So that's 1 Thessalonians, 1
Thessalonians chapter 4 and verse 1. 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, so ye would abound more and more. For ye
know what commandments we gave you by the Lord Jesus. For this
is the will of God, even your sanctification, that ye should
abstain from fornication, that every one of you should know
how to possess his vessel in sanctification and honour, not
in the lust of concupiscence, even as the Gentiles which know
not God. that no man go beyond and defraud
his brother in any matter, because that the Lord is the avenger
of all such, as we also have forewarned you and testified. For God hath not called us unto
uncleanness, but unto holiness. He therefore that despiseth,
despiseth not man, but God, who hath also given unto us his Holy
Spirit. Amen, may the Lord bless this
reading to us. In our verses today, we find
direction from the Apostle to the believers at Thessalonica
that they serve and honour the Lord according to the grace the
Lord has given to them. And what the Apostle wrote to
them we shall gladly, I trust, read and take to ourselves also. Here in these few verses that
we've just read together, we find a great and a blessed and
I think an important principle of New Testament apostolic teaching. Namely that the Lord seeks nothing
from his people that he does not first provide. He asks nothing
from us that he does not first freely grant to us. Now this passage is not calling
for works of obedience that will endear or commend us to God Rather, it anticipates the predictable
fruit of the new birth that will testify and give tangible evidence
to the presence of God the Holy Spirit in the lives of His people. God's quickening grace converts
and transforms sinners. And the internal transformation
of a man's soul or a woman's soul brings an outward effect. Believers who live in the spirit,
walk in the spirit, Believers who have experienced God's mercy
are merciful. Believers who have enjoyed God's
forgiveness are forgiving. And knowing God's grace in our
hearts, we live graciously and exercise grace to one another. So that what the apostle is talking
about here are the fruits of conversion. And rather than gaining
God's pleasure for us, the fruits of conversion, or the fruit of
the spirit, exhibits God's pleasure in us. Rather than gaining God's
pleasure for us, the fruit of conversion exhibits God's pleasure
in us. Good works and upright behaviour
are not being set down here by Paul as an aspirational moral
code of behaviour for all men and women, but they are being
set forth as the expected evidences, dare I say the ordinary evidences
of conversion that will most assuredly be discoverable in
the lives of Christ's followers and Christ's church. So that
these brothers and sisters in Christ, to whom Paul is writing,
are the very people that Timothy has just recently returned from
bearing good news concerning their faith and their love in
Christ. Love to Christ and love to the
brethren and love for the apostles. And indeed it's these evidences
of conversion in their lives and their faith in Christ that
the Apostle has been just now rejoicing in when he wrote at
the end of our chapter 3 We don't have the chapters and
the verses in the original epistle, one can't imagine. So it was
just a continuation of what he had written at the end of chapter
three, that he had been rejoicing in their faith. He had written
to them these words. The Lord make you to increase
and abound in love one toward another and toward all men, even
as we do toward you. to the end that he may establish
your hearts unblameable in holiness before God, even our Father. So that was chapter three, verse
12 and 13. Now the apostle had there said,
the Lord make you to increase and abound. Now if it is the
Lord, if the Lord is he who makes them abound in love, to one another
and all men. So it will be the Lord who will
enable them to abound more and more, as we read in this opening
verse of chapter four, in all aspects of their Christian walk
and witness. And in our Christian lives, We
must always trace our holiness, our sanctification, our good
works and our godly service, whatever that might be, back
to its source. Any righteousness we have, any
goodness that is within us, any of those good works that it's
been foreordained that we should walk therein, must be traced
back to their source, and that source is Christ. Not the will
of the man, not the heart of the woman. We're only fallen
creatures at best, but to the renewed spirit of all in whom
Christ dwells and who says Paul, walk not after the flesh but
after the spirit. And the commandments that Paul
is speaking about here are commandments that have been given by the Lord
Jesus and so expressly they are not the commandments of Moses. Just because the scripture says
commandments, whether that's in the Old Testament or the New
Testament, we mustn't let our minds immediately run to the
Ten Commandments as if that's what's being talked about. The
word commandments is used in a variety of different ways in
scripture. And when Paul speaks here of
the Lord Jesus Christ's commandments, he's not talking about the Lord
repeating Moses' commandments. Those were commandments that
no man could obey. but rather there is a yoke which
Christ gives which is an easy yoke and a light yoke and comprises
for the believer resting in Christ for all our righteousness and
it causes us to express our gratitude to him by living for him and
serving him in faith and in love. And this principle is beautifully
confirmed here by the apostle. And he says in verse three, for
this is the will of God, even your sanctification. God's will
