In these days of kindergarten, we were taught to stay within the lines. Although back in the old days when I went to school, they didn't have kindergarten. They had first grade. And there we were taught when we learned to print our letters to stay within the lines. Some of you boys and girls have been learning that in school this year already. And then when we progressed to the crayons, we were taught to stay within the lines as we colored to make the picture look pretty.
Now as you get older, you learn to watch out for the edges too. As you learn to play golf, you come to realize that the object is to hit the ball down the middle of that green strip, not beyond the edge. You need to stay within the lines. As you learn to drive a car, you learn that you have to stay on this side of that line to avoid the edge and the ditch. It's the extremes that we have to watch out for. Balance, perspective, and proportion are important to those who study art.
But I want to say this morning that it's also important for those of us who are students of theology and the Bible, because truth that is out of balance is heresy. A right doctrine that is placed in wrong perspective can be misleading. If there is any area of teaching that has its extremes and its edges where a lot of people have gone beyond, it's that area of teaching regarding the thing we call the Christian life.
Some certainly proclaim the gospel of grace, that we are saved by grace alone, but then go beyond that to add lists of their man-made rules and regulations. And we are told by them that if we want to prove ourselves spiritual, we must live according to those lists that they have drawn up for us. That is an extreme position, that is heresy. It's called legalism.
On the other hand, there are those who proclaim the same gospel of grace, that we are saved by grace alone without works, but then they declare that after we're saved, there are no rules, that we can go out and live any way we want to live. They call it liberty. To them, the Christian life has no responsibilities that are integral, no duties, no accountability. And they tell us that if we say otherwise, we're motivating people by guilt.
And I would say to you that that also is an extreme position. What both of these positions fail to grasp, it seems to me, is the balance that we see stated for example in Titus 2 verses 11 and 12, which I will paraphrase, that the grace of God has appeared bringing salvation to all men, and it also instructs us to deny ungodliness and worldly desires and to live sensibly, righteously, and godly in this present age. There is a balance that is there.
The grace of God that cannot be purchased or deserved or earned by anything that we do is our professor, our teacher, and it seeks to instruct us that as those who are saved by grace, there are some standards to life. We are to deny some things and we're to live out other things. I believe that that balance is found in our text today in 1 Thessalonians chapter 4.
The full paragraph that I had hoped we might look at is verses 1 through 12, but as I began preparing this week, I quickly saw that I had overreached myself, and so I have focused on only the first part of our text, which is verses 1 through 8, and it's that part of it that we'll read this morning and we'll continue on next week.
He says, finally then, brethren, we request and exhort you in the Lord Jesus, that as you received from us instruction as to how you ought to walk and please God, just as you actually do walk, that you may excel still more, for you know what commandments we gave you by authority of the Lord Jesus.
For this is the will of God, your sanctification, that is, that you abstain from sexual immorality, that each of you know how to possess his own vessel in sanctification and honor, not in lustful passion like the Gentiles who do not know God, and that no man transgress and defraud his brother in the matter, because the Lord is the avenger of all these things, just as we also told you before and solemnly warned you. For God has not called us for the purpose of impurity, but in sanctification.
Consequently, he who rejects this is not rejecting man, but the God who gives us his Holy Spirit. Notice that the apostle begins by saying that we ought to walk and to live pleasing to God. It's not a suggestion, it's a command. It is an expectation. He says you ought to do this as a result of clear thinking, as a result of logic in your life, in your mind. You ought to live to please God. But he balances that out in verse 2 by saying that we do this by the Lord Jesus.
That's the best understanding, I think, of verse 2. For you know what commandment we gave you by the Lord Jesus. The thought here seems to be not only did Jesus give these words to Paul to write to them, but that Jesus would be in the Thessalonians enabling them to keep these commands. You see, God doesn't say you ought to do this and leave us to our own strength to do it. But he lives within us in the person of the Holy Spirit to enable us to live like he tells us we ought to live.
That is a wonderful thing about the Gospel. We Christians are to live pleasing to God. Our lifestyle choices and patterns ought to be rooted in what delights God. I want to emphasize again, this is not an option for us to consider, it's not somebody's opinion for us to evaluate, but what we're talking about here is the expectation of God. That you and I will be distinct in every respect of our lifestyle from the pagan culture that is around us.
Dr. David Johnson has written, Christianity does not take its standards from society around it, but from the God who separates Christians from that society as a testimony to that society. Well spoken. God has called us out from the world around us to be different. And if we're going to be different, it means that we live pleasing to God, and we ought to do that. But we ask the question, how must I live pleasing to God? What does that mean? How does that flesh out?
