1 THESSALONIANS 4:1-8 - God's Great Purpose for You - Part I

Introduction

In 1952 a young campus minister in California named Bill Bright wrote a Gospel tract that he could use in his efforts to evangelize students at UCLA (at a ministry that would come to be known as Campus Crusade for Christ). The tract that he wrote was titled “Have You Heard of the Four Spiritual Laws?” and was written as a simple way to communicate the Gospel of salvation in Jesus Christ.

The first of the four spiritual laws has become one of the most familiar opening statements of the Gospel message in evangelism today:

“God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.”

Now, for the record, I think that this is absolutely true—as far as it goes. Unfortunately there are a lot of Christians who like to take that sentence all by itself and just run with it without grounding it in the Scriptures. They like to load up that phrase “wonderful plan” with whatever they think is “wonderful”: God wants them to be happy, He wants them to be comfortable, He wants them to be healthy, He wants them to have good self-esteem, He wants them to be prosperous.

But is that what the Scriptures say God wants for you? I would submit to you that we must understand God’s “wonderful plan” in light of what God has revealed His plan for us to be. And here in our text this morning, we have it stated as plainly as can be:

1 Thessalonians 4:3 (ESV)

3 For this is the will of God, your sanctification...

The word translated here “sanctification” comes from a verb that means “to set apart; to make holy”. And so when the Scriptures speak to us about sanctification, what we are to understand is that it is

SANCTIFICATION: God’s PROGRESSIVE work of CONFORMING believers to the HOLINESS of Christ as they BATTLE against their SIN

This then, is God’s “wonderful plan for your life”, Christian—that you spend as many days as God gives you on this earth fighting and defeating your remaining sin. God doesn’t promise ease or comfort or health or wealth or amusement in this life; He promises that you will be made holy.

This is God’s “wonderful plan”; that everything He brings into your life—whether grief or joy, prosperity or loss, comfort or sorrow—all of it comes from His hand so that you will be made more holy in Christ! Not your comfort, not your self-esteem, not your ease or prosperity or health, but your holiness is the great purpose of God for your life!

If the Lord wills, we will spend the next two weeks unpacking this statement from Paul. In the first twelve verses of 1 Thessalonians 4 we find two outworkings of the great purpose of God in sanctification. Next week we will consider verses 9-12 and our holiness in our love for one another; today we will consider verses 1-8 and how they reveal God’s great purpose for us for sanctification as we fight sexual sin.

What we see in our text today is that God wills our sanctification in “abstaining from sexual immorality” (v. 3). And so the way I want to summarize it for us today is to say that

God wills your VICTORY over SEXUAL sin

If God’s great purpose for your life is your conformity to the holiness of Jesus Christ, that means that you will see victory over this sin in your life; He is the one that wills it, and so that means that He is the one who will see it come to pass in your life as you go to war with this sin.

Verses 4, 5 and 6 fall neatly into three core tactics Paul lays out for the Thessalonian church as they seek to battle against their sin. So look first with me at verse 4:

1 Thessalonians 4:3–4 (ESV)

3 For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality; 4 that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness and honor,

The word for “sexual immorality” here is the Greek word porneia, which is where our English word “pornography” comes from. It is a word that refers to any kind of sexual activity that falls outside of God’s clearly defined boundaries of one man and one woman covenantally bound by marriage for life. The first principle Paul lays out in our battle against sexual immorality is

I. Don’t be CONTROLLED by your own BODY (1 Thessalonians 4:4)

Paul says something here about battling this sin that runs directly contrary to the prevailing attitude towards sexual appetites. When he says that you must “know how to control your own body”, he is stipulating that you can control your body’s appetites! You can know what to do when this sin is chasing you, you can learn how to fight and win! The lie—as we’ll unpack further in a few moments—is that the moment lust appears, you’re a “goner”. But Paul says no—it is not an unbeatable adversary; God has willed your victory over it! You can know what to do!

In his magnificent work, The Mortification of Sin, John Owen writes about fighting sin:

This is the way men deal with their enemies. They search out their plans, ponder their goals, and consider how and by what means they have prevailed in the past. Then, they can be defeated. This is a most important strategy. If you do not utilize this great strategy, your warfare is very primitive. We need to know how sin uses occasions, opportunities, and temptations to gain advantage. Search its pleas, pretences, reasonings, strategies, colours, and excuses. We need to trace this serpent in all of its windings, and to recognize its most secret tricks: ‘This is your usual way, and course; I know what you aim at’ . . . bring it to the law of God and love of Christ” (Rushing, R. (2010). Voices from the Past: Puritan Devotional Readings. Banner of Truth Trust. p. 56)

And here in verse 4 there are two important anchors for you as you seek to understand this enemy, two certainties that you can know as you take up this fight. First,

Know you are SET APART (cp. Romans 6:13)

See how Paul says that you are to know how to control your body in holiness—in other words, you go into this fight knowing that you have been set apart for good, not evil! This is what Paul is getting at when he writes in Romans 6--

Romans 6:13 (ESV)

13 Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness.

