EPISODE 86 1 THESSALONIANS CHAPTER 4 "As for other matters"

Thank you for joining us for this edition of Share the Word, the podcast that explains the big ideas in the New Testament chapter by chapter. If I might suggest, when I listen, I open my Bible to the chapter of the podcast so that I can follow along and make notes. Okay, ready? Let's get into today's lesson. First Thessalonians chapter 4. As for other matters.

With that line, as for other matters, the apostle Paul moves past his many commendations of the Thessalonian church to some of the areas where he realized he needed to fill in the gaps of their faith, as he'd put it. And the two big topics that he brings up in chapter 4 are as interesting as they are different. They are sex and the return of Christ. Imagine your dad saying to you one time when you came home from high school, I think it's time we had a talk about a couple of important things, son. Okay, Dad, what's that? Sex and the return of Christ.

I don't know, but maybe it's just me. This struck me as odd, like two things you wouldn't normally put together. But here in chapter 4 of First Thessalonians, those are the two biggest ideas addressed. So let's think about what Paul, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, tells these young Christians about those two topics. He begins by saying, You know what instructions we gave you by the authority of the Lord Jesus. He's referring to the teaching he'd been able to share with them during the short time he was in Thessalonica.

Those who had responded to the gospel message he'd begun to instruct on how to now live as Christians, to live in ways that please God. And notice he says here he did so by the authority of the Lord Jesus. Lord is not just a polite title like Mr. or Sir, by the way. Lord was a title of authority. When you hear us say on our podcast, as we often do, becoming a Christian means accepting Jesus as your Savior and Lord, that means not only receiving what He did on Calvary to pay for your sins, it also means being ready to turn your life toward following Him now as your leader, the rightful leader of your life. So what Paul is saying is, I shared with you when I was there by the authority of the Lord some instructions about how to live now as God's children.

As an apostle, Paul had the authority to speak directly for Christ. Jesus gave His apostles that unique authority. That's why He commended them earlier in this letter, if you remember, for accepting the things that He preached and taught while He was there as not only His words, but as He said, as the Word of God. He says here at the outset of chapter 4, We instructed you how to live in order to please God, as in fact you are doing. Now we ask you and urge you in the Lord Jesus to do this more and more. From Timothy, he's heard that they have been obeying the instructions he left with them.

But growing up as Christians, he knew, is a process. Understanding what pleases the Lord takes time. Making changes in our lives, you know, that's progressive. So he says, I hope to hear about you living in order to please God more and more. By the way, that should be every believer's objective in response to God's grace in our lives, wanting to understand God's will and then live in ways that please the Lord more and more. Then he gets to where he's heading at verse 3 and following.

He says there, It is God's will that each of you be sanctified, that you should avoid sexual immorality, that each of you should learn to control your own body in a way that is holy and honorable, not in passionate lust like the pagans who do not know God. That's something that's God's will for sure, Paul tells them. You need to behave differently in the sexual area of your lives than the people around us who don't know God. Sanctified means holy, set apart for God's purposes. That doesn't mean taking a vow of celibacy and becoming monks or nuns. It means keeping sex inside the boundaries God intended for it, which, as Paul notes here, takes self-control.

Pagans in ancient Greece were not very different from pagans today. They saw sex as something that you get wherever and however you can. Some of the Greek pagan religions incorporated sexual liaisons with male and female temple prostitutes as part of their religious experience, believe that or not. It's true. You know, I have seen in my lifetime, in my society, a serious shift away from honoring God's boundaries regarding sex to becoming a society swamped with sexual immorality. Now, I'm not saying that everybody in the 1950s and 60s when I was growing up was sexually moral and honored God's boundaries.

What I'm saying is, though, as a culture, at that time, we still upheld God's values as ideal. But I remember very well when that began to change, when those values began to be publicly challenged. An article on this topic in Wikipedia describes it in almost clinical terms. During the 1960s, the United States underwent a sexual revolution. Revolution was a social and cultural movement that resulted in liberalized attitudes towards sex and morality. Well, that's what happened, all right.

But we need to ask, a revolution against what? It was, of course, a revolution against the traditional way of understanding the role of sex, which is to say, God's way of understanding the role of sex, which is to say, really, a revolution against God. People called this change that swept over Western societies the new morality. You know what? It wasn't new. It was just the old immorality regurgitated, pretty much the same kinds of immorality that were commonplace in the cities of the Roman Empire when Paul first took the gospel there.

When we look at this spiritual rebellion, which has been masquerading as social and sexual enlightenment, going on for now, what, 60 years or so, what are the outcomes? Are we a better society, you think, and a happier society, a healthier society, a more stable society? Yeah, everybody who's my age here has one answer to this question, and I'm pretty sure we all agree. Maybe some people who are younger than us think a society awash in pornography and one where virtually every popular film has to have illicit sex as part of the story, where children are growing up thoroughly sexually confused, where very few seem to be able to stay married and faithful to their spouse, where sexually transmitted diseases are rampant, and I could go on. Maybe some see this as progress.

