Today's text is 1 Thessalonians 4:1-8. As we've seen previously, the primary purpose of this letter is to disciple the young church at Thessalonica. In the first 3 chapters Paul is thanking God for and commending them. In chapter 4, he switches to exhortation mode. Here are the verses, from The Message.
1-3 One final word, friends. We ask you—urge is more like it—that you keep on doing what we told you to do to please God, not in a dogged religious plod, but in a living, spirited dance. You know the guidelines we laid out for you from the Master Jesus. God wants you to live a pure life.
Keep yourselves from sexual promiscuity.
4-5 Learn to appreciate and give dignity to your body, not abusing it, as is so common among those who know nothing of God.
6-7 Don’t run roughshod over the concerns of your brothers and sisters. Their concerns are God’s concerns, and he will take care of them. We’ve warned you about this before. God hasn’t invited us into a disorderly, unkempt life but into something holy and beautiful—as beautiful on the inside as the outside.
8 If you disregard this advice, you’re not offending your neighbors; you’re rejecting God, who is making you a gift of his Holy Spirit.
I have to laugh at Paul's "one final word"; he's like the preacher who announces his final point, but that final point drags on for 30 minutes! No one could accuse Paul of being a man of few words! There are 5 chapters in 1 Thessalonians...
In verses 1-3, Paul exhorts the believers to please God by living pure lives, as opposed to disorderly, unkept lives spent serving our flesh. Here Paul is acknowledging the very real battle of our "flesh", our sinful humanity that fights against the Holy Spirit God has given to those who name His Son as their Savior.
Inside our souls resides the most beautiful gift ever given, God Himself; His Holy Spirit lives inside of us. Our bodies are His dwelling place, and it is for this reason that we are urged by the apostle and by the Spirit to keep His home, His "temple" pure. We are to treat our bodies with dignity.
The practical application that Paul makes here involves sexual promiscuity/immorality. Various ones of The Bride/The Body are tempted in this area to varying degrees, often depending on their lives before they came to know the Savior. Some are tempted to pollute their souls with pornography. Others are tempted to engage in heterosexual adultery. Still others are tempted to sin with members of their same sex, or with children or with animals. The depravity of man runs deep, and we are at the nexus of the Cosmic Battleground. Our adversary, Satan, hates us and all that represent. He is hell-bent on our destruction. Nothing degrades and destroys the relationship with Christ more than sexual sin, which is why Paul mentions it here specifically. Paul mentions that this particular sin also destroys others, not just the person initiating it with someone else. Sin IS sin, but this is a deep one. In many people's lives, it is an addiction which can only be broken through a combination of addiction counseling, the power of the Holy Spirit and many prayers.
Paul points out that the Thessalonians were surrounded by people who believed free sexual behavior to be nothing out of the ordinary. The pagan peoples surrounding the young churches even incorporated deviant sexual practices in their "worship" services. So, those Christians ran very much "against the grain" in their desire to please God with their bodies. The same is true today. At times, even loved ones work against what Christ is trying to do in our lives. This is the most difficult to bear.
The world looks at Christians who fight to live lives of purity and say, "What drudgery! What a dogged, religious plod!" But, this is a conclusion drawn from spiritual ignorance. What the Holman Christian Standard Bible calls "sanctification" the Message version calls "a living, spirited dance".
Yes, it is extremely difficult to resist the flesh, whether in sexual behaviors or other types of sin. And, if this is not yours, your turn is coming! Paul is an "equal opportunity offender"! Satan has been granted the ability to make the inferior look more appealing than the superior choice. That's why it is called, 'temptation". If the wrong choice did not look so good, we would not choose it! But, the joys of obedience and yielding to Christ, our Bridegroom, are immeasurable and eternal.
The process of sanctification is to prayerfully surrender our will, our control to the Holy Spirit, especially in times of great temptation. We must call out to Him and acknowledge our helplessness against our areas of weaknesses. His grace can then fill us with the strength to resist the Devil's traps.
If you find yourself enmeshed in addiction, get some professional Christian help. There is no shame in getting brothers and sisters in the faith to help you! That type of help falls under the category of mentoring/discipling we discussed yesterday, only in a very specialized way.
Do you realize how God sees you, Beloved? If you belong to His Son, God the Father sees You as beautiful, inside and out! Yes, He hates all sin. But, your sins are forgiven; they are "under Christ's blood", covered, forever. Confess them, and receive God's peace. Another powerful tool of the Enemy is to make us believe that we are defeated by our besetting sins. The Enemy torments us with our failures; he wants us to just give up and perpetually give in.
"Now Satan is a liar, and he wants to make us think that we are paupers, when he knows himself we're Children of the King!" (from "Praise the Lord", by The Imperials)
Resist! Every failure is another opportunity to once again seek success and victory. Don't.give.up. Victory is utterly worth the sacrifice.
Dear Lord, I look forward to the day when all sin is banished because some days I just get weary from the fight. I know that I'm not alone in this. Strengthen us, Holy Spirit, to go against the grain of the world and to live lives of joy, to embrace the "living, spirited dance". Help us to please You by consistently accepting Your Spirit's invitation to holiness and true beauty of the soul. In Jesus' name, amen.
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