1 Thessalonians 1 - Faith, Hope, and Love in Action
Tom Shrader explores Paul's letter to the young Thessalonian church, highlighting the three essential marks of genuine Christian conversion: work of faith, labor of love, and steadfastness of hope. He emphasizes how these characteristics should be evident in every believer's life as outward expressions of inward transformation. Shrader connects these marks to the doctrine of election, showing how God's choice produces assurance, holiness, humility, and witness in believers' lives.
“Every Christian, without exception, is a believer, a lover, and a hoper.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: 1 Thessalonians
Recorded: November 06, 2011
Duration: 48 min
Themes: faith, hope, love, conversion, transformation, election, assurance, witness, new believer, questioning salvation, young christian, church member, seeking assurance, new to church, spiritual growth, christian maturity
Scripture: 1 Thessalonians 1:1-10, Acts 17:1-6, 2 Corinthians 10:10, Romans 5:1, Ephesians 1:15-18, 1 John 5:21, Matthew 6:24, 2 Timothy 4:6-8, John 3:8
Theological Themes: sanctification, election, conversion, ecclesiology, church life, spiritual transformation, assurance of salvation, biblical authority
Full Transcript
If you need a Bible, raise your hand. The guys will bring you a Bible. Page 640 in the Bible we give you. We have a study guide that on the very front page will take you through the schedule. This is the series that will take us to Christmas. You can see we've called this In Light of His Coming, so it's the idea of not just His coming this time, but Advent as well, and how should we live in the light of His coming. It should be a great time for us to work our way through these weeks.
Last week, Tim began the study in 1 Thessalonians. That's what we're looking at. 1 Thessalonians chapter one today. He began the study by doing a biographical sketch of the Apostle Paul. That came out of a lot of discussions. Here's what we're finding as we sit and talk about the churches, all of them, but even at Gilbert as well: we're finding so many people who are brand new to church. When we talk about Paul, most of you go, "Yeah," and you've got a whole biographical sketch that you can kind of click off. But a lot of people don't. So we felt it was important to take last week and essentially focus on Paul and who he was.
This week, we're looking at all of chapter one. This is kind of cool: I haven't found Susan's first Bible yet, so we'll find that as we're going through stuff. But in her very first Bible, where it says 1 Thessalonians, it says, "Tommy teaches for the first time." The first time I ever taught a lesson was in Les Taylor's Sunday school class, and it was on 1 Thessalonians. Les was going to be gone, and he asked me if I would teach, and it was just a great time. I have an affinity for this chapter for those reasons, but I love the way that the chapter just tees up what we should be looking at in terms of a normal Christian life.
The Structure of Ancient Letters
Paul follows a pattern that you would see in ancient letters. They would identify their sender, identify the recipients, and then oftentimes there would be a well-wish or something, a thanksgiving or something. All of those are present here.
It's Paul and Silas and Timothy. That's who's sending it. Paul's really the author here. Silas and Timothy are just part of his team, so they're not co-authors. He's kind of greeting them on their behalf. "To the church of the Thessalonians that are in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, grace to you and peace." He's writing to this church.
The Founding of the Thessalonian Church
We know a little bit about Thessalonica and a little bit about this church. If you turn to the left, to the book of Acts, page 591 if you have one of our Bibles, Acts chapter 17, we'll see how this church got started. Paul is in his second missionary journey, and they are making several stops. They arrive at Thessalonica.
Paul does there what is his pattern. We know in Thessalonica, there was a large enough Jewish population to have a synagogue. Paul goes to the synagogue. That's what he'd do. Then once he's there, it's very predictable what he's going to do.
Paul goes to the synagogue, and according to his customs, this is what he did typically. He went to them for three Sabbaths, so he's there about three weeks, and he reasons with them from the scriptures. He's explaining and giving evidence that the Christ had to suffer and rise again from the dead, saying, "This Jesus whom I'm proclaiming to you is the Christ."
