Good morning. We're going to
open this morning's services with that hymn Joy was just playing,
There is a Fountain. It's number 222 in your hardback
hymnal, and we'll stand and sing it together. There is a fountain filled with
blood Drawn from Emmanuel's veins And sinners plunged beneath that
flood Lose all their guilty stains Lose all their guilty stains
Lose all their guilty stains And sinners plunged beneath that
flood Lose all their guilty stains The dying thief rejoiced to see
That fountain in his day. And there may I, though vile
as he, Wash all my sins away, Wash all my sins away, Wash all
my sins away. And there may I, though vile
as He, Wash all my sins away. Dear dying lamb, thy precious
blood shall never lose its power. Till all the ransomed church
of God be saved to sin no more. Be safe to sin no more, be safe
to sin no more. Till all the ransomed Church
of God be safe to sin no more. E'er since, by faith, I saw the
stream, Thy flowing wounds supply. Redeeming love has been my theme,
And shall be till I die. and shall be till I die, and
shall be till I die. Redeeming love has been my theme,
and shall be till I die. This poor lisping, stammering
tongue lies silent in the grave. Then in a nobler, sweeter song,
I'll sing thy power to save. I'll sing my power to save. I'll sing my power to save. Then in a nobler, sweeter song,
I'll sing my power to save. Be seated, please. What a day that'll be when we'll
be able to sing in a sweeter, nobler song, His power to save. I pray the Lord will be pleased
to bless us with His salvation this morning. We're going to
be in 1 Thessalonians 4, continuing our study in this wonderful portion
of God's holy word. I pray the Lord will make it
profitable to us. Let's ask the Lord's blessings
before we begin. Our merciful Heavenly Father, we rejoice in your power to save
Lord, we are unable to save ourselves. We are unable to atone for our
sins, to satisfy your justice, unable to establish a righteousness
before thee that would be pleasing in thy sight. What hope and comfort
we have in knowing that that is exactly what thy dear son,
our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ did for us. We pray that your
Holy Spirit would would cause him to be lifted up, that our
hearts and eyes would be drawn to him, that we would be enabled
by your grace to set our affections on him, and that we might rest
all the hope of our salvation in his glorious person and in
his accomplished work. We ask it in his name. Amen. 1 Thessalonians chapter 4. I've titled this message, The
Believer and Sin. And I know that every child of
God has a a very keen interest in that subject. For every believer
sees themselves as a sinner saved by God's grace. And our Lord
has spoken words of hope and comfort to us and words of correction
and rebuke, particularly in the beginning of this passage There's
an article in your bulletin that's titled, Henry Mahan wrote it
years ago, and it's titled The Believer's Attitude Towards Sin. And I want to try to develop
the four points that he made in that article in the second
part of this message. But we'll read the first eight
verses of this passage and then seek the Lord's help in giving
us some understanding as to what the believer's life is in his
relationship to sin. Now, I remind you once again
that Paul had only been in Thessalonica for three weeks. And so now he's
writing back to this predominantly Gentile church who would have
come out of a very pagan culture, a culture particularly that's
much like our culture in that it is extremely sexually promiscuous. They have no sense of morality. when it comes to that subject. And so these believers now have
been converted. They've come to Christ and Paul's
reminding them of the things that he told them when he was
there with them, particularly in relationship to this subject.
In verse one of chapter four, he says, furthermore, Then we beseech thee, now that
word beseech means we plead with thee, we ask thee, we're coming beside
you brethren and we exhort you, we're comforting you, So these
words are pleading words and these words are comforting words
and I hope they will be that to us. I hope that we will hear
them from the Lord as pleading words and as words of comfort. Words of instruction and words
of comfort. We beseech you, brethren, He
addresses them as believers and we exhort you by the Lord Jesus. None of these things can be understood
or believed apart from our union with Christ. Everything is to
be seen in light of him. that as you have received of
us, how you ought to walk. Now, the important thing to understand
here is this word walk. He's giving them instructions
on how they ought to live their lives. He's not particularly
talking about their sinless position in Christ before God. That's already been established.
Now he's instructing them and comforting them on the manner
of life in which they should live, the way in which they should
walk. And to please God. So you would abound more and
more. Might you grow in grace and in the knowledge of the Lord
Jesus Christ. And might you abound in these
things. that the Lord has instructed
us in. So he's telling them, this is
God's will. These are the things I told you.
These are the things that please God. These are the things that
are good for you. And they are contrary. They're contrary to
everything that your culture tells you. For you know what commandments
we gave you by Jesus Christ. We gave you these instructions.
