Sermon Tone Analysis

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.

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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