Paul's Different Approaches to Different Audiences
There's a distinctively different pattern that Paul uses when you get to Acts chapter 17, same chapter, but verse 16. There Paul goes to Athens, he's wandering around the city, he's making notes, and then when he speaks to them, he's going to talk to them about Jesus, but he's going to do it in a context. He doesn't use scripture, because that wouldn't mean anything to them because they didn't believe in scripture. He uses their culture, he uses the observation that there in Athens, you have altars to all these different gods, including to an unknown God. Here's what he does there: he says, "I'm here today to speak to you about that unknown God."
To the Jews, he reasons here from the scriptures, that this is the evidence that Jesus is the Christ, that is, He's the Messiah. He goes back through all those Old Testament prophecies, all that speaking about the coming Messiah, and that the Messiah would suffer, and the Messiah would die, and yet that Messiah would rise again. He goes through all of those, and he takes for the Jews now, "These are the scriptures, you believe in them, they now point us to Christ." That's his reasoning.
Opposition and Success in Thessalonica
What happens is what happens often. Verse four: "Some of them are persuaded, and they join Paul and Silas, along with a large number of the God-fearing Greeks and a number of the leading women." But the Jews, so that's typically the Jewish leaders, become jealous. Taking along some wicked men from the marketplace, they form a mob, and set the city in an uproar, and attack the house of Jason, so that's where they thought Paul and Silas would be, and they're seeking to bring them out.
When they didn't find him, they began to drag Jason out, and some of the brethren before the city authorities, and they're shouting. Here's their declaration, Acts chapter 17, verse six: "These men have upset the world, and they've come here also." Some of the paraphrases will say this: "These men have turned the world upside down, and now they're here."
Turning the World Right Side Up
This is really important. Paul and Silas and Timothy, and the teaching that they were doing, was not turning the world upside down, but turning the world right side up. We looked at this when we studied those 13 weeks on doctrine. God creates, God empowers man, man comes into the world, man's in paradise, he sins, and plunges everything into ruin. When Adam sinned, he took God's system, and turned everything upside down. When I come to Christ in repentance
Years ago, Tony Campolo wrote a book called *Who Switched the Price Tags?* In this book, Campolo talked about when he was a kid. He said we would go into a drugstore, and if there was a fountain pen that was a dollar, and a radio that was five dollars, and we wanted to buy the radio, but we only had a dollar, we'd switch the price tags. We would go and buy the radio for a buck. He said what happened to me is when I got older, and I looked around at the world, it seemed like somebody had switched all the price tags in the world. What God said was valuable and important was not valued by the world, and what the world said was really important didn't seem to be equally important in the eyes of God.
That's exactly what Paul and Silas are doing with this message. As they're encountering the culture, it's not just new to us here in 2011. They're encountering all the cultures since Adam turned everything upside down. Now all of a sudden when I come to Christ, there's a reevaluation. My allegiance changes. My perspective changes. So I see things differently.
The City of Thessalonica
Thessalonica is a city that's a natural harbor. It was founded in the fourth century BC. It's a strategic position on the main route between Rome and the east. Thessalonica is the capital of Macedonia, the province. One author suggests that it "narrowly escaped being made the capital of the world." Today it would be the second most important city in Greece.
When Paul comes, I think this is important to note. We think of Paul, and we think of this powerful figure, but Paul speaks autobiographically in 2 Corinthians chapter 10, verse 10. He says this: "His letters are weighty and strong, but his personal appearance is unimpressive, and his speech contemptible." So in comes Paul, probably with some level, if they'd heard about him, a little certain level of disappointment. He comes, and he begins to speak, and he begins to live with these people, and minister to these people, and something important happens. God moves in this city, in this church.
William Barclay, in his commentary, writes this: "It's impossible to overstress the importance of the arrival of Christianity in Thessalonica. If Christianity was settled there, it was bound to spread east until all Asia was conquered, and west until it stormed even the city of Rome. The coming of Christianity to Thessalonica was crucial in the making of it into a world religion." God is now using His system to spread the gospel.
A Young Church with Mature Faith
Paul writes to this church, and get this, keep this in your mind, you've got to keep this fresh in front of you. These people have probably only been believers for a few months. It's not like some of you who have been believers for decades. This church has been here for 20 years now. That's not the case here. So when you read about this church at Thessalonica, it's impressive, it's really impressive when you understand that it's a church that's just three or four months old.