When you believe the gospel, we instructed you in the things
of God. These are people that prior to
Paul coming to town would have had no access to the law of God
or to the word of God. though the moral law was written
on their hearts even as it is written on the hearts of all
men and though men see their conscience and though men call
good evil and they call evil good, the law of God is still
written on their hearts and they know in their heart of hearts
what is pleasing to God and what's not pleasing to God. So here
the Lord is instructing his children, he's warning his children as
a parent would warn their child of the things of this world and
the things that are good for them and the things that are
right and things that are wrong and not to be conformed. That's what Paul said in Romans
chapter 12, be not conformed to the image of this world, but
be you rather transformed by the renewing of your mind in
Christ Jesus that you might be able to prove what is that good
and acceptable and pleasing will of God. So the things of God
are contrary to the things of the world. And believers want
to know, well, what does God say? What's God say? Because
that's, I know is what's right and that's what's good and that's
what's holy and that's what I need. Verse three, for this is the
will of God, even your sanctification, that you should abstain from
fornication. All sexual activity outside of
marriage, the scripture calls fornication. Abstain from it. The Lord's saying, you know,
don't do it. It's a sin against the body,
a sin against God. It's going to bring difficult
things into your life. Every one of you should know
how to possess his vessel, in sanctified vessel, there's the
body, in sanctification and honor. And we're gonna look at this
subject of sanctification in a little more detail in a moment,
but let's just read these verses together. Not in the lust of
concupiscence, unrestrained passion, just following the will of the
flesh and the desires of the flesh, that's concupiscence. Even as the Gentiles, that's
where you came from, which know not God. They don't know God,
you do. They have a different rule. You have a different Lord. different desires. That no man go beyond and defraud
his brother in any manner. When I first read this passage,
I mean I read it before, but in preparation for this message
I thought, well he's given us two things. Number one, abstain
from fornication. Number two, don't defraud your
brother. But then in further study I understood better that
it's the same subject or being unfaithful is to defraud your
brother. He's not talking about, obviously,
we ought to be honest in our dealings with men and be, you
know, not be greedy and be upfront and, you know, not be cheats
and liars and business and whatever else. But that's not what he's
talking about here. He's talking about defrauding another man
Sexually speaking, that no man go beyond and defraud
his brother. Notice the word any is in italics.
It doesn't belong there. Really, a better word, if you're
going to insert a word there, would be this, not any. Defraud
your brother in this matter. Make sure that this matter is
understood and followed. You remember the spirit in which
this is given is exhortation, it's encouragement, it's beseeching,
it's a father speaking to his children and warning them about
the dangers that come with this sort of thing. Verse six, that no man go beyond
to fraud his brother in this manner. because that the Lord
is the avenger of all such as you have also, as we also have
forewarned you and testified. We told you these things when
we were there. But Paul, understanding the culture of the day, saw the
importance of reinforcing this particular sin, this particular
thing, this particular problem that would have been easy for
a believer to fall into if not if not properly taught. For God has not called us to
uncleanness, but unto holiness. That's the same word. We've seen
the word sanctification twice already in this passage and this
word holiness is that word, is to be set apart. He therefore
that despiseth that disagrees with this, that has an objection
to this clear instruction from God, is not disagreeing with
man, he's disagreeing with God. He's taking up with God. There
are those who would hear this and they would say, well, that's
not important or that's putting me under the law or something
to that effect. He'd take that up with God. That's what he's
saying. who hath also given us his Holy
Spirit. Romans chapter eight says, if
man has not the Spirit of God, he's none of his. If we have
the Holy Spirit, the same Holy Spirit that inspired the Apostle
Paul to write these words is inspiring us right now to believe
them, to rejoice in them, to say amen to them. And if we have
any other response to the Word of God than that, it is only
evidence that we don't have the Spirit of God. We have the Spirit
of God, we just, we say amen. Amen, Lord, you're right. You're
right. Sanctification is brought up
a couple of times in this passage of scripture. And there are those who believe that
sanctification is a process by which a believer becomes more
and more holy. And we don't believe that. Do
we believe that the people of God, the children of God, by
the grace of God and by the spirit of God and through the word of
God, grow in grace and in the knowledge of Christ? Yes. Yes,
we do. But a believer's growth is like
a tree. In that the higher it reaches
into heavens, the deeper the roots go into the ground. And
so Do we desire more than anything else for the Lord to restrain
our flesh? We know that before God, the
Lord made it clear when he said, you've heard that it said that
if a man If a man takes his brother's wife, he's guilty of adultery.
