North, South, East and West
(1 Thessalonians 5:23-28)
Like an X and Y axis in Algebra, so spiritual growth comes from both vertical and horizontal directions.
1. God has a lot of work to do in our lives; for some of us, God has cleared away the biggest hurdles, but there are plenty of lesser ones. In other cases, Hi is working on the big ones!
2. It is easy to get frustrated, but the fact we care, the fact we want to grow, the fact we have indeed grown in some areas is a sign of God working within us.
3. Hopefully we are not like the little boy who prayed, "Lord, if you can’t make me a better boy, don’t worry about it. I’m having a real good time like I am."
4. Back in the 1970’s, someone came up with buttons and stickers that had these letters:
P B P W M G I N F W M Y
Please be patient with me, God is not finished with me yet!
5. So, how do we grow? It obviously starts with salvation, but what then?
Main Idea: Just as the two Great Commandments are both vertical and horizontal, so spiritual growth comes predominantly from vertical and horizontal sources.
I Vertical Growth: Our SANCTIFICATION Through God (23-24)
OUR RELATIONSHIP TO GOD IS AT THE CENTER OF OUR SPIRITUAL GROWTH
A. A WISH (23)
• In the original Greek, this is the optative mood, the mood of wish
• A blessing is a prayer in the third person (may He, God, do this for you)
• Rick Warren expressed his opinion that songs of worship to God, written in the second person ("Lord, I Lift Your Name on High") are more worshipful than songs that sing about God; but if the Psalms are any clue, then Rick Warren is wrong. "I love the Lord because He hears my prayer."
• "The Lord is righteous and blameless in all His ways…"
• You see, whenever you talk about God, He is eavesdropping…hence this blessing
1. WHAT is sanctification?
• comes from the God of peace, so it must refer to living in harmony with Him
• "set apart for God;" same as the word "holy"
• John MacArthur writes, "Sanctification is the ongoing spiritual process by which God increasingly sets believers apart from sin and moves them toward holiness."
• The one thing God uses more than anything else to help us grow is His Word.
John 16:17-18, a text in which Jesus is praying for His disciples, reads:
" They are not of the world, even as I am not of it. Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world."
The most important thing you can do to grow in the Lord is to read and study the Bible.
One secret to keep Bible study interesting is to change levels of depth…
My brother in law is a video game fanatic, going back to the days of Atari…expert level, beginning level…
2. The TENSES of sanctification
• Past -- We are legally set apart as holy for God when we believe
• Present -- The Holy Spirit is helping us to become more holy progressively
• Future --When we seen Christ, we shall be completely sanctified
In I John 3:1-3, we see all three tenses:
How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! [past: this happened when we believed]. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is [future: we will be completely Christ-like when He appears]. Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself, just as he is pure [present: we purify ourselves on the basis of hope].
3. The WHOLE extent of sanctification
• "through and through" means completely, all of us
• to be kept "blameless" means that we will not be embarrassed when He returns
• I John 2:28, "And now, dear children, continue in him, so that when he appears we may be confident and unashamed before him at his coming."
• Both the I John verse and this verse in Thessalonians connects the concept of being blameless to the return of Jesus Christ…
• How many parts does a human being have?
B. An Assurance Based on GOD’S Character (24)
• This blessing is not just a wish and not just a prayer; it is, rather, an assurance….
• God does sanctify His own. Note the promise of Romans 8:29, "For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers."
• Philippians 2:13, "…for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure…"
1. Because God is FAITHFUL
• Faithful means dependable, trustworthy, loyal, constant, staunch, reliable, unswerving, and unwavering…
• God is faithful to finish what He has promised to do, not what we want Him to do or mistakenly think He has promised to do…
2. Because God gets things DONE
• He doesn’t have good intentions without follow-through; He does not merely make plans, He executes them.
• Illustration: On our third floor, you will find a Carpet Ball Table… The original surfaced for Camp Emmanuel in the early 1990’s. We thought about building one since then…one man measured, another man measured, even I measured and intended to build it. But it was never built.
• Finally, in 2006 -- over a dozen years after our first intention -- some of our teens measure it, got the materials, and put it together…
• Paul says, "He will do it!" His Spirit will use His Word and His People to help us grow.
Just as the two Great Commandments are both vertical and horizontal, so spiritual growth comes predominantly from vertical and horizontal sources.
II Horizontal Growth: Our CONNECTION to Fellow Believers (25-28)
WITHOUT THE BODY OF CHRIST AND WITHOUT CHRISTIAN RELATIONSHIPS, WE WILL NEVER REACH OUR SPIRITUAL POTENTIAL.
A. Mutual PRAYER (25)
1. Paul needed prayer just like any other Christian…. all on one level of humanity
2. Christians reciprocate with one another (Paul prayed for them, they prayed for him)
B. WARMTH for one another (26)
1. A "holy kiss" in the early church
2. A comfortable part of culture, not something odd
C. Equal ACCESS (27)
1. All believers were to hear this letter; not just the leadership, not just some clergy caste
2. Our kind of Christianity flourishes when the person in the pew is reading & studying the Bible and not just blindly trusting the leadership; our kind of Christianity declines when that is not the case
3. What happened in church history is that over the centuries the leading elder turned into a priest and the members of the church just mindlessly did what the priest said without holding church leaders accountable to the Scripture because they did not know the Scriptures…
4. Although the priest stuff is not happening within evangelicalism today, the latter part is
D. Common DEPENDENCE upon Jesus Christ (28)
1. Sometimes you meet people who think they are on a different level of humanity
2. We are all constantly vulnerable; we depend upon God for every breath whether we know it or not, whether we can explain the mechanics of it or not.
3. As Christians, we stand before God through grace. We get through life by grace.
4. As pertains to salvation, grace is God’s undeserved favor. As pertains to the Christian life, grace is God’s undeserved strength.
5. What we do can be called works; what God does for us can be called grace.
6. This common sense of dependence unites us!
Just as the two Great Commandments are both vertical and horizontal, so spiritual growth comes predominantly from vertical and horizontal sources.
CONCLUSION
1. Life can have its good times without God in the picture.
2. Life takes on an eternal perspective and new depth with God at its center, because now we are fulfilling the purpose of our existence, to glorify Him.
3. But life with God can only take us so far; God has ordained that we cannot fully mature without people; this includes society at large, but especially God’s people, fellow believers.
4. Which is why the mission of Highland Park Church recognizes all these elements:
"The mission of Highland Park Church is to reach people with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, to connect believers to one another and to God, and to deepen them in their Christian walk."