So he says at the end of verse one, "Grace to you and peace." That becomes the basis for everything that would make us a Christian. Always you will see those two ideas in that order. I have grace with God, and because I have grace with God, I can now have peace with God, and because I have peace with God, I can have the peace of God.
In that whole world that we live in, you see this constant search. One of the Kardashians, we'll see how long she can stay married. She spent $20 million for a wedding that lasted 72 days. That seems high, but I don't know. "I'll find him, and if I have him, I'll have peace. If I have the big wedding, I'll have peace." Those things that we think would bring us peace, what God says in His word is, no, peace, real peace, is not the absence of turmoil—it's His presence. That's the whole idea in Romans chapter five: "Having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through the Lord Jesus Christ."
Salvation Defined
Let's use these words but define them, let's not leave them hanging out there. Words like saved, or delivered, or rescued. So I'm saved, delivered, rescued, from what? Well, from that peril that I'm in, separated from God because of my sin, with nothing I can do to make it right or to fix it.
So God comes along in grace. There are all different ways to describe grace: unmerited favor, the acronym some have used—God's riches at Christ's expense. Whatever it is, it's God moving and extending to us not what we deserve, but something that we don't deserve. So God comes along and in spite of us, not because of us, God saves us, God redeems us, God puts us in right relationship through His son Jesus.
The Triad of Christian Life
Then he says this: "We give thanks to God always for all of you, making mention of you in our prayers." Now, if you're somebody who circles or marks in your Bible, time to mark here, verse three. "Constantly bearing in mind three things: your work of faith, your labor of love, and your steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ."
So he says, we are thanking God always. When we think of you, we immediately begin to thank God for you. And what we thank God for is what He's going to give us now in the rest, really the rest of the book, but for the focus today, the rest of this chapter. We thank God for these things that we saw, the fruit that we saw: the work of faith and the labor of love.
and the steadfastness of hope. So there are those words: faith, love, hope. You'll see them often, and I'll give you a couple of examples here.
Paul's writing to the church at Ephesus, and he writes this: "For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and your love for all the saints, I've not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers. I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which He has called you." There's that idea of faith, love, hope.
Now get this - remember, it's their work of faith, their labor of love, their steadfastness of hope. These are people who've been converted a matter of months, who have a whole new belief system, a whole new set of standards, a whole new set of convictions, and immediately they face persecution. That's what we saw back in Acts chapter 17. There are those who don't believe, and they are going to aggressively try to stop this. They want to put an end to this as quickly as they possibly can.
The Work of Faith
So you have these three things: faith, love, hope. When we talk about faith, we're talking about this idea of believing and trusting God. Believing and trusting God for Him to do what He says He'll do and to be who He says He'll be.
I probably have - I'm assuming I'm like everyone else - but for me, I have these moments where I get upset seeing the health and wealth and prosperity guys. I've had a lot of that during my time with Susan when she was sick, and the idea was, if you have faith, you'll be healed. That just isn't true. It was never a matter of having faith. It was never having faith that somehow obligated God to heal her. I had faith that He could heal her if He desired to, but regardless, He was going to use whatever came in our life in that situation for His glory, for our good.
We have to be really careful with faith. If you do synonyms, there are words like trust in it. It's not necessarily having every answer in every situation. It's having to be able to be in times where I go, "You know what, here's my work of faith. It's trusting God and believing Him, even though I don't have all the answers, and it may not be giving me even the answer that I want. But in the ultimate sense, it's exactly the answer I want because I want His will to be done."
For some of us, like these people at Thessalonica, they had to have faith just to get through the day - faith for food and work. Most of us have it so wired in our life that we don't even really need much faith. We feel we're strong enough to pull it off.
The Labor of Love
So there's the work of faith, and there's the labor of love. There's action with this. Faith might be a belief, but now there's an action that's associated with it. We're going to be characterized by the greatest of all traits, which is going to be the trait of love. I love others, I love our neighbor, going to love our enemies, going to love those in the church, going to love those outside the church, going to have love enough to forgive. He said, "I see it all over."
The Steadfastness of Hope
And then also, there is hope. The hope has with it the idea of stability, and this is key. Here's this uncertain future. I spent a lot of time intensively in the last month, just with Susan or at home or when we were in hospitals, whatever it was. So I would watch a lot of television. I would look at the world around me, and I would get very discouraged.
