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Frances Chan in his book, Halfway Herbert, describes a boy that can’t seem to finish anything.
As you can see from the cover, he only brushes half of his teeth.
In the book we see that he only does half of his chores.
He lives his whole life doing things halfway until he finally learns the consequences of his actions and changes his ways once he realizes God’s plan for his life isn’t a halfway plan.
Today’s sermon is on the final verses of 1 Thessalonians.
In these verses, Paul admonishes the church to finish faithfully.
He gives them a series of rapid-fire commands that encourages them to remain faithful to the Lord.
They are to continue working until the work of God has been completed in them.
And that work will not be complete until we go to be with the Lord.
So in the meantime, may we be a people that finish what we started.
May we be faithful to One and True God Who is always faithful to us.
And may we be a people who do not go halfway in but a people that are are all in.
Join me as I read today’s Scripture:
Let us pray.
Prayer.
Today we will see three different ways that we should finish faithfully.
The first is...
I. Believers Should Finish Faithfully By… Discerning with Fortitude (19-22)
Paul continues his rapid fire commands into verse 19 with charging the church to not quench the Spirit.
If we look back a few verses we can see that Paul had just finished teaching about how to have a healthy church family in verses 12-15 and how to continue in the will of God in verses 16-18.
And he is ending this book with a few more admonitions for the church.
But what does he mean when he charges the church to not quench the Spirit?
I’m sure most of us understand the Spirit (which is capitalized here) as referring to the Holy Spirit.
The key word that we need to get a handle on to further understand this verse is the word ‘quench’ which in Greek is sbennymi (spin-nee-me) which means to quench or to extinguish.
This word often referred to quenching a fire.
In other words, we should not quench the fire of the Holy Spirit.
But what does this practically look like in our lives?
What does it look like to quench the fire of the Holy Spirit?
There are many ways that this can look but I have come up with 5 practice ways that we quench the Spirit:
We quench the fire of the Holy Spirit...
1.
When We Resist Sanctification.
When we resist the working of the Holy Spirit in our lives, we are quenching the work of the Holy Spirit in us.
We are preventing Him from making us more like Christ.
We will get into this concept more in our next point.
We quench the fire of the Holy Spirit...
2. When We Tolerate Impurity.
When we tolerate any impurity in our lives we quench the Spirit’s work in us.
Whether this is sexual immorality, pride, greed or anything else sinful - we quench, or extinguish the Spirit’s work in us by continuing in sin.
We are called to be holy as He is holy as seen in 1 Peter 1:16:
We quench the fire of the Holy Spirit...
3. When We Are Disobedient.
We quench the work of the Spirit when we walk in disobedience.
When God commands you to do something and you are disobedient to Him, you create a barrier between God and yourself.
Sin creates this barrier and His work in you is quenched at that point.
We quench the fire of the Holy Spirit...
4. When We Neglect Prayer and Bible Reading.
Two of the most important ways that the Holy Spirit sanctifies us is through the Word of God and prayer.
When we are not reading His Word and conversing with Him in prayer, we stunt our growth spiritually and we quench the work of the Spirit.
We quench the fire of the Holy Spirit...
5. When We Neglect His Church.
God has chosen to use His church to reach the world with the Gospel and to disciple believers.
When we neglect meeting together as we see in Hebrews 10:25
...We stunt our spiritual growth as well.
God has chosen to create us for community.
If we are neglecting church attendance and not doing life with other believers, then our sanctification is also hindered.
God has chosen to use the preached Word and the fellowship of the saints to help us grow in our sanctification.
Moving to verses 20 and 21:
In this context and our context today, the term prophecies refers to the preached Word of God.
Direct revelation from God ceased to to be revealed after the big ‘A’ Apostles died.
But we see a charge to preach the Word of God and we see the Word of God called prophesy elsewhere in Scripture:
Here we see that pastors are to preach the Word.
And in our next verse we will see that the Word of God is referred to as prophesy:
We see even Paul refer to prophesy as the written Word of God in Romans 16:26
He understood that the words He was writing were to be compiled into the Word of God - or the Bible that we have today.
But why would people despise prophesies?
Why would they despise the preached Word of God?
There are many reasons one might despise prophesies - meaning they consider them as nothing or they have contempt for them.
Some of these reasons might include a love for something more than the Word of God.
Some people despise prophesies because of their love of music.
I’ve been to church services that had an hour of music and the equivalent of a devotion.
One service I went to on a Sunday morning years ago didn’t even involve a sermon at all!
I must admit that was the last time I visited that church!
Others might despise preaching because it isn’t entertaining enough.
They’d rather watch a movie.
Still others might despise the preaching of the Word because they don’t like feeling guilty in their conscience.
They might not want to hear the truth proclaimed because it will shine light on the darkness in their life.
Whatever the reason - Paul tells us to not despise prophesies.
We should love hearing the preached Word of God because it points us to Him and helps us learn more about Him.
It charges us to be more like Him as well.
However, Paul does give us a qualifier in verses 21-22.
When we hear the preached Word, we need to exercise discernment.
This is where I developed our first point from.
We need to discern with fortitude.
We need to discern with determination.
We are to listen to the preached Word of God with a discerning heart.
I dare not say that we are to listen with a critical heart as that can quickly lead to pride and sin.
I see far too many people these days with their access to platforms like Twitter and Facebook post like they are theologians when they are strikingly ignorant of God’s Word.
We can quickly become unteachable if we do not remain humble under the Word of God.
But I must reassert that we should listen with a Spirit-led discernment.
Sadly, today there is a growing number of preachers that should be despised in their preaching because it is not from the Word of God.
Some preachers are not of God and instead of their father the Devil.
We get good advice from John regarding these false teachers who teach from a spirit of rebellion instead of love for God.
We need to recognize those who are not of God.
We need to exercise good discernment when listening to preaching.
And this discernment is done through the power of the Holy Spirit and from a good understanding of the Word of God.
Those things that are discerned as right - we are to hold fast to.
Those things that are good - we are to hold fast to.
But we are to hate and not partake in anything that is evil.
We see this summarized in Romans 12:9
Romans 12:9b (ESV)
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