But I say unto you, if a man lusteth in his heart toward a
woman, he's already committed. God judges the heart. Man looks
at the outward appearance. God's looking at the heart. So
these sins of the heart, we all know what they are. And we hope
and pray and desire more than anything that they not manifest
themselves in the flesh. but just because the Lord restrains
the sins of the heart from being carried out in the flesh doesn't
make us more holy. You see, those who believe in
progressive sanctification, they mind the things of the flesh.
And so they're making judgments on holiness based on what they
see. And the child of God, as he grows in grace, the roots
are growing deeper and he's seeing more and more of the pride and
the unbelief and the worldliness and the sin of the heart. That's
where the sin really is. It's in the heart. Those who teach progressive sanctification
ultimately use the law to measure and monitor one's progress in
holiness. And they end up putting you back
under the law. Read the book of Galatians. The
whole book of Galatians, Paul is writing against progressive
sanctification. He's writing against it. You that are under grace, are
you gonna go back to the law? You're gonna go back to the law?
No. No. If there's any restraining of
the flesh, it's not gonna be done by the law. The strength
of sin is the law. You put a man under the law and
all it does is inspire sin. It doesn't restrain it. The restraint
for sin is the grace of God in the Lord Jesus Christ. And though
it be restrained in the flesh, And though we grow in grace,
we see more and more. I've listened recently to some
men, some Calvinist. I think I mentioned this to y'all
a couple of weeks ago. I listened to five messages by
five of the most popular preachers in America, and they're all Calvinist. And they, They titled their message, What
is the Gospel? And none of them preached the
gospel. But one thing that is evident in these camps is the
pride, the arrogance. You see, what they do is they
have a hierarchy of holiness and they separate the clergy
from the laity and they use the law to beat one
another up. Progressive sanctification is
living purgatory. That's what it is. And every
religion has a form of purgatory. I mentioned this Wednesday night,
the Catholic Church have a very elaborate form of purgatory.
You know, you die with venial sins still on your heart. You
get to go to this place where you can suffer for a while and
atone for your sins before you're allowed into heaven. But you
know, those who believe in a pre-tribulation rapture, you know that you've
heard it. The church is gonna get raptured
out of the world, and then there's gonna be seven years of tribulation,
and where anybody who professes Christ is gonna be killed for
their faith, and then after that will come the second coming of
Christ and the thousand year reign. That's all, what is that? It's purgatory. In case you weren't
saved when the church is raptured, you can get saved during the
tribulation by dying for the faith. And then you can get to
go see everybody. And the Reformed Baptists have
progressive sanctification, which is nothing more than living purgatory,
where everybody is monitored and motivated by the law and
measured by the law to see where they stand in this. And you get
the assurance of your salvation by looking to your obedience.
That's where you get the assurance of your salvation, to see how
well you're doing. What's happened in progressive
sanctification of men has replaced the outward evidence of sin with
a much more sinister form of self-righteousness and pride
and arrogance. And the sin has actually become
worse. So that the strength of sin is
the law. Is the law. If the Lord enables a believer
by his grace to be restrained from any acts of sin that he
might have considered in his heart, that believer knows that
the Lord gets all the glory. That he was the one who kept
me. He was the one that restrained
me. There can't be There can't be
any pride in faith. There can't be any self-righteousness
in faith. Faith by its very definition
is the absence of such things. And so, the child of God wants
to be restrained from these things. He wants to be kept from them.
And he prays to be. And when he is, He knows that
it was the Lord working in him, causing him to will and to do
after God's own pleasure. He takes no pride in what he
hasn't done because he sees in his heart, he sees in his heart
the evidences of sin and that he has the potential to do anything that
the Lord would not keep him from. Is that not true? So when the Lord's speaking of
sanctification, let us This word sanctification is used
in the Bible in two senses. Number one sense it's used as
something that is set apart for the service of God. The firstborn in the Old Testament
was sanctified and set apart, belonged to the Lord. The tabernacle,
the temple, was sanctified. The utensils of worship, the
vessels of worship, were sanctified. They were set apart for for holy
purposes, for the purpose of worship and service to God. And
in that sense, the child of God has been set apart. And I'm sure
that's what the Lord is referring to here in our text. Even your
sanctification, you've been set apart. Your body's not your own. It belongs to the Lord. It's
a, know you not that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit?