Well in our full text, all 12 verses, there are three answers to the question. If we would live pleasing to God in the first place, it means as God knows me, I must live purely. It means also as my brother knows me, I must live lovingly. If the world knows me, I must live honestly. Purely, lovingly, honestly. This morning we're going to focus primarily on verses 1 through 8, and the fact that if I am going to live pleasing to God as he knows me, I must live purely.
To open these verses, I'd like to ask several questions. The first one is, who? Who is it that makes this demand of us that we live purely in an impure world? Is it the preacher who stands at the pulpit and who makes the command? Is it merely a man who lived 2,000 years ago and was called an apostle? Is he the one who makes this demand of us? Is it the one who is discipling me or the Sunday school teacher? Is that who it is?
The answer is no. The one who makes this demand for pure living is God himself. It says in verse 3, this is the will of God, your sanctification. It is specific, it is clear, it is unmistakable. We don't have to pray about it. This is the will of God. This originates with the Lord God himself that we should live holy lives. This is not a man-made obligation. This is not a rule that's been attached by some person. But this is God's expectation of you and of me.
This word sanctification is quite a theological word, isn't it? It means holiness. God's will for you and for me is holiness. But again, that is another big word. It has a lot of ramifications to it. But Paul is not thinking broadly. He mentions the word sanctification and then immediately he brings it right down to the narrow focus that he wants us to consider. He says, here's what I mean. That is that you abstain from sexual immorality.
So he wants us to clearly understand that when he talks about holiness of living being God's will, he is talking primarily in this context at least about our sexuality. He says that we are to conduct ourselves sexually in such a way that we can be called pure. God is specific about this area of life. Why is that? Why is God so demanding regarding sexual purity? One answer to that is because immorality is so destructive. Immorality never builds a person, a family, or a society.
Immorality always tears down, it always destroys. That is true whether one is a Christian or a non-Christian. Immorality is a destroyer. That is why God so focuses on this important theme about sexual purity. Because God does not want our lives to be destroyed. He loves us too much for that. And so let's try to listen today with our defenses down about this subject.
Let's try to hear what God is saying to us with understanding and determine in our hearts to do what God wants us to do because that is our best as well as his. We live in an immoral world and one that is becoming increasingly filthy. We live in an age that is really insensitive to moral decency for the most part. Moral decay is swirling around us and it points up to the imminent collapse of the culture in which we live unless God intervenes.
No culture can continue to exist and to imbibe itself on immorality as ours does. God wants you and me, whether we are grandparents or we are teenagers, God wants us to live separately from the mainstream culture by our distinguishing lifestyle as the children of God by our living purely in an impure world. It's God who establishes this expectation. But what does it entail? What does this mean that we are to live morally pure? Well there are three answers to that question in our text today.
In the first place it means to abstain from immorality, from sexual impurity. To abstain from that. Literally it means to hold yourself away from it. To get even close to it. Not even close enough to shake its hand. Stay away from sexual immorality, he says. God's plan is to make you holy, says the Phillips translation. And that entails first of all a clean cut with sexual immorality.
Now it was important for the Thessalonians to hear this because their whole life had been wrapped up in religious immorality. You see in the temples where they went to worship their gods there was ritualistic prostitution both male and female. Thessalonians was awash with immorality. These people had been saved out of that by God.
Now Paul wants them to know, God wants them to know through Paul, that it is his will that they hold themselves away from what they had been involved in before their salvation. When he says that we are to abstain from sexual immorality, he uses a broad word. It refers to any kind of sexual relationship outside of the bonds of marriage. Adultery, bigamy, homosexuality, sodomy, prostitution, bestiality, premarital and extramarital sex.
God sets them all outside the boundary of what moral purity is. They are all beyond the edge of what God's will for us is. Now why is that? Well it's not merely because those things are dangerous and that kind of living has never been more dangerous than it is today. It is tragic that in our school systems many of our young people are being taught that there is such a thing as safe sex outside of monogamous marriage that is a lie.
I could go into detail on that but I don't choose to because of children here this morning. There is not such a thing as safe sex outside of monogamous marriage, particularly in our world today with the AIDS virus and with the STDs that are running rampant and exploding in the United States today. But that's not the primary reason God says stay away from that. Nor is it primarily because that kind of immorality is indiscreet, although it is.
But the reason that God lays down the line and draws it distinctly and clearly is because that kind of activity described as immorality violates His holy nature and His holy will for all of humanity. That's why God says stay away from it. Because it is a violation of who God is and who He has made us to be. He says abstain, stay completely away from any kind of sexual immorality. If you and I want to live purely in an impure world, here's what God says to do. This is not gray.
