First Thessalonians 4:3b-8 The worthy walk, class 2
1 Thessalonians 4:3b-8 · Andrew Molloy · May 2, 2021
Thessalonians, No. 14
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/49261922402716

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Okay here we are in 1 Thessalonians chapter 4 verse 3 and I'm taking it from 3b technically through verse 8 because Roy left us off right in 3 the first part of 3, 3a is what he said so I'm taking it from 3b and he called it last week the worthy walk which I think Macaulay gave it that title. Yeah, The Worthy Walk.

And I'm calling it part two, because he started it. But we're still on this part one you see below of three kind of walks here for sexual purity is what this is. Next week we look at our walk or our lifestyle and brotherly love. and then third, orderly living. I think that's all next week. I think those are conjoined next week through verse 12, I believe. So we're basically in a section from verse 1 through 12 of chapter 4. Here's our passage for today in blue, but I'll read from Roy's passions last week as well, from verse 1 in chapter 4.

Finally then, we request and exhort you in the Lord Jesus, that as you receive from us instruction as how you ought to walk and please God, just as you actually do walk, that you excel still more. For you know what commandments we gave you by the authority of the Lord Jesus. And here's our new passage, starting at 3.

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 in all these things. just as we told you before and solemnly warned you. For God has not called us for the purpose of impurity, but in sanctification. So, he who rejects this is not rejecting man, but the God who gives his Holy Spirit to you.

So there's the eight verses that kind of encapsulates this morning's lesson. And I'll start here at verse one again, Finally then, brethren, we request and exhort you in the Lord Jesus that as you receive from us instruction as how you ought to walk and please God, just as you actually do walk, that you excel all the more. for you know what commandments we gave you by the authority of the Lord Jesus verses 1 and 2. And I'll stop there and I'll just do a brief review from last week. I listened to Roy's podcast and these are some of the things he told us from last week.

Verse 1 is a command in grace for our general walk that is pleasing to God. And Paul says, we are requesting, we are even urging and pleading with you. And one commentator said, we are pleading on bended knee that you must please God. And Roy had this neat way of saying that this brings God pleasure. And I never saw it that way or read it like that, but that is true.

When we walk in God's light and according to His ways, we bring pleasure to God, and that's a good way to state it. If we are empowered by the Holy Spirit and we are conformed to the image of Christ, that brings pleasure to God. The Thessalonians were doing well, they were walking pleasingly to God, but there was always room for more, more in it, more excelling walk, better and better. as they grew in grace and the knowledge of the Lord Jesus, right? As it always is in our Christian life.

And note from the verses last week that it wasn't, and Paul says this very strongly, it's just not Paul, Silas, and Timothy making this command or this request, this pleading, but he says it directly comes from the Lord Jesus Christ. and by His authority.

So they got it by revelation from Christ Himself that this is the way they ought to walk. And the word up there, ought to walk, is actually must. You must walk this way. The same word that Jesus used to Nicodemus, you must be born again, is the word must. and let's see I have Roy's literal translation from last week on his verses which I find really helpful because it really kind of brings it out the meaning so he says in verse chapter 4 verse 1 in addition therefore brethren we are requesting you indeed we are urging with you with the Lord Jesus with the Lord Jesus that just as you received from us the way you must be walking, indeed be giving pleasure to God, just as indeed you were walking, that you may be excelling all the more, or even more. For you have come to know what instructions we gave you on behalf of the Lord Jesus, for this being the will of God, the sanctification of you. That is that you keep away from sexual immorality.

And that B section there of 3 is where I start here. So let's look at verse 3 here in chapter 4 and the will of God. So this is the will of God. And what is the will of God? Well defined, it's... and my definition is in red there. define it as, and this is quick and off the top of my head, but it's defined as the things which God determines to do, the things which God determines to have done by others, and this settled thought on the way things are to go, or the way things ought to go. And then if you look at the Strong's definition, it's very similar, it's his desires and wishes, his inclination, God's choice in things, His pleasure, and there's the word pleasure there. So that's how we'll define the will of God for this morning, for this passage. How do we know that this abstaining from sexual immorality is the will of God, besides what Paul tells us? Let's say the Thessalonians didn't really believe Paul, hypothetically, let's say, and they wanted to verify. by scripture.

