1 Thessalonians 3:11-13
Please turn in your copy of the
scriptures to 1 Thessalonians 3, today’s passage 11, verse
11 through 13. 1 Thessalonians 3, 11 to 13. As you’re making your way there,
let me point out a common feature of New Testament epistles. Often, they have two halves. It’s not quite that simple, but
just for purposes of this, think this way. The first half would
be what you learned in grammar, in English grammar indicatives,
things that are true. The second half would be what
we call in grammar imperatives. Those are usually the verbs that
your mom spoke to you that had an exclamation point. Like dinner,
dinner meant get in the house, wash up and be at the table.
Imperatives are do verbs. So we have indicatives. These
things are true. Like God is triune. Jesus is
saved. The Holy Spirit has filled you.
Therefore live this way, obey this way, worship this way. So
today we end the indicatives and next week when we get to
chapter four, we’ll begin the imperatives or the exhortations
of the book of Thessalonians. But today we have a treat. We
have a mid book benediction. Usually benedictions, blessings
are held to the end, but here is one right in the middle. It’s
a sort of benediction slash prayer, and in it, Paul prays for two
main things for the Thessalonians. First, that God would direct
his way to them, and then second, that they would increase or abound
in love. So hear God’s word. as we read
it from 1 Thessalonians 3, 11 to 13. Now may our God and Father
himself and our Lord Jesus direct our way to you and may the Lord
make you increase and abound in love for one another and for
all as we do for you so that he may establish your hearts
blameless in holiness before our God and Father at the coming
of our Lord Jesus with all his saints. Pray with me. Lord, we
ask that your word would do its work, that it would open up our
hearts and do the necessary surgery so that we see you as triune
God and we are filled full of love for one another and for
the whole world who needs Jesus. Do the work of salvation and
sanctification today. We pray in Jesus mighty name.
Amen. Well, We’re in a new spot today. I’m standing on a jiggly pulpit.
I don’t know if you can see, but it’s wiggly and wobbly. You
all Presbyterians have had the upset of your lives. Your seats
are different. You’re having to sit close to
other people. You’re getting breathed on. It’s just a whole
different day. But also we’ve embarked on a
new journey. We are calling ourselves now
Covenant Presbyterian Church. And our hope and prayer is that
we would be a light to this community. We would be a beacon of the gospel,
a beacon of hope to people who are still in the throes of death,
still under Satan’s chains, still living a crooked and depraved
life and in need of salvation through faith in Jesus. So we
wanna be a light to that world. Maybe you’ve been to the coast
and visited The lighthouses we have, I think we’ve got several.
South Carolina has a few. You go out to the Virginia coast,
maybe on up to the coast of Maine. There are all kinds of lighthouses
that are there as beacons, as lights to warn ships of dangers
or to show them the way home. And so as a congregation of the
Lord Jesus, we want to be a beacon that shows the way home, the
way to heaven. And maybe as you visited these
lighthouses, you’ve climbed the steps and Maybe you’re a bit
on the technical side. How is the power generated? How do they get electricity out
to the island? Is there a cable barrier? Do
they have their own way to make power? And then you look at the
actual light. How, back in the day when this
was built, did they get light out to the distant coast to warn
ships of dangers and those sorts of things. And then, you know,
you go in one today, did they convert it? Is it LED now? How
does all that work? Well, if you were to climb the
steps of the church and to go up in its tower, its lighthouse,
what would be there? What would be things we would
like to have in our lighthouse that would shine brightly before
the watching world? And I think we could do no better
than what the apostle prays for the Thessalonians. The prayer
that he offers and that perhaps would be our prayer is that we
would be holy, that we would be loving, and that we would
have faith in our triune God. What else could the world use? What else could the world use
that’s so full of entertainment, that’s so full of of all sorts
of diversions. We give them the triune God.