There are no shadows here. It's black and white. If we want to live purely in an impure world, it means secondly, and He tells us, verse 4, to possess our own vessels. The word vessel refers to our physical bodies with their appetites and their desires. But understand that the appetites and desires that God has given us in our bodies are not wrong. The appetite for relaxation, the desire for food, the appetite for sexual fulfillment, those are righteous and holy desires that God gives us.
But what He says is that we must possess our vessel with their appetites. That is, we must have self-mastery to control the appetites that are part of our physical being. Because you see, sin that dwells within us seeks to use those appetites for its own expression. It seeks to cause us to fulfill those appetites in a way that does not please God. And so He says, if you want to live pure in the 1990s, you must learn how to have mastery over the appetites of your body.
That stands in contrast to everything we're taught in our pagan culture. We are told that anything goes today. That kind of philosophy is brought right into our living rooms where the television sits. We live in a society where bodies are dishonored, where personal purity is thought nothing of, and where degrading passions are eagerly fulfilled. And all of that said to be in the name of liberty, when in fact it is absolute bondage.
Indecent activities are promoted and encouraged, and all of it flows from the mind, minds that are controlled by sin. If we are going to have mastery over our bodies, how in the world do we do that? For we live in a sexually stimulated culture, where when we drive down the freeway, we watch our televisions, we read a magazine, constantly we are bombarded by sexual stimuli. How can we control our appetites and possess our vessels in a world like this?
I can't give a full answer to that this morning, but I do want to give three answers to that question very quickly. In the first place, we possess our vessels by renewing our minds with the Word of God. Listen with me please to Psalm 119, familiar verses worth looking at again. Psalm 119, verses 9 and 11. How can a young man keep his way pure? That is the question, isn't it? How does a young man on the high school campus today keep himself pure?
How does a single adult keep herself pure with the pressures that are upon her if she wants to have a social life? How does that person in the office keep his or her way pure when there are all kinds of opportunities presenting themselves among the co-workers? How do we keep our way pure? He says, by keeping it according to thy word. There's the answer, the Word of God. He says further in verse 11, thy word I have treasured in my heart that I may not sin against thee.
When I was newly a Christian, someone gave me the sentence that was probably given to you. I wrote it in my Bible like many of you wrote it in your Bible. If you've never written it in your Bible, maybe it's time to do it. It simply says, this book will keep me from sin or what? Sin. Many of you know, sin will keep me from this book. It's not that the Bible is magic. That's not the point. It's not that the Bible is like a rabbit's foot.
If you just go to it and read a verse or two, sin's going to just disappear, no temptation anymore. The point is that the battleground for sin is our minds. That's where it starts. Whether the thought comes to us from the outside, external, through something visual or audio that we have picked up, or it comes internally from our own nature, the flesh that is in us. Wherever it comes from, it begins in the mind. What we do with that thought is the important thing.
It arises there in the first place as merely a temptation, but it's what we do with that that counts. If we continue to have that thought and to embellish it and to enlarge it and let it grow, it will fulfill itself in some way. If on the other hand we attack that tempting thought with the Word of God, it will be removed. If you were told this morning that you had a brain tumor, you would go see a doctor this week to see how fast you could get that thing out of your head, wouldn't you?
Because you know that a brain tumor grows and eventually kills you. A thought toward immorality is like a tumor. If you do not cut that thought out with the Word of God and allow the Word of God to renew your mind, the chances are great that that thought is going to continue to grow until it controls you and fulfills itself in some way. Your Word have I treasured in my heart.
The idea is to receive it not just in the mind, but to take it deeply into the storehouse of the Spirit where we lay it up and we come back to it and we'll meditate upon it so that the Word of God is able to snip out of our thoughts the tumorous temptations that come and it's able to renew that spot in our minds to make us healthy again. You and I can only possess our vessels in this culture if we begin here by daily renewing our minds with the Word of God.
Secondly, by yielding our wills to the Holy Spirit. You see, it begins in the mind, but it quickly transfers to the will part of us. What am I going to do with this? Do I choose to turn it over to God or do I choose to go my own way and have some fun with this thought? So we need our wills to be empowered by the Holy Spirit. Turn please to Romans chapter 8 and verse 13 where we find, I think, a helpful insight.
Backing up to verse 12 he says, so then brethren we are under obligation not to the flesh to live according to the flesh. Now the flesh here is more than our physical bodies of flesh and blood. He's talking about that pattern of thought and activity that is still within us left over from what we were before we were saved. We have a new nature now, but we still have printed upon our minds and our wills that old pattern of the sinful man that we were.