Well, they'd go back to the Old Testament, God's word spoken by his own mouth, and they would see that in Genesis 2 through 24, and in the creation of Eve, specifically, and the first marriage of Adam and Eve. And when Christ, point two here, Christ himself, in Matthew 19, 4 through 6, A man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife in marriage. And in the next point, which should be point three, I think, but I have it mislabeled, we see God's will expressing itself in Leviticus 18 and the law. Leviticus 18 is all the sexual purity laws. you know, don't have relations with your sister, your sister-in-law, your mother-in-law, and it goes through who your sexual partners are, and that is your wife, but no one else. And point three here, we see that, and this I never thought about, but if you look at point three, we see that sexual union, meant marriage.

Or, one guy put it, I don't know his name, but he said that sex equaled marriage, sex equals marriage in the Old Testament back then, because when Adam and Eve were created, they didn't really get married, they just became one flesh, right? They just consummated their marriage and there wasn't this ceremony that we have today.

Or look at Isaac and Rebekah. Abraham's servant goes off and picks out Rebekah and convinces Rebekah, will you come back with me, my master's son? I got this from the Lord and she said, yeah, I'll go live with you and I'll go back to your land. And so she went back there and she went back with Abraham's servant and then Isaac and you see the scripture there that then Isaac brought her into his mother Sarah's tent and he took Rebecca and she became his wife and he loved her thus Isaac was comforted after his mother's death and that's Genesis 24. So you see that the fact that in Jesus's time they would have a marriage but back before that It was, you know, just a father would give his daughter to a fellow and they were married. And that's God's will, that union between one man, one woman.

Finally, I have this moral will of God that I found in 1 Corinthians 6. and speaking from Paul himself, do you know that your bodies are members of Christ? Since I then take away, shall I then take away the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? May it never be. Or do you not know that the one who joins himself to a prostitute is one body with her?

For he says the two shall become one flesh. So that's God's moral will in sexual purity and marriage. So we looked at the will of God, now let's look at what we mean by sanctification here. This is the will of God, your sanctification. Sanctification is the Greek word hagiasmos, from hagiopso, and we always at Holly Hills just shorten it to say, it means to be set apart. and you could go on and it means to consecrate or dedicate something separate one profane thing to another thing or separate profane things from highly venerated things and it could be anything, it could be people, it could be vessels A lot of vessels are sanctified, and vessels can just mean utensils really, household utensils. So man can sanctify, God can sanctify, Christ sanctifies, the Holy Spirit sanctifies, and that's just, they set apart. We know this from several Sundays over the years at Holly Hills, and that is sanctification. Sanctification comes in three aspects, right? First is the positional aspect of sanctification, and that happened in the past when we were set apart by God in Christ as an operation of the Holy Spirit in the spiritual baptism of the new birth.

Paul says in 1st Corinthians, you are sanctified in Christ Jesus. Saints, I call them. In chapter 1 of verse 2 of 1st Corinthians. And I forgot, but that word saints is haggios. So that word saints is the same word as sanctified. Same word as haggiosmos and haggioso. and we are just sanctified ones, we are saints. The set apart ones, right? Yeah, the set apart ones. The second part of sanctification is in the present or experientially we are progressively being set apart in our growth in holiness of life as a function of knowing and growing in grace.

But more importantly, as we get to know the Lord Himself, by 2 Corinthians 3.18, as we behold His glory, we are transformed into His character. And I have several verses there that reference that.

1 Peter 3.15, it says, sanctify yourselves. So we can sanctify ourselves in our present bodies, in our walk. And then at the end I quote the verse we have today from up top, verse 3 of chapter 4 Thessalonians.

This is our sanctification and how we get there is that we, and we'll look at this later, we abstain from sexual immorality. Then finally there's the future and ultimate sanctification. when we're raptured and we get new bodies and we're permanently in the glorious state and we're in the presence of Christ with transformed bodies and we no longer have sin nature and we will be like Him and fully conform to His image holy and blameless before Him and that will be brought out in the next couple weeks here when we get to chapter 5 of 1 Thessalonians verses 22 and 23. So you guys know the answer to this but we are... what phase are we in? We're talking about the second phase this morning here in verse 3 and 4 of sanctification, the present or the experiential sanctification. How do we get to sanctification?

I mentioned this earlier, it's by abstinence, right? It's something we do, it's apeko, and it's a very strong word, which is meant to keep on abstaining. And the definition of to abstain is to hold back from, hold off, keep away from. It's in the middle voice, which means we ourselves are doing it, it involves us, and we do it to our own benefit. each one of us and that's what the middle voice kind of brings out. And I kept when I was earlier this week when I was at this verse, I could not get a song out of my head that illustrates this apeko or abstaining very well. And it works in with our lesson today about sexual immorality.

And it's um... I don't know, I can't remember. It's um... I can't remember it. Okay. It's actually, it's all on... No, it's um... Oh, it's uh... Keep away from Maran Ransu, right? Okay. Keep away from Maran Ransu. Yes. That's Kian. So, that's exactly what he's saying.

