“Keep Living as Holy People”

1 Thessalonians 4:1-12

August 29, 2004

We know begin to enter into the heart of Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians. From the start of Paul’s letter until now, Paul has taken every opportunity to praise the Thessalonians for their example of faith for all believers. Paul has praised them for turning from idols to serve the living and true God, he has praised them for accepting the word preached to them as God’s word, he has praised them for remaining steadfast in their faith and love during persecutions, and he has praised them for being a source of strength and encouragement for the apostles in their own trials and tribulations. And now Paul makes a conscious shift in his letter to address specific issues facing the Thessalonian church.

As I mentioned to you in previous sermons, the letters of the New Testament are not written just for the heck of it; they are written for a purpose, to real people who are called to live out their faith in the real world, a world with real pressures, real conflicts, real influences, and real threats.

The Thessalonian church found itself in the heart of the Roman Empire, in a major Gentile city in the Greco-Roman world. They were experiencing persecution of some kind. It is not clear from this letter whether or not it was physical persecution, but it was persecution nonetheless.

Let us remember that being a Christian in the 1^st century, especially in a major city like Thessalonica, was not easy. A city such as this brought with it all kinds of cultural and religious options, from the pagan and imperial cults to the polytheistic religions. Christianity, for all practical purposes, was just another option to choose from. And yet, by the grace of the one, true God, and by the Spirit of the living Christ, the Thessalonian church continued to thrive in spite of all this, and now Paul wants to make sure they continue to do so.

Our text for this morning is a difficult text to work through, not so much because of the topics Paul brings up, but because it is not so clear about the reason Paul writes what he does. If this letter is a window into the world of this 1^st century church, then in some ways, at least in this part of the letter, it is a cloudy window.

At the seminary, my family and I lived at 604 Kirk Rd. Apt. 14. Sometimes we would get mail for Apt. 15, and the people in Apt. 15 would get our mail. If we didn’t know the people in Apt. 15 and they didn’t know us, then they might be able to tell a little bit about us from what kind of mail we received. They would know our names, where we may have gone to school from the alumni letters, and what kind of hobbies we liked from the magazines we subscribed to. From our mail, they would have been able to piece together information about us, but they would not have the complete picture.

This is the way it is sometimes when reading Paul’s letters to the various churches he writes to. Exact information about what was going in the churches is sometimes clearer in some of his letters than it is others, like this letter to the Thessalonians.

Paul’s mentioning of sexual impurity, love of brothers and sisters, and proper communal conduct are spoken about so briefly that one is left to wonder if Paul is just trying to remind the Thessalonians about Christian ethics or if the Thessalonians are indeed doing things they should not be doing.

The first clue to why Paul writes what he does comes in the first three verses of our text when Paul says, “as you learned from us how you ought to live and to please God (as in fact, you are doing), you should do so more and more. For you know what instructions we gave you through the Lord Jesus. For this is the will of God: your sanctification…” And the second clue comes in verse 7 when Paul says, “For God did not call us to impurity but in holiness.”

For Paul, being a Christian means that one is been both justified and sanctified by God. In other words, a person is both made right with God and set apart as holy by God. For many people, sanctification, or being made holy, is a goal of perfection one works toward after one is saved, like the next step in the process of salvation. A person is first saved (that is justified), and then after being saved, the person begins to work toward becoming holy (or sanctified).

But being Christian is not about living right so that someday we might become holy; being a Christian is about living right because we already are holy. Christians are already holy because we have been cleansed and forgiven through the blood of Jesus Christ. Christians are already holy because we have been set apart as God’s own through the waters of baptism. Christians are holy because God has made it so.

Through the grace of God, we are a holy people because God has set us apart from the world. We are a holy people, who are not to conform to the world’s standards. We are a holy people, who are not to live by the world’s ways, or even our ways, because through Jesus Christ, we no longer belong to the world, or even ourselves, we belong to God.

Paul’s message to the Thessalonians becomes clearer when we remind ourselves that the Thessalonian church was called to live out its faith and love in the midst of a culture and society that had no moral or ethical clarity, because it did not know God. For Paul, being a Christian means that theology cannot be separated from ethics, what we believe cannot be separated from how we act, especially in relationships with one another.

Sexual purity, love of our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, and how we conduct ourselves in the community in which we live matters, because they are the outward expressions of our faith and love for God.

From the beginning of the letter, Paul has not stopped praising the Thessalonians for their faith and love, and he is now praising them for continuing to live out their calling as holy people. The success of the Thessalonian church, and the reason why their faith and love and holiness has become an example to all believers, is because they had not wavered from the purpose of their calling which is to serve and please God.

They had not succumbed to the temptations to return to worshipping idols or engaging in the pagan and imperial fertility cults. They have remained true and faithful to the God who has called them in holiness even under the pressures, conflicts, influences, and threats of a cultural and society that persecuted them.

Paul is doing more than just reminding the Thessalonians of what they have already been doing; he is encouraging the church to keep on doing it. Paul wants the Thessalonians not to forget that they are holy people set apart by God. Paul wants the Thessalonians not to forget that there are to be clear-cut boundaries between their Christian community and the world in which they live. Paul wants the Thessalonians not to forget that the claims of the gospel are incompatible with the claims of the world.

Any blurring of the boundaries between the church and the world, will inevitably lead to a disintegration of the communal bonds that holds Christians together. Any permissive attitudes about moral and ethical conduct in relationships with spouses, fellow Christians, friends, neighbors, and even those outside the church, will inevitably destroy the integrity of the claims of our faith. Being a Christian either means something, or it will inevitably mean nothing.

We the church must never so completely separate ourselves from the world that we refuse to go into the world. Paul does not mean that here, and he never says as much in any letter he writes. For Paul, being a Christian means being part of a community of faith, and being a part of the community of faith, does indeed mean being separate from the world, but it never means being isolated from the world. Living quietly, does not mean that our faith should be kept private from the world. Minding our own affairs does not mean that we should never speak out against injustice and oppression in the world. Working with our hands does not mean that we should rid ourselves of the tools and instruments of modern technology of the world.

What all of this means for us is that we should never engage ourselves in the world in order to seek power and glory for ourselves. Our work in the world should never to be done for self-promotion, to point fingers at someone else, or to be a burden on the community in which we live, but in order that we may live a life that is pleasing to God, as witnesses and servants of the Lord and Savior.

But there is a question that still lingers. Why does Paul feel it is necessary to tell the Thessalonians to keep on doing what they are already doing? Why does he feel he needs to tell them again what he has already told them?

It’s kind of like telling my children to mind their manners, and to say please and thank you, and to behave, whenever they go to a friend’s house to play, and their eyes roll back up into their heads, and they say, “We know, Dad…duh.” So why do we tell them this over and over again? Because we know they, and many times we, have a tendency to not do those things they are supposed to be doing?

Is there a tendency of the Thessalonians, at least some of them, to not do the things they are supposed to be doing? Is there a tendency of some of the members of the church to be irresponsible in their Christian ethics? If this is the case, then why? We will answer these questions next week. Amen.