The Gospel Confidence

INTRODUCTION:

Interest:

I was working on the sermon for this morning on Friday—Valentine’s Day. From everything I observed on Facebook on Friday, there were a fair number of you who had obviously been anticipating the arrival of Valentine’s Day. Now, there may have been a few of you who dreaded the coming of the day as well, but overall there seemed to be a lot of anticipation. I’m not aware of any new love interests within our church, so I didn’t see any surprise revelations of anticipation of the day.

I also saw a cartoon about Valentine’s Day on Friday; one that I afraid probably describes the way Grace and I celebrate with the day more than it should. The cartoon of was of a husband and wife. They were laying on separate couches in the room with hands over their eyes, clearly exhausted. The husband says, “Oh, by the way, Happy Valentine’s Day” and the wife responds, “Same to you” without either of them moving at all. Sad, right? My wife and I have never been ones to focus much on the Hallmark holidays, but I can still understand the anticipation that many of you felt waiting for the day to arrive this past week.

Involvement:

Anticipation of a coming event remains the focus of our passage this morning as well.

Context:

For the past couple of weeks, we have been dealing with the topic of the Lord’s return. Paul began talking about the topic because the Thessalonians were concerned about the fate of deceased Christians when Christ returned. Paul had taught as a core component of the gospel message that Jesus, our risen Lord and Savior, is coming again. He had also apparently taught that He could come at any time; leaving the expectation that it would be soon. He wrote the verses at the end of chapter 4 order to assure the young church in Thessalonica that those who died before His return would not miss out on that exciting event.

Last week, as we moved into chapter 5 of Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians, we saw that he continued talking about the Lord’s return by moving to matter of the assured destruction that Christ’s return will bring upon the enemies of God. We were reminded as we looked at the first three verses of the chapter how important it is for us to force ourselves to be content with what God has revealed on this topic, even if all of the questions that we have are not answered…what God has revealed is sufficient us to understand the suddenness with which the many events making up the future “Day of the Lord”—the phrase that refers to everything that will happen when the Lord returns—its suddenness and its finality. Those who reject God’s offer of salvation—the gospel message that ushers those who believe into the gospel life cycle described throughout this letter—those who reject the gospel will not escape the judgment of God.

Preview:

Last week Paul pointed to the implications of the Lord’s return for those who rejected God’s salvation; this week he is going to contrast their future experience with those who have accepted Jesus as Savior, who have trusted the gospel message and have gospel life.

Application

My since hope is that most of the people in this room are in this category; you have accepted Jesus as your personal Savior. In fact, I wish that all of you were in this category. If you have not accepted Jesus as your Savior, then really this message has nothing to offer you because the things we are going to talk about today apply only to believers. You can listen to the promises that the rest of us have been given by God as well as the wonderful implications of those promises in our lives, but really it is the warning of last week that is God’s word speaking to you; sudden, terrible, judgment awaits you when the Lord returns unless you change the path of your life and accept Jesus as your own personal Savior.

For most of us—those of us who have Jesus as Savior—the verses that we are going to look at today are indeed significant verses. You see, the main idea that we will see in these verses is that the coming of Christ should cause us to live with great confidence!

Our Savior is coming again. That is a promise that God has revealed; we can count on it. The coming of Christ should cause us to live with great confidence! In fact, in our verses we will see four different things that should be produced in our lives as a result of the confidence that we have in the Lord’s return—I am calling them “confidence products” this morning.

Transition from introduction to body:

The coming of Christ should cause us to live with great confidence! In the first four verses of the passage we are going to consider today we can see the first of our confidence products. Confidence product number 1,…

BODY:

I. Our confidence produces distinct moral lives, vv. 4–7

Our verses are a continuation of those we looked at last week. In fact, let’s go ahead and back up to the beginning of the chapter and read the three verses we looked at last week as well as the first verses for today so that we can see the connection…<read 1 Thess 5:1–7>.

Did you notice that as we came to verse 4, the beginning of our verses, that it started with the words, “But you.” Paul is making a strong contrast to those who are facing judgment and the Thessalonians. The members of the church are facing a far different experience when the Day of the Lord strikes than the unbelievers…the contrast could not be starker. Paul lays out this contrast using the imagery of night and day; the unbelievers are of the night and darkness but believers are of the day and light. In fact, did you notice that Paul switched from talking about “you” to talking about “we” in verse 5; everything he says about their future experience as believers in Christ is true of him and the other missionaries, Silas and Timothy, as well.

