1 Thessalonians 4:9-12
You can be seated. Please turn
in your copy of the scriptures to 1 Thessalonians 4. Our passage
today will be verses 9 through 12. Remember, in our couple months
long study of 1 Thessalonians, that the first three chapters,
Paul gives his love to the Thessalonians, the people he had to leave so
quickly in the night because of persecution. He had been with
them for a month. They converted to faith in Christ. and he was discipling them, but
when he was run off, he still prayed for and cared for them,
and so while at Athens, he sent Timothy, Timothy came back with
a report, and so now this is the first of two letters Paul
sends, and he writes of those details in the first three chapters,
but now he turns to the spiritual needs of that congregation, giving
them to the Thessalonians by letter, As we now know, because
these are in our copy of the scriptures, these are the holy
words of God that were given under inspiration of the spirit.
And so they were for the Thessalonians, but now also for us. And since
that is true, let’s ask for God’s blessing and his help as we turn
to his word. Pray with me. Lord, we pray that when your
word is read and preached, that your spirit would work and that
we would tremble at the threatenings, that we would embrace the promises
and yield our obedience to your holy scriptures. And we ask it
in Christ’s mighty name. Amen. 1 Thessalonians 4, beginning
at verse 9. Now concerning brotherly love,
you have no need for anyone to write to you, for you yourselves
have been taught by God to love one another. For that is indeed
what you are doing to all the brothers throughout Macedonia.
But we urge you, brothers, to do this more and more as we instructed
you. Aspire to live quietly and to
mind your own affairs and to work with your hands so that
you may walk properly before outsiders and be dependent on
no one. Amen. God’s gracious and mighty
word. Some of you will probably know
the feeling as I tell you my experience at the car dealership.
You know how it is. You go in for an oil change. You go in for maybe a tire rotation,
you go in to drink the free coffee and perhaps they’ll wash it for
you and you hope to get out of there for maybe 90 bucks if things
go well that day. But while you’re there drinking
the free coffee, the vultures circle. And they tell you how
pitiful your car is, and that you should go ahead and trade
it before it has big problems, though you just bought it two
years ago. And when you bought it two years ago, they told you it was
the greatest automobile ever made, and you’ll never have to
buy another one. Now they changed their story, but the vultures
are circling. And then the service advisor comes out, again, while
you’re drinking your free coffee and watching free cable. And
he drops a paper that lands on the floor and just rolls and
rolls and rolls. And your car needs this and this and this.
and this and you say how much is all that going to be and then
you begin to look over at the vultures and think trading is
probably a bit more profitable than doing all those things. Well if we neglect our automobiles
sometimes that long list is needed. Sometimes there are items of
neglected maintenance or deferred maintenance that can stack up
and be rather expensive. And if we neglect them, our cars
don’t run so well. And that’s very true, I think,
in the spiritual life. When we don’t come to church
week by week, when we neglect our own Bible reading and those
sorts of things, we can begin to squeak and shake and shimmy
and begin to not work or blow a belt or a gasket. And our spiritual
lives can fall out of order. Every Christian, every church
from time to time needs a tune up. And so we come to these exhortations
in the life of the Thessalonians and for sure in our own lives,
both as a church and as individuals. And we come to this spirit given
list of things that will help the church be in good running
order. Things that will help the church
be a great witness before the watching world. And so the oil,
the fluid change, in a sense, is really the love of the brothers,
the love of the Christian church. And the command that Paul gives
is that you do it more and more. This is a section, chapter four,
where God, through Paul, is telling the Thessalonians and us to live
in a way that pleases God. Last week, we looked at immorality,
that we should avoid it. Today, we’ll think about how
to live in Christian community. And then in the coming weeks,
we’ll look at what is Christian living, but also what is our
view of the second coming of Jesus, particularly where are
those who have fallen asleep, Paul says, or have passed away
and we wonder about them. And so today in this whole stretch
of chapter four and a bit of chapter five as well. This address
is really about time management. It’s about boundaries. It’s about
being busy and productive in good and right things. But I
wanna mention the brotherly love again. Brotherly love is really
the oil. It’s the lubrication, it’s the
grease that helps the church run well. You reach back to Paul’s
admonitions about immorality and he says, do not defraud another
brother. And so brotherly love helps us
with our morality. But today he’s gonna speak about
how living together in brotherly love leads us to be calm, it
leads us to mind our own business, and it leads us to work or to
be busy about our vocation that God has given us. Now, the Apostle
Paul is really good at making up words. Some of you will remember
the George W., the son, George W. Bush administration and how
he would just make up words, how Saturday Night Live had a
wonderful time with, I believe it was, And he gave us so many
more good words and phrases, and they brought great humor,
I think, to our land, especially during a time of terrorism. wars
and those sorts of things. But the apostle Paul is really
good at making up new words. So Paul is a very well-educated
guy. He knows probably four or five
languages. He especially knows the Hebrew
language of the Old Testament. He knows the Greek language because
he was a Roman citizen. He was raised in both Roman and
Hebrew cultures. And then he knew Aramaic and
other languages. And in the Greek language, he
would take several words and jam them together and make up
Christian So if you study Greek New Testament, you understand
it’s in Koine Greek or common Greek, but you also begin to
understand there are words that are only used in the Greek language
in the New Testament. And today we have one. It’s the
word God mashed together by Paul with the word teacher. And our
passage tells us, and I believe Paul echoes back to Isaiah 54,
he says to the Thessalonians, you have been taught by God.