He's saying abstain from run-around soup, hold back from, keep away from. Well, Andrew, isn't it interesting that our society has this kind of all flipped around because, you know, it's sad to see that many young people decide that they'll live together before they get married. So they flipped it around, we'll try out marriage, quote-unquote, and then they, but it's all backwards, you know, and it's, you know, it's very, very sad to see that. permeate our society. And unbelievers too, unfortunately.

Yeah, yeah. And one other pastor was mentioning back in the 50s, there was a song called Wake Up Little Susie, right? Yeah. So that is And that's how the morals or the mores have changed. That song is about, hey, we were out on a date looking at the stars, and we fell asleep. And we just fell dead asleep. We woke up. It was morning, and oh, we've got to go back now. But we didn't do anything.

How are we going to tell everybody? So now, it's completely, it's, yeah, I can't even tell you. Yeah, just in the recent news, there's there's a song basically is pornographic by this Cardi B. It's just that the world is much changed is the point of this I guess. Right? Yeah.

So the possession of our own vessel in verse 4 that each of you know how to possess his own vessel in sanctification and honor. The Greek word for vessel is kiosks, skews, and it just to mean household utensils, everyday implements. Fishing and sailing gear, maybe fishing tackle. They used it a lot for seafaring things. Ships packed with goods for market. And metaphorically, of course, it's a man who is a chosen instrument, a man of quality, or a woman of quality, a chosen instrument.

There's one challenge in this verse 4 is how to take this verse. The Greeks metaphorically meant, when they used theos, they meant the body, your own body. But the Hebrews back in times past, this word kele, they would refer to a Thessal as one's spouse, one's own spouse. So what does Paul mean here? Is he talking to Thessalonians as Greeks or as Jewish? And Peter uses the word Thessal And you see it there, giving honor unto the wife, the weaker vessel. So he uses it the Hebrew way there, of course, because I think his audience was mainly Jewish. So is it our body, or is it our spouse we are to possess in sanctification and honor?

And I relied a lot on this Jay Hampton Keithley this week. He gives us the answer that I'm going with. This is my answer and I'm sticking to it. Okay. It's the spouse, or your own husband, or your own wife. And his reason is, the word possess is kataman, was frequently used of courtship and contracting in a marriage, i.e. acquiring a wife. Same word used when Boaz bought you know, the estate of Naomi, right? And they said, okay, I'm going to give up my right of first refusal. I forget what that guy's name was. So you can acquire the estate. So he does, but he said, when you acquire the estate, you get this Ruth, the Moabites. Ruth from Moab comes with, and that is the word ketomai. this word, possess.

So in the New Testament, possess is used as you think it is used. It's to acquire or purchase for oneself, goods and services and things like that. But it's never used in the sense of gaining control or mastery over something. And in verse 4, there's that thought of gaining control or mastery over your own body in sanctification. So that's why Keithley says he thinks it's as possessing your own husband or wife in sanctification and honor. Now Merriman says the opposite. He says he thinks it's your own body. So both are correct. So you can't go wrong in And if you think about both ways, you really can't go wrong. So Roy, did you have a comment?

Yeah, one of the things that we're maybe steering on is ourselves being involved here in possessing our own and the focus then goes on us whereas it is God's purpose to reveal His will of his purposes for what is the holy life, the set-apart unto Him life. And it is a great area that that is to be true, including the relationship to our own bodies, the relationship to our wife, the relationship to our brother and sister in Christ, the relationship to the world around our brother and sister in Christ.

In all of those relationships, God wants us to think of it like He thinks of it. That's what sanctification is, to reveal His glory, His will. But we lose that focus if we put it on controlling ourselves, or controlling, I guess in this sense, our wives. That's wrong, because that puts the focus on us. That's a perspective I have here. It is God's will that maybe needs to be more in our focus.

What's His will? Yeah, and Roy, that's one of the challenges I have in these verses because I'm down in the minute granular level here in like verse 4 and I'm defining these words and I'm saying His own vessel and so you're down at that level But I think when I wrap this up, I'm going back up to your level of the overall, what is God's will? So I'll get back to that. Right now, yeah, I'm in the word-by-word kind of thing here.

But that's a good point. So we looked at what sanctification means. Honor is to esteem or value your spouse or your body, let's say, as precious. And I like this summary, point G here, so then, and it does sound, I agree with you, it does sound that we're possessing our wife or husband in it. But I just got to kind of work these things out here. So in point G here, possessing your spouse in the sphere or atmosphere of respect for marriage as a special and holy creation of God. and as an institution set up by Him is the force of what set apart and honor me in verse 4 there.