We give them an example of the life of holiness before God. We give them the love that only
Christians can show. We would shine brightly, wouldn’t
we, as holy people in an unloving world. We would shine brightly
as loving people in what is now a very hate-filled world. And
we would Lift up the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in a world
that is a perpetual idol factory. Day by day, moment by moment,
hour by hour, we live in a hate-filled, dark world that produces idols
and does not exalt the triune God, nor do we find much love. And so how would we accomplish
this? How would we be a bright spot? Well, we could adopt the prayer
that the Apostle Paul has for the Thessalonians. If we would
pray, if we would pray in faith, and if God would do a mighty
work in us, perhaps we would shine brightly and people would
say to us, who are you and where have you come from? And we can
say that we are citizens of heaven. We’ve been made new by the blood
of Jesus. and in his righteousness. And
then as we go in the world to all our places, all our spheres
of influence, perhaps we can faithfully speak of the goodness
of God in Christ Jesus and the watching world, perhaps we’ll
see good things. One of the ways we can accomplish
this is through our Sunday evening prayers. I think I mentioned
last week, You know, a lot of times prayer time is the organ
recital and my joke is we always pray for somebody’s big toe,
right? And remember, God does care about the body. He will
redeem the body he made. We will be raised up in glory
and our bodies will be united with our souls in heaven. So
don’t hear that as a knock on our prayers. We should pray for
our bodies. We should pray for big toes when it’s necessary.
But we often fall short of praying for spiritual things. And I think
Paul’s example here is a good one for us. Make our God and
Father himself and the Lord Jesus direct our way to you. Now, you may say, well, we don’t
need Paul to come to us. Well, we kind of do through his apostolic
word as written by the Spirit in our scriptures. And may the
Lord make us increase in love and abound in love for one another
and for all. So we’ve gotten in Thessalonians
to the end of Timothy’s report. Timothy’s come back and reported
good things. We’re in the middle of Thessalonians.
It’s going to turn from indicatives to imperatives. It’s going to
turn from Hey, how y’all doing? It’s good to hear from you. It’s
good to hear y’all are doing well. Now he’s going to exhort them
on the things. Well, next week, chapter four,
he’s going to begin to exhort them in the things that they’ve
asked Timothy to bring back to Paul. Paul’s hope, of course,
is to go back and preach to them. But if he can’t, here’s the letter.
So that will come in chapters four and five. But he gives this
prayer. He gives this double benediction. And there’s two, may God do this. May God do that for you. And
so we want to think about it for a few moments today. Look,
if you will, again at verses 11, 12, and 13. And as I reread it to us, think
about our God, our triune God, think about our love for one
another and for the world, and then think about our end or the
goal of the Christian life. Now may our God and Father himself
and our Lord Jesus direct our way to you. And may the Lord
make you increase and abound in love for one another and for
all, as we do for you, so that, here’s the result, he may establish
your hearts blameless and holiness. before our God and Father at
the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints. So we have
our God, we have our love, and we have our end, or the goal
of the Christian life. Now, before we pick through these
things, remember Paul is on the missionary journey number two.
He’s left Antioch, swung through Galatia, told not to go through
Asia, Macedonian call, ministry at Philippi, has a great ministry
there. Good things take place, but they
get run off. Then he goes to Thessalonica,
three Sabbaths. Good things happen there, but
he also gets run off. So the reason for Timothy’s Thessalonian
visit, the reason for Paul’s letter to them was to encourage
them as they live under persecution. It was to encourage them in their
baby faith. Satan is at work, but he wants
to show them our God, our love, and our end. So let’s think about
first our God. If you read through your scriptures
and you read through the scriptures and you look at what the Bible
says about God and you look at how God acts towards his people,
you begin from the very beginning of Genesis. and you see it all
the way through, that we have a blessing God. We have a God
who loves to bless His people. We have a triune God, Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit, who loves to put His name, and He loves
to put His blessings and His resources on His people. We see
it in creation. We see God made, and there was
day one, and God made, and there was day two, and God made, and
there was day three, and on through day six. And at the end of every
day, He said, Behold, it is good. That was God’s benediction. Bene,
being good, and diction, word, benediction, is simply a good
word, and generally we think of it as God placing his good
word on us as he commanded Aaron and Moses and the priests to
do in the Old Testament, the book of Numbers, chapter six. God says to Moses, tell Aaron
to bless the people of God this way, and you remember the Aaronic
The Lord bless you and keep you and cause his face to shine upon
you. The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace now
and forever. And so we see God as a blessing
God, not just in the days of creation, not just in the days
of the old covenant people gathered, but we see that God blessed Abraham
when he moved to the promised land as God commanded him. We
see that God blesses the work of Joseph when he is the prime
minister of Egypt. And he keeps seven years of plenty
for seven years of want. And on and on, we can go through
the scriptures and see how God blessed David, God blessed Solomon,
and then God most graciously blessed his son, our Lord Jesus.
