey, life, you know, pleasing God just comes down to, as we've said around here, um, no expectations for actually doing anything. You know, I've used the phrase earlier on when we talked about the beginning of this book. Uh, the essence of the Christian or Christian theology is grace. Therefore, the essence of our ethics is gratitude. And we connected in chapter 1. A good church is a work of God's grace that leads to the gratitude of the believer for the gospel of Jesus and our spiritual growth. So we connect grace and gratitude. But when you read this and you see that we're expected to do something, I want to expand that definition out and say, listen, if the essence of our theology of believers is grace and the essence of our ethics, what we do is out of gratitude, then that gratitude ought to be seen in our good works. Because if it's from the heart, if you're thankful for what God has done for you in Christ and you have gratitude for it, then you're not just thankful. Like, oh, you know what my Christian life is...just thanking God all the time, but not actually doing anything for anybody else. I think that's short of the mark. You know, it's good to be grateful. Grace does produce gratitude in a true believer. But out of that gratitude, then we see good works as our opportunities to what?...bring more glory to his name, to let our light shine with our good works so that our Father in heaven is praised. And that's the connection that Paul was making in this first verse, that we should excel still more, having received instructions in the Lord Jesus, we should keep it going, which moves us to our second verse. 
 And the second point that excel still more moves us underneath verse 2’s authority. You know what commandments we gave you by the authority of the Lord Jesus. If we are made to please God, and we are. Then the question is how do I please him? And verse 2 unlocks the secret of pleasing God. It may not be exciting because it's some mystical experience, some spiritual high that well, I get in this zone, I go away on this weekend retreat and I meet the Lord at the Transfiguration, somewhere up in the Appalachian Mountains. And now my life has never been the same, and I know I never struggle. Everything's easy. Is that what Paul says in verse 2? No. The ability to please God and excel still more comes down to one shoe leather, faith word...obedience. Verse 2. Because he just says it. We instructed you how you ought to walk to please God, and we want you to excel still more in pleasing God. That's what you exist for. How am I going to do it? Verse two. Well, you know what commandments we gave you by the authority of the Lord Jesus. And then in chapters four and five, he's going to give them all the commands he already gave them. He might expand on them. But this idea of saying today as a Christian...I exist through Jesus Christ to please God. So what am I supposed to do about it? You're supposed to obey. That's how it's seen. That's the fruit of your good life, your good works. As a Christian, you obey. But you obey from a heart that wants to please God, not a heart that wants to please itself. 2 Corinthians 5:9 Paul says, therefore we have as our ambition, our aim, our goal, whether at home, he means down here on earth or absent away with the Lord in heaven to be pleasing to him. I've got one aim in my life I want to please God, Paul would say. And how do I do it? Verse two, I do it by obeying the commands of the authority of the Lord Jesus. That our Christian life is not just found in Christ to please God...through Christ we please him in our obedience. And that obedience is something that can always be improved upon, can't it? That none of us are going to arrive at perfection while we're down here. You can always excel still more. There's always more of your heart to give to the Lord and pleasing him. And then out of that excitement and joy in him, you would say, like 1 John says, his commandments are not burdensome. They're for my good. And you have to hold that intention in your heart right now that I can be perfectly accepted by God in Christ and loved by him, and that can never be lost. And yet I can excel still more and be pleasing to him. You know, I was thinking about that, how I put that together in my mind, at least. And it took me back to grade eight, Miss McCann's English class. Two things stand out from my eighth grade English class with Miss McCann. It was the first time I got detention. Don't remember what for. Because I was a teacher's kid. I wasn't a teacher's pet. I was a teacher's kid. My dad was a teacher. So anything I did, ever, he found out. So that prohibits one from getting too many detentions. You already know he's going to see it all and know it all. There's a certain omnipresence he had. That's the first thing that stood out. The second thing was in that eighth grade English class, four semesters, I got an A every semester. I mean, it's evident, isn't it? You hear me speak and write, right? I'm an eighth grade A student. After that it goes downhill. But she would give me the same comment every quarter. It's comment number eight...remember it...needs to exert more effort. Now that's a problem for an eighth grade boy who gets an A. What's the goal? Why exert more effort? I got the A. Help me out with that one. But I remember that still to today, and I see its relevance in our Christian life. In Christ, positionally, you are as justified and as saved and as redeemed as you will ever be. You've got an A. How you stand before God in Christ. And yet on all of our report cards of faith...excel still more. Wherever you are. Excel still more. Abound is the word for excel. It's used 39 times in the New Testament. It's a wonderful word that talks about something overflowing and thriving and flourishing and teeming with life. It's this idea that there's still more to do, because if there wasn't more for us to do, more for us to excel in, not to earn our salvation, but to live out of it, what would be the point of sticking around here. If there wasn't more race left to be run, and more people we can win for Christ and help in Christ and serve in Christ. So we excel still more. And God can look at