And I wanted to point this out before we really dig into this
passage to encourage you and remind you of this. When you
come to faith in Jesus and you are made new or regenerated by
the Holy Spirit and God’s Word is implanted in you, His Spirit
fills you. Yes, you should come to church.
Yes, you should read your Bibles. Yes, all these things are true
to feed and nourish and Well, keep the mechanic from giving
you a long list of spiritual breakdowns that need to be avoided
and should be fixed even at a high cost. Well, Paul is assuring
the Thessalonians who are in that apostolic age where perhaps
Paul comes in on a mission journey and he ministers for a while
and disciples for a little while, and then he moves on either by
the call of God or the circumstances. And Paul had to leave prematurely.
And so he’s desperate as a father would be to the children to finish
teaching them in the Lord. And so he assures them, you’ve
been taught by God. You know, there’s times in the
history of God’s people where they don’t have copies of the
scripture. Or say times like the thousand years dark ages
where the Roman Catholic Church really locked up things in Latin
and they hid things behind the masses and the ceremonies of
the church. They kept the scriptures from
the priesthood of all believers, only the church. could read and
interpret the scriptures. And so we’re grateful to be Reformation
people who have the Word of God, and it has been unleashed in
our own lives. But there are times when we can’t
get to the Word. And it’s wonderful to understand
Paul’s mentioning of that providence here, though he has been torn
away from them, God, through the work of the Spirit, reminding
them of the things they have heard and learned, and perhaps
through the Old Testament readings at their synagogue, had taught
them brotherly love. And so this wonderful Paulism,
this wonderful made up word, they are God taught, should lead
us to ask this question of ourselves as a church, but also individuals.
Are we being taught by God? Do we submit to his word and
to his spirit? In a couple verses, Paul will
say to the Thessalonians, do not quench the spirit. He encourages
them to submit to the God, the sovereign one over them, to submit
to his word and to his spirit. But are we taught by God? Are
you taught by God? Well, there’s four topics all
related with a result in our passage today. And we want to
think of those instructions as God teaches us. God the Father,
God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit through the pen and through
the words of the apostle by the Holy Spirit. And he begins this
way. He says, we urge you, brothers,
to do this more and more. What’s the do this more and more?
It’s the brotherly love. Concerning brotherly love, you
have no need for anyone to write to you. You yourselves have been
taught by God to love one another. That is indeed what you’re doing.
But notice the second part of verse 10, but we urge you brothers
to do this more and more. They’re pretty good at it, but
do better, do more, stretch your limits, stretch your boundaries. Concerning brotherly love, do
this more and more. What is brotherly love? What does it look like? Well,
within God’s people, it looks like hospitality. It looks like
care for one another. It looks like seeing others’
needs and meeting them. Or perhaps, like Paul says to
the Colossians or the Philippians, consider others better than yourselves. Seek to fulfill other people’s
interest before your own. That manifests itself in the
life of the church by seeing needs and meeting those needs,
by looking for opportunities in the Lord to serve one another.
That’s the family affection of the church of Jesus Christ. Now,
Paul uses two love words. I think you’re aware that in
the New Testament, there are several words for love. We just have love in English,
but in the New Testament, there are A handful, and two of them
are used. The first one is the Philadelphia
love, the phileo love, the brotherly love. Now, in Greek literature,
that’s often only used to speak of love between brothers and
sisters, natural families. But what does God in Christ do
when he brings us into his family? He calls us brothers and sisters.