is that the church be conformed to the image of Christ. And he
doesn't leave that task to be completed by us. He takes responsibility
for it himself. And he has ordained that Christ
is made of God, that is, made of God's divine power and grace,
unto his people wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption. We read that in 1 Corinthians
chapter 1 verse 30. So that since this is God's will
and Christ is our sanctification, the life of Christ and the soul
of a believer will manifest itself. It can't be hidden. The preacher
and writer Robert Hawker says, Christ reigns and rules within
and is the source of everything blessed to his people. It is
known from the actions without that Christ reigns within. for they that are Christ's have
crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts. And he's quoting there from Galatians
5 24. So that this teaching on sanctification
and Christian holiness is important for us to grasp. This, in a sense,
is a distinguishing mark of the preaching ministry that we are
party to. Too often the perception is given
that the Christian faith is about not doing what we want to do,
not living in the way that we want to live, and rather putting
ourselves under a code of conduct and strict religious obedience
in pursuit of pleasing God and building up a stock of divine
goodwill and personal holiness. Some people even teach that since
salvation can't be gained by obeying Moses' law, all we have
to do is obey Christ's law instead, and love God and love one another,
and that love will do instead. That's called neonomianism, by
the way, for a little bit of a technical word there. It's as if one code of life was
too hard to fulfil, so we'll replace it with an easier one. And then with God's help and
with Christ's forgiveness for past mistakes and present shortcomings,
we'll please God second time around. As if loving God and
our fellow man was an easier thing to do than keep Moses'
law. That won't do. And this is what
we mean when we say Christ must be all our righteousness. We
bring nothing to the table but our impotence and our need. In verses four to six here, Paul
gives an example. about the way in which the spirit
will be seen in the life of a believer, the outworking and evidence of
conversion. And perhaps it is the best possible
example that he could have quoted, because lust is a great passion. And it was especially amongst
the Gentiles that sexual immorality was commonplace and unexceptional. Their religious practices as
well as their daily life brought them constantly into that indulgence
and there was not the view that it was of any great seriousness. But here the Apostle Paul draws
the attention of the Thessalonian believers to the fact that God
has not called us to uncleanness, but unto holiness. He says that
in verse seven. And by this reference in verses
four to six, to a believer possessing his vessel in sanctification
and honor, he means for the man to be content with his wife and
honouring her and maintaining the sanctity of the marriage
vows and the marriage bed. And that works equally the other
way around the woman for the man. So that as God loves us,
so we love our wives and our husbands. as God cares for us
and is gentle with us and provides for us and dedicates himself
to us and gives himself for us and is faithful to us. So we
are to exhibit the selfsame characteristics to our spouses and not dishonour
them. our own bodies or the testimony
of Christ by fornication and adultery and sexual lust. It's an example that he's quoting
here to make the point. Sin and the pursuit of sin and
the willing indulgence or condoning of sin is not only to the heart
of those who are the immediate casualties of our actions and
our lusts, but it's to the heart of our own selves. And most importantly,
it is to the detriment of the testimony of God. If God makes
us holy in Christ and has given unto us his Holy Spirit, it's
a desperate and despicable thing to abuse his goodness and his
mercy. And let me just say one more
thing in closing today. While the apostle is directing
and exhorting the Thessalonian brothers and sisters to live
according to the promptings of the Spirit who lives in us, that
is not to say we always do. This flesh is weak, while the
lusts of the flesh are powerful. And believers are not free from
sin. We struggle with temptation daily. And sometimes even the children
of God fall grievously, dreadfully, and bring shame on our own selves
and on our families and on our testimony and on our Lord. And the Bible recognises this. And while the Lord does keep
us by grace, He is faithful even when we are unfaithful. He does
keep us by His grace. His goodness, nevertheless, may
be despised by our own willfulness and disobedience. John tells
us in 1 John 2, verse 1, My little children, These things write
I unto you, that ye sin not. And if any man sin, we have an
advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. So brothers
and sisters, we are children of King Jesus. We are heirs of
the kingdom of God. We are blood-bought. We are condemnation
free. We are redeemed and we are forgiven. Let us not abuse that great privilege
and the inheritance that it brings. Let us not dally with sin. Let us not play fast and loose
with temptation. Let us not despise the goodness
and mercy that God has given us. But when we fall, as we will,
let us remember we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ
the righteous. And let us be like those saints
of Isaiah's day. Let us stay upon the Lord. Let
us return to the Lord. Let us prove the faithfulness
of the Lord to forgive us our sin and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Amen.