Sermon Tone Analysis

1 Thessalonians 4:9-4:18

Good morning church.

Open your Bibles with me to 1 Thessalonians chapter 4. We got as far as the 8th verse last week, let me just remind you that Paul begins the chapter with the words finally then.

Not as his closing, but as a transition between doctrine and practice.

Or teaching and showing.

Paul transitions to the “so what”, or the so this is what it should look like in our lives.

I’ll tell you what, if you weren’t with us last week, rather than go through the whole thing again, if you would just stand, I identify the sin that Paul says you need to stop doing.

No, I’m kidding.

But he does say Christian, if you want to know God’s will for your life, it is your sanctification.

I hope those that were here, did take the time to do your homework and understand the differences between justification and sanctification.

If you were here and completely forgot, start taking notes.

Go over the passage and the message again when you have time with just you and God.

Paul tells us that it is God’s will for us that we be set apart for God, that we allow Him to clean us up, to be holy like He is holy, not overnight, but overtime.

Practice application number one was that we would abstain from sexual immorality and we talked about what that is, and what it looks like in our lives.

Paul now moves to another practical point of application in our sanctification and he writes in verse 9...

Let’s pray and then we will go through this....

So Paul continues on with this revelation of God’s will for our lives.

He desires for us a life a purity.

Which in this world is going to show up the most, stand out to others around you the most, in two major areas of our lives.

The first is in Sexual purity.

If we want to honor God with our sexuality, we will limit our eyes, our minds, and our activities to the covenant relationship of marriage as He established it in the Garden of Eden.

We won’t engage in any of it before marriage, or outside of marriage.

Within marriage God has blessed it and in the book of Hebrews He says....Heb 13:4

So sexual purity will be a witness to the world, but then he hits on another big one here and that is our love.

Jesus said, John 13:35

And Paul here just tells us what that should look like…1 Thes 4:9-10

As Christians, God the Holy Spirit is dwelling in us, the Bible says we are now the temple of God, it also says that God is love.

Not that He is really, really good at it, or sets a great example for us, but God is love.

So God is in us, and teaching us His children what loving our brothers and sisters looks like.

Sometimes it’s through them messing up really big, or really painfully, and us realizing that love is not an emotion, love is a choice.

However, He is doing it in your life, if you are a Christian, God is going to be teaching you how to love, just like the Christians in Thessalonica.

So Paul says, I know you know what love is, I know you know how to love each other, he even says you’re doing great at it, even those that are in someone else’s Growth Group, right?

All those in all of Macedonia.

But, we urge you, we beg you, we earnestly plead with you and persuade you, to grow in that love, and then when you do that, grow in it some more, and then keep growing in it, more and more.

That...

Aspire, or are ambitious toward, leading a quiet life…I wonder how many of us could say my testimony to both my brother and sisters in the Lord, and the world around me that doesn’t know Jesus, is that I love God above everything else, and everyone else in my life.

I’m cooperating with Him as He sanctifies me, or makes me more and more like Jesus,... more today than I was last week, and more last week than I was in 2022.

I am doing what it takes to remove the drama, to remove the ciaos, to remove the too busy, the over scheduled, over committed, the too engaged in the noise around me to ever listen and hear from the Lord.

I’m purging all of that aspiring to lead a quite life.

I’m minding my own business.

That doesn’t mean isolating and not engaging with my brothers and sisters or even the world around me, but it does mean minding my own business.

While still regarding others before myself, it is myself and my business that I’m examining before the Lord, not everyone else’s.

I’m not the morality police for everyone else.

I’m not the Holy Spirit for everyone else.

I mind my own business, let the Lord sanctify that.

And I share the Gospel, the good news about salvation in Christ with the broken, lost world around me…where I work.

Where I’m productive.

Where I’m not lazy, but carry my weight, and contribute.

There is a huge portion of Christianity today that think of themselves as baby birds in a nest that someone else build for them, and they want to be fed big juicy night crawlers all day, everyday.

