The Measure of Success
1 Thessalonians 2:1-12
How do you measure success and failure? (v.2: 1)
Measure success by your faithfulness to God (v. 2:2-6a)
Measure success by your dealings with people (v. 2:6b-12)
Treat them gently (v. 2:6b-7)
Treat them in love (v. 2:8-9)
Treat them Righteously(v. 2:10-12)
Introduction
Slide
Have you ever experienced times where you are trying to do what you believe to be the thing that God wants you to do, only to have one bad circumstance after another seem to happen and think to yourself, “Boy, is this really supposed to be what God wants me doing, because things didn’t go very well.”
Soup Kitchen
Maybe you have prayed and feel God has directed you to help out at a soup Kitchen but on the way you experience a flat tire and bad traffic. You get to the soup kitchen and many of the people seem ungrateful or like they are owed this meal. As you work, you are able to share your faith with a few people, but the people who run the soup kitchen are a little put out that you are doing that because this is secular soup kitchen, so they ask you not to come back. They don’t want people talking about Jesus there. When you leave, you find your car has been keyed and all your hub caps gone.
Success or failure?
Foster Parent
Or maybe after praying, you sense a calling to be a foster parent. You go through all the paper work and interviews and you are willing to take in hard to place kids. You wait and wait and finally you get a kid with a lot of social and anger issues and he is very hard to deal with but you try and help him and share with him how the Lord loves him and cares for him and he seems to respond at first, but the anger issues persist. You continue to try sharing the hope of Jesus Christ with him but, as he has a few incidents at school and with some neighbor kids that you are trying to help him overcome and not deal with people in anger, he doesn’t respond well to your discipline and tells his DCFS social worker that you are trying to force Jesus down his throat and he wants out of there. They pull him out and they still haven’t placed another child with you. Success or failure?
To be able to answer the question of success or failure, it is vital that we know how to measure success?
Slide
Transition to Paul
Paul had some pretty terrible circumstances occur to him that could have easily discouraged him from continuing if he had measured success by the world’s means, but instead, he measured success by God’s standard of success.
I want you to turn to 1 Thessalonians 2:1-12 this morning and seek to discover how we might measure success to the glory of God.
Slide
As you turn there, I want to remind you of some of the background of Paul’s second missionary journey.
Background – 2nd Missionary Journey
In Acts 16, we find that Paul had wanted to go to Asia, but was prevented by the Spirit from doing so (Acts 16:6-7). Instead, Paul had a vision of a man calling him to Macedonia to preach the gospel, so he took it as the Spirit calling him there (Acts 16:10). So he sets out to follow the Lord.
We tend to think that if the Lord is calling us to do something, then things are going to go well in terms of it will happen smoothly, the circumstances will be good, people will respond well.
Advance Team - Olympics
If you live in Chicago area, we have a chance to get the Olympics in 2016. Well, the President may be going to Copenhagen to stump for Chicago’s bid. And to prepare the way if he goes, he has sent an advance team out there to make sure that everything would go smooth, if he happens to go.
Well, if the Lord has called us to do something, we think He has probably sent an advance team to take care of all the circumstances that would enable this journey to be successful. But here again, we have to know what success looks like in God’s eyes.
So what happens on this journey?
Philippi
Well, Paul heads to Macedonia, to Philippi. He shares the gospel there and a few women believe. He drives out a demon from a slave girl and it causes the masses to turn against Paul and Silas. The get “severely flogged” and thrown in jail. They get to share the gospel with the jailer and he and his family believe. The next day they are released and asked to leave town.
Well, that didn’t really go as they had hoped, but there is always the next town.
Thessalonica
They head to Thessalonica and preach for a number of weeks and see a number of converts. So far, so good. The Jewish leaders become jealous and start riots and an angry mob comes to have Paul and his companions arrested. He is able to escape by the dark of night but those you were staying with have been arrested and had to post bond and it is costing them.
Boy, Lord, things are not going that successfully.
Berea
Anyway, he escapes to Berea and preaches there. Leaders from Thessalonica hear about it and send people to stir up crowd and he is forced to flee again.