And so this family of God, this family love is what Paul is calling
the Thessalonians who are good at it to do more and more, to
continue because it’s a great witness before the watching world.
If you remember the beginning of his letter, he says, Hey,
Thessalonians, I’m thankful for you because I hear that your
love And the evidence of your love, your service to one another
is spread not just in Thessalonica where your little church is,
but it’s spread all through Macedonia. That would be like saying, hey,
little church, I hear about your love and it’s spreading all through
the state of North Carolina or maybe the Piedmont area, something
like that. And so their love for one another
because of God’s love for them and Jesus is spreading around.
And so this brotherly, this sisterly love given to them in Jesus is
something they need to keep on doing, keep on loving one another.
But then he throws in the other word, agape. You’ve probably
heard that one. They’re used interchangeably,
the phileo and the agape, but agape has a little bit more oomph
to it, a little bit more meaning. It’s a word that simply says,
I’ll do for others no matter what. It’s a volitional love
that make a decision, to do something that is right and necessary.
We see that in the Christian church. We’ve seen that over
the Christian centuries. In fact, I have a quote on my
wall. I think I read it to y’all some months back, but it’s a
quote from Aristides, who was not a Christian. And somewhere
in this era of history, he was describing Christians to Hadrian,
one of the rulers. And he said this, they love one
another. They never fail. They help widows, they save orphans
from those who would hurt them. If they have something, they
give freely to the one who has nothing. If they see a stranger,
they take him home and are happy as though he were a real brother.
They don’t consider themselves brothers in the usual sense,
but brothers instead through the spirit of God. That is what
Paul is speaking of. And what better way to witness
to the watching world than through the love of fellow Christians? If God’s Trinitarian love has
so loved us and been given to us, and that’s how he so loved
the world, then that’s also how we should so love the world around
us. And this brotherly love I mentioned
is the oil, it’s the fluid, it’s the lubrication, it’s the thing
that keeps the church running well. And it does reach back
to the statements we looked at last week on immorality, but
it reaches forward into these next three things. And these three things roll from
one to the other, aspire to live quietly. And as you aspire to
live quietly, you mind your own affairs. And as you mind your
own affairs, You work with your hands. And then there’s a so
that. So that is so that you can walk properly before outsiders. And so the first thing we think
of is brotherly love. That’s the overarching thing,
but what’s the first command? It’s to aspire to live quietly.
In fact, in verse 10, he says, we urge you brothers to do this
more and more. That’s the brotherly love. As
we instructed you and as God taught you, And he says, secondly,
to aspire to live quietly. Now this is a funny little saying
of the apostle Paul. He says, make it your ambition
not to be ambitious. Makes no sense, does it? Be ambitious,
but be ambitious not to be ambitious or act to not act. What he’s calling Christians
to is to live a quiet or a tranquil life. When Paul writes to Timothy
in his two pastoral letters to young Timothy, the preacher at
Ephesus, he says, teach the people to live a quiet life for that
is both godly and it is dignified. We live in a loud world. We live in a loud world where
we scream. We scream on Facebook. We scream
on Instagram. We scream on all kinds of social
media. We get on Yelp and we yelp about
restaurants that didn’t you know, feed us when our tummy growled
the first time. We yap and we yelp. And it’s just a noisy world. I can remember riding along in
the car as a kid, and if the three of us got noisy in the
backseat, my dad would say something poetic like this. If you can’t
improve on the silence, you can figure out what was next, then
be quiet. And what is Paul calling us to?
He’s calling us to have a tranquil heart, a tranquil mind, to be
godly and dignified, as he tells Timothy, and to act to not act,
to aspire not to aspire. Some perhaps think this was to
stay off of the radar of the Roman Empire. You know, if we
Christians are quiet, they’ll think us good citizens. There’s
something to that. But this is also aimed at a problem
within the church. We need to live quietly among
one another. We need to have inner calm of
heart and mind and soul and strength. Our minds go everywhere these
days. I think they say now with social media and digital devices,
our attention spans have gone from 12 seconds to eight seconds.
And I’ve heard recently that that’s even gotten worse. We
always have to be on. We always have to be hearing.