If they get a meal worm now and again, or a minnow, they spit it out, rather than work for themselves.

Paul says lead a quiet life, mind your own business, and work, with your own hands like we commanded you.

Why did they have to command it?

Maybe there were some baby birds back then?

Really, in the Greek culture, it was status when you no longer had to do the manual labor things for yourself, when you could just hire someone else to do it, or give a donation, rather than participate.

Things haven’t changed much.

Remember, this is all a part of God’s will, all a part of our sanctification, all a part of changing what just comes natural to us, to supernaturally becoming more and more like Jesus, so the world sees that this is real, that Jesus is real.

That’s really what he is saying in Verse 12, 1 Thes 4:12

Those who are outside, not yet Christians.

If they see this kind of life in you, this kind of life in the church, they are going to want that for themselves.

That’s reason #1, and that you may lack nothing.

Remember back in chapter 3 Paul said we were so excited when Timothy came with such great news of your faith and love!

But we are praying exceedingly, that we can come see you face to face, so you will be lacking nothing in your faith.

So Paul is saying do these things so you represent right to the outside world, and so you will no longer be lacking.

Now Paul transitions to the most exciting part of our chapter, the rapture of the church!

How many of you have ever heard that the rapture is something the church made up, or that the word rapture isn’t even in the Bible?

Well, they are wrong, and wrong!

It was not made up by the church, and they wrong, well maybe a little right on the word rapture not being in the Bible.

We get our word rapture from the Latin raeptius.

In fact, it occurs in the Latin Vulgate, the original Latin translation of the New Testament produced by St. Jerome, sometime between 383 and 404 A.D. He translated the Latin Vulgate from the original Greek text.

Our New Testament Bible was originally recorded in Greek and directly translated into English.

Rapture is not a Greek word, we take it from the Latin, so of course it does not appear in our Bibles.

The Greek word Harpazo does however, translated I think in verse 17 as caught up in our English Bibles, is in the Latin Vulgate as rapiemur where we get the word rapture.

I say it is the most exciting part of our chapter, to me, it’s hard to top as a topic in the Scriptures period.

When I was a teenager, it was talked about all the time.

Pastor’s preached it, they taught it to their churches, they encouraged each other with these words.

I remember one of my friends had a bunch of older brothers who where in a Christian rock band.

My friend was their only road crew, they’d practice at his house, and I remember meeting the lead singer one day, and as he is introducing himself to me, he asked if “I was in the air man?”

I had no idea what he was talking about!

But it was this! Was I going to be raptured as part of the church?

Was I saved?

Anybody middle aged like me remember the Left Behind movies?

It seemed like the whole idea was to terrify you into the kingdom of Heaven, but Paul says here, these things are written for us to comfort each other with.

Let’s read through it first.

I wish we could all meet in our growth groups this week and comfort one another with these words!

That we could have discussions about it, answer questions about it.

Because for the most part, the church today has stopped talking about it.

Mostly because Pastors aren’t sure of their own theology and eschatology, or what they should believe about the end times.

There are seminaries today that seem to base their doctrine on whatever the latest blogger say, rather than what the Bible tells us.

I want to read you a couple of different passages first.

Listen, don’t get lost in the different references.

I know that is easy to do when we are flipping all over the place, that is one of the primary reasons why I try to stick to verse by verse teaching and stay in a chapter.

This teaching is a big deal, this topic is a big deal.

It is so important, that Paul covered it with this church that he only got to spend a couple of weeks with.

So it’s not deep theology that you shouldn’t learn until you’ve been a Christian for a number of years, it’s vital stuff that you should know right now, because I truly believe it affects both the way that we live, and the way that we witness.

So first John 14.

This is an awesome chapter of the Bible, one of my favorites.

It where Thomas, doubting Thomas had the guts to say, Jesus, we don’t get it.

And Jesus responded, I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, no one comes to the Father but through Me, aren’t you thankful for that clarity?

The chapter starts the night before Jesus dies on the cross.

Jesus is meeting with the Disciples and He says, John 14:1-3