I don't see any reason to think that this economy gets better. I look at Greece and go, "The things they need to do, they don't want to do." I look at every kind of situation - banking, I look at everything - and I get very, very, very discouraged. All of a sudden, you can look at the future, and you can - I made a list of four reactions. I can be frustrated. So they were doing an interview the other day with a girl who borrowed $100,000 to go to college and is offended she has to pay it back. I'm offended that she's offended. But see that? So I get frustrated, I can get angry, I can get fearful. I can just resign and say, "Well, there's nothing I can do."
No, here's what hope says. Hope says, "Listen, it may appear to you to be hopeless, but that's no reason to be frustrated or fearful or just throw in the towel." It's in the midst of this, you work knowing that God controls the results. So in that whole process, there's this whole situation where I can have this stability in my life in the most unstable environments, not because I know the future, but - it sounds like a bumper sticker, I know - but I know the One who does.
The Normal Christian Life
That's what he's focusing on here. I want to make the point that I think this is the normal Christian life, that in anyone who says Jesus is Lord, there should be a work of faith, a labor of love, and a steadfastness of hope. All of these are outgoing. So my faith is directed toward God, my love is directed toward others inside and outside the church, and my hope is directed to the future.
One author writes this - I have a lot of quotes today. My daughter Haley says whenever I have a lot of quotes, I have nothing to say. So she might be right, I don't know. I love this quote: "Every Christian, without exception, is a believer, a lover, and a hoper." I like this distinction. "Not necessarily an optimist, since optimist is a matter of temperament. Hope is theology. Faith, hope, and love are thus sure evidences of regeneration by the Holy Spirit."
So how do I know? Those are the questions you get all the time: "How do I know?" Well, faith, hope, and love. "Together, they completely reorient our lives as we find ourselves being drawn upward toward God and faith and toward the others around us in love. The new birth means little or nothing if it does not pull us out of our fallen life and direct us toward God, Christ, and our fellow human being."
So last Sunday, Tyler had the boys in the car, Sunday night, and they had come to see Susan.
The week before, Tyler told Brayden and Yale, "Nana went to be with Jesus," and they both clapped and cheered. Now, that's amazing theology. And sad. I mean, there's still a sadness there. We get together for a football Saturday, and when I walked in yesterday, the first thing Brooklyn said to me is, "Where's Nana?" She's a year and a half and trying to sort this out. But when I heard Brayden's reaction and Yale's reaction, that was my reaction, but a little more tempered, I guess. That's just good theology. You can call it childlike faith, or you could even mock it in moments of cynicism. I think it's beautiful.
So faith and hope and love are present in this church at Thessalonica individually, and it's present corporately.
God's Choice in Salvation
Now, it gets very interesting in this discussion when he gets to verse four. He says, "Knowing, brethren, beloved by God, His choice of you." He interjects the idea that their salvation was not something they generated, but something God generated in them. He introduces this idea, and he drops it in. He doesn't make any explanation for it, doesn't try to unpack it, doesn't say go back to the book of Romans and check out chapters eight and nine. He just simply says, here's what I know. I know that there's a connection here between your work of faith and your labor of love and your steadfastness of hope. I know there's a connection between that and the way the gospel was received. I know you were chosen by God.
So what the Bible teaches really clearly, I think, is that before the foundations of the earth, God decided that He would invade some lives and not others. Never based on anything within you, but totally within God's love. This is a great paragraph or two. Moreover, the author's talking about election. He's talking about Old Testament, Abraham. The vocabulary is deliberately transferred to the New Testament. Moreover, the topic of election is nearly always introduced for practical reasons.
Four Practical Results of Election
In order to foster - there's four of these that you ought to write down. The doctrine of election creates in me, practically, assurance and holiness and humility and witness. We'll come back and unpack them.
So the doctrine of election produces in me assurance, not presumption. It's been very interesting this week. I heard from people who I know are not Christians. I heard from them the declaration, "Susan's in a better place," which I believe she is. But their idea is death puts you in a better place. That's all they're doing there. I believe Susan's in a better place because God invaded her heart and gave her the capacity, desire, and ability to believe. Therefore, she's in heaven today based on what Christ did, not based on anything she did. That is assurance. That's not presumption. I'm not presuming something. I'm going, no, God said He would do that. And He also said that whoever began the good work would continue it.
