Sermon Tone Analysis

!! God’s Word Changes Me

!! 1 Thess 2:13-20

!! Is there any hope?

In Judges 13, we read a true-life story of a man and his wife who did not know many happy days.

In fact, we could say their lives were pretty sad.

As we read their story, we see two particular reasons for their misery.

Outwardly, Manoah and his wife are living in a time of severe oppression.

The nation of Israel has once again fallen into a cycle of sin that has brought on the judgment of God.

God has allowed the Philistines to subjugate them, to oppress them, to rule over them.

As if that weren’t bad enough, paying heavy taxes to foreigners, being jerked around at the whim of proud taskmasters, and all the other things that go with slavery,  \\     Manoah and his wife also are having to deal with an internal oppression.

Manoah’s wife is barren, unable to have children.

For a Jewish family, that was a heavy burden to bear indeed.

All of their culture and all of their history highlighted the importance of having children.

So on top of their difficult outward circumstances of living under foreign rulers, they lived each day with personal feelings of inadequacies—barrenness for sure, impotence perhaps, and surely some feelings of guilt for their own sin which had contributed to the judgment of God upon their nation.

\\     Not a very happy picture, is it?

Not a situation any of us would choose if we had any choices in the matter.

But this is a portrait that some of us can easily identify.

There are no doubt a number of us who find ourselves suffering under outward circumstances we’d love to change.

“Goodness, if only my spouse could be more attentive to my needs.”

“Boy, if the institution would just give me a $100 a month raise.”

“Heavens, why can’t the pastor be more sensitive to my situation and offer more help?”

If my kids were just more responsive to my leadership, if the tax bills weren’t so high, if the professor didn’t have such an ego—his assignments take up most of my time, why doesn’t the government do something more about the price of corn?

Lord, don’t you know we need rain, etc., etc., etc. \\     And then on the other hand, how about the internal pressures!

I’m sure there are some of us are acutely aware of the defeats we have experienced because of  our own inadequacies.

Our feelings have been beaten and we feel pretty rotten.

We didn’t see what was happening with our children.

Nothing we do seems to please the boss.

We can’t think fast enough in tense situations; only afterward do we think about all the things we should have said.

My guess is that every one of us could add a statement here that we could all understand.

All of us can identify with the man Manoah and his wife.

\\     And so we find ourselves suffering without much joy, without much peace, without much hope because of circumstances beyond our control and~/or because of our own acute sense of inadequacies and their consequences.

\\     We wonder if there is any hope.

So what might be powerful enough to change us?

What could give us hope in the midst of difficult circumstances?

What could lead us into grace that would cover all our inadequacies?

What could anchor our souls while the storms blow?

What could surround us with a hurricane-proof hedge of inner joy until the sun shines again?

!! Power to change circumstances

    The story of Manoah and his wife reveals the rescuer that we are all looking for.

The same power that rescued this Israelite couple is what can rescue us!

The same power that reversed their fortunes can reverse ours!

We find the answer in our text from I Thessalonians 2.  I’ll encourage you to read Judges 13 for yourself and learn the rest of that story.

Here we will be reading I Thessalonians 2:13-20.

“For this reason, we also constantly thank God that when you received the word of God which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men, but for what it really is, the word of God, which also performs its work in you who believe.

\\     For you, brethren, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea, for you also endured the same sufferings at the hands of your own countrymen, even as they did from the Jews, who both killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out.

They are not pleasing to God, but hostile to all men, /hindering/ us from speaking to the Gentiles so that they may be saved; with the result that they always fill up the measure of their sin.

But wrath has come upon them to the utmost.

\\     But we, brethren, having been taken away from you for a short while—in person, not in spirit—were all the more eager with great desire to see your face.

\\     For we wanted to come to you—I, Paul, more than once—and yet Satan /hindered/ us.

\\     For who is our hope or joy or crown of exultation?