Now, I want us to notice three things about this contrasting image that Paul spells out in these verses. First of all, notice the inclusive nature of Paul’s statement, “you are all sons of light and sons of day.” All—Paul places ever reader of the letter in Thessalonica into this group because he has stated his assumption throughout that every one of them is a genuine believer in Jesus Christ. This means that every believer is included in this group he is calling sons of light and sons of day, no exceptions. None of them can be classified as sons of darkness or sons of night.

The idea of “sons of” something goes back to Paul’s Jewish heritage and training. In the OT, to be the son of something meant that the person or even group of people participated in the characteristics of that something. This is why the statement that Jesus is the Son of God is so significant; it means that Jesus participates in the characteristic of God—He is God.

Well, light and dark cannot coexist; they are mutually exclusive. Likewise, day and night cannot coexist—there is no twilight in this image. A person is either in the one group and has the characteristics of that group or is in the other. All believers in Jesus Christ are in the group characterized by light and day. That is the first thing to notice in these verses.

The second thing, though…the point of emphasis in these verses…is that which group a person is in is expected to be determinative of his behavior. Paul uses a second set of images to make this point—images associated with day and night. The expected behavior for sons of darkness is described as sleep and drunkenness, activities associated with night and darkness. Of course, Paul is using these terms here metaphorically—he is not talking about actual sleep. What he is saying is that unbelievers are characterized by lack of attention and lack of self-control or self-restraint.

By contrast, believers are to be “alert”—the word that Paul uses in verse 6 is actually a word that means “be awake” but our translators of the NASB and several of the other English translations have tried to help us understand that Paul is not referring to actual sleep here. Believers are to be alert and they are also to be sober—the exact opposite of unbelievers; believers are to be self-controlled and known for their self-restraint.

Of course, we recognize from many places in the NT that our Christian life is expected to produce a distinct moral ethic—we are to live distinctly moral lives. Even earlier in this letter in chapter 4, verse 3 we specifically encountered the command to abstain from sexual immorality. The idea that we are to have distinct moral lives is not new. What is new, though, is the third thing that I want us to notice—Paul ties this moral expectation to the coming of Christ. The reason that we are to live this distinct moral life is because our Lord is coming. But He is coming in the most unexpected and sudden fashion. Just as there will be no time for unbelievers to escape judgment when He comes; there will no time for us to suddenly get our lives in order in preparation for meeting our Lord. Paul is telling us that we must prepare now for the unexpected because we are confident that He is coming.

Illustration

To me, this idea reminds me of the idea of risk planning in project management. For several years I worked in the area of project management when I was in the business world. Many of the projects that I worked on and helped plan were quite massive, involving multiple years and hundreds of people. Several also involved people and locations from multiple countries. These were complex projects, so risk management was a significant concern. You see, the idea behind risk management is to plan for the unplannable. Because of the magnitude of the projects, we were very confident that unexpected things would occur. We would joke that a project plan was only the tool that we used to know what we wouldn’t do because the minute the plan was produced, we had to begin making adjustments for factors that did not go according to plan. Risk management was the process of building enough flexibility into the plan so that we could adjust as needed. We were confident that we would be surprised by unexpected events along the way.

Well, we can be even more confident that we will be surprised by the return of Christ. He is coming and when He does, we are expected to be living distinct moral lives—to be living as the sons and daughters that we truly are—alert and self-controlled. Of course, there is no way that believer will actually be lumped into the category of unbeliever and face judgment; but it is possible for a believer to live like and unbeliever morally which is to live unprepared. We are to be ready for the Lord’s return, not unprepared. The only way for us to be ready is for us to be living that morally ready now, every day; we cannot wait until we think His coming is near as there will be no further warning than the promises we have already received.

Transition:

The coming of Christ should cause us to live with great confidence! The first product that our confidence in the coming of Christ is that of a distinct moral life. Our confidence produces distinct moral lives.