It's not just assurance, there's holiness. It's not just going through the motions. It's all of a sudden understanding that now God has saved me and now I'm His kid and I should look like, think like, act like, be like Him. It's not just following rules. I read a sentence this week, a simple sentence: "Discipline without motivation is drudgery." I thought that was great. So if you're just saying "just do it," if all you do is practice, practice, practice and hit balls and never play a game, that's drudgery. Discipline for the sake of discipline, that's no good. But if I add motivation, so 2 Timothy chapter four verses six, seven, and eight: "fought the good fight, finished the race, kept the faith, and there is stored up for me a crown of righteousness which the righteous judge will award to me on that day." Now I have that motivation which lets discipline make sense, so holiness.
Not just assurance and holiness, but humility. There should be nobody who understands the doctrines of grace who has the slightest amount of arrogance in them because God saved you in spite of you, not because of you. You should not for one second think that God was in heaven going, "There's seven billion people. If I can get him, that's a winner. If I can get her, boy, that's just a minor little rehab project and I'll have something very special there." No, Romans five is clear: while I was an enemy, while I hated God, while I spit in His face, while I said to God "I don't want anything to do with You," He saved me in that moment. There's no source of pride in that at all. I probably could get some pride if I thought I made a decision for Jesus. I might be able to think, never say it out loud, "Oh, I'm smart enough to figure it out or clever enough to figure it out." But what He's saying here is God chose you. It's a source of humility.
And then lastly, it's a source of witness, meaning now I wanna take that word all over. That's what you see now in verses five, six, seven, and eight. Because that word's true and I understand it, now I wanna take that word all over.
How We Know Someone Is Chosen
So Paul says we know, beloved, that you were His choice. Well, I wrote right next to it as I'm reading through my first study: how do you know that? How do you know that somebody's a follower of Christ or how do you know that somebody's chosen by God? Well, there's two tests. There's a doctrinal test and there's an experiential test. The doctrinal test is that their doctrine...
They say that Jesus died for them, they believe in Him, Christ rose from the dead, and there's an experiential test. So look at verse five. Here's what he says: "Knowing, brethren, beloved by God His choice of you, for our gospel did not come to you in word only." So he said, we didn't just say it, "but also in power and in the Holy Spirit with full conviction, just as you know what kind of men we prove to be among you." He said, we didn't just talk this. There was power and the power was generated by the Holy Spirit.
The Gospel Comes in Word and Deed
Now it's both, and I want to make a strong point. I was somewhere last year speaking and the guy ahead of me was talking and he makes the comment, he quotes St. Francis of Assisi—it's a very familiar quote—"preach the gospel; if you must, use words." Well, I hate that quote. I didn't say anything there because that would be inappropriate, but I hate that quote. What's behind it, if what you're saying is live the gospel, I'm good with that. But if what you're saying is just live the gospel and that's enough, that'll never get it done. Our task is to make the invisible God visible and then to speak the truth boldly. You can't separate those two.
And what Paul is saying is we came in deed. We're going to talk about deeds in a minute, but the word came and the power came and the power wasn't in his persuasion. Remember what we saw in 2 Corinthians 10:10? Very unimpressive in person. We don't know, but there's all sorts of conjecture about his physical appearance—shorter in stature, bald head, hooked nose, like we had a thorn in the flesh. Many believe it was an eye issue, we don't know, but many believe it was just this eye that just kind of continually oozed. So you're going, here's our speaker tonight and he just comes walking up looking like a Phantom of the Opera or something. Well, he's very unimpressive. Paul's saying that wasn't the power, the power wasn't me, the power was the Holy Spirit.
Our Task vs. God's Task
You're wasting your time if you're just preaching and the Holy Spirit doesn't apply it. But see, that's where the conviction comes and that's where the decision comes and that's where the life change comes is when the Holy Spirit's there. So for you and me, me on a Sunday here, you, me, us all week long, talking to people, our responsibility is to present the truth the best way we can in honest, loving context, and then at that point it's up to God whether anything happens or not. I find great freedom there. I don't have to win anybody to Christ. You can't win a person to Christ. Christ, the Holy Spirit wins people to Christ.