with the gifts of grace that he has now bestowed on us in
Christ. And so all the blessings, all
the promises of God are yes and amen and Jesus. But we have a
God, our God is a blessing God. Our God is also a sovereign God. He is able to answer the prayer
of Paul. Paul says, now may our God direct
us to you. Paul is sitting now in Corinth
where he’ll have about a year and a half of ministry. We know
from at least the two letters to Corinth, that was a pretty
rough group. There was a lot of pastoral work there. There’s
two other letters to the Corinthians we don’t have, so they got four
letters. Maybe not as rough as the letter to Galatia where they
had been bewitched and were foolish, but the Corinthians were living
in the midst of moral chaos. And so there was moral chaos
in the church there. But Paul is sitting there at
Corinth. He’s waiting for Timothy to return. He’s been torn away
from the Thessalonians. And he wants desperately to go
preach and teach and minister to those baby young in the faith
Christians. He wants to build them up in
their faith. He wants to put their feet on firm faith ground. And he’s been torn away from
them. They’re still under persecution. He can’t go. And so his first
prayer, and he sees it as a benediction, God, may you direct our way.
God, may you be the divine travel agent. Satan has hindered Paul
from returning to the Thessalonians. Satan has stirred up jealousy
among the Jews and they pursue Paul on through Berea, they pursue
him at Thessalonica. And if you’ll remember in our
study of Acts, they pursue him all the way to Jerusalem and
all the way to Caesarea, where he makes his appeal before Roman
authorities. Somehow they don’t sneak, up
to Rome, probably because of the shipwreck and all the other
disturbances in Paul’s trip. But these rabble rousers, these
folks who are jealous and want to prevent the gospel from going
to the Roman world, pursue and persist in keeping Paul from
preaching. And so he says, I’m just going
to go to the tip top here. You know, you go to the store
and you get a helper that just doesn’t seem to know what they’re
doing. And you say, can I see a manager? You want a better
answer. You want a better result. And
that’s, in a sense, what Paul is doing. And that’s what we
have the gift and privilege of doing. We can go to the tip top.
We can go to the throne of grace. We can go directly into the Holy
of Holies, to the mercy seat where Christ is seated, and we
can seek his face. We can take our concerns and
our prayers to him. And so Paul does. May our God
and Father Himself and our Lord Jesus direct our way. Our God, a blessing God, is sovereign
over Satan. He’s sovereign over rabble-rousers
who would stop the gospel. He’s sovereign over elections
in a country like ours. He’s sovereign over even our
own wills. I don’t know if you think about
this, but think about all the things in your life that you
would do if you could. but God in his sovereignty over
you, he changes your heart. He opens his word to you. You
begin to love him and seek his will and his ways. Our triune
blessing God is sovereign and we ought to seek him in all things,
whether it be the ministry of the church, whether it be our
concern over elections or our troubles over the culture we
live in, it could be our health, God does care for big toes, remember.
It could be our spiritual health, our walk with him. It could be
over the kings of the earth, but our sovereign triune blessing
God is the one to whom we should pray. This was Paul’s God. This
is the Thessalonians’ God. This is our God. And you go back
to the beginning of things we mentioned a few moments ago.
If we desire to be a bright light in this community before the
dark and dying world, We should pray to the Lord of heaven that
he would let us scatter seed and that he would let that seed
fall on good soil and that by the watering of that seed with
the spirit and by the word, it might produce fruit. This is
our God and Paul says, please direct my way to the Thessalonians. One last thought on this. our
God section and why God would pray, or why Paul would pray
that God would direct his way there. Paul knows this. This
young church needs apostolic preaching. Our church needs apostolic
preaching. Paul knows and affirms that the
way God builds up his church is through the ministry of the
word. And it’s great trouble It’s not that he misses people.
He does. His great trouble is that they
are sheep without a shepherd. And they are sheep without a
shepherd among wolves, people that hate them and people that
want to shut them down. And so his great concern is that
God, the blessing triune God, the sovereign one, would direct
his way there. that he could preach the sovereign
word of God to those people. And so that’s our God. Let’s
think about our love. The second request that Paul
gives in his, may God our father and the Lord Jesus Christ himself.