That's what he's saying. Child of God, you've been set
apart. Don't forget that. The second meaning of the word
sanctification means to make something pure and holy that
was not pure and holy. make something sinless that was
prior not sinless. And by virtue of our union with
Christ and being placed in Christ, we have a holiness, a righteousness
before God. First Corinthians chapter one,
verse 21, God has made him to be unto us our wisdom, our
righteousness, our sanctification, and our redemption. So we have
a holiness in Christ. In John chapter 17, the Lord
Jesus said, Father, I sanctify myself. Now was the Lord Jesus
saying, Father, I'm making myself holy because I wasn't holy before? No, he's saying, I'm setting
myself apart as the redeemer. of my people. And so here's the two meanings
of that word. In Jude verse 1, the scripture
says that we are sanctified by God the Father. We are set apart
by the Father. We are made holy in election
by the Father. In Ephesians chapter 5 the scripture
says that the Lord Jesus Christ might sanctify us unto himself
by the washing of water by the word and so the Lord Jesus Christ
sets us apart and makes us holy in Christ in himself and in And
in 2 Thessalonians 2, verse 13, God has chosen you through the
sanctification of the Spirit. So God the Father sanctified
us in election, God the Son has sanctified us in redemption,
and God the Holy Spirit has sanctified us in regeneration. And the Lord
is reminding us that we've been set apart for God's glory and
God's service. And we've been made holy in Christ. And this is the motivation for,
how does the Lord say it in our text? To know how to possess
our vessel. Not just in fornication, but
in all things. the Lord enable us to possess
our vessel in a way that would be honoring to him, understanding
that our sanctification is all of God. It's all of God. And this sanctification is from
beginning to end. He that began a good work in
you will continue it until the day of Jesus Christ. So though
there are many experiences that the believer has where he loses
sight of Christ and loses possession of his vessel, the Lord never leaves him to
himself. He's pleased to correct him and
to establish him, to keep him. The Lord said, they shall revive
as the corn and grow as the vine. So, The Lord grows us in his
grace and revives us when we fall. How thankful we are for
that. What is the believer's attitude
towards sin? Well, first and foremost, most
important, is that the Lord Jesus Christ has put away our sin. that we've been sanctified in
him, that we stand, we are able to come with boldness before
the throne of grace, knowing that our sin has been separated
from us as far as the east is from the west and that God remembers
it no more. He's buried it in the depths
of the sea. Christ put them away by the sacrifice
of himself. Once in the end of the world,
he has put away our sins by the sacrifice of himself. He entered
in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption
for us. He offered himself without spot
to God, and God saw the travail of his soul, and God was satisfied. He paid the full price for redemption
and all the sins of all of God's elect were put away once and
for all. Oh, we can come, we can come
into the very presence of God knowing that our iniquity is
not marked by God. Here's our boldness in the day
of judgment that as he is, so are we in this world. If my sin
has not been put away, then I have no hope of coming into the presence
of a holy God. There is now therefore no condemnation
to them that are in Christ Jesus, those that have been sanctified
in him. Those had been set apart in him. That's our attitude towards
sin. This is our view of sin, my sin.
If I'm going to have any ability to come before God, I've got
to look in faith to Christ and know that he was successful.
He was successful in putting away my sin. And that I'm accepted
in the beloved. That's my attitude toward my
sin, all my sin. The sin that has broken out in
bad behavior and the sin that remains secret in my heart, it's
all been put away. All been put away. Second thing we see about our
sin is that it has infected every
part of our being. Apart from being sanctified in
Christ, apart from being made holy in the Lord Jesus Christ,
we have no righteousness. Because everything that I do
is infected with my sin. Man at his very best state is
altogether vanity. Every thought that I have, every
word that I speak, everything that I do, oh brethren, There's
enough sin, and I say this shamefully, but there's enough sin in what
I'm doing right now, trying to preach the gospel, to send me
to hell. It's true, I know that's true.
I wish it wasn't, but it is. I can't escape it. It's ever before me. When I would
do good, evil is ever present with me. We must look outside of ourselves
if we're going to find any hope of salvation. If God judges us on the best thing we've done, we'll be condemned for it. And we grieve over that. We do. This is the humbling effect of
the gospel, isn't it? You see, if all we saw that we
are in Christ without sin, there might be reason for pride. But
the second thing about the truth of our sin is that it's ever
before us. What a humbling thing that is. As we relate to one another and
as we come before the throne of grace, We're always a sinner and always
seeing ourselves in need of mercy. As the light of the gospel brightens,
it reveals more and more the dark recesses of our heart. And
as our love for Christ grows, our hatred for our sin grows. We can't excuse our sin, we can't
justify it, we can't find anyone to blame for it. We can say with our brother Job,
I am vile. When the Lord Jesus is pleased
to reveal his glory, we see like Daniel, my comeliness, my beauty,
my strength has turned into corruption. We find ourselves before the
throne where the Lord Jesus is high and lifted up and the seraphim
are crying, holy, holy, holy, and we cry with a brother, Isaiah,
Lord, woe is me, I'm undone, I'm a man of unclean lips. I
live among a people of unclean, there's no one clean around me. The stars are not clean in his
sight. They're not pure in his sight.