Our task is not to convert people. Our task is to proclaim the gospel. There's a big difference there. Our task is not to drive toward a decision and get a decision. That's not our task. We hope that happens. We hope God saves people when we talk to them, but that's not our task. Our task is to be faithful and to communicate the truth. If God's going to do something, He does it. We make the invisible God visible. We speak the truth boldly.
So Paul's saying to this church and the people in it that have been converted three or four months, I know you were chosen. I saw the gospel for those three or four weeks that I was there. It came to you in power.
From Conversion to Example
Verse six: "And you became imitators of us and of the Lord, having received the word in much tribulation and with the joy of the Holy Spirit, so that you became examples to Macedonia and all the areas." He said, here's what happened: all of a sudden, you began to follow us as we follow Christ. You began to be a disciple of Jesus. You didn't just play at this, you followed Him. And tribulation came, and you found joy in the midst of the tribulation. And the only way you can do that is if the Holy Spirit's producing that in your life. And now you're an example everywhere else. Now the people all around are seeing you in that.
Let me take a second here and stop and try to apply this, if I can, in our life. So Paul's saying, you heard the gospel, lived the gospel, shared the gospel, prayed for the gospel. The Holy Spirit moved. That's what the Holy Spirit's going to do. That's John 3. As the wind blows, that's where He goes. But that's what we talk about when we talk about preaching. I think it's Tim Keller's definition, but it's a great definition to me of preaching: it's a hostile takeover of the heart by the Holy Spirit applying the Word of God. So that's conviction. So that's what's happened there.
The Word Sounding Forth
And as a result of that, verse 8, "the word of the Lord has sounded forth." That word that's translated "sounded"—it's the only time it's used in the New Testament. It means to sound, to ring, to boom. So here's what he's saying: The Word came to you in power and in truth, and now you lived it. You proclaimed it. That's God's plan. God's plan for the expansion of the kingdom is to have people like us see our hearts transformed, to see our minds informed, see our lives become radical, and now we become instruments that God and the Holy Spirit uses to reach the people around us.
So everywhere you go, there should be people who are looking at you going, there's something different about you. Not odd, different. So let me do this. When's the last time you had that happen to you? When was the last time somebody who's observing you—maybe they are your barista, or you're theirs, or there's somebody you see at the gym, or there's somebody that's in the neighborhood, or it's somebody at work, or somebody that you go to the same restaurant, or wherever you go—when's the last time that one of them said, what's up with you? You're really different and weird, but in a good way. I kind of want what you have. When's the last time that happened to you?
And I want to suggest if that's not happening fairly regularly, something's probably wrong with us. Now they may express it differently. So they may look at you, for example, and say, "Gosh, your family seems to work. My family's all screwed up." That's their way of saying, tell me about Jesus.
Your life—you hit these bumps in the road, and you just keep going, and you even thrive in the midst of it. What is that? That's them saying to you, tell me about Jesus. The more they watch you, the more they're intrigued by you, because you just don't fit. You're not like anything else around them.
See, that should be a steady flow, and Paul is saying that's what happened in this church here at Thessalonica. All of a sudden, these people who are newly converted, right out of paganism, or Judaism, maybe they were God-fearing Greeks, so they're following some of the Jewish law, but they're not Jews, whatever. All of a sudden, there's a change that's taking place. There's opposition that comes, and this, I'm going to contend, is the normal pattern.
The Opportunity in Family Gatherings
So people, family, here we're getting ready for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Thanksgiving, my favorite holiday. Christmas, my least favorite holiday, probably. Although I was listening to Christmas music yesterday, it's 9:30 on my newly configured Cox cable. Families together, people that you know well, but they don't understand you, and it's a great opportunity for them to see Jesus in you.
Now, I'll preach the gospel in a few must-use words. Let me put that in place. So you create, through your behavior, God uses that to create a hunger and thirst in them, and now you have the opportunity to speak the truth boldly. If you don't speak the truth boldly, then all you've done is create a hunger and thirst, and they're going to write that off to the fact that you have a better disposition than they do. You're just wired differently.