These members that you possess—the strength in your limbs, the breath in your lungs, the pulse in your veins—have been set apart so that you can serve God! He has prepared work for you to do (Eph. 2:10), and when you acknowledge that and get to it, you are spending your strength the way God calls you to. King David tripped up when he let himself stay home from the battles he was supposed to be leading (2 Samuel 11), and in the same way, when you turn aside from the good works and ministry opportunities that God places in your way, you are opening up yourself to the idleness that opens the door to all kinds of temptation

You are not to be controlled by your body’s appetites, you are to know how to control your body—know you are set apart, and

Know that your body is HONORABLE (cp. 1 Cor. 6:15; 19b-20)

As Paul is warning the church in Corinth against the pagan practices of ritual prostitution in the pagan temples, he makes an incisive point: Christians don’t go into the pagan temples to join themselves to the gods by joining with temple prostitutes—Christians are joined to Christ:

1 Corinthians 6:15, 19 (ESV)

15 Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never!

Christian, when you give way to sexual immorality of any sort, what does this verse say you are doing? Whose body are you dishonoring? Whose body is it that you are putting through those motions, whose body is it that you are using to satisfy your sinful desires? Paul says that you fight against this sin by remembering that your body is honorable because it belongs to Jesus Christ:

1 Corinthians 6:19–20 (ESV)

19 ...You are not your own, 20 for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.

God wills your victory over sexual sin—you are called to know how to control your own body, to study the way this sin attacks and learn how to meet it and fight it. Don’t be controlled by your body, and in verse 5 Paul says

II. Don’t BEHAVE like a PAGAN (1 Thessalonians 4:5)

1 Thessalonians 4:5 (ESV)

5 not in the passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God;

Paul makes it very clear that the Thessalonian Christians are not to treat this matter the same way as the unbelievers do. The prevailing attitude of their city (and in fact, all of Greco-Roman culture) was very similar to what we find ourselves surrounded by today—anything goes. There is no such thing as “wrong” sexual expression; whatever combination of whatever number of individuals identifying as whatever kind of gender they want are free and encouraged to find gratification in whatever way they want.

Paul says clearly, though, that God’s people do not have an “anything goes” attitude towards sexual behavior:

You do not get a PASS on your PASSIONS

It is easy to allow the permissiveness of our culture lull us into rationalizing our attitudes towards sexual purity. The prevailing attitudes may be that pornography is harmless or that fornication is an old-fashioned idea or that “the heart wants what it wants” and so marriage bonds are inconsequential in deciding who to sleep with—but you belong to Christ. You do not get a pass on your passions and lusts; you don’t get to use the world’s excuse of “Love is love; the heart wants what it wants; it doesn’t hurt anyone, anyway...” You were bought with a price, your body does not belong to you anymore. The One Who suffered and died on the Cross for your redemption has the right to tell you how to govern your body and its appetites, and He says that you may not conduct yourself like the unbelievers around you. You don’t take their advice on intimacy, you don’t follow their patterns for sexual expression, you don’t get honeymoon tips from their websites, you don’t share their ideas of a good time—you answer to Christ.

The pagans around you give each other a pass on their passions, but you don’t get that kind of so-called “freedom”. In fact, Christian, you have far more freedom than they do—because what they call sexual “freedom” is in fact bondage. But the Scriptures teach that

You are FREE from all BONDAGE (cp. Gal. 5:24; Rom. 7:7-8)

Paul writes to the church in Galatia that

Galatians 5:24 (ESV)

24 And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.

When he says here in our text that you are not to give up control of your body in passion of lust, he is reminding you that you no longer have to obey that lust! The world around you says that the instant that impulse appears in your thoughts or emotions that it must be satisfied; that it is unnatural or harmful or repressed to deny such a “natural” expression. But you are free from that bondage! Those passions and desires that unbelievers slavishly obey no longer hold you! And it is a lie to believe that you are still under that bondage!

A quick illustration can show you the lie that sexual lust is irresistible and must be satisfied. John Piper gives an illustration of an unmarried couple tenting in the woods at night being “overcome” by temptation—he says, “Imagine that at the moment when they are about to succumb to that temptation, a grizzly bear crashes through the underbrush and starts wrecking their campsite—instantly, all thoughts of satisfying sexual urges vanishes, doesn’t it? So this demonstrates the lie that says that sexual appetites must be inevitably satisfied.

Christian, you are free from the bondage that says your lusts must be immediately satisfied—but along with this goes the truth that you are also free from the bondage to the Law that can worsen your temptation.