Transition
Boy, if you look at the circumstances, if you are Paul, you could easily be saying to yourself,
Did I hear God wrong?
Was I really supposed to come this way?
Maybe God wanted me doing something else because, while there are some who are believing, it is not the masses that I had expected. And the problems that continue to follow me wherever I go are not what I expected for this mission from God.
Well, considering all these circumstances, at that time, without seeing the lasting and multiplying effects throughout history of Paul’s preaching, it would have been easy to conclude that Paul’s journey was not all that successful, if we were measuring success in human terms.
Well, let’s read 1 Thessalonians 2:1-12 and see what Paul says about his visit and his journey and see how he measures success.
1 Thessalonians 2:1-12
1 You know, brothers, that our visit to you was not a failure. 2 We had previously suffered and been insulted in Philippi, as you know, but with the help of our God we dared to tell you his gospel in spite of strong opposition. 3 For the appeal we make does not spring from error or impure motives, nor are we trying to trick you. 4 On the contrary, we speak as men approved by God to be entrusted with the gospel. We are not trying to please men but God, who tests our hearts. 5 You know we never used flattery, nor did we put on a mask to cover up greed-God is our witness. 6 We were not looking for praise from men, not from you or anyone else.
As apostles of Christ we could have been a burden to you, 7 but we were gentle among you, like a mother caring for her little children. 8 We loved you so much that we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God but our lives as well, because you had become so dear to us. 9 Surely you remember, brothers, our toil and hardship; we worked night and day in order not to be a burden to anyone while we preached the gospel of God to you.
10 You are witnesses, and so is God, of how holy, righteous and blameless we were among you who believed. 11 For you know that we dealt with each of you as a father deals with his own children, 12 encouraging, comforting and urging you to live lives worthy of God, who calls you into his kingdom and glory.
Pray
Wow, did you see that first line in chapter 2. Even after all the terrible circumstances, Paul doesn’t see his trip to Thessalonica or Philippi as a failure (v. 1).
Even in spite of suffering and strong opposition, hardship and a lack of a huge number of followers, he sees his journey and his visit as a success, not a failure.
That is because of the way Paul measured success and the way God wants us to measure success.
He doesn’t measure it in terms of lack of opposition, smooth sailing, apparent success or numbers.
Now don’t get me wrong. I believe that God wants large numbers of converts because those numbers represent people and God cares about people and loves them and wants to see them saved.
But growth in numbers is God’s business, not ours.
Now I think lack of outward growth should cause us to ask questions and assess how we are doing, but I think we always need to be doing that because outward growth does not mean that everything is as it should be either.
So how should we measure Success? The same way Paul does.
First, we need to
Measure success by our Faithfulness to God
Slide
In 1 Thessalonians 2:2-6a
We learn that
Paul and companions were faithful and obedient to God in spite of opposition (v.2)
They faithfully spoke the message that the Lord had entrusted to them (v.4)
They faithfully trusted the Lord’s provision by not seeking any support personally (v.5,9)
They faithfully sought the Lord’s praise, not mans (v.6)
Success was not in a lack of opposition
Success was not in being well liked by men
Success was not in getting rich
Success was in being faithful to God in preaching the word of God to the people that the Lord directed them to.
How does this apply to us?
It applies to us as a church in that we need to measure our success in our faithfulness to God in fulfilling our commission.
Matthew 28:19-20 – “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”
Are we making disciples?
Now to be a disciple, means to be a follower of Jesus. We can’t make people be followers of Jesus. But our responsibility is just like Paul’s to share the gospel with people so they can respond and receive Christ.
In Philippi, Paul was faithfully preaching the gospel and a woman named Lydia became a believer and it says this about her in
Acts 16:14 - The Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul’s message.
The Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul’s message. Paul didn’t convert her. But He was faithful to what God wanted him to do and then the Lord opened her heart to respond.
Are we being faithful to declare the message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ?
That is a question we have got to continually ask because what can happen is that as we grow and do more ministry in our community, which I think we should, we can forget the reason we are doing it, to share the message of hope through Jesus Christ.
Otherwise we fail to be a church and are just a community organization that seeks to serve. While not bad, it doesn’t address their true eternal need.