our lives in a way that we really can't. He can see to our heart. And when we talk about excelling still more there might be this motivation that you hear about in John 12 where we could want the approval of man when we hear excel still more. You know, it's hard because in our fallenness we immediately could think of, you know, Hebrews 12 that Jeremy preached a few weeks ago. Hey, run the race. And immediately we think about, I need to beat somebody. And so we compare. And that's not how we run the race. It's not a race of comparison. You're in it. Now, you're in it with a bunch of other believers. But you're not there just looking around saying, am I faster than this guy? Am I slower than that guy? Yeah, well who do we look to in that?...Hebrews 12. The author and perfecter of our faith, the only one. And so we can certainly excel still more to try to catch him. But if you just set up for yourself people around you that you're trying to I mean, it's going to take you down a spiral, either a spiral of despair because you hang around some really great Christians and you figure I can never be as good as them. Or rather than despair, it pumps you up with pride because you look around and say, look at all these slouches. I'm dusting them. So we don't look around. That's what the Pharisees did. I was referencing that. Jesus is speaking in John 12 and he's saying to them, while you have the light, believe in the light, so you may become sons of light. But they were not believing in him. Verse 37 of John 12. And verse 42 tells you why. Nevertheless, many, even the rulers, believed in him, as in they might have as we talked about a few weeks ago agreed with some of the things he was saying, but they didn't put their faith in him. It says, uh, because of the Pharisees, they were not confessing him for fear that they would be put out of the synagogue. For they love the approval of men rather than the approval of God. We can still do that as Christians can't we? Might even get worse, because we think it's some kind of race around here, just trying to sprint faster than the next person and then evaluating our righteousness on a false standard. And how amazing is God that he looks at our hearts. He knows the effort we give. Um, there's times you're going to fall back and maybe you're in a small group and you feel like everybody else showed up for life group that week and confessed to have a good week, and you're the only one that was one of the worst weeks of your Christian life, and you feel like you're behind in the race. Well get back up, God says, I look at your heart. I know your effort. Are you in it to please me or to please them? Only an omniscient infinitely wise God can look at all his children and there's no game of comparison. I mean, the game's going on and everybody's playing at the same time. But he could see each one of you individually and understand the motive of your heart, either to please him or not, and rate your excelling. Based on what he knows is going on in the inside of you. I was thinking about that yesterday, watching. I took my kids over to a football practice for their school, and as I was trying to get my mind around it, then I kind of again, analogies fall apart, but on human levels they help us understand, how could God do that? How could it not be a race? And I was watching the kids compete and they're competing in the 40 yard dash. And they're being evaluated by their coaches. How fast they are. And I'm watching my kids. I have a particular interest in them. I mean, all the other kids are going, but I'm not really paying too much attention to them. I like them, they're nice. But my kid I'm really interested in and I had no ability to see what the clock times were. I was standing far enough away, but all I could really see was the effort, you know? Did it look like they gave their best? Even one didn't have his cleats and was falling down and getting back up. And I was pleased as his dad. I don't care about what the times were. Who's the fastest sixth grader? I just cared about the effort. That whatever he was going to do, he was going to give it his best. That's part of what it is to want to please God and excel still more by your obedience. It is saying if it's true, if this is how this Christian life works, that you know one day, we're going to stand before God. And he's not going to judge us based on comparing to everybody else. What's the parable of the talents? Somebody he gave ten. Someone he gave five. Someone he gave one. And he says, well done, good and faithful slave based on what you did with what you had. Not comparing you to the person who was given more or given less. And then in the Gospels, how many times does Jesus say that he who's given much, much more will be given to him? But he who does nothing, what he has, will be taken away? And then when you press on to know the Lord, to love him, to seek him, to please him, and you lean into that and run towards that and try to excel in that, he's going to be faithful to give. He's not going to withhold more of himself knowing him. He wants you to abound in those good fruits. He's not playing a game with you. But that comes back to your heart as a Christian. Do you really want to please him, or can you get caught up in a lot of other ways we think about our Christian life?...pleasing self, pleasing man. You know, as we move into these next few chapters in 1 Thessalonians, there's some commands of how to live a more pure life...sexual purity. And relationship with people around us. There's commands about how to live a quiet, productive life as a good worker. And to test our motives this morning, I could ask you, how do you think you would respond to the word the rest of the way in Thessalonians? If I said, you know, I've I've been pouring into these texts and it's been weeks of studying, I've actually unlocked the key to success at your job because he's going to talk about work. And it boils down to these three things. And here's the thing. If you keep these three principles about how to work...in a year, God will give you one million dollars. And I promise you that. And if somehow that was true, how compelled would you be to keep those