The second confidence product that the coming of Christ will produce is found in verse 8,…

II. Our confidence produces vibrant spiritual lives, v. 8

Not only are we to be distinct from unbelievers; our distinction is to be generated by a vibrant spiritual life. Look at verse 8…<read 1 Thess 5:8>.

Because of the group that we are in—because our faith in Jesus has made us children of the day, using Paul’s imagery—we are to “be sober.” The command in this verse is given in a form that means this is to be our continual attitude—an ongoing description at all time. The question that comes up, though, is, “How can we be this way?” Well, Paul gives the answer in the second half of the verse; we can continually be what we are meant to be by constantly living in the knowledge of what we have received—the “breastplate of faith and love, and as a helmet, the hope of salvation.”

Paul says that these three traits, these three Christian virtues, must be recognized as our possession already: “having put on” is the language he uses. This is a single verb expressed as an accomplished event; this has already happened! It is a bit cryptic here, but Paul is expressing the idea that at the moment of salvation these things were put on us as new items.

Illustration

Think of a newborn baby, Finley is the most recent in our church. Finley does not help put her any of her clothing on. David or Katie select what she is going to wear and then put it on her. She may not even be aware at a given moment that she is wearing a particular item of clothing, but that doesn’t change the fact that she is.

In a similar fashion, Paul is pointing to the fact that at them moment of our salvation, God clothed us with these items which are the exact items that we need to be vigilant—faith, love and hope. These are three Christian virtues that repeatedly show up together in the NT. Here, Paul is saying that these three virtues work together to function as all the defensive armor we need to ensure that we are prepared for the Day of the Lord. All we need to do is utilize them.

Application

Of course, most of us have probably been Christians long enough to be able to recognize that using faith and love and hope does not come automatically, we must work at them; we must exercise our faith, we must put our love into practice through effort, we must constrain our hope by what this book says. In other words, we must work at developing a vibrant spiritual life. Yet, the reason that we can and will work at developing and maintaining a vibrant spiritual life is because of our confidence that the Lord will return.

Think about it, if the Lord were not returning what purpose would there be to deny ourselves the pleasures of this world? What purpose would there be in loving others? The most logical thing for us to do, if the Lord were not returning, would be to seek out as much pleasure and self-centered enjoyment that we could get in this life. What motivates us to live differently is our confidence that He is returning.

Transition:

The coming of Christ should cause us to live with great confidence! Our confidence produces vibrant spiritual lives—confidence product number 2.

Moving on to verses 9 and 10 we can see a third confidence project produced by our confidence that the Lord is coming again,…

III. Our confidence produces unshakable eternal hope, vv. 9–10

Let’s read these verses…<read 1 Thess 5:9–10>.

Our confidence produces unshakable eternal hope. Look at the verbs that Paul uses in verse 9, “God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation.” That verb “destined is one that is regularly used to describe God’s sovereign determination of events. God has sovereignly determined that we will not suffer His wrath. Wrath is coming—destruction is imminent—but it is not for us.

Instead we are to “obtain” salvation. That verb is one that carries the idea of gaining something. Rather than experience the wrath of God, we are going to gain salvation, salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ.

And, lest we forget how this all is possible; it is possible because our Lord Jesus Christ died for us. He died—He suffered the full and complete wrath of God that we deserved upon the cross. And because Christ did that, we can now obtain salvation by believing in Him; believing that He alone has met the requirements of God’s holiness and justice through His love by dying in our place.

Now, I’m going to be open with you this morning; I am not entirely sure what Paul means when he says here in verse 10 that it doesn’t matter whether we are awake or asleep. The vast majority of commentators point back to chapter 4 and suggest that Paul is looping back around to the point he made at the end of the previous chapter that death does not need to shake our confidence, we will life with Christ when He returns whether we are alive when He returns or not. Suggesting that this is what Paul means in this verse is certainly suggesting something true; this is the way that this verse has largely been interpreted throughout history.