Turn with me a moment in your Bible to Romans 7 (page 943 of the pew Bible). In verses 7-8, Paul makes a profound connection between temptation and the moral law:

Romans 7:7–8 (ESV)

7 ... if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” 8 But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. For apart from the law, sin lies dead.

Now, take this dynamic and apply it to the battle with sexual temptation. When you bind yourself under the legal requirements of your behavior (as Paul illustrates here), what happens is that the Law actually intensifies your desire to sin! So many times we believe that we are being “spiritual” when, for example, we are surfing online and an ad featuring some bikini-clad airhead pops up and we immediately act like Ron Swanson discovering Google Earth for the first time—yank the monitor out of the wall and throw it in the dumpster.

Everyone around us might say, “wow—he really wants to protect his purity!!” But nine times out of ten, what you’ve actually done is let your outward conformity to the Law create an even stronger inward desire to sin! This is not, as they say, a bug in the Law—it is a design feature! This is the way the moral Law of God is intended to function! It is supposed to demonstrate that outward conformity to the Law only makes your sin worse.

Now I am not saying this so that you can just let popup ads for herpes-in-heels regularly decorate your computer screen because it is “no big deal”—Paul is clear here that you must not allow yourself to just go with the flow regarding sexual temptation—elsewhere telling Timothy to flee from youthful passions (1 Tim. 2:22).

But what I am saying is that you must understand what is happening when you screw down your legalistic resolve so tight that you react like someone threw boiling coffee in your eyes every time a girl walks by who looks like she just threw on her outfit and missed. Far better to recognize that there is temptation to be avoided and sin to be fought in that moment without acting like you are taking on single combat against the great principalities and powers of the heavenly realms. A simple, “Gee, I wonder where her mother got to?” and then going about your business is a far better—and freer response to temptation than the legalism and power of the flesh that can only lead to failure. You are free from bondage, Christian—free from slavishly obeying your lusts, and free from the legal demands of the Law that can only condemn you.

God wills your victory over sexual sin, Christian—don’t be controlled by your own body, and don’t behave like a pagan. In verse 6 of our text, Paul gives one more direction to the church in Thessalonica as they seek to become more like Christ as they battle sexual sin:

III. Don’t TAKE ADVANTAGE of each other (1 Thessalonians 4:6)

Paul says something intriguing about sexual purity in verse 6:

1 Thessalonians 4:6 (ESV)

6 that no one transgress and wrong his brother in this matter, because the Lord is an avenger in all these things, as we told you beforehand and solemnly warned you.

The word that the ESV translates “wrong” is a Greek word also translated “defraud” or “cheat”—the idea is of greedily or selfishly taking something for your own personal gain at someone else’s expense. Paul says that sexual immorality is a fraudulent activity; it cheats someone out of something that you have no right to.

And I think that we can see this clearly when we consider the different ways that men and women sin sexually. Make no mistake about it—men and women both sin in this way (regardless of our feminized culture that insists that only men are sexual sinners!) But men sin as men, and women sin as women.

When we go back to Genesis and consider the essential nature of the way Adam sinned in the Garden, we see that when it comes to sexual immorality,

Men sin by ABDICATION

Adam’s sin in the Garden was to abdicate his role as leader and protector. In the same way, when a man sins sexually, he is only looking at a woman as (in C.S. Lewis’ words) “the necessary apparatus by which he satisfies his appetites.” He ignores all of the covenantal obligations that God has designed into sexual expression—he does not want to be a husband, he does not want to be a father, he does not want to nurture and raise and protect and die for the children that would come of this union. He just wants the involuntary physiological response associated with that activity with that woman (whether physically present or virtual). And after that he has no use for her. He defrauds her, abdicating the whole purpose of sex.

When men sin sexually, they are committing a sin of abdication. And when we consider Eve’s sin in the Garden, it helps us understand that when women are sexually immoral, their sin is not less than men’s but different. Men sin by abdication, and

Women sin by USURPATION (cp. Prov. 7:10-23)

When women sin sexually, they are not usually focusing on the biology of the sin—their sin is grounded in the way that they can control and dominate and manipulate men by their sin. Where men will abdicate the covenant bonds of sexual activity, women will try to take over the headship of those covenant bonds. Solomon writes about the immoral woman in Proverbs 7—everything she does and says in that passage is geared toward getting this man to do what she wants:

Proverbs 7:15 (ESV)

15 so now I have come out to meet you, to seek you eagerly, and I have found you.

Proverbs 7:18 (ESV)

18 Come, let us take our fill of love till morning; let us delight ourselves with love.

Proverbs 7:19–20 (ESV)

19 For my husband is not at home; he has gone on a long journey; 20 he took a bag of money with him; at full moon he will come home.”