three commands. If you knew $1 million was coming at the end? Be honest with your heart today. I think every one of us would give it our best varsity attempt, wouldn't we? We would try it. You're lying if you say you wouldn't. We'd all try it. We'd give it our best. You say I'm not motivated. Well, be motivated to send money to our missionaries. Okay, get the million bucks. I don't need money. Do something good with it. I'm just saying that motivation could be to keep a command, yet not be what?...interested at all in pleasing God. You can obey with no interest in pleasing God. You can take commands in the New Testament and take them in and of themselves and what they might hold out, and those could be good things. But the great thing is what?...doing it because you want to do what?...you want to please him. And so you'll do whatever it costs, without any thought of, well, pragmatically, what am I getting in response? That's not what it's about. Pleasing God is about loving him. And out of love for him and delight in him because of what he did for you, that he first loved you. So you love him. You're going to keep those commands and there's no magic tricks to it. You do these four things that Thessalonians 4 whatever says. That's not how it works, friends. Because God wants your heart. And he wants to ask you this morning before we launch into the rest of this letter, when you read how you ought to walk and please God, excel still more, you're under the commandments given by the authority of the Lord Jesus. Are you going to obey them? First and foremost, because you want to be pleasing to God. And there is a connection in the New Testament between our pleasing God and our obedience. It's not legalism. It's exactly the way the things laid out. In the same way that you can try to obey without desiring to please God. You can flip that thing around. You don't please him by not obeying him. That is plain and simple from the New Testament. Let me read you a litany of verses that put those two things next to each other. We'll start with Ephesians because it's nearby. Ephesians 5:8, you were formerly darkness, now you're light in the Lord. We're talking to Christians. Walk as children of the light, for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness and righteousness and truth. Ephesians 5:10, trying to learn what is pleasing to the Lord. There's your starting point. The connection between your obedience and pleasing God starts with this idea that as we become Christians and learn the Christian life and what it is to please God, we have to learn it, Ephesians 5:10. So wherever you are today, as a believer, it's okay to feel like I don't even know where to start. Aren't there like thousands of commands? Yeah. And part of you growing as a Christian is just learning how to please the Lord by knowing what those commands are and then obeying them. Some you might have never heard of before. Stick around long enough, you'll learn more of them. And then you're to grow in pleasing him in every respect. From Ephesians, just go two books over to Colossians 1. Paul's opening prayer to empower these believers. Colossians 1:9,he says, since the day we heard of your faith, we have not ceased to pray for you and to ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of God's will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding. Here it is, verse ten. Colossians one. So that you will walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, to please him in every respect. So how much of your life does God want you to please him in? Every respect inside and outside...thoughts, feelings, actions, of course...words. That you would please him in all respects, bearing fruit in every good work. And then. Here's what he wants with you too... Increasing in the knowledge of God. God wants us to obey him in every respect, in every good work, and bear good fruit, and in that we increase in the knowledge of God because we see around us the effect of the fruit of our lives when we do that, and we learn more about him. And he's more precious to us, he's more glorious to us. And that joyful obedience to him makes us want to do it all the more. Colossians says that. Hebrews 13:21, May he equip you in every good thing to do his will, working in us that which is pleasing in his sight through Jesus Christ. Hebrews 13:21. There's this idea in Ephesians 5:10, Colossians 1:10, Hebrews 13:21 that growing in our obedience to him is directly connected to our pleasing of him. That's a good thing for us. And then there's some specific ways we can do it. Any kids in the room? Any children in the room who want to honor the Lord? That's awesome. To be in Christ at a young age. To say you want to follow him. The greatest thing. The greatest thing you could want to do is to follow Christ with all your life if you're a kid in here, ten years old, 15 years old teenager. You know, God is kind to you, that though there's many things over the course of your Christian life that will be expected of you. He makes one commandment really clear to you, young person. And it's attached to being pleasing to him. Colossians 3:20. Children, be obedient to your parents in all things. For this is well pleasing to the Lord. If you say you're a Christian and you're a young person, whatever age, and you wonder like, what's man like...like curfew. Like, where's that in the Bible? I have to stop playing my video games. Where's that in the Bible? I got to take a bath. Where's that in the Bible. You know it is in the Bible? By obeying what your mom and dad ask you to do you can please the Lord. Is that enough motivation for you, young person? That you can obey the Lord in obeying your parents and bring glory and joy and pleasure to your creator. Because if you just limit it to the thing that your mom and dad are telling you you can't do. Oh, I'm just supposed to be obedient to them and do everything they say? Well, no. There's somebody even above them that they take their marching orders from. And when they're asking you to do something. Yeah, it may bug. And you may roll your eyes and then you, you got to take that heart attitude to the Lord. But then you got to come to Colossians 3:20 and say, wait a second. My obedience to my mom and dad in all things it says...that's well pleasing to the Lord. So God can put your life on the right track in obedience by you understanding the simplicity of Colossians 3:20. That's how kind God is to you young people. Now, for the rest of us, hey, it just adds. You read through the scriptures. There's more to obey. Our giving is to be well pleasing to the Lord. Philippians 4:18. What you have sent a fragrant aroma, an acceptable sacrifice, well pleasing to God. When you give whatever age you are, when you work hard Monday to Friday, and you give that back to the Lord, that's well pleasing to him. You're sharing Hebrews 13:16 do not neglect doing good and sharing, for with such sacrifices God is pleased. How about keeping his commands? 