1 Thessalonians 1:9-10 (Part B)

Luther was going up the steps. He was a priest, and he was going up those steps.

He said what am I? God spoke to him. The just shall live by faith. And he got up and never went back to that religion. Became a Protestant. He protested that religion. And when they said listen, if you go to the city of worms, which is kind of funny, but what do I have to worry about? There's no people.

But no, it's not the same thing. Anyway, they're going to arrest you and kill you. And he said I have to go. And he went and he stood up. In today's edition of Cross Reference Radio, Pastor Rick will be teaching in 1 Thessalonians Chapter 1.

But he'll begin in Malachi Chapter 1 on today's edition of Cross Reference Radio. So God is saying, oh, come on. Give me a break. You're playing these games with me. I'm God. Do you think I don't know this? I'm your creator.

Look around you. How dumb can you be? You got the robe and you got the hat and you're using my name. And then you lie to my face. You mock me.

And you think I'm too dumb to figure this out. It's amazing how a human being can fall off a horse and be just about as smart as a donkey's foot with spiritual things. He says these things to a people that were supposed to be devoted to him, not to idols too.

And this is one of the problems. The Christian who recognizes that my flesh is devoted to pleasure and sin and everything that I am to renounce and I will fight this, the unbeliever says, well, I might fight it too, but not for the same reasons that you do. I'm not fighting it because I love Jesus. I'm fighting it because I want control back in my life. This is one of the problems with groups that claim that there's a higher power out there, any one of them. Jesus said, what does it profit you if you gain the world and lose your soul?

So what? You're able to break an addiction, but you're still going to hell. Jesus says, I want to break your addiction and I want to lead you to heaven at the same time.

So you cannot have these ungodly alliances running around inside your head and expect me to be good with it. Why is it that idolaters oftentimes outdo us in their own faith even though they worship something that's false? For example, the Hindus, to their idols and shrines, they put us to shame in their offerings and their givings, what they give to build their temples. Yeah, they may be starving to death, but what they give to say, I am a believer. I am willing to suffer to show you how much I believe.

We look at that and we say, it's crazy. Your God is fake. You made that thing up. And then, not give a cent to the Lord. King David said, I shall not give anything that does not cause me pain to the Lord. When I sacrifice, it's going to be a sacrifice. How many Christians never learn this? You know what they do when they hear the pastor talking this way? Oh, it's fundraising. I don't want to hear it. And they just blow it all away. Listen, we will pay our electric bill or we'll meet under a tree.

We don't need the money. We need to follow what God says. And if you have been intercepted in your faith by some corrupt pastor, that's your business. And it's part of your business to straighten it out before the Lord. Me, personally, I almost went to hell because I looked at Christians and saw the mess they were making of their testimony. I said, if that is God, keep it.

I'm better off over here. What I was saying is, I want the truth. But I was looking at people who were claiming the truth and living lies. It wasn't until I came into touch with Jesus himself that I met real Christians. And where were these guys before?

Well, I could not have appreciated them, I'm sure. God knows what he's doing. And so, shall we let the pagans outdo us in serving their God?

I hope not. This is what Walter Martin said. Have you ever recognized what a Walter Martin was a believer who wrote one of the, not any longer, but at the time, the definitive work on the cults, the kingdom of the cults. And Walter Martin says, are you willing to do for the truth what a pagan is willing to do for a lie?

And it is a question that convicts. Now, that does not mean you should run out and do anything. But what it does mean, you should do something, and that something is this, get on your knees and say, here I am, Lord, what will you have me to do? And then do it. But how many times has God moved someone in the pew through a powerful sermon that I have given, and then, and then, and not made good on it? Pastor, God spoke to me, I'm going to do this, and he never do it. All I can say to you is, ooh.

What's the bursting radius of a lightning strike? Because I want to be away from you when it comes. And so what happened is, why they turned from idols to God is when Paul showed up in Corinth, having come from Philippi, which we'll talk quite a bit about, especially when we get to chapter 2, we'll revisit this again. He took the beatings in Philippi. Philippi was 100 miles away thereabout from Thessalonica, but on the same travel route, the Ignatian Way. They spoke the same language. Word traveled fast.

Three to seven days you could be from Philippi to Thessalonica if you took a horse or a cart or walked it. And so they knew before Paul got there what was happening in Philippi. Somebody came from the city, said, hey, did you hear they beat up these Christians with rod? Then they found out they were Roman citizens.