The second request is that our love would abound more and more. Now there’s two little tricky
things I want to point out to you. But I first want to say
this, why does Paul pray for their love. He could have prayed
for a lot of things. He could have prayed that, you
know, they would have, you know, gotten a big old building. They
could have, you know, had good coffee. He could have prayed,
you know, think of all the modern stuff. He could have prayed that,
you know, their ministry could have had a Gulfstream, you know,
a jet, a TV ministry. He could have prayed all kinds
of stuff. What does he pray for? I’m sort of tongue in cheek there,
but what does he pray for? He prays that they would increase
in love. and he connects it to holiness. If you notice in the passage,
there’s a so that, so he prays for two things, God direct our
way there, we wanna preach. God may their love increase more
and more, and the so that is that he may establish their hearts
blameless in holiness. There’s a connection between
love and holiness. Holy people love like God loves.
Christians who are loving, are also holy people. That’s sort
of the idea that is deep in this passage. And so may the Lord
make you increase and abound, it’s kind of a two-way synonym
there, increase and abound in love for one another and for
all as we do for you. Love is a result of holy love.
and blameless living. Love is a result of sanctification.
Love is a result of having a new heart. Love, Christian love,
is a result of God at work in us. Now, if you are fancy and
maybe read C.S. Lewis or you know a little Greek,
you know that the language has several words for love. There’s
kind of the I love ice cream love. There’s the I love my brother. We get Philadelphia from that
city of brotherly love. There’s the the love of human relationships,
and then there’s the love between people in the church. That’s
the agape love. I don’t know about y’all, but
I have a little sense of humor when I ride through town. You
see things named after a Christian. The other day I saw Trinity car
sales. Okay, if it was in the city of Trinity, I’d get that.
That’s a little much of a name. You know, that’s like naming
your little chihuahua, you know, beast or something. It’s just
too much name. But I saw a place the other day, it was called
Agape something or another. Most people don’t know what that
word means, but it’s the great word of Christian love, brotherly
love within the church that only Christians can have. It basically
says this, I’ll love you with everything I got and expect nothing
in return. Well, what does that sound like?
That sounds like Jesus. I’ll love you with everything
I’ve got, not because you’re lovable, not because you deserve
it, but simply because I want to, and I’ll expect nothing in
return. And that’s the way Christians
are called to love. Now, think about this very positively. Paul has already written a couple
chapters, many verses to the Thessalonians that we’ve been
looking at since around Easter or so. And remember, he writes
to them in the first chapter and says, I already know about
your labor of love. It’s really good. And it’s contagious. It’s spreading the gospel in
Macedonia, the report of your love for God and your love for
one another. And you’re telling other people
as you go about the Roman roads and trade systems, your love
is evident to the whole world, he says. And that’s why he’s
praying that our love, their love, would abound more and more.
What does this world need? Does this world need another
religious YMCA? Does this world need some sweet
poetry? Does this world need seven how-to
steps? No, this world needs the transforming
power of the gospel that makes unloving people loving, it makes
unholy people holy. And so he’s praying that they
would abound and increase in love with the result that they
would have holy and blameless lives. Now, Paul is a thick writer,
and I’ve already explained to you the connection between love
and holiness. Let me explain another connection that he throws
in here. If God is going to establish
our hearts blameless in holiness, he’s got to do a couple things.
One, he’s got to forgive you. You can’t be blameless in God’s
sight unless your sins have been forgiven. You can’t be blameless
in God’s sight unless your sins have been dealt with. And we
know from our scriptures, we know from our theology that the
way God dealt with sin was he placed them on the head of Jesus. God the Father saw Jesus the
Son as if he was our sin. He who had no sin, knew no sin,
became sin for us in order that we might become the righteousness
of Christ. So Jesus is the scapegoat. The sins of his people were placed
on him at the cross. And so we stand forgiven because
Jesus paid for all our sins, past, present, and future. So
that’s the only way we can be blameless. Well, how can we be
holy? And holiness is a little tricky
here. There’s a twofold piece of holiness
here. We are becoming holy as we grow
in grace, and then we will be holy at the last day when we
are glorified. And so what does Paul mean here
when he says, may he establish your hearts? That’s after increasing
in love, right? Increasing in love for one another,
increasing in love for the world. imitating Paul and Silas and
Timothy and their love. He wants to establish their hearts
blameless and holiness. He expects them and he’s hoping
to get there and preach to them. But he expects Christians. And
this is where perhaps our prayer times, after we pray for Big
Toes, this is where our prayer time can be for our own holiness. Do you ever pray for that? Lord,
I’m not a very loving person. Lord, I’m not a very holy person.