The problem with that standard interpretation is that beginning in verse 6…just 5 verses earlier…Paul switched to a different word for sleep. In chapter 4 Paul used one word 3 times to point to those who had died. As we talked about a couple of weeks ago, this word literally means to physical sleep, but Paul used it metaphorically to refer to those who had died. But here in chapter 5, really in the very next paragraph Paul introduces a different term. This word also literally means physical sleep, but in this context, as we have already discussed a short time ago, Paul used the word in verses 6 and 7 to refer to those who are unprepared for the Lord’s return. It seems strange to me that Paul would switch the metaphorical meaning of the word He is using here in verse 10 to jump to the idea of chapter 4 when he could have made the jump clear by switching words once more. Now, I’m not sure you followed all of that, but I hope you at least got that Paul used two different words for sleep, one in chapter 4 and one in chapter 5. For that reason, it is possible that the point Paul is making here in verse 10 is not that it ultimately doesn’t matter whether we are alive or dead, but it doesn’t even matter if we are morally prepared are unprepared: our salvation does not depend upon anything that we do; it is dependent entirely upon what Jesus has already done.

Now, even if Paul does mean that our moral efforts are ultimately of concern when the Lord returns, that does not lessen our obligation to live for our Savior now. What it does do though is maintain a proper balance between our future anticipate of the Lord’s return and our present obligations; we need not fear missing the Lord’s return because it is not dependent upon us.

Like I said, I am not entirely want Paul means when he says that it doesn’t matter whether we are awake or asleep here in verse 10, but I am completely sure of the hope that He is holding out—we will live together with Christ when He returns. Nothing can shake my confidence in that fact. Death cannot. My ongoing struggle with sin cannot. Nothing because my confidence is not based upon anything I might experience; it is based upon His sacrificial death.

Transition:

Our confidence in His return produces an unshakeable eternal hope. That is the third confidence product produced. The coming of Christ should cause us to live with great confidence!

In our final verse this morning, there is one more confidence product that we can look at, confidence product number four,…

IV. Our confidence produces active Christian fellowship, v. 11

<read 1 Thess 5:11>.

This verse is very similar to the final verse of chapter 4. The word that we have translated “encourage” here in verse 11 is actually the same word even as we have translated “comfort” in verse 18 of chapter 4. Once again Paul tells the Thessalonians that they are to encourage each other and this time he adds the idea of building each other up.

Remember, this is a group of young-in-the-faith believers who were facing numerous hardships. Christianity was brand new in the city and had already attracted the hostility of the Jewish community. Essentially the pagans Gentiles in Thessalonica would have considered Christianity a weird, strange religion; they wouldn’t have cared if the Jews were persecuting the new Christians. This small group of believers had no one to lean on other than each other.

And lean on each other is exactly what Paul tells them to do, but he tells them to do it by standing together upon the foundation of this precious truth—Jesus is coming again. The fact that they shared in the anticipation of this blessed hope was to generate a unity of spirit and mutual encouragement—it was to produce Christian fellowship. He even recognizes that they were already doing this very thing for each other while he admonishes them to keep at it.

Application

Truth is meant to encourage us and build us up in our spiritual lives. In fact, that is the very idea of Christian fellowship—being involved in each other’s lives for the sake of encouraging and building up. It is not Christian fellowship to simply share a meal together. It is not Christian fellowship to watch a football game or have a craft time or any other activity that you may do with each other. These are all good, but for any of these things to become Christian fellowship, biblical truth must be brought into the picture so that there is a component of encouraging each other and building each other in the truth. And frankly, every time we get together with each other we should be looking for opportunities to encourage and build each other up in the faith. After all, the most real thing we have before us is the fact that Jesus is coming! All else pales in comparison to that truth. Are you engaging in active Christian fellowship? It should be a natural product of the fact that you have confidence in the coming of our Lord.

Transition from body to conclusion:.

Our confidence produces active Christian fellowship; confidence product number 4. The coming of Christ should cause us to live with great confidence!

CONCLUSION

The coming of Christ should cause us to live with great confidence!

Much as it was this past week with Valentine’s Day, but with even greater anticipation, we should be anticipating the coming of the Lord. Not only should we anticipate His coming, the fact that He is should impact our lives now because of the great confidence that it generates.

As we saw this morning, our confidence in the coming of Christ should produce four products—we called them confidence products:

1. Distinct moral lives

2. Vibrant spiritual lives

3. Unshakable eternal hope

4. Active Christian fellowship

The coming of Christ should cause us to live with great confidence!