No way. Well, the word was beginning to spread before he even came there to build the church. When he gets there, as he realized long before, that there was great opportunity for Christianity within the Roman Empire, but it would come only by blood and hope.

That's how it would come. The people that were in the Roman Empire following these mythological gods, which they are mythological to us, but to them they were very real. And they wanted a better god, most of them.

Well, many of them, I should say. Many of them wanted a better god. They knew that the gods Mercury and Zeus and all the other ones, Bacchus and Apollo, they knew that they were scheming, they were lustful, quarrelsome, paranoid, warring, vengeful, malicious towards each other, and man also cruel, weak. This was the pagan gods of ancient Rome.

Just read up on the literature. It's been preserved. And you can say, what kind of gods are these?

Petty, vicious. And so the people began to secretly say, we only follow the gods because we fear the consequences of the gods. And they associated everything with the gods. If there was a volcano, if the rains didn't come or did come, it was all connected to the gods. Any miracle, they would sacrifice a bull. This was the story when Paul and Barnabas, they go and Paul is preaching.

He looks at him and he heals him. And the people said, oh, man, the gods have come down to visit us. And they got a bull and they were going to sacrifice it. And Paul said, please, I'll get my barbecue elsewhere.

Not just your bad cooks or anything, but this is not how we do business. Judaism was another of the religions moving around the Roman Empire at the time. Now remember, Islam was 600 years away.

It hadn't even been thought of yet. When that monstrosity was concocted, that whole world would take a nose dive from which it would never recover to this day. I think part of the end time scenarios with the armies from Saudi Arabia and Turkey, the Islamic nations, Iran, coming against Israel will largely be because they don't need their oil anymore.

And once you take away that, you're just left with sand. And so anyway, that's for another sermon. Well, maybe as we dig deeper into the Thessalonian letter, we start getting into the rapture and end times, but Judaism. Judaism was a religion that came as an alternative to these pagan religions.

And the people of the Roman Empire were listening to the Jews saying, I'm liking this. There's some things about this I'm not liking. Pork? Well, you know, I got to give up pork.

I don't know if it's worth it. And then the whole circumcision for the men thing was like, you know what? I'll just like you, but I won't follow you. Just think, you have to have Facebook and all that to make that ending.

That's pretty cool. Okay, back to this. But what they had observed in Judaism is that the people who practice it, though devout, were mostly concerned with circumcision and Sabbaths, dietary restrictions. Well, we don't have that in the church today. Animal sacrifice, an endless list of rules and burdens to put on other people, the rituals and extreme requirements. And then that turned the people. You know what?

This is not the same as the myth of the Roman gods or the Greek gods. But this is bad, too. It was almost there. I was liking it.

Then it just dropped and fell. And so they didn't. They wanted something else. They were ripe. The people were ripe when Paul comes into Thessalonica. And he comes there and he brings them Christ.

The world system, without these gods, without the gods of the Greeks and Romans, without Judaism, the world system as we see it today, the atheism, the foolish people who can get A's on tests but can't figure out where they come from, like Hawking's this, you know, mad scientist is what he is. The world is infested with corruptions too open to be denied. You look at the world and say, you can't deny this. You guys are so corrupt. You can't even send a bottle of water to Kenya and hope it gets to someone because the government will steal it. We throw money at things. We're going to throw aid there.

What happens to it? Government comes in, takes it, gives it to their army, gives it to the higher of the people on the route. You know, I was just reading the pastoral training of Asia, PTA. Here's a pastor that goes into the deepest parts of Southeast Asia, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia.

And he teaches or gives conferences to the pastors and starts the church in the Philippines, another place he does. And he was talking about this Christian group that had come into Vietnam. And the commies over there, that's what they are.

They have strict rules. Okay, you can have your church, but you've got to follow this pattern you can't have with so many people. You can have a Christian school, but you've got to teach Marxism at the same time.

That would be like saying, you know, you can have a church, but you've also got to preach Mormonism or Hinduism or some other religion with it because, again, Marxism is a religion. And so, anyway, he goes into these places and he says these Christians had dug a well for this little village in Vietnam. The water there, if you drink it, especially a gringo, it will kill you.

The water is so bad. So they dug the well and the commies come along and they take it. And this well is just for the communists, it's not for the Christians. And so this infestation of corruption is indisputable and it's global.

It's not limited to this little village that no one knows about in Vietnam. The world is too rotten to be defended by any person that has these two traits, honesty and sanity. Some people are honestly insane. Others are insanely honest.