But Paul says, no, something happened in this church, and it was very different. And where Paul says, I'm absolutely sure this is real. How? Well, the doctrine is there, and then look at the test. There's the work of faith, and the labor of love, and the steadfastness of hope.
The Beautiful Structure of Faith, Hope, and Love
Now, I want to show you something that I personally think is really cool. That doesn't mean you will, you should, but you probably won't. Look at verse 3. Work of faith, labor of love, steadfastness of hope. Look at verse 9. How you turn to God from idols, that's the work of faith, to serve a living and true God, that's the labor of love, to wait for His Son from heaven, whom God raised from the dead, that is Jesus, who rescues us from the wrath to come, that's the steadfastness of hope.
So this work of faith, in all of this, is this idea of transformation that takes place, especially as I begin to look at my life, and understand that there are idols in my life, and I need to take those idols, and take them off their shelf. An idol is really simple. An idol is anything that has a place in your life that's reserved exclusively for God.
The Heart as an Idol Factory
First John's just an interesting book, and John's just rocking and rolling, He's laying all this stuff out. Here's how this book ends. He's moving along, 1 John chapter 5 verse 21, "Little children, guard yourselves against idols," period. Very odd and abrupt ending, but very wise, as he says, listen, here's what you got to find. Your heart in here, John Calvin says, is an idol factory, meaning it's constantly producing idols, something to worship, and that work of faith is to take sin, and turn from sin to Christ, or from darkness to light, from idols to God.
And we live at a time, if man's heart is an idol factory, we live in a time and in a culture that is absolutely custom-made to feed into that. So it's all around us. I mean you're not really a person until you have that, you're not really significant until you have that. There was an ad, I talk about it all the time, but Radio Shack had a tagline a few years ago that said, "We have thousands of things you never knew you needed." That was their ad. I mean that's just blatantly on the ad, that's what they're saying, they have all these things.
Identifying Your Idols
How do you know what are the idols in your life? Here's a real easy test, just complete the sentence, "If I didn't have blank, life wouldn't be worth living." Or, "If I only had blank, I'd be happy." And if whatever you're putting in there is something other than Jesus, that's an idol.
So you see, I mean one of the great things, we were talking about childhood, I can't remember where I was the other day, we were talking about raising kids. Somebody said they had a four-year-old, how great the four-year-olds were, and I said, you know what, every stage, at least for me, every stage that we had our kids, every year got better. Four was good, five was better, ten was good, eleven was better, seventeen was good, eighteen was better. And one of the things, and it's a product really of Susan, Susan just didn't allow a lot of drama in the house. Susan didn't have a lot of drama in her life, and she didn't have any drama with the girls. But think of that teenager, girl or boy, who's going, oh, my life is over, it's not worth living because I lost whatever. That's an idol. So it can be, it could be anything.
Modern Idols and Cultural Pressure
I was talking to somebody this week about retiring, and I said, I don't know how you figured this out, because it's like I get the number I think I'm supposed to have, but then you can't get any return for it, and then you lose the capital you have, I don't know, I'm never going to get there, but it doesn't matter, whatever. Well that, all of a sudden, that, you think about that. My birthday is this month, I'll be 62, I can get Social Security, and they create an idol out of retirement. The world is made to just create this, boy, now you go live for yourself, really? That's not biblical.
So my heart's an idol factory, and I live in a culture that's constantly just saying, look at this idol, look at this idol, look at this idol. So here you go, the
The Work of Faith: Turning from Idols to the Creator
The work of faith is to turn from these dead, dormant idols, these false idols, to turn from dead idols, created objects, to the Creator. Here's a fundamental basic principle about false idols or false gods: False gods never fail to fail. Whatever you're trusting, whatever you're trusting and you think, "I'm going to have my joy, peace, happiness, if I get that"—whatever it is, if it's anything other than Jesus, it can't do that.
I did that with Susan when I first met her. I married Susan, hoping she'd make me happy, which she did, but hoping she'd make me happy, hoping she'd change me. I realized three months into it that I wasn't happy, that she couldn't change me. I had to get back—I had to be away from it now a couple of decades to see—I was asking her to do what only Christ can do. So that's the work of faith.
