I Thessalonians 4:1-12
Intro – Somewhere, out there, is a list of things without which I expect I can still make it to heaven. I think you can not be a Cubs fan and still make it into Heaven. I think you’d be OK not understanding the difference between licentiousness, concupiscence, and debauchery. But this subject today is a deal breaker. It’s one you have to have. Heb 12:14 says without this, no one will see the Lord! - Come back next week to find out!
I want to see the Lord one day! Do you? We’re going to need sanctification.
Sanctification is one of those words…like the name of someone you ought to know by now – but you’ve forgotten it or just never knew it in the first place, and now you’re too embarrassed to ask. “Sanctification. What’s that again?”
It's the same as the word for holiness. To sanctify something means to make it holy. I want you to remember it this way: to set it aside for special use.
Ill – You phone ahead to Red Lobster. There are going to be 22 in your party. So, when you arrive, you tell them your name is Anderson, and they take you back to your table. Not only do they have the tables put together, but they’ve also got 20 chairs and 2 high chairs, and 22 placemats all set to go. That place is set aside special for your use. That’s like sanctification.
Sanctification is part of being a Christian. God sets us aside for His special use when we accept Jesus, but He’s also cleaning up our lifestyles and our mouths and our minds for the rest of our lives. Maybe you didn’t realize that this morning – that after you become a Christian God works a change you. Until that time, you’re just trying to do it on your own. Aren’t you getting tired of that?
Hebrews 13:12 says Jesus suffered for the sake of making us holy -- to sanctify us. It isn’t something we do ourselves. It’s something that He does to us with our willing cooperation.
Ch 4 of I Thes. is about the how-to’s of sanctification. Let’s look at them. First, I see…
I. 3 Approaches To Life that Prove Sanctification
If you’re sanctified – if you’re truly set aside for God’s special use – then there are some things about your approach to life that will show that.
1 Thessalonians 4:3-7 - It is God's will that you should be sanctified: that you should avoid sexual immorality; that each of you should learn to control his own body in a way that is holy and honorable, not in passionate lust like the heathen, who do not know God; and that in this matter no one should wrong his brother or take advantage of him. The Lord will punish men for all such sins, as we have already told you and warned you. For God did not call us to be impure, but to live a holy life.
Look again at v3. What do you see after the word "sanctified"? (a colon) In other words, what follows are some definitions of what it means to be sanctified – to be set apart for Jesus.
What does it look like if you’re “sanctified”?
1. You Avoid sexual immorality
God’s people show they are sanctified when they avoid sexual immorality.
Joke - A mother in Texas was telling her daughter about the importance of being chaste. Her daughter said, "But why, Mom? I'd rather do the chasing myself instead of being chased."
There was a time when we used euphemisms for dealing with this delicate subject.
We talked about waiting, keeping yourself pure, remaining unstained, saving yourself until marriage, being faithful to your wife or husband; monogamy.
But when Paul deals with this, he doesn’t look for a bunch of different ways to say it. In v3 he uses a broad term for sexual immorality in general. It’s the word from which we get our word pornography. It includes all kind of sexually impure behaviors. Run down the list, not out loud, of everything that the world has done to make sexuality something ugly and wrong, and that’s what Paul is talking about here.
Being sanctified means we keep ourselves away from these things.
In the neighborhood where the Thessalonian Christians lived, sexual purity really wasn’t a big deal. In fact, the only reason sex outside of marriage might be considered bad was not being sure who a child’s father was. Other than that it was considered acceptable.
In a culture like that the Thessalonian Christians needed to hear what the HS had to say about purity.
If you haven’t noticed, in much of the neighborhood where the Christians of Central Christian Church live, sexual purity is really no big deal. Much like the Thessalonians, we’re surrounded by a constant flood of reasons to abandon any attempt to remain pure people.
The latest poll data I could find shows that the attitude of teens about premarital sex is all over the charts. It all depends on whose poll you read, but one thing is apparent: There’s a large percentage of kids who are terribly confused about the whole subject of sexuality. Can you imagine why?
Just like the Thessalonians, the Christians of Rockford and the surrounding area need to hear what the HS has to say through Paul this morning about us avoiding sexual immorality!
So, let me ask: How do we avoid it and pay to view it? set aside time to read it? memorize it set to music? arrange to be involved in it?
One of the decisions about life that shows we’re sanctified is sexually purity. God did not call us to be impure, but to live a holy life.
A 2nd approach is to…
2. Learn self-control (vv 4-5)
There's some question of exactly what Paul is saying in v4 . That’s OK because either way, what we should do about it is pretty simple: We should show that we’re set apart for God by keeping our physical urges controlled.
Self control – last in the list of the fruit of the Spirit. Not a popular topic. How do you “learn” something like that? Let me answer by saying there are some poor methods to learn things like:
• How fast can I drive a car into a brick wall before the injuries will require hospitalization?
• How much Draino can I drink before it will make me sick?
• How long can I stare at the sun before it permanently damages my eyes? And…
• Just how physically involved can I be on a date before it’s too far?