But it seems to me that deciding to throw off God's values and living in passionate lust like the heathen, as Paul put it, has been anything but progress for people's hearts and lives and relationships, and collectively for society. According to the most recent research I've read in this area, this is from the Barna Institute, which studies societal trends, today only about 20 percent of younger Americans believe sexual relations outside of marriage are wrong. That means 80% think it's fine, and only 20% believe that homosexual relations are immoral. Means 80% think it's fine. In fact, more young people today believe that it's immoral not to recycle than believe it is immoral to use pornography. Hmm.

This isn't progress, friends. This is not enlightenment. In contrast to what we see around us, the apostle Paul, under Jesus' authority, wrote this timeless instruction: This is the will of God, your sanctification, that is, that you abstain from sexual immorality, that each of us know how to possess our own vessel, that is, your body, in sanctification and honor. He similarly wrote to believers in another young church in a Greek city called Corinth, Run from sexual sin. No other sin so clearly affects our bodies as that one, for sexual immorality is a sin against yourself. Don't you realize that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who lives in you and was given to you by God?

You do not belong to yourself, for God bought you with a very high price. So, honor God with your body. One thing we must not say, if we're Christians, is something I constantly hear being said today, and that is, Well, it's my body and I'll do with it what I want. For believers, Paul says it's not just our spirits and souls that belong to God; it's our bodies too. They are to be treated in ways that honor God. When we're immoral, we sin against God by violating His boundaries.

We sin against ourselves because He says we have the Holy Spirit living inside of us, and we're redeemed people. And we sin against the person we're immoral with because we've used them for our selfish satisfaction. You know, there's even more wrongs because Paul adds in verse 6 a line about immorality as defrauding your brother, by which I think he meant someone who has sexual relations with someone else's husband or wife, or their son or daughter, or even someone else's future husband or wife. When we do that, we are sinning against that person. Sexual immorality has a lot of ramifications, and none of them are good. You're probably wondering, how then can a Christian engage in sex that doesn't offend God?

Well, let me remind you that God invented sexual relations. It was His idea in the first place. But how they can be used properly and well and good, that's a twofold thing according to His plan. It's to be uniquely a pleasurable bonding-type experience and active intimacy that's exclusive between a man and a woman who've committed themselves together as partners for a lifetime. It's something between them and them alone. It's special.

And of course, second, it's also the way God made for all living things to procreate. We make babies this way. Something also ought to be done only in a committed family environment because that's the healthiest environment for children to be reared. When we ignore God's purposes for sex and just turn it into a selfish pleasure game, using people that have no real commitment to us and we have no real commitment to them, we're acting like pagans, like heathens, Paul says. We're not honoring God and others made in His image. Therefore, he concludes, whoever disregards this disregards not man, but God.

He is the one who has given His Holy Spirit to live in us. Living by a higher standards in the area of sexual morality is one clear way we show we are God's people and that we are committed to pleasing Him. It certainly takes determination and discipline to do that, but it can be done. Believe it or not, some people still wisely listen to God in this area of their lives and are blessed because of it. Did you hear Paul say in that 1 Corinthians 6 passage I was quoting from a moment ago, The way you beat immorality is to run from it, or as the older translations put it, flee from it. It's one sin we shouldn't try and negotiate with or mentally try and defeat.

It's something you get away from and you stay away from. Situations where you know sexual temptations are going to be strong, you get away from. There's an account back in the book of Genesis about Joseph when he was still a slave in Egypt, in a trusted position to run the household of a powerful man named Potiphar. Joseph, by the way, is described in that passage, this is Genesis 39, as well-built and handsome. Here's what it says happened. After some time, Joseph's master's wife looked longingly at him and said, Come sleep with me.

But he refused. Look, he said, my master does not concern himself with anything in his house. He's put all that he owns under my authority. He has only withheld one thing from you, and that's you, because you are his wife. So how could I do such an immense evil? How could I sin against God like that?

Although she spoke to Joseph that way day after day, he refused to sleep with her. Then one day he went into the house to do his chores, and none of the household servants were there. Uh-oh. She grabbed him by his garment and said, Sleep with me. By leaving his garment in her hands, the passage says, he escaped by running outside. When she grabbed him and said, Lie with me, you beautiful Hebrew hunk of a man, Joseph did the only thing he could do in that situation, and he ran.

He got out of there, and he escaped that temptation. Why is that story even in the Bible? I'm pretty sure it's there to show us how intent that young man was on pleasing God rather than pleasing himself. Then or now, believers who are more committed to pleasing God than living selfishly, God will honor. And as that narrative plays out, Joseph was greatly honored and used by God in significant ways. So, bottom line, stay away from immorality.

Control your body and its appetites. If you are a son or daughter of God, don't act just like the heathen do in our rebellious society, and God will honor you for being different, for being loyal to Him and to His ways. At verse 13, Paul takes a very sharp turn off the road he's been on so far onto a ramp marked eschatology. Eschatology means the study of end times, and in Christian theology, it's the end of this age that we are living in now. What happens at the end of this age? That's eschatology.