And that's why I would hope I'd fall into that category. So my point is, here you have Judaism, the idol worship of the Greek mythological gods, the world system. Wherever you find these systems, they're wrong. And they're not wrong because we just insist that they're wrong. And everybody knows it. When someone says, you Christians going around bombing abortion clinics, those aren't Christians.

Those are imposters. I mean, what part of the Bible do you not understand? Oh, you don't understand any of it.

You can't even find one if I put it on top of your head. So my point is, when these charges are bogus, they want them to be so they don't want Christianity to be what it says it is. So when you find some of the other religions, there are other religions out there that if they show love, you say, wait a minute, that's not in your scripture. You got to only show love to your own type, not to anybody. You kill everybody else. But for us, you go to our scripture, it says love your enemies. So you find Christians hating on the enemies. You find a Christian that's disobedient. Don't go attacking the faith.

It's his problem. Christianity came and it preached God's love. And it preached this, that God searched for man.

Man did not search for God. Climbing up steps on your knees will only wear your pants out, cost you some Band-Aids and stuff like that. But you will not find God at the top of those steps. Martin Luther, you know, again, I'm not a fan of many of the Reformers. I appreciate what they went through.

I respect many of them, some of them I don't. I have great respect for Luther as a man. Luther was going up the steps. He was a priest and he was going up those steps. He said, what am I? God spoke to him. The just shall live by faith. And he got up and never went back to that religion, became a Protestant. He protested that religion. And when they said, listen, if you go to the city of worms, which is kind of funny, but, well, what do I have to worry about? There's no people.

But no, it's not the same thing. Anyway, they're going to arrest you and kill you. And he said, I have to go. And he went and he stood up. There were others. The Scottish, the Scots, the Reformation, when it got to Scotland, there were men like Patrick Hamilton who preached the truth and they burned him at the stake.

They said that he burned for six hours, you know, his body, the flesh. He was dead, of course, before that. And then there was George Wishart, who John Knox was his bodyguard.

And before John Knox became the great reformer of Scotland. And Wishart was also turned over to these same authorities and they burned him at the stake. And John Knox, who was his bodyguard, wasn't bodyguarding him at the time he got turned over. He probably would have been killed.

But Knox, you know, would carry a sword because Wishart threatened his life. People put a threat on his life for preaching the gospel, for telling people that the scripture had the answers to their lives. And that the popes and the cardinals were so corrupt they could not be prepared.

They were outside of scripture. Well, these men died for that. And then John Knox, you know, John Knox became a slave on a galley and he's, you know, he's rowing and they would bring around the relics for them to kiss and they get to John Knox and he... They try to force...

I'm not kissing that. This is a piece of gaudy wood. And they try to force it on him so he takes it and he throws it overboard.

He says, this should figure out how to swim. She's a god. So those men had guts. I mean, they were like men and they were not just men, the women too. The women had faith. One of them had like a town hall meeting, threw a stool at the guy for the lies he was trying to pump down their throats.

That's why we don't have stools in the sanctuary. Well, anyway, those reformers were turning from idols too. They had crept into Christianity and killed it. We know it as the dark ages. We could not even find the Bible.

And in many places, if you quoted a scripture, you would be killed or suffer some form of persecution by the church and not called dark ages by mistake. And so with that introduction, we come to the... I don't know if any of this is fascinating to you, but it's real. It's there. The record has been preserved.

It's out there. And, you know, the danger with history is much of it is for a Christian is much of it is fascinating, but it can end up leading you away from that which is necessary, which is the scripture. And so just be careful. And then in verse 10, he says, And to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, even Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come. So this is the message he preached to them. He preached a crucified Jesus.

Look, if you think you can preach Christianity without the cross, you're not preaching Christianity. You have to preach the cross of Christ. Faith comes by hearing.

Hearing what? That a pure and holy God died on a cross for you. That's the gospel. That's the first part of the gospel. The second part is that he rose again. He demonstrated his love on the cross.

He demonstrated his power by busting out of the tomb. And he did so with class because when they came to the tomb, they found the garments folded up. I mean, it's like, who thought of that? It's like, God, like, you know, I'm not going to leave this place a mess, a slob, even apostles. And he like, you could just, you know, right there in the corner and they come in and someone goes, huh?

Because they recorded it. There they were folded up. So anyway, wait for his son from heaven. Early believers lived in anticipation of Christ's return. If you're not living in with this anticipation, you're missing a beat as a Christian. I'm not