On to verse 5, not in lustful passion like the Gentiles who do not know God. And let's look at that phrase, not in lustful passion, and that's pathos is passionate and it refers to one's suffering or the experiences one has in suffering like Christ and that's why we call it the path or some people call it the passion of Christ or in this case sexual passion and lust is a strong desire, a longing and I like Merriman's definition an ungovernable desire is what he would describe as lustful passion. So do not possess your body or your spouse in lustful passion. But passionate desire is good in Song of Solomon as long as it's within the marriage context.

Point B I make here. But Outside of marriage, it's highly destructive, incredibly destructive, and it's incendiary in mind, soul, and spirit. In your mind, soul, and spirit's stability and harmony when it's outside of God's boundaries. In other words, it just... God's given our sex life... so powerful it goes right through your body to your soul and might even involve the spirit.

It really goes down there to your whole being is the point I'm making. So not like the Gentiles, let's look at how the Gentiles would have this lustful passion. And I'll just read this, I like this, it's very gives it really well here. Gentiles had come out of gross idolatry, which have little or no restraint on their moral character, especially in the matter of sex. In fact, prostitution was a very prominent part of their religious life, since the worship of the so-called gods involved the use of temple prostitutes, and we know that from our study in the first Corinthians too. The moral climate in the Roman Empire was morally decadent, and morality was the way of life, and thanks to slavery, people had the leisure time to indulge in the latest pleasures. The Christian message of holy living was new to that culture, and it was not easy for these young believers to fight the temptations around them, especially in the view of the moral climate that has developed in Rome, he's talking about Rome in the last 40 years, Willem Barclay has a significant comment about the conditions of Rome, in which he says, in Rome, for the first 500 years, 520 years of the Republic, there had not been one single divorce, but now under the Empire, as it had been put, divorce was now a matter of caprice.

As Seneca said, women were married to be divorced and divorced to be married. In Rome, the years were identified by the names of the consuls. But it was said that the fashionable ladies of the time identified the years by the names of their husbands. Juvenal quotes an instance of a woman who had eight husbands in five years. Morality was dead. And that's nothing when you look at Hollywood. How many wives and husbands do those Hollywood actors take? They seem to be always marrying and divorcing.

And then lastly, this quote from Demosthenes. He wrote, we keep prostitutes for pleasure. We keep mistresses for the day, for the day-to-day needs of the body. We keep wives for the beginning of children. and for the faithful guardianship of our homes. So long as a man supported his wife and family, there is no shame whatsoever in extramarital relationships.

So that's the conditions and that's how the Gentiles did it who did not know God. So I just thought that that was really helpful to put this in context. Now let's look at this this phrase that no man transgress and defraud his brother in the matter. Transgress is huperbino or that's to go beyond or to overreach or to transgress, overstep the proper limits. Defraud is pleonecteo, to gain an advantage or greater share over another person so that we are not to hyper-huperbano or play a mecteo over our brother in this matter brother is a Christian brother and it can be a Christian male but in this verse it could be just brothers and sisters in Christ and you could even take it to mean society as a whole as strangers in the Thessalonian temples because if you were going there and doing this temple prostitute stuff you were defrauding people, right? And overstepping moral boundaries. One who fornicates or sins against his or her own body and against the Lord. That's from 1 Corinthians 6, 13-16.

And there is always a victim. And this is key. There's always a victim or several victims in what was going on back then and what goes on now in our society. It is a sin against someone else's body too. It's easy to think of who the victims are when you go beyond and defraud another person in these matters. There's, you know, in this day and age, there's children and things like they're wrapped up in this, this whole trafficking of children, they're victims. And this is all part of this, in this day and age. The reason not to defraud, the verse gives, and that is the Lord avenges the wrong done on behalf of victims. And God will punish. And how does he punish? He allows bad things to happen. He intends bad consequences.

In Isaiah 45 he said, I am the one forming light and creating darkness. Causing well-being and creating calamity. and specifically when, you know, things go wrong. I like the second law of thermodynamics and that says that things start out in an ordered state and then eventually they dissipate into chaos and disorder, right? And it's talking about energy but it can also be taken to mean a lot of things.

I thought about this film Fatal Attraction, right, where Michael Douglas has an affair against his wife with Glenn Close. And Glenn Close starts just to call him on the phone all hours of the night and then show up and confront him. And it's just a really good film of what can happen in extramarital relations or sexual immorality and it ends up with, unfortunately, Glenn Close getting shot. She's a victim too, right? She's, he, Michael Douglas transgressed and defrauded his brother in this matter. And, you know, so you never know all the chaos that's going to happen when you participate in these things.