What caused Paul's mind to veer off in that direction when he's been discussing things so different? Must have been to address questions Timothy brought back from Thessalonica about how this age would end and about the return of Jesus. But why do you think they had questions about that? This dawned on me as I thought about the connection between where we are now in his letter to Thessalonica and his original visit there and what we're told about that back in the book of Acts in chapter 17. There's only a brief synopsis of what happened in Thessalonica. He was only there a brief time.

And it says, Then they came to Thessalonica, where there was a Jewish synagogue. As usual, Paul went into the synagogue and on three consecutive Sabbaths reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Messiah to suffer and rise from the dead. He was claiming, This Jesus I am telling you about is the Messiah. Paul was able to speak to a predominantly Jewish audience in Thessalonica and dialogue with them over the important question, Was Jesus really the Jewish Messiah? After hearing Paul's arguments from the Old Testament, some believed he was and believed the gospel message. But others, then and still now, disagreed because Jesus did not fulfill other expectations the Jews had of the Messiah when he appeared.

I think we've talked about this before. The Jews' biggest objection to Jesus was he ended up on a Roman cross, not sitting on the King David's throne in a restored Jewish kingdom. That's what they expected to happen when the Messiah appeared. Too many Old Testament prophecies promised that outcome. So what do we say to this as Christians? Well, what I say to it is, yes, Jesus did end up on a cross because he was not only Israel's Messiah.

Jesus was the Savior for the whole world, and his atonement on the cross for sin was necessary in God's plan for our salvation. But that does not mean that he will not fulfill the rest of the Messianic prophecies in the Old Testament. He will. He will because he's coming back, and he will fulfill them then. This had to have been central to Paul's back and forth during those synagogue meetings with religious Jews in Thessalonica. As we've mentioned a few times, his time in that city was cut short.

And now several months later, when Timothy returned from them, from his checkup on them who had believed the gospel there, it's not at all surprising, is it, that he brought back questions they needed clarification on, specifically questions stemming from what Paul was teaching about Jesus coming back. Well, questions like what? At verse 13 he wrote, Brothers and sisters, we don't want you to be uninformed about those who have already died, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind who have no hope. Maybe the question was theoretical, but it's more likely that since Paul's departure in the intervening months, someone in her church had died. So their concern was, what will happen with them? You told us that Jesus is returning, but what about those who die before he does?

It's in Paul's answer to that question that we get one of the most important sections in the New Testament about the future. Here's how Paul answered it. We believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. According to the Lord's word, we tell you that we who are still alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep, and by that he means those who have already died. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.

And so we will be with the Lord forever. Comfort and encourage one another with these words. Paul's answer to their immediate question was that those who have died trusting in Jesus are already with him in heaven. He wrote elsewhere on the same point, To be absent from the body is to be at home with the Lord. And he says, When Jesus returns, he's going to bring with him those believers who have died. So the answer is, when a Christian dies, our soul and spirit, the immaterial part of us, goes to be with the Lord in heaven, while our body remains here, whether it's buried, cremated, however it's handled.

But when Jesus returns, the bodies of believers will be resurrected just as Jesus' body was resurrected. So those who died with their faith in Christ, their bodies will be resurrected and reunited with their immortal spirit and soul, now in heaven with Christ. Your believing loved ones are safe with Christ, and you'll be with them and see them again, Paul assures them. So comfort and encourage one another with this truth. That's good to know. They're already with the Lord, and our reunion with them is coming when Jesus returns.

This promises why, for Christians, although being separated from a loved one when they die is emotionally hard and genuinely sad, Paul says, We don't grieve like the rest who don't have any hope. I've mentioned before that my parents lived with my family during their final years in an apartment actually attached to our house. My father went home to be with the Lord. That's Paul's word here, home. And I think it was 1996. There was no somber funeral.

We had a celebration of his life, and there was much to celebrate about it. My mom lived on for another decade or so, but her physical body eventually wore out too. I remember very clearly the afternoon she died. She was still at my house, staying in one of our bedrooms. She was laboring to breathe. Her heart was very weak.

I called for hospice that day, and when they arrived and checked her over, the nurse confirmed to me that she was very close to death. I remember getting down into my mom's face as close as I could to be sure she would hear me. She could no longer speak, but I know she heard me, and I said, Dad is waiting for you. I can't even imagine how glad he's going to be to see you. And her eyes lit up, and I will be along shortly. It won't be long.

We'll all be home together soon. That was our last conversation. She went home to heaven later that evening. But we will be together soon. This is the word of the Lord, and the Lord always keeps His word. Paul's answer to the Thessalonians' questions brings up many more insights about Jesus' return, which we don't have time to get into today, but we will get into them next time.

We're not sliding past them. This topic is one of the most interesting and important and encouraging in the New Testament. So we'll come back to this section, and then we'll finish it up and get into the next chapter of 1 Thessalonians. I'll see you then. This is Paul for Share the Word. Thanks, Paul.

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