How much more, he that is born of woman, speaking lies from
the womb. Here's our view of sin. This is our attitude towards
sin. We say with Brother Paul, O wretched man that I am, who
shall deliver me from the body of this death? Thanks be to God. Thanks be to God through Christ
Jesus I am free. So we see that our sin's been
completely put away in Christ and we see that the evidence
of it is ever with us. Long as we're in this body, how
long is it gonna last until this body goes back to where it came
from? That's how long it's gonna last.
And there is a very real sense in which the more we grow in
grace and the more God enables us by his grace to restrain these
kind of sins that the Lord is warning us of, that we become
more and more sinful in our own minds, in our own hearts, and
that we see more and more of the tentacles of it wrapping
around everything. Thirdly, the third point about
our attitude towards sin is that we must forgive. We must forgive. If we believe
ourselves to be the chief of all sinners, if we believe that
no one in this world has been given more light and more grace,
to whom much is given, much is required, We can't look down
our self-righteous nose at people that are doing things that we're
not doing and think, well, we're more righteous than they are. We believe that no one has been
given more grace and more light and more truth and more love
and more opportunity than we've been given and remain as unbelieving
as we are. How can we stand in judgment
of another? The Lord taught us that. He said,
Lord, forgive us our trespasses, even as we forgive those who
trespass against me. You see, there's a correlation,
isn't there? Between the two. I love the way Brother Henry
said it in the article that you have there in your bulletin.
He said, to not be able to forgive is to forfeit your right to ask
for forgiveness. I love that. That's perfect. That ties the two together. To
not be able to forgive is to forfeit your right to ask for
forgiveness. If you're gonna be in a position
to ask God for forgiveness, you've got to be able to forgive. The
Lord gave us a parable in Matthew chapter 18 about that, about
the king who had a servant who owed him 10,000 talents. Now, I did a little calculating. My calculations are right. This
servant owed his master $227 million, 10,000 talents. A talent
was a certain weight of gold in today's economy. He went to his master and he
begged for forgiveness. The master wrote off his debt.
That servant then turns to one of his servant, and the Bible
says that that second servant owed the first servant 100 pence,
which is about $300. And the first servant refused to
forgive his servant. And his servant begged for forgiveness. and he refused to forgive. And
the master found out about it. And the prison keepers came and
locked up the first servant. And the scripture says he was
tormented by the prison keepers until he paid the full debt.
Now that's what an unforgiving spirit will do. It'll leave you
tormented by the prison keepers. And what do we do when we're
tormented with an unforgiving spirit? We try to find in our
hearts the ability to forgive. And we try to drum up enough
virtue and enough grace to be able to forgive someone else.
And all of our concentration is on the person that we're trying
to forgive and on the offense that they've given to us. Don't
do that. Don't do that. You might find
some relief from the prison keepers for just a little while. But
you're gonna end up back in prison. Why? Because the only way to
forgive is to look to Christ and see how much he's forgiven
you. If you do that, forgiveness will be easy. Forgiveness will
be easy. One who cannot forgive has no
understanding of how much God has forgiven them. A debt you
could not pay. There's our, what is our attitude
towards sin? It's all gone, covered by the
blood, put away. It's ever present with me, always
in need of grace. And where sin abounds, grace
does much more bound. I must be a forgiving person.
In the light of what God has done for me, I have no option
but to forgive. And fourthly, I long for that
day when sin will be no more in me, my brother, and my neighbor. Oh, there's two things about
heaven, brethren, that's going to make heaven heaven. Number
one, we're going to see him as he is. Number two, we're going
to be made like him. Anybody talks about heaven otherwise
doesn't understand what we have to look forward to. Oh, they
talk about the golden streets, they talk about seeing mama in
heaven, and they talk about this and that. Those, that's what
makes heaven heaven. See him as he is in the full
splendor of his glory. We look through glass darkly
now, but then face to face. Number two, to be made like Him. What does that mean? It means
that we're gonna be without sin, no memory of sin, no experience
with sin. Oh, what's that gonna be like? I don't know. I don't know, but
I believe it and I look forward to it. What a day it'll be when
sin will be no more, no more. Let us receive, in grace and
in faith, the instructions of God's Word on how to walk in
this world in our sanctification. Amen? All right, let's take a
break. Yeah.