We always have to be following our impulses. And in a, maybe
a modern. application of the scripture,
we should be encouraged maybe to ditch or take a fast or a
break from some of these things that hijack our minds and our
thoughts and our impulses. Well, if we have brotherly love
and we aspire to do that more and more, if we aspire to live
quietly, calm lives, it leads us to mind our own affairs. So we make it our ambition not
to be ambitious, but we also make it our ambition to mind
our own affairs. We had a little saying when we
were kids in our family, mind your own beeswax. Okay, that
wasn’t unique to our family. Okay, so there’s something to
that. I didn’t look it up this week to see where it came from,
but you know, when little kids living in the same house, they
get in each other’s business. Big sister, somebody says, mind
your own beeswax. Well, that’s what Paul was saying.
Mind your own affairs. You know, every church, I don’t
think we do. I hope we don’t. Every church
has the head of the Department of Minding Other People’s Affairs.
Right, they’re just in your business. They’re just in your affairs.
These Paul is describing, we’ll get to it in the rest of 1 Thessalonians
or 2 Thessalonians, there’s people not working. And so what do you
do when you don’t work? Well, you find ways to be busy.
And in the Thessalonian church, people were minding other people’s
affairs. You know, churches always have
meddlers. Churches always have busybodies. Churches always have
micromanagers. And what’s Paul saying? You’re
fired, right? We don’t need you. Your services
are no longer necessary. Mind your own affairs. Stop worrying about other people
and worry about your own things. Now, I just said something about
brotherly love and we should love people and take care of them,
right? It’s not saying get out of that business. But it’s more
of a, hey, y’all aren’t working. You’re not busy with your hands.
You’re not being productive citizens. So get busy. And then you won’t
have time for that sort of thing. So brotherly love. Aspire to
live quietly. Mind your own affairs. And that leads to work with your
hands. Now, we all want a white collar
job, don’t we? We want to work nine to five.
We want to get bank holidays off. We want them paid. you know,
good healthcare, we want dental, we want eye coverage, we want
a retirement plan, we want all these entitlements and perks.
And most companies can’t afford to give those anymore, and so
white-collar jobs are, well, they seem to be fading. Well,
in Paul’s day, there were no white-collar jobs unless you
were a ruler or someone in the big government. Most people had
hands-on jobs. And if you were anyone in the
Roman Empire, you didn’t work with your hands. And you know
the saying, never trust a person, especially a man who has nice
hands, right? They look like they’ve had a
pedicure. Never trust a man with nice hands. Always trust somebody
with calluses and busted knuckles. That means they are hard working.
That means they change their own oil. There’s grease under
their nails. And so why does he say work with
your own hands? Well, many of the people, particularly in a
place like Thessalonica, were artisans. Paul himself was a
tent maker. And so you can imagine working
with heavy material and the calluses from cutting and the rough fingers
from sewing and pushing needles through heavy material, those
sorts of things. And he’s saying to folks, who probably have it in their
mind, working with the hands is for servants. Working with
the hands, that’s for the slaves. I’m above that sort of work.
And there’s a sense where he’s saying, look, if you’re in Jesus
Christ, he was a servant, you’d be a servant. And so whatever
God calls you to be and do, that is who you should be. And that’s
what you should do. The Protestant Reformation brought
us all kinds of wonderful things. It brought back the scriptures
to the people of God. It brought back pure worship
and got rid of the empty and wrongheaded ceremonies of the
dark ages church. It brought back the doctrine
of vocation. Going back to the Garden of Eden
where God gives each man, each woman, each person something
to do in life, something to fulfill. In fact, Martin Luther was known
for saying, when you pray for give me this day my daily bread,
you’re praying to God that he would raise up a dairy farmer,
that he would raise up a cow, that he would raise up a milkmaid,
that he would raise up one who would prepare and sell the product
and deliver the product and therefore you would have it. And so when
we pray, give us this day our daily bread, we’re in a sense
praying for one another’s vocations. our callings in life. And Paul
is saying, don’t be afraid to work with your hands. Don’t be
afraid to do what God has called you to be and do. It may seem
taboo in the culture that you live in, but in Christ, you are
meant to live quietly, to mind your own affairs and to work
with your hands for you belong to Jesus. Now, something else
was going on in the church. They were wondering about the
second coming. They were wondering about where their loved ones
who had died are. So he’s going to straighten out
their view of where the dead are when they die. But he’s also
going to straighten out their view of the second coming. But
it seemed that some had said, you know, if Jesus is coming
back, we might as well quit work. If Jesus is coming back and he’s
coming back soon, let’s sell everything. Let’s give it to
the poor. And let’s just, I guess, sit
back in the lawn chair in the front yard and wait for the sky
to open. and the trumpet to sound. And he’s saying, no, while you
live the Christian life, and here we are 2000 plus years later,
while you live the Christian life, brotherly love, mind your
own affairs, aspire to live quietly and work with your hands. And
here’s the reason, here’s the motivation. It’s so that, verse
12 says, you may walk properly before outsiders. So there’s
a witness aspect. And then there’s another practical
aspect that says, and be not dependent on any other man, be
dependent on no one. And so why do we live the Christian
life faithfully? Ultimately, yes, it pleases God.