1 John 3:21 to 22, we have confidence before God, and whatever we ask, we receive from him, because we keep his commandments and do the things that are pleasing in his sight. You never move past it. 10 or 100...being pleasing to God is seen in the fruit of your good works, your obedience to him. That's what Paul is trying to set up in 1 Thessalonians 4:1-2, before he moves out into all the details. He wants our hearts and these people to understand that it has to come from your heart. It has to be about pleasing God. And then when it's about pleasing God, walking in the ways that he commands under the authority of Jesus, you can do it. You can become who he's created you to be. But there's no other option to take. The path of legalism, which just says, I'm just going to perform. I'm not going to worry about my heart. I'm just going to do it on the outside. That's not the path. The path of Libertinism, which says, I stand as a child of God. He accepts me as I am. I'm perfect just the way I am. Don't give me any commandments. Really? I don't know what you're going to do with the rest of Thessalonians. But he says, here's the path. God has been gracious to you in Christ. Your heart response of gratitude leads to your good works done to please him, not to please man. That's who you look to. It's like a kid who, um, he's out with his buddies. Maybe. Not that I'm telling on myself, but maybe he was in eighth grade, and, um, there was a bunch of old steel mills around, abandoned and a favorite target of eighth grade boys to want to throw rocks through all those windows. And so say, this guy's hanging around with his friends and, you know, they're having a good old time breaking the law. Um, but he won't join in. And these kids are looking at him going. What's wrong with you? What are you afraid of? If your dad finds out that, what's he going to do to you? Is that why you're not doing it? And he just says no. I'm not doing it because what my dad might do to me if he finds out. It's what it would do to him. Do you live your Christian life that way? You know that fear of, oh, if God finds us out, he knows it. He sees everything. He sees down to your heart motive. So it's not about him finding out. Now there is a fear of the Lord, Hebrews 12 says, we should have. Just as earthly fathers disciplined us, our heavenly father will discipline us. But if the only realm you have to motivate your obedience is fearing God, you're missing out on a really big part. The part that motivates you to obey God based on wanting to what?...please him. That your disobedience doesn't please him like that kid. And you go, oh, I know what it does to him. And that's what hurts me. More than maybe even the chastisement that I'm going to get. It's letting him down. Because I know of what he did for me. I mean, you understand that, you know that's the highest form of motivation. When somebody has loved you so much, given so much for you, sacrificed for you, and then you turn around and you say, what should I do for them? Well I can't ever pay him back? But I just want my life to bring joy to their life. I want my service to them to bring pleasure to them. And we talked about that last week when Paul says in 3:8, now we really live if you stand firm in the Lord. Is your life so bound up in your love for the Lord that that's how you feel about obedience. Man that I can bring him joy. One day I will hear and you will hear. Well done, good and faithful slave. You excelled still more. Adam. You finally learned how to exert more effort. Enter into my joy. At my right hand are pleasures forevermore. Because what you've been told your whole life about its joy, its joy, its pleasure, let that motivate you. John 15:11, if you've heard my commands, you have them. My joy will be in you. Your joy will be made full. If you really believe that, why would anything change for eternity? When you get to God and you stand before him and he says, enter into the joy of your master. I've got pleasures forevermore. Psalm 16:11. It's just one continuation of it, isn't it? So you got to get a taste of it now. Live a life pleasing to him and want to excel still more in it. Just like Christ, for the joy set before him obeyed all the way to the cross. Us? We don't got to go to the cross. We just got to carry it. But we got to go all the way to what...he calls us home. And then we get the reward. More joy, more pleasure. If that doesn't motivate you to obey, I really don't know what can. Let's take a moment and pray. And then as we do that, the band will come back out. We'll have a time to remember the Lord's table today together. Um, you can actually raise your hand now if you don't have one of these. The band will make their way to the stage. Just keep your hand up and some of the ushers will come down and give you one of these. But while they're doing that, and while the band is coming, let me pray for our time before the Lord's table today. 
Father, we thank you for your grace to us in Christ. We thank you that we exist in you to please you, and we exist through you to please you. And our life is bound up in you as you first loved us, and now we love you. And so this time, now that we reflect on the gospel, Christ, we reflect on your body being broken and your blood being poured out...that it would renew the affections of our hearts for you. For that's what you want. We ask this in your name. Amen.