In everything we do, our ultimate purpose is to be able to gain opportunity to share the gospel because the Lord uses the gospel to open people’s hearts.
Baptism
We also have to be encouraging and teaching people about Baptism as an act of faithful obedience to the Lord as one of the first steps after someone has trusted Jesus as Savior?
We have a baptism opportunity coming up on October 18th. If you have not been biblically baptized after having received Jesus Christ, you need to be. Failure to do so, while it doesn’t keep you out of heaven, hinders your ability to grow. The Lord has given baptism as one of the first things we should do after having received him as Savior. That is why he states it here in the Great Commission.
Teaching
Finally, are we teaching people the word of God so they can continue growing in their relationship and in faithfulness to the Lord.
That is what it means when Jesus tells us to teach them “all things I have commanded you.”
This is why we are working hard to offer opportunities to people to be growing in their faith through our discipleship process.
We have a Back to the Basics course, Andy is teaching our first level Beyond the Basics at 9am on Sunday’s. We are offering The Truth Project on Sunday evenings that is more advanced in helping us to view things through a Biblical worldview, understanding the truths that Jesus taught us.
We are by no means doing everything perfect, but actually that is not our measure of success. Are we faithfully taking steps to follow the Lord’s calling?
I believe we are but this is not something that is a one-time event. We need to continually assess how we are doing in faithfully fulfilling God’s commission to us.
Asking hard questions, getting feedback from the church and making hard decisions that will help us better communicate the message of the gospel and the teachings of the Lord.
We are successful as a church when we faithfully communicate the gospel and faithfully teach the word of God.
Not only do we measure success in our faithfulness and obedience to God, but we also
Measure success by our Treatment of people
Slide
In this entire section of Scripture, Paul basically says this:
Our visit was not a failure.
It was not a failure, first, because we were faithful to God in telling you the good news for His glory
Second, it was not a failure because of the way we treated you.
Listen to 1 Thessalonians 2:6b-12 again.
As apostles of Christ we could have been a burden to you, 7 but we were gentle among you, like a mother caring for her little children. 8 We loved you so much that we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God but our lives as well, because you had become so dear to us. 9 Surely you remember, brothers, our toil and hardship; we worked night and day in order not to be a burden to anyone while we preached the gospel of God to you.
10 You are witnesses, and so is God, of how holy, righteous and blameless we were among you who believed. 11 For you know that we dealt with each of you as a father deals with his own children, 12 encouraging, comforting and urging you to live lives worthy of God, who calls you into his kingdom and glory.
God has designed us to live in community, in relationship with other people.
How we treat people either helps our relationships or harms our relationships.
We need to treat others so that relationships will be enhanced, not hindered
Let’s look a little more closely at how Paul treated the Thessalonians so that we might find success in God’s eyes in our treatment of others as well.
First, we see that we should
Treat People Gently
Slide
Verse 6 says they could have been a burden, but instead, they were gentle among them, like a mother caring for her little children.
We need to treat people gently.
As we grow as Christians, we need to realize that not everyone is going to be in the same place that we are.
We are going to meet people, other Christians n fact, that are younger in the faith and are going to do things and act in ways that perhaps a Christian more mature in the faith wouldn’t do. We need to treat people gently in helping them grow, just like Jesus treats us.
Jesus said in Matthew 11:28-30
28 "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”
People should be comfortable talking to us, knowing that we will speak to them gently even if what we think they are doing is wrong.
And even when they don’t think what they are doing is wrong when Scripture speaks otherwise, we still need to be gentle.
2 Timothy 2:25 - Those who oppose him he must gently instruct, in the hope that God will grant them repentance leading them to a knowledge of the truth
So we need to treat people gently, not harshly. When we are treating people gently with the truth instead of bashing them with the truth, we are being successful, regardless of their response.
Secondly, we need to
Treat People in Love
Slide
1 Thessalonians 2:8-9
8 We loved you so much that we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God but our lives as well, because you had become so dear to us. 9 Surely you remember, brothers, our toil and hardship; we worked night and day in order not to be a burden to anyone while we preached the gospel of God to you.