So wrapping this up, sanctification bookends this passage. In verse 3 Paul tells us that the will of God is our sanctification, we looked at that. The Thessalonians and all believers are to abstain from fornication here in verse 7 for a greater reason. we are called to sanctification. And here we're coming back to the higher level of things that Roy was at. Calling is kaleo.

Same word is used in 1 Timothy 2.12 and Romans 8.30. We're called to be... God calls us.

And Romans 8.30, you see the verse there, in whom he predestined, he also called. Verse 8, our last verse for this morning, as I'll wrap things up here, is a strong, coercive language Paul gives to those rejecting this command to abstain from sexual immorality. And that strong and coercive is what Keithley and Comfortable, quoting Wanamaker, said.

And why is that? Was it that Paul was Was he addressing a specific problem in the Thessalonian church? Were these things going on? Maybe not. They were going on in Corinthians. They were really a church, a very carnal church over in Corinth. But Thessalonica, I don't know if he was addressing a problem there.

Merriman And I agree with Merriman, it seems that he was just doing preventative maintenance here for these Datholonians, and giving it in the strongest terms to make sure they knew what he was teaching them. But the final phrase here is, God gives his Holy Spirit to you, is the key phrase of the whole command. And that is, you know what, and that's where we're getting to where Roy was going with this. And I'll go quickly here because now I'm running out of time. Oh, is the command impossibly high for the Thessalonians, given where they live and their Greek culture? And I would venture yes.

However, there was a Holy Spirit given. which is the one person who can bring in something so foreign to them, and that is holiness, fidelity, honor, monogamy, sanctity, and give them the power to do it, right? And that's specifically, I think, why Paul mentions that the Holy Spirit comes into play here. The deeds of the flesh are evident in morality, impurity, sensuality, that's from Galatians 5, but the fruit of the Spirit is love, goodness, faithfulness, And to keep away from immorality, you get another fruit of the Spirit, and that's self-control. And further, those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh with his passions, and that's what we've been talking about all morning, and its desires.

Galatians 5.23 So yeah, it's what... and I want to wrap up with this and say that This is how we live the Christian life. We have a new life. We're not from the old root, we have a new root in Christ, and as we abide in Him, His desires become our desires. God's things become our things and we live according to what he wills. And it's a life, it's not law, is it? And I put this little phrase finally from my little 1970s teaching guide. The writer says, the believer is under authority, under law, under responsibility, under rules and regulations. Like a slave, he comes and goes at the bidding of his master. So, would you say that commentator is right or wrong?

Any thoughts on that? Your focus is wrong. Yeah, right. I think it's incredibly legal, right? It's a legal standpoint. And then I figured out that this little booklet I think is from the Reformed Theology kind of division. So, yeah, it's the Holy Spirit and it's abiding in Christ. It's Christ's life is to be lived out through us. Yeah. If we go by the rules and regulations, we're going to fail. Yeah.

And you could see, though, when I was in the... when you're in the verses reading it, you've got to sort of get in there with it. And it seems like you're being legal, but overall, you... I don't know if I'm expressing that well, but it was... I needed to go down into me seeming like I was being legal. But I want to come out. So there you go. No, that's good. That's good, Andrew. That's very good. But it was a lot. There's a lot of verses there. Yeah, there are. And a serious subject. Yeah.

Also, Andrew, there's another aspect of when a believer does fall. Let's see, a believer does fall into temptation. You know, there's that path where a believer does succumb to things like that, you know, and God is gracious and there's a way, you know, that he can return to him by confessing his sin, by, you know, doing what's right. So, in our society, unfortunately, there are, you know, people that have gone, believers that have gone the wrong path, but God isn't finished with them.

He has plans and purposes for all his children. That's another whole story, another whole set of teaching and stuff like that. Yeah. Could I say something here, guys? Yeah. Briefly, in a summary way, it's God's will to reveal His glory of Himself through what He has created. Us. And it is His work to do that.

If we really believe that, we're not in what it says here in verse, I guess it's verse 8, he therefore that despises despises not man but God that's where these verses are going and concluding and it doesn't end there that God has given unto us his Holy Spirit he is the one who takes the things of God and gives them unto us do we really believe that? is he doing it? Well Roy we're going to be talking about the spiritual gifts here coming up shortly so do we believe that he really, his Holy Spirit really gifts us and we have a job to do for him and so anyway that's uh I think we're gonna have to wrap it up here unfortunately. Musicians are coming to practice