But he says we're no longer under obligation to that pattern like we were before. He says if you're living according to the flesh you must die, but if by the Spirit you are putting to death the deeds of the body, you will live. You and I are not left to put to death our temptations by ourselves. It is by the Spirit that we must will to do this. If by the Spirit, he says, you're putting to death the deeds of the body, you will live.
This ties together, I think, with Galatians chapter 5 where we were told if we walk by the aid of the Holy Spirit we will not fulfill the lusts of the flesh. The Holy Spirit must control our wills. If he doesn't, frankly, a lot of the times we're going to choose to go after sin.
If we would be pure, in this culture we must possess our bodies, and if we would possess our bodies we must renew our minds with the Word, we must yield our wills to the Spirit, and finally we must avoid the situations of temptation. That's why Timothy is told by Paul, flee youthful lusts, get away from them, don't go near them. Chuck Swindoll in writing about this says, there are films, television programs, and magazines that weaken us morally because they beckon us toward an immoral lifestyle.
Certain conversations carried on by certain people have the same detrimental effect. Specific types of parties, places, and seductive pastimes have a lure toward impurity that we should avoid, regardless of the pressures to attend. We are foolish to think we can play around with these things without getting hurt. We must stop tantalizing ourselves with sin. Our abstinence and avoidance will be for our own good and God's splendid glory. How often we put ourselves in the way of temptation.
We know where those places are, we know what those sources are, where temptation easily has come in our lives before, and we walk as close to the edge as possible. That's foolish. If we would have mastery over our bodies we must avoid situations of temptation. That is true young men and young women when you are dating. How do you handle it when you go see a movie where the two of you are sitting there and what you are seeing come off that screen is moral garbage?
What do you do with that in your relationship to one another? Does that present any kind of temptation to you to act out what you have seen? Not me. You are a fool if you think you can't be tempted by that. Why do some of us allow those kind of movies in our homes? Why do we go to certain places and do certain activities when we know when we go there that we are opening ourselves to sexual temptation?
You see if we are serious about living purely it involves having mastery over our bodies and having mastery over our bodies means that we must avoid places and people and situations where temptation is rampant. The kind of message that I have barely started this morning is a heavy message because it can produce all kinds of guilt and shame that people have to deal with.
If it does you need to thank God because you see guilt and shame are God's ways of throwing up red flags in our lives and saying you are going in the wrong direction. Thank God for guilt. Thank God for shame that you still can be ashamed. There are some people who have gotten beyond that point. When you see those red flags of God in your life it means turn around and get back the other direction. You are too close to the edge. It means you are in danger.
It is time to repent before God and confess your sin and to take steps to correct where you have gotten off the path. I am thankful that the God who holds up this standard of moral purity is a God who also offers forgiveness for those who have failed and who are repentant and acknowledge their failure. I am thankful that this God cannot only forgive but he can deliver people from bondage of uncleanness and patterns of shame in their lives. He can do that through the power of Jesus Christ.
It is useless for us to try to clean up ourselves. We cannot do it, but he can do it if we give ourselves to him. That is my plea this morning. God says we ought to live to please him. To do that we must live purely. Wherein we have been impure in an impure world, may God today call us back to his way, the way of holiness that we might walk in it. Let's pray.
With our heads bowed and as God alone knows our hearts and searches us, right where you are seated, what does your response need to be today, right now, to spare you any more damage? Will you make confession to the Lord and repent if that needs to be done? Will you ask him to empower your will? Will you commit yourself to go to his word daily to renew your mind? Do you promise to treasure it in your heart?
Lord I pray that we will not only be hearers but doers of the word and that each of us will respond and understand how you want us to live pleasing to you and follow through and act that out by the power of your spirit in our lives. We acknowledge before you the battle is tough in this world. We acknowledge before you that we have flesh that desires to fulfill itself and its lusts. We thank you that you have an answer for us through your grace that we might live above that.
May that be our experience this week. For Jesus' sake, Amen. Would you stand with me please? I recognize that this kind of a message can cause some people to almost be in despair because of battles that they have been struggling with sometimes for years. I want you to know that my office is open to you, our other pastors are available to you and if we have touched on an area of life this morning where you are having deep problems, please come.
Let us pray with you and point you in a direction that will help bring health and wholeness and holiness to your life. For that's what God wants and God knows that's for our best as well as for His glory. We'll continue on next week. God bless you. Be dismissed.