MODELING GENEROSITY
Isaac Butterworth
October 24, 2010
1 Thessalonians 1:2-1- (The Message)
2-4 Day and night you're in our prayers as we call to mind your work of faith, your labor of love, and your patience of hope in following our Master, Jesus Christ, before God our Father. It is clear to us, friends, that God not only loves you very much but also has put his hand on you for something special. When the Message we preached came to you, it wasn't just words. Something happened in you. The Holy Spirit put steel in your convictions.
5-6 You paid careful attention to the way we lived among you, and determined to live that way yourselves. In imitating us, you imitated the Master. Although great trouble accompanied the Word, you were able to take great joy from the Holy Spirit!—taking the trouble with the joy, the joy with the trouble.
7-10 Do you know that all over the provinces of both Macedonia and Achaia believers look up to you? The word has gotten around. Your lives are echoing the Master's Word, not only in the provinces but all over the place. The news of your faith in God is out. We don't even have to say anything anymore—you're the message! People come up and tell us how you received us with open arms, how you deserted the dead idols of your old life so you could embrace and serve God, the true God. They marvel at how expectantly you await the arrival of his Son, whom he raised from the dead—Jesus, who rescued us from certain doom.
The most influential person in my life was a man by the name of Charles. He was the pastor of the church where I went as a teenager. You may have heard me talk about Charles before, and, if you have, you may remember that he taught me how to drive, he helped me learn a trade and gave me my first job, and he was my mentor all throughout high school. If I had a problem, I went to him. If I had spare time, I wanted to spend it with him. If I could be close to anybody, I wanted it to be him. At that time in my life, there was no one in the world that I wanted to be more like. He was my ideal. He was for me the example of what every man should want to be.
And I wanted to be just like him. I wanted to be like him so much that I began to take on some of his idiosyncrasies. Unconsciously, you understand! But I took them on nonetheless. Even the less desirable ones. For example, there was this thing he did with his face. He kind of flared his nostrils and wiggled his nose. He didn’t have a mustache, but it was like he did, and it was like he was always shaking it. I don’t know whether he was aware of doing it or not, but he did it incessantly.
I wanted to be like this man so much, that, without being aware that I was doing it, I started scrunching my nose and wiggling it. And one day I caught myself doing it. Or, maybe I should say, somebody else caught me doing it. I was at the church, and I popped my head just inside the office door to speak to the secretary, and with her looking at me, I did 'the Charles thing.' I wrinkled my nose and wiggled it. We were both surprised. And I was embarrassed. And I realized in that moment that, to imitate the man I admired so much, didn’t mean I had to imitate everything he did!
But we do that, don’t we? As kids, we dress up like our heroes. If we look up to a certain athlete, we find ourselves trying to stand the same way or move the same way. We imagine ourselves as our favorite actor. We may even try to be like one of our parents! Even as adults we have our models; we can name people that we want to pattern ourselves after. Sometimes we know them personally; sometimes we don’t.
Now, here’s a thought: What if we turn out to be somebody else’s model? What if someone else is looking up to us, imitating us, doing the things we do the way we do them? What if somebody else is basing their attitudes, their values, their actions on ours? It’s a scary thought, isn’t it? And it’s scary because, if it’s true, we may have to think about what we’re doing and how we’re living.
I remember several years ago when NBA basketball star Charles Barclay made a public statement that he didn’t intend to be anybody’s role model. He didn’t want the pressure. Guess what! Too bad! There were probably thousands of kids that wanted to be just like Charles Barclay.
The truth is, there’s a chance that somebody is always looking to you for clues about how to live their life. Consider that for a moment, and then ask yourself this question: How would you live differently if you believed that someone were, in fact, following your example?
Now consider this: They are! Someone is looking to you and imitating you. Maybe not your facial tic, if you have one, or any of your other mannerisms. But they are adopting your values. They are embracing your pattern of living. When they are trying to figure out what life might be saying to them about what’s important, YOU’RE THE MESSAGE. You’re the message.
You may or may not have heard of the Thessalonians, but in the first century their name was a household word -- especially among the Christians in the Roman Empire. In the passage we read earlier, Paul tells them ‘that all over the provinces of both Macedonia and Achaia believers look up to you? The word has gotten around,’ he says. ‘Your lives are echoing the Master's Word, not only in the provinces but all over the place. The news of your faith in God is out. We don't even have to say anything anymore—you're the message!’
In other words, the people of Thessalonica had become model believers. We might have expected something like that. If you were here last Sunday, we were talking about how generous the Macedonian Christians were, and Thessalonica was a city in Macedonia. These Thessalonians modeled generosity not only in their giving but also in their living. Together, they made up the kind of church that everybody wants to belong to. ‘All over...,’ Paul says, ‘believers look up to you?’ What was it that these Thessalonians were modeling? What was it that made others look up to them?