Paul and Silas and Timothy treated people with a love that was sacrificial.
They shared their lives with the Thessalonians.
They worked hard so they would not be a burden to the Thessalonians so that the life giving message of the gospel could go forward unhindered.
Are we loving people enough to sacrifice for them?
Or do we say we love people but are unwilling to sacrifice for them?
When I think of this, I always think of the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-35)
A Jew gets beat up and left for dead on the side of the road.
A priest and the Levite walk by the man who was beaten and left for dead.
Now there were probably some reasons they did this, perhaps they thought the man was dead already or they were late for other obligations and didn’t want to be unclean by touching a dead man. But it showed a lack of love for people. Then a Samaritan man comes along and cares for the man, sacrificing time, resources, what he wants for this other man.
Now we can read the story and think to ourselves, we would never do such a thing as the priest and the Levite that is until we find ourselves in their shoes.
Illustration – Family in need
I remember once I was helping this family that was down on some hard times. It was a man and woman, they had 2 kids and they needed help to get to a homeless shelter. I am not sure they were even married and I know that part of their problem was their own fault.
They had no car, and I remember they were living down the street at a motel and had to leave for some reason. Anyway, one evening they needed help in getting themselves and their stuff to the shelter to stay. It is about 4 pm and I get them loaded up and my car is full of all their stuff and them and their 2 kids. We get to the shelter and it turns out they won’t take them.
It is about 5 pm at this point, I have people coming over to my house for dinner that are newer to the church. If I am going to be a successful pastor, I need to get home to minister to these folks, but I have this other family and all their stuff in my car and I am thinking why am I stuck dealing this? I don’t have time to deal with this.
And then the Lord spoke to my spirit and said you are just like the Pharisee and the Levite. I was not loving this family that the Lord placed in front of me.
I was viewing success as something other than loving people.
Well, as I felt the conviction of the Lord, I was weeping inside as I determined to put this family up in a hotel for that night and then to find them a place close to where he had just gotten a job on the west side of Joliet. I was very late for dinner, but the Lord opened my eyes to what success looked like that night; treat people with love that is willing to sacrifice.
The last thing we see is that we are to
Treat People Righteously
Slide
1 Thessalonians 2:10-12 - You are witnesses, and so is God, of how holy, righteous and blameless we were among you who believed.
11 For you know that we dealt with each of you as a father deals with his own children, 12 encouraging, comforting and urging you to live lives worthy of God, who calls you into his kingdom and glory.
Paul says that he and Silas and Timothy lived and treated people righteously just as the Lord would have them.
Righteous means morally right.
We need to live and treat people in a way that is right before God.
We need to honest with People in love.
We need to encourage them when they are down
We need to comfort them when they hurt
And We need to continually inspire people toward godly living by setting an example for them.
It says here they treated them as a father treats his own kids.
That reminds me of what the Lord said in how we are to treat people in
Matthew 7:9-12
He said, “Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? 10 Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? 11 If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him! 12 So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you”
We need to treat people just as we want to be treated, in truth, with respect, righteously. That is when we will have been successful in life.
Conclusion
Success, in the eyes of the One that truly matters,
is about faithfulness and
is about treating people in a way that glorifies the Lord and
provides opportunities for them to hear the gospel from you;
from your actions,
from your mouth and
from your heart.
How have you been measuring success?
Are you measuring success correctly?
Are you still measuring it by the world’s standards or by God’s standards?
When we go back to how we opened the message this morning, I talked about people who had prayed and sensed God directing them to do something and they were faithful to follow that. Even though the circumstances that surrounded those works were not all that good, by God’s measure of success, they were faithful and the treated people in a way that was gentle, showed love and was right.
What God does with it from there is His business.
It could be that the homeless person at the soup kitchen is now a believer because that person was obedient to God’s call and treatment of others.
It could be the foster child bounced around but always remembered what he learned at your home and his eternity was changed forever.
Let’s measure success the way the Lord wants us to and the way Paul exampled for us.
Let’s be faithful and treat people as we want to be treated, gently, in love and righteously.
Let’s pray.