Lord, I’m a very worldly person. Lord, I got my fingers wrapped
tight around some idols. And that’s true of every one
of us, isn’t it? And hopefully today in church, by God’s word
and spirit, and by hearing good, right, and true things, you begin
to realize that’s more and more true the longer you live. We’ve
got to pry our fingers off our idols. We’ve got to be loving
people, and we’ve got to be holy people. And Paul knows this. If you direct my way there, Lord,
I’ll preach. Your word will comfort and build
up saints in their most holy faith. It will sanctify them
and it will wash them with the word. But sanctification is a
work in progress. And then one day it’s just, boom,
you’re holy. Now, the only way to have that
happen is either to die, right? We call it going to glory, being
glorified, or to be alive at the second coming of Jesus. And
you just, you know, beam me up. Don’t have to die. You’re like,
Elijah and the chariot of fire or Enoch in the Old Testament,
God took him and he was not. Some will not taste death at
the return of Jesus. And so our triune God, our sovereign
God, our blessing God, may he direct Paul there to do word
ministry, but may he cause us to increase in love. And that
love is for one another. Yes, agape, Christian love, that
love is for the dark and dying and hurting world. Sometimes
we get disgusted with the world and say, well, they deserve what
they get. We need to have compassion for that world. It’s hard, but
we can have that through the grace of God. But we need to
also find Christians who are imitating the love of God and
see how they do it. And by God’s help and blessing
and spirit do it well. And the result is that God would
establish our hearts. And that’s our end. We’ve got
our God, we’ve got our love. Now we’ve got our end. Why does
God want to make the Thessalonians? Why should we want to abound
in love? It’s so that we will stand before God and he will
see us blameless in Jesus, but he will also see people that
leaned into their growth in grace. He will see people that worked
out their salvation with fear and trembling. He will see people
that every day had a hunger, Every day had a thirst and every
day had a holy dissatisfaction. Now think about this. If we cook
a meal, we always think about how to make it better next time.
I think I’m going to add this or that or cook it shorter, longer,
whatever. If we exercise, we think, you know, I’m going to
get a better time next time. If we maybe make something, we’re
into pottery, or we paint or something, we say, you know,
next time I get a blank canvas, I’m gonna do this a little better. And on we could go through our
habits and our hobbies. But what about our Christian
life? Do you ever leave Sunday church, and I hope the answer
is yes, being wholly dissatisfied with your holiness? Saying, you
know, I kind of stink at being a Christian. I got a ways to
go. The Word revealed something today.
The Spirit pressed in on me something today that I don’t think I’ve
thought of before. Perhaps it’s a blind spot. Perhaps
it’s something that we need to have our fingers pried off. Perhaps
it’s something of pride or whatever. But there ought to be a holy
dissatisfaction with our holiness. There ought to be something in
us that says, I need to grow more. That’s something we have
to pray for. That’s something we have to lean
into, but it’s ultimately something God has to do. And he will, he will establish
our hearts. He will put our feet on firm
ground. He will send us to the scriptures.
He will send us through the crucible, the suffering, the fire, and
he will bring us on the other side, yes, sanctified, and he
will present us to his son one day, glorious and spotless. Now it’s easier said than done.
We live in the world. We live with remnant sin in the
flesh. The devil does his work. But if we wanna be a church,
if we wanna be Christians who are effective in this world,
if we wanna be salt, and if we want to be light, we need to
pray that God would direct our paths to the scripture, that
faithful apostolic scriptural ministry would be all over us,
all around us. and that God would sanctify us,
he would build up love in us. And that as the Psalmist says
in Psalm 67, as the light of the blessing God’s face shines
on his church, and they go out in the dark and dying world,
that his ways are made known to the ends of the earth, and
people see, and perhaps they will taste and they will see
that the Lord is good. May these two mays, From Paul
to the Thessalonians, be our two maize and may God bless us
with an answer to this great prayer and be a blessing God
to us so that we can be a blessing to the world. Let’s go to him
now in prayer. Lord, we thank you for the chance to stop and
think about what we need to be great faithful Christians and
good witnesses help us to Be dissatisfied with where we are
and seek your face, your help. Direct us to the scriptures.
Work love in us so that we can be holy and blameless before
the world, but especially in your sight through Jesus, we
pray in God’s mighty name, amen. We want to sing now of the saints
of God that go before us. We’ll stand and sing number 542. And perhaps this will be your
prayer for your own life. and your own vision for the day
when you enter glory and stand before Almighty God. Let’s sing
together and praise to God.