You don’t learn self-control by constantly pushing the limits. You learn it by practicing purity. A pianist doesn’t learn how to play the piano by just hitting all the wrong keys and seeing if he learns anything. He practices playing it right, and the outcome is an ability to play it well. You don’t gain the skill of self-control by seeing how far you can go the wrong direction before you lose control.
It’s the only way you’ll be able to one day say to your husband or wife, “Here I am! I kept myself for you, and only you.”
Self-control means making decisions before you ever face the moment. You'll find that means refusing to "go right to the edge" where your sexuality is concerned.
Self control means believing what God has said is the proper course for your life and doing it.
If you’re a Christ-follower, it's paying attention to the HS inside of you, so that you tap into His power to say "No" when you need to and "Yes" when you need to.
Titus 2:11-12 (NIV)
For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men. It teaches us to say "No" to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age,
God did not call us to be impure, but to live a holy life. Learn self-control.
A 3rd approach is
3. Be true to your brother (v6)
Did you realize that when you fail to keep yourself sexually pure you wrong more than just yourself?
• You wrong the other person involved by enabling that person to sin
• You wrong the spouse of a married person, or the future spouse of an unmarried person, and if you're the one who ends up marrying that person, you wrong each other by weakening the meaning of the marriage vows you'll make to each other.
• If there are children involved, you wrong them by robbing them of a parent, and you impress upon them that this purity means nothing.
• You also wrong the family of God by sullying its name in the community or when you lie to cover what you're doing.
The HS says to us, "You want to practice sanctification? Don't wrong your brothers and sisters in Christ in this way. Be above reproach."
By the way, to all of you who have remained faithful for so long, thank you. You remain a positive for faithfulness to those around you. You’re a good encouragement. Not only have you been true to your sanctification, but you have been true to the family of God of which we are a part.
God did not call us to be impure, but to live a holy life.
Something tells me that part of what makes this a hard sermon to listen to is that the world has nearly convinced us we're being unreasonable. After all, since 1998, we live in an age where the President of our country stepped out of bounds sexually and the whole world learned about it. I nearly fell over as I listened to a congressman say it wasn’t good to uphold "an unattainable standard of morality" for the President. Wrong! Being faithful to your wife is not only possible, but lots of people have attained to it!
The neighborhood isn’t going to tell you it's reasonable or even possible to practice being people who are set apart.
We need motivation. Not only “Why should I do that?” but “How can I possibly do that?”
The Thessalonians must have, because Paul gives them 5 right here. Here are…
(II. 5 Motivations To Pull This Off)
1. v3 To please God.
God's will for your life - Where should you work? Whom should you marry? Where should you live? - that's God's particular will for you. You keep searching for that, and He'll help you find it. But there's another will, His prescriptive will, that God has prescribed for every one of us just the same. Guess what’s part of it: your sanctification. That's God's will for your life. I’m not sure what vocation God wants you in or for sure who you should marry or where you should live. But no matter who you are, I'm sure that God wants your sanctification. I'm sure that to please God, you need to be there - because that's His will for you and me and everyone else.
Why do we pray, “Lord, help me do your will…”? Because this pleases God, and those who love Him want to please Him. If you're interested in pleasing God, you'll care about living as a sanctified person.
2. v6 To Escape Punishment!
I'm not sure if this means there will be immediate consequences or just eternal ones -- you think it through. Is He talking about hell only and being separated from God forever, or is he also including sexually transmitted diseases, jealous spouses, emotional scars, unplanned pregnancies, and the stress of living a lie? I’d suggest it’s all of the above.
It shouldn't matter. We're asking the wrong question if we're wondering how much we can get away with and survive instead of how much we can be what God wants!
God will punish such sins. That's fair warning from His word. Don’t say you weren’t told. I’m pretty sure God put it there to motivate us to be people who are set apart.
3. v7 Because it fits with our calling.
Remember – God doesn’t just call us away from an old life, but He also calls us to new life.
If you've accepted Christ, you accepted an invitation to become a sanctified person.
How embarrassing! Someone told you the party was a Hawaiian luau theme, and you came in a grass skirt only to find out that it was a western theme! Awkward! You won’t fit in very well if everyone else is wearing jeans and cowboy hats, will you? But what if someone told you right, and you just said, “I don’t care. I like the grass skirt look. I hate baked beans, and I don’t want to dress like Howdy Doody!” Well, why accept an invitation to a party if you really don’t want to be a part of it?
To accept Jesus and then reject sanctification is like accepting an invitation to a costume party and then complaining that you have to wear a costume. If you don't want to wear the costume, don't go to the party! Seems to me that Jesus told a story about that in Matthew 22.
Living out a holy life fits with what we accepted in the first place. Being sanctified fits with the calling we received.
4. v8 Because these are God's words, not man's.
This morning, if you don't like listening to me, I’m OK with that! Listen to what God says! Whoever rejects these ideas about sanctification isn't rejecting man's ideas. These are God's ideas! The same God Who gives His Spirit inside of us to clean us up - to sanctify us - is the God Who inspired these words in I Thes 4. Read them! Accept them! Don’t fall into the trap of thinking, “Oh, that’s just Paul, or the preacher, or CCC.” Did God give us this word or not? That means these are God’s words. I’m a lot more motivated to listen to God than what someone else has to say.
5. v12 To make a good impact on outsiders.
If you want to convince people that Jesus makes a difference in your life, you have to live like a sanctified person.
If you’re really thinking about the effect your life has on others, it will motivate you to live like a sanctified person.
• Parents, if you really care about the impact your actions are having on your kids, it'll motivate you to live like a sanctified person.
• Teachers, if you're really interested in the way you're going to affect lives, it'll motivate you to live like a sanctified person.
• Younger people, if you really care about your life making a difference in someone else's life for good, you'll be motivated to live like people who are set apart by God.
The person sitting close to you this morning is another motivation for you to live a sanctified life. Or, imagine if you will, turning instead to him or her and saying, “You really don’t matter to me.”
Those are the motivators. I'm glad there are a lot of them, because when something is tough, we need a lot of help to carry it through. And this must tough, because so many people, even in the Church, are failing at it. Some of those will be more helpful than others for you, depending on who you are. Here are some people sharing what motivates them to live pure lives…
(video of people talking about what motivates them to be PURE)
Let’s go another step this morning…
Sure, there's good motives for us, there's different ways to practice being "set apart," but what's the point of it? To what end? What will happen?
Ill - Can you imagine... The wedding march begins, the bridesmaids are all in now; the organ comes to full volume, and everyone stands. There she is, at the start of the aisle. She's beautiful. She's pure. She's all prepared for the groom. But she's just standing there. Apparently the words to the wedding march have been change from "here comes the bride" to "there stands the bride." After a while, everyone leaves, except for the groom who's trying to figure out why they went through all this trouble if she never planned on coming down the aisle!
What if Jesus had kept Himself perfect and pure, and then it came time to face Jerusalem and the cross and He said, “Nah, I don’t think so”? But that’s not what He did, is it? Instead, we find Him praying in the hours before the cross,
John 17:19 For them I sanctify myself, that they too may be truly sanctified.
Do you realize this? That Jesus kept Himself pure, for the sake of going to the cross and dying as a pure sacrifice, so that you could be…sanctified?!!!!
Here’s the really encouraging part of this message: Jesus kept Himself for you! In the desert, as Satan tempted Him with hunger and fame and the easy road, Jesus had you on His mind. When Jesus was tempted to not bother getting up early and go spend time with the Father, Jesus was careful to make the effort for your sake. When Jesus was tempted to just give up on His little-faith followers, He kept Himself for you. He was tempted in every way, just as we are, but He kept Himself sinless. Why’d He do it? For you! But what, then, if He hadn’t followed it through to the cross?
Lots of people have set themselves apart from the world. There are whole religious orders of people whose focus is to be set apart. They separate themselves from the world, go live in some remote monastery, and never interact with the world.
You know what? Churches can get that way! We can get caught up in being set apart, and then forget that it has a purpose. So I want to end with…
(III. A Purpose To Focus On)
There's a reason for us being sanctified. Here it is: To be useful to God! We're set apart to be useful.
Ill - In the OT, Aaron and his sons were set apart to serve as priests in the Tabernacle. There was a great ceremony. They were washed and anointed with oil. There was even a sign placed on their foreheads that said, "Holy to the Lord." In other words, they were set apart for special work.
Now, that was OT. That priesthood has been replaced. That anointing oil has been replaced. And who is wearing that sign on their foreheads today? We are! You and me. We're set apart to serve.
2 Timothy 2:20 21 In a large house there are articles not only of gold and silver, but also of wood and clay; some are for noble purposes and some for ignoble. If a man cleanses himself from the latter, he will be an instrument for noble purposes, made holy, useful to the Master and prepared to do any good work.
The whole purpose of this sanctification thing is for us to be useful to God. Only when we live like sanctified people can we be useful to God as we should be:
• People can look at us and say "You're no different from the rest" and God won't use us to reach them with the message that could save them, or we can be sanctified and have a reputation with others that convicts them
• We can be unusable to God, with minds that are preoccupied and hindered by worldly things, or we can have a mental freedom and a focus on eternal things.
• We can have our bodies affected by the ravages of the world that promised to please us, and God won't do as much with us because of the physical hindrances we bring on ourselves, or we can have freedom from the diseases and physical setbacks of worldly living.
What is it that keeps you from being used by God today? We're called to be set apart for a purpose: to be useful to the Master and prepared to do any good work.
No wonder God's will is your sanctification. God wants people who are sanctified and useful in His service. That's what sanctification is all about. We've been set apart to be useful.
Conclusion:
Each of us has to do some self-examining now. Do we really have that desire? Do we really want to be sanctified people?
We’re going to sing a couple of songs. It applies to you this morning, whether you have accepted Jesus or not. It’s a prayer:
Lord, prepare me to be a sanctuary, pure and holy, tried and true
Lord, help me be a place set aside and kept special for God to live there.
I want you to join me in saying, as a prayer, the end of Ps 139.
Psalm 139:23-24
Search me, O God, and know my heart;
test me and know my anxious thoughts.
See if there is any offensive way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting.
(song)