And this whole section has been, please God, walk in a way that
pleases God, do it more and more. But we also want to be a witness
before the watching world. What is the watching world? see
when it looks in on Christians? Does it see laziness or productivity?
We should be the most productive people on the face of the earth.
Remember Adam before sin, before the fall, was made and put in
the garden to work, to make it productive, to keep it, to protect
it, but also to have dominion over the earth. And so we see
banking systems, we see dams and electricity, and we’ve harnessed
nuclear energy. It’s amazing the phones we hold
in our hands, the cars we drove to church in today, the printing
presses that gave us our Bibles. But we wanna be hardworking,
minding our own business, living quietly so that outsiders will
have nothing bad to say about the church. Remember that quote
I read to you on love, the visible love of Christians, that was
written by an outsider. That was written by those Paul
was exactly saying, do these things, please God, but live
in a way that is eye pleasing to people around, because then
they’re going to come to you and say, why do you live this
way? Well, let me tell you about Jesus and how he’s transformed
my life. Let me tell you about Jesus and
how he’s made me new. I know to a few of y’all’s chagrin,
I talk about how Christians should have the neatest house on the
block, right? Our flowers should be blooming.
Our cars should shine. Our grass should be cut. And
it’s the same for our church. We, every two years, get an inspection
from the fire marshal. And we hope he doesn’t come in
here the next four months with all this going on. But he comes
in our building every two years and he says, this is the cleanest,
neatest church I ever come into. And that’s something that we
ought to be proud of. Our azaleas blooming, our yard
kept up. And so it’s the same both for
the church and for the Christian. We ought to be People, the world,
scratch their heads and say, what’s so different about you? Now, yes, it’s good to have some
flowers and a happy yard and all the rest, but it’s really
the heart, isn’t it? It’s the overflow of the heart.
The mouth speaks from there. It’s the overflow of the heart
that we love one another. It’s the overflow of the heart
that we walk in a manner that’s worthy of the gospel. We live
in a way that adorns the gospel. And I don’t know about you, it’s
not easy to do this. The theologians would say in
Latin, in Corvitus say, we are turned in on ourselves. We love
to worship ourselves. That was the sin of Adam and
Eve. We love to do for ourselves and not for others. We love to
build our own kingdoms and not God’s kingdom. But what does
the world see when it looks in? You know, when you go to the
car dealership and they drop that sheet of paper, you know, your, your
car’s falling apart. You better trade it or at least
fix all this stuff and make us rich. It’s a little scary. Now, Paul drops a sheet in this
letter before the Thessalonians and say, you know, you Christians
need a tune up. The church needs a tune up. And let me read to
you just a handful of the things he tells them. He says, you should
abstain from immorality. You should continue in brotherly
love. Don’t grieve the Holy Spirit. Be awake for the day of the Lord.
Respect your rulers. Admonish the ungodly or the unruly
or the idle. Do not repay evil for evil. Rejoice
always. Pray without ceasing. In everything
give thanks. Test all things and abound more
and more in walking with and pleasing God. Now the car dealership
may drop an expensive list in front of you and you say, I can’t
possibly afford it. But when God drops a list before
his church, he says, this is what I desire, and this is what
I give if you will ask for it, if you will trust the Holy Spirit’s
power to bring it about, and if you will lean into it and
seek after it. And so let’s do that as fellow
believers, as individuals, but as churches, looking to God for
his laundry list of things to tune up and to abound in more
and more so that the world will see the power of God and the
gospel of Jesus to change sinners into saints. May it be so, let’s
pray together. Lord, we thank you for the chance
to think about things in our life that need a little tune
up, a little attention, a little repair. So help us to take these
things to heart so that the world will see and know of our great
savior, And we pray it in his mighty name. Amen.