Is it not even you, in the presence of our Lord Jesus at His coming?

For you are our glory and joy.”

The key to our passage is identifying the hiding place for the focus of our hope, I Thessalonians 2:13.

“…when you received the word of God which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men, but for what it really is, the word of God, which also performs its work in you who believe.”

The power that burst into Manoah’s world was a word from God!  It changed everything!

And the word of God that came into the Thessalonian’s world did the same thing!

It changed everything!

\\     Those of you at the university are so blessed to have your new dean of the chapel.

I was blessed to sit in on chapel this past Friday and be ministered to by Richard Alan Farmer and his exposition of John 5.  I wrote down this line from his message, where he paraphrased Jesus saying, “When I show up, circumstances change!”

When the living Word of God arrives on the scene, things change.

When the written word of God bursts forth upon a set of circumstances, things change!

\\     Now friends, when the word of God bursts upon a scene, it is so important to see the context of that explosion.

There are three concepts here in chapter 2 that we will explore, that forms the context for our study of the power of the word of God.

Power is a relative term and must always be seen in a context for it to be properly understood.

Then, out of these three concepts we want to make personal application as we come to the end of our hour together.

\\     Idea number 1, starting from the end of our text, is simply this:  

| Satan, within the will of God, has the /power/  to defeat us.

It is a real possibility that our external circumstances and our internal feelings have been influenced by the devil himself!

He does have the power to defeat us.

|

| Idea number 2 rhymes with #1:  Pagans have the /power/  to mistreat us.

It is a real possibility that our external circumstances and our internal feelings are the result of painful mistreatment by the opponents of God.

Pagans have the power to mistreat us.

|

| But our salvation is in idea #3:  The word of God has the /power/  to complete us!

The power of God to change us, the power of God to complete us, to make us whole, to fill us with joy and peace, /that/  power is beyond compare!

It trumps all others.

|

!! Relying on God

    So let’s look deeper.

We see Paul defeated by the power of Satan in I Thessalonians 2:18.

" For we wanted to come to you—I, Paul, more than once—and yet Satan hindered us.”

The word “hindered” here is being repeated.

It had first shown up in our text in I Thessalonians 2:16, so its repetition catches our eye.

It is a term that conveys in the original language of the Bible the idea of breaking up a road so that it is unusable and impassable.

Floods this year on the east coast have even made some of the interstate highways impassable and thus have hindered travel.

We who have journeyed to other parts of the world have been on what is called a road by the local people, but with our Western eyes, we can’t see it as such.

Paul wanted to travel the road again to Thessalonica, but the enemy made it impossible to do so.

\\     Now friends, it is not hard to imagine Paul’s feelings at this point.

He surely knew some anxiety about how those new believers were doing.

He surely felt some frustration at being blocked from returning.

He must have felt some disappointment and even some confusion at being prevented from doing what was surely the will of God.

\\     What Paul didn’t know, and perhaps what he learned from this experience of defeat, was that in his absence, the new believers were turning to the risen Christ for what they needed.

(This becomes clear to us in chapter three, that we will see later)  God was at work drawing these new believers to Himself, using the devil to move forward His own purposes.

I can’t help but imagine that the Thessalonians wanted to have Paul in their midst, to answer their questions, to encourage them.

\\     But in Paul’s absence, they found all that in their relationship with Christ Himself!

We conclude that Satan may indeed defeat us, may hinder our plans, may prevent our desires from being fulfilled, but he cannot keep God from fulfilling his purpose.

\\     There’s a lesson for us here, friends.

Our restraint in offering aid and comfort to someone who is broken and hurting may move that one closer to Christ.

I know the Scripture’s admonition to bare one another’s burden, and that we must do.

But as God would lead, it is far better a suffering saint become dependent upon the Lord Jesus than he becomes dependent upon us!

It has been good for our children to be far away for their college experiences.

By being far away, unable to intervene, I have watched both kids being stretched in the matter of their faith.