Men will defraud women by abdicating the covenantal responsibilities that sexual expression is designed by God to include; women will defraud men by using their sexual appetites to put themselves “in the driver’s seat” in their relationship. Paul warns them—and us—do not defraud each other.

Brothers, do not use women for your own sexual gratification. Study after study shows that a large number of women who are involved in pornographic films are there because they have been abused or coerced or forced in some way. When you watch them being so used, you are defrauding them of their dignity, and you are abdicating your God-given role of protecting and nurturing and providing and sacrificing—it costs you nothing to get your satisfaction by watching them; and it costs them everything. Husbands, your wives are not merely sexual partners—that activity is at the center of an entire galaxy of love and nurture and care and protection and sacrifice that you may not bypass on your way to bed.

Sisters, do not use sex to manipulate men—you may not be inviting men to your couch covered with colored linens from Egypt and perfumed with myrrh, but you know how to put yourself in the driver’s seat in a relationship through sexual attraction. Using sex to get your way with a guy (whether the act or the promise of it) is to defraud him, and if you are a Christian—you may not do such a thing. Wives, your husbands must certainly remember their covenant obligations to you that accompany the marriage bed—but that means that you must certainly not defraud them by sinful manipulations intended for you to short-circuit their headship. You don’t get him to drop his pants so that you can start wearing them.

You may not defraud each other in this way, beloved,

1 Thessalonians 4:6 (ESV)

6 ... because the Lord is an avenger in all these things, as we told you beforehand and solemnly warned you.

Paul issues a solemn warning that the Lord Jesus Christ will avenge the fraud that you commit against one another. He is the executor of judgment; He will repay.

1 Thessalonians 4:7–8 (ESV)

7 For God has not called us for impurity, but in holiness. 8 Therefore whoever disregards this, disregards not man but God, who gives his Holy Spirit to you.

If you will not heed His call to holiness in this matter; if you would rather follow the no-holds-barred, do-what-you-want, love-is-love of the world around you; if God’s Word has offended your attitudes towards sex, if you are at this moment cataloging all of the reasons why this sermon is all wet and this passage doesn’t apply to you and this is all blown out of proportion and is sexist, bigoted (and maybe even illegal), God’s Word tells you to consider that you are not disregarding man’s word, but God, who gives His Holy Spirit to you. Don’t be deceived, God will not be mocked. Sow disregard to the Spirit’s call to sanctification in sexual purity, and you will reap the avenging whirlwind of depression, isolation, loneliness, ruined homes, broken marriages, resentful and bitter children, a seared conscience and the peril of a soul numb to sin before a holy and righteous God.

And if you are here today with a heart that is mourning over the sexual impurity that has characterized your life; if you are hurting because you see and you know how torn and stained and soaked your life is by the impurity and immorality and abuse and manipulation and shame and filth of your sexual sin; if you are being crushed by that guilt this morning, then I want you to look again at 1 Thessalonians 4:7:

1 Thessalonians 4:7 (ESV)

7 For God has not called us for impurity, but in holiness.

He is calling you today—and He is calling you to holiness! If it is His will for you to be holy (and it is), then you can be holier than you ever thought possible! You can have more victory over sexual sin than you ever dreamed; you can be cleaner and more guilt-free than you could ever imagine! Because Jesus Christ is the Avenger of the sins committed against you, and He is at the same time the Sufferer of the sins you have committed!

Are you crushed by the weight of your sexual guilt before God? Jesus Christ was crushed for your iniquities! Are you brokenhearted over the way you have stained and degraded your life? He is the one who became your sin so that you could become His righteousness! He has called you here this morning so that you can discover His “wonderful plan for your life”—freedom and purity and joy and holiness purchased for you by the blood of your Savior, Jesus Christ!

BENEDICTION

Hebrews 13:20–21 (ESV)

20 Now may the God of peace who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep, by the blood of the eternal covenant, 21 equip you with everything good that you may do his will, working in us that which is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION:

If you were to ask people what God wants for them, what kinds of answers would you expect to get? How does Paul define God’s great purpose for your life? (Hint: Look at 1 Thessalonians 4:3). How does this differ from what we think God wants for us?

What are some things that this passage teaches about the nature of sexual expression that is different from the way the world around us would say? Read 1 Thessalonians 4:4—how does this verse differ from the common cry we hear today, “My body, my choice”?

Read 1 Thessalonians 4:6 again. How does a man’s sexual sin defraud a woman? How does a woman’s sexual sin defraud a man? Read Genesis 3:1-6. How does Adam and Eve’s sin help us see the defrauding nature of sexual sin?

Read 1 Thessalonians 4:7 again. How does this verse convict a Christian who has been allowing sexual immorality free reign in his or her life? How is this verse a comfort to those who are carrying a burden of shame over their sexual sin?