HOW TO POSSESS YOUR VESSEL IN HOLINESS AND HONOR
TEXT: 1 Thessalonians 4:1-4
1 Thessalonians 4:1-4 KJV Furthermore then we beseech you, brethren, and exhort you by the Lord Jesus, that as ye have received of us how ye ought to walk and to please God, so ye would abound more and more. [2] For ye know what commandments we gave you by the Lord Jesus. [3] For this is the will of God, even your sanctification, that ye should abstain from fornication: [4] That every one of you should know how to possess his vessel in sanctification and honour;
I. INTRODUCTION—ALABAMA MEN’S CONFERENCE AND A RECENT ALTAR SERVICE
-My thoughts for this message are driven by my recent return from the Men’s Conference that was preached by Brothers _________ and __________. Brother ________ preached a message called “When Men’s Conference Is Over.” He mentioned how that so many times that he and the men of his church had participated in Men’s Conferences with the full intentions of changing some of their actions only to find that when they came back home that far too often they would slip back into the same old routines of behavior. He noted that he had a cartoon of Dennis Menace who was telling Joey that he was glad Christmas was over so he could go back to his regular self. I think that most of us, if we are honest with ourselves would have to say the same thing. We have the greatest intentions in the world of changing but so often we are only fueled by inspiration and we have little instruction to go with that inspiration. Inspiration without instruction leads to frustration!
-Furthermore, I was involved in a recent altar service away from this church and it was extremely obvious to even those who had never encountered it, that there was a man in the altars who had literally allowed a spirit to possess him. He was demonstrating all of the behaviors of a very troubled soul who was demon possessed. The writhing about on the floor, the boisterous and crude actions of a foul spirit, was manifesting itself in this young man. The demonic spirit was doing exactly what it desired and that was to get an audience or “stage time” so it could promote fear and intimidation to those who had never seen it before.
-There is deliverance and freedom in the name of Jesus and in the power of the blood!
-But as I contemplated both of those two scenarios, the need for change and what had this young man done to allow this spirit to gain access to him, I began to meditate on this Scripture I read in 1 Thessalonians 4.
-We live in a day that needs far more than just sermonizing but rather we need preaching that is Word-driven, soul-enriching, and Spirit-empowered. I trust that in the next little while this passage will open up to you some instruction that will help you to change in a positive way but that it will also cause you to put some guards at the gate of your soul.
II. 1 THESSALONIANS 4
A. Potential. . . Purity. . . Progress
-It is important to establish at the beginning of this message that this text is dealing with sexual purity and specifically delving into the area of fornication. Paul sets forth that there is an imperative, a command, an order for a saint of God to restrain his flesh. This is done with the work of the Word and the submission to the Spirit.
-Self-denial is always related to the activities of the disciplining of the mind and the spirit. You can always be prepared to know that where a man’s mind lives, it will not be long until the mind will take the flesh to what has been on the mind.
-The first twelve verses of this chapter are dealing with practical matters of our Christian walk. Then Paul gets into the fact that the Rapture will something that will inevitably take place. The connection is that our moral and spiritual attitudes greatly has to do with the whether or not we are prepared for the Rapture.
-Note in 1 Thessalonians 4:1 how that we are to walk and to please God and by doing so there is a strength that comes about. If there is a word we could place in the first two verses, we would note the potential that we have as a Spirit-filled saint.
-Note in 1 Thessalonians 4:3-8 that there is a connection between this potential that we have, this abounding and this growth and it is related to purity. Men who walk and please God will have boundaries that surround them which creates purity.
-The word here is sanctification. Any time you see that word in the NT, you can interchange it with holiness. This is the will of God, even your holiness, which you abstain from fornication. But that is just a small aspect of this matter of holiness.
-You possess your vessel through the work of holiness which is the process of being separated from sin and set apart to God.
Psalms 4:3 KJV But know that the LORD hath set apart him that is godly for himself: the LORD will hear when I call unto him.
Jeremiah 1:5 KJV Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.
John 17:17 KJV Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth.
Romans 6:22 KJV But now being made free from sin, and become servants to God, ye have your fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life.
Ephesians 5:26-27 KJV That he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, [27] That he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish.
2 Timothy 2:21 KJV If a man therefore purge himself from these, he shall be a vessel unto honour, sanctified, and meet for the master's use, and prepared unto every good work.
(Heb. 2:11; 10:10; 13:12; 2 Cor. 6:17; Eph. 5:7-9; Php. 2:12-13)
-God has a high call to holiness and it is crucial for us to have an understanding of this. It is the priority of my life. When we come to 1 Thessalonians 4:9-10 you can see what has taken place when the potential of pleasing God and the purity of the saint come together. We can see a demonstrated progress that is present in his life.
-It has to do with fellowship. We participate in a brotherly love toward each other. It is a godly concern that we have so that we want to make sure that others about us are moving forward in their walk toward heaven.
-Finally in 1 Thessalonians 4:11-12, there is a purpose that is laid out for us.
• Study to be quiet
• Do your own business
• Work with your own hands
• Walk honestly toward those who are outside the church
-Notice at the end of 1 Thessalonians 4:11 there is a command and at the end of 1 Thessalonians 4:12 there is a blessing that is given to us (that we lack nothing).
B. The Concept of Vessel
1 Thessalonians 4:4 KJV That every one of you should know how to possess his vessel in sanctification and honour;
-There is some debate about this word “vessel.” Some scholars see it as:
• The wife
• Utensils that belonged to the believer
• Groups of people this believer might be over (family, church, etc.)