The Labor of Love: An Exchange of Slavery
The labor of love is now the expression of this. It's now the action. We could say that it's an exchange of one slavery for another. So long as we have the new slavery, it is real freedom.
I'm a slave to sin, I'm a slave to all these things. I get rid of that, but now I take the same identity that Paul says, when he says, "I'm a bondservant, I'm a slave," but not of sin, but of the Lord Jesus Christ. You're never the master, just so you know. You're always the slave. It's just a matter of who are you enslaved to. As Jesus says in Matthew 6, you can't serve two masters, you can't serve God and the world—you'll love one and hate the other.
There's this whole idea now of this labor of love. Now my life is moved by service. "Be an imitator of me as I was an imitator of Christ," so when Jesus said, "I came not to be served, but to serve," He's going, "This is your lot. You're here to serve." As one of you told me, and I think it's just beautiful: "I don't mind being a servant until somebody treats me like one."
The Steadfastness of Hope: Waiting for His Coming
And then there's that steadfastness of hope. What is that? Verse 10, to wait for His son from heaven. It's to wait for Jesus, it's to live with the idea of understanding that He could come back at any moment. That, by the way, is why the title of this series is "In Light of His Coming"—it's all through the book.
Let me just take you through this. We've been through chapter one. Look at chapter two, verse 19, and you'll just see the theme repeat itself: "For we wanted to come to you, Paul, more than I, Satan hindered us, for who is our hope or joy or crown of exaltation? Is it not even you in the presence of our Lord at His coming?"
Chapter three, verse 13: "so we may establish your hearts without blame and holiness before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." Chapter four, we get into verse 13 through 18—that's the whole idea. He'll descend from heaven with a shout. Chapter five, verse nine and ten: "for God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ who died for us so that whether we are awake or asleep, we will live with Him together when He comes back."
Living in Faith, Love, and Hope
Here's what Paul says to the church at Thessalonica, and I'm going to be so bold as to say to every church in every place: the church itself and therefore the people in it should be about the work of faith, the labor of love, and the steadfastness of hope.
There should be in our life constantly this sense of this work of faith. I come to Christ in repentance and faith. Indeed, there is that one moment, but I'm constantly—for me, I'm constantly trying to knock these idols off the shelf because they want to climb right back on there. There's constantly that battle there, but there's also the faith that God is who He said He was, that God defines Himself. It's not up to us to define Him. He defines Himself in His word.
There's that labor of love. There should be that constant sense of giving, serving, sharing. That's the manifestation of it. That's what James says: It doesn't do you any good to say I have faith if it doesn't have a corresponding love that joins it.
And then there's the thing that kind of holds it all together, and that's the steadfastness of hope. The fact that this isn't the end, that we are in the land of the dead, and we will one day go to the land of the living, and that Jesus will come again.
The Uncertainty and Certainty of His Coming
I don't know when that's going to happen. As I said, I'm watching a lot of news. Among several things that the president gets wrong continually is the way he deals with Iran, and he's just letting this guy get these bombs. It's a sad, scary thing of a really poor, incompetent leader on our part, and what do you do? You move quickly, and you should have been moving. It's like the parent standing at Toys R Us going, "Okay, one, two"—you think it's going to change him?
All of a sudden, I'm going, "Wait a minute, Iran gets him, Syria gets him, they're going to bomb the snot out of Israel." What was kind of a dark moment became a very bright moment for me. Maybe Jesus is here. He might just be months away.
Now, let me also add the caveat: everybody's been saying that for 2,000 years. If you have all of a sudden this compulsion to say, "I got to give away everything," well, bring it right on over to my house, and you can leave it there. I'm not encouraging that. I'm just saying, I don't know.
Here's what I know: Whether Jesus comes or I die, either way, God's the one who ultimately will reign. Jesus is the one who ultimately reigns. That's what we look at in chapter one, and we'll spend now, whatever it is, eight or nine weeks finishing this time in this book.
We would be individuals in a church that would be marked by a work of faith and a labor of love and that steadfastness of hope. God, let us stand firm based on the conviction, the power of Your Holy Spirit. Jesus, thank You, and we praise You in Christ's name. Amen.