Let’s pray. Oh, gracious heavenly Father, we love You. We love You because You first loved us. We come to You now as your children, children eager to hear your voice. Speak to us, we pray. Give us ears to hear. Help us to pay attention. We’re so easily distracted. We have so many other things we are thinking about; lunch, and this afternoon, and the coming week. Renew our minds. Revive our spirits. In the Name of Jesus we pray and for His sake. Amen.
I invite you to turn in your Bibles to 1 Thessalonians Chapter 2. 1 Thessalonians, way at the back of your Bibles, one of Paul’s letters. I’ll be reading verses 13 through 16 of 1 Thessalonians Chapter 2.
“And we also thank God constantly for this, that when you received the Word of God which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the Word of God, which is at work in you believers. For you, brothers, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea. For you suffered the same things from your own countrymen as they did from the Jews, who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out, and displease God and oppose all mankind by hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles that they might be saved—so as always to fill up the measure of their sins. But wrath has come upon them at last!”
I’ve entitled this short series “A Church to be Thankful For,” or if you want to put it more elegantly, “A Church for which to be Thankful.” One of you reminded me last week after the service of the quotation attributed to Winston Churchill. Don’t know if he really said it or not, but supposedly an editor was chiding him for something he had written and he was ending a sentence with a preposition, and his editor said “tsk, tsk, you’re not supposed to do that,” and he replied “that is a rule up with which I will not put.” So there. “A Church to be Thankful For.”
The idea is that by looking at Paul’s prayers, and specifically what he gives thanks for, we can try to answer some very fundamental questions. What does a good church look like? What’s the blueprint? What’s the DNA? Is there some kind of secret sauce that we should be concocting? What is it that makes up a good, a healthy, a vibrant church?
I remember hearing several years ago of a church. It was experiencing good growth and good things seemed to be happening and good ministries, and people coming, and people, you know, growing, and people being changed by the gospel and some church leaders from outside the church, denominational leaders, not the PCA, came and they met with that church. And they said, “Now what’s going on here? Why are things going effective?” And as they met with the pastors and the elders, to a man every one of them just kept saying, “Well, the Word,” “Well, the Word.”
“Okay, yes,” they said. “We know. But what else? What are you really doing?” And they said, “Well, we put an emphasis on the Word.” “Okay, okay. The Word. You said that already.” And person after person just kept saying, “That’s what we’re doing.” They wanted something else. They wanted to know, you know, how you turn up the guitar amp to 11, or they wanted to know what you do with the lighting, or how to set the mist to come just rolling over the congregants. I don’t know what they wanted to know. What is the secret that you’re doing?
Now, of course, there are all sorts of things that we want to be thoughtful about and be organized and, you know, have put our first foot forward, but really something in their minds seemed to be saying “there must be something else than the Word.”
I have long thought, and I’ve thought this only because God needs to constantly...