There were, in fact, three qualities that set them apart, and you can read about those three qualities in verse 3. There Paul speaks of ‘your work of faith, your labor of love, and your patience of hope in following our Master, Jesus Christ....’
Three qualities, three characteristics. Faith, hope, and love. Not in that order, of course, but those are the qualities. The same qualities that Paul mentions in 1 Corinthians, chapter 13, ‘the Love Chapter,’ as it’s often called. There he says, ‘And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love’ (NIV).
Now, if you go back to 1 Thessalonians and look again at chapter 1, verses 9 and 10, you’ll see that Paul mentions these three qualities yet again. He repeats them, only this time in a little different form. When he says to the Thessalonians, ‘You received us with open arms,’ he’s talking about their love. When he writes to them, ‘You deserted...dead idols...so you could embrace and serve...the true God,’ he’s talking about faith, or, more accurately, faithfulness. When he speaks in verse 10 of ‘how expectantly [they] await the arrival of [God’s] Son,’ he’s talking about what? Hope! Right?
These are three exemplary qualities: unconditional, persistent love; faithfulness to God that is tested over time and proven to be true; and undying hope that God’s future will one day arrive when Jesus comes again. Where do such qualities come from?
Paul tells us. He says to these Thessalonian Christians: ‘It is clear to us, friends, that God not only loves you very much but also has put his hand on you for something special. When the Message we preached came to you, it wasn't just words. Something happened in you. The Holy Spirit put steel in your convictions.’ This, you see, is the work of the Spirit. God had put his hand on this church for something special.
And, as a result, everyone wanted to be like them. Listen again to what Paul said to them: ‘All over...believers look up to you,’ he said. ‘Your lives are echoing the Master's Word, not only in the provinces but all over the place.’ Wouldn’t it be wonderful if that could be said about us? Wouldn’t it be great if our church had that kind of reputation? Wouldn’t it be the best thing anybody could say about our church if they said what Paul says here: ‘Your lives are echoing the Master’s Word...all over the place’?
The truth is, our lives are echoing somebody’s ‘word.’ We’re telling some story. We have a message of some sort. It may be the message we want to send; it may not be. But we’re sending a message. And, sisters and brothers, we are the message!
Every church has a message. The church in first-century Thessalonica had a message. The church down the street and the one across town, the one around the corner from where you live -- they all have a message. They’re all telling some story. The way they do things says, ‘This is the way to do things.’ They all have a message. Our church has a message. What are we ‘echoing’? What is sounding forth from our life together? Is it love? Is it faith? Is it hope? Whatever it is, one thing that Paul says to the Thessalonians, he can truthfully say to us. Whatever the message that’s getting out, make no mistake: You are the message! The life you live, the values you hold, the priorities you reveal in the choices you make, your habits and your patterns -- you! You are the message.
Now look at something else with me. Look at verse 5. Paul talks about the nature of influence. He says to the Thessalonians, ‘You paid careful attention to the way we lived among you, and’ -- then, he says -- you ‘determined to live that way yourselves.’ What is more, ‘in imitating us, you imitated the Master.’
Can that be said of our lives? Someone is paying ‘careful attention to the way we’ live, and they may determine ‘to live that way’ themselves. Can we say to them that, ‘in imitating us, you [imitate] the Master’?
That’s what he tells the Thessalonians. ‘Your lives,’ he says, ‘are echoing the Master’s Word...all over the place. The news of your faith in God is out. We don’t even have to say anything anymore -- you’re the message!’ You’re the message.
We can’t escape the simple truth of this statement. We are the message. Whatever message people are getting, they’re getting it not from what we say we believe but from what we show we believe. We are the message. So, what do we want our ‘message’ to be?
If others are imitating us, whom do we need to be imitating? If others are following our example, whose example do we need to be following? Let me suggest four pairs of questions we need to be asking ourselves:
First, whom are we following? Whom are we imitating? And who do we want it to be?
Second, if we keep following the example we’re following, whose ever example it is, where will it lead? And where do we want it to lead? Is ‘where they’re going’ where we want to go?
Third, who is following us? And the question to pair with that one is, ‘Who IS following us?’ Because, believe me, someone is. Someone is going to wind up embracing our values, adopting our thinking, assuming our posture, following our patterns for living.
And, fourth, where will that lead? Is ‘where we’re going’ where we want to lead others to go? Is our life together producing in others the qualities we want to produce in them? Are we instilling in others a heart of love, a commitment to faithfulness, an attitude of hope?
The most important question to ask, I guess, is: What are our lives ‘echoing...all over the place?’ Do we want others to follow the example we set? It’s the right question because, remember: You are the message!