-But in the strongest sense, Paul was telling the saints in Thessalonica that they were to be in control of their bodies. As you are aware, unredeemed and uncontrolled flesh is always a beachhead for sin and immorality to get the upper hand in.
-Here are a few of the commands that Paul gave to accomplish possessing our vessel.
Romans 13:14 KJV But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof.
2 Corinthians 7:1 KJV Having therefore these promises, dearly beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God.
Romans 8:13 KJV For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.
-Those are matters that a saint can do to possess his vessel.
III. PRACTICAL WAYS TO ORDER YOUR PRIVATE WORLD
-So if we reach the conclusion that Paul was speaking to us about this vessel that the Holy Spirit has come to reside in. . . Then we have to know that our minds, our private worlds have to come under some hand of discipline or some hand of the Spirit.
A. Understand You Are Called
-One way that I can capitalize on the inspiration of what I have experienced is to understand that there is a calling that is involved in my life.
-Here is what I know about a calling. It comes to:
• The unnoticed
• The unappreciated
• The unsophisticated
1 Corinthians 1:25-29 KJV Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men. [26] For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called: [27] But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; [28] And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are: [29] That no flesh should glory in his presence.
-A calling affects everything in my life!
• My priorities
• My plans
• My relationships
• My choice of entertainment
• My choice of how I spend my time
-Your calling will help you come to understand who you are. Your private world can get in great disarray if you lose your sense of identity. James remarked that double-minded men are unstable in everything that they do.
-John the Baptist never was confused about his identity. Somewhere in the wilderness, he had a connection with the Lord, a private place of prayer where his identity was settled out by the Lord. If you are called, you will have a place of prayer!
-Prayer is a life-line that connects us to the Kingdom of God!
B. Time Becomes Ever So Valuable to You
-Not only do you have to understand that you are called, you also have to understand the value of time!
James 4:13-14 KJV Go to now, ye that say, To day or to morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain: [14] Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.
-William Barclay, a fine New Testament scholar, made reference to Samuel Taylor Coleridge and how undisciplined that his life was:
Coleridge is the supreme tragedy of indiscipline. Never did so great a mind produce so little. He left Cambridge University to join the army; he left the army because he could not rub down a horse; he returned to Oxford and left without a degree. He began a paper called The Watchman which lived for ten numbers and then died. It has been said of him: “he lost himself in visions of work to be done, that always remained to be done. Coleridge had every poetic gift but one—the gift of sustained and concentrated effort.” In his head and in his mind he all kinds of books, as he said, himself, “completed save for transcription. I am on the even,” he says, “of sending to the press two octavo volumes.” But the books were never composed outside of Coleridge’s mind, because he would not face the discipline of sitting down to write them out. No one ever reached any eminence, and no one having reached it ever maintained it, without discipline.”
-Coleridge was a living example of the fact that a man can be multi-talented, possess enormous intelligence and remarkable communicative gifts and yet end up squandering it all because of an inability to seize control of time.
-One of the things that makes many of us uncomfortable is to sit down and take a ruthless self-appraisal about our habits of time use.
-This will sting a bit but here are some marks of people who waste their time.
• Everything in their life has a messy and cluttered appearance. Their desk, their bedroom dresser, their bathroom counter, and so forth.
• The condition of their car. Dirty inside and out. Maintenance schedule non-existent.
• A loss of their own self-esteem because they feel they are not giving their employer their best.
• Forgotten appointments, unreturned phone calls, overloaded email boxes, and too much time frittered away on social media.
• Overloading your energy on unproductive tasks.
• You feel poorly about your work.
• There is little time for spiritual times for prayer and reading your Bible.
• The quality of personal relationships and this starts with our families.
-There are some hard choices that I need to make about my schedule and about my time commitments. You have to budget your time and this means that sometimes you have to be willing to mark out a schedule.
-Jesus was under constant pressure and yet there were times that he regularly withdrew to recharge and refuel his own inner man.
-Over the years, there are some things that I have learned about time. Some of those things I have learned from my intake of Scripture. Other things I have learned about time has come because I have read books on time management. I have listened to some of the podcasts by the Harvard Business Review and by John Maxwell about how to manage my time. Here are some of the things I have learned about time:
• Unseized time will gravitate toward my weaknesses.
• Unseized time will come under the influence of people who want to dominate our lives.
• Unseized time will surrender to the demands of all emergencies. (And everything becomes an emergency.)
-You recapture time by spending it in your areas of strength. You have to develop a schedule of sorts to help you to get through life. Some time matters we have no choice about but it is the things that we do have a choice about that we have to make the hard decisions about.
C. The Discipline of the Mind
-It is not how you start but how you finish. There is increasingly a necessity for all men to train their minds in the direction that we want them to think.
-Your mind is not automatically geared to think spiritually. So we have to train our minds and we do that best by reading!
-Furthermore, we can grow through the discipline of study. However, the reason we study Scripture is not for information but rather for transformation.
-The mind is like a garden and when it has no structure at all, it will grow weeds. We don’t call them weeds but rather we call them attitudes, grudges, bitterness, jealousies, malice, wrath, and lusts that war against the mind of Christ.
IV. CONCLUSION—GETTING CONTROL OF YOUR VESSEL
-There is a calling to give ourselves to! There are a multitude of other matters for us to consider in our moments of inspiration.
-We can be developed through worship, through witnessing, and through being an encouragement to others!
Philip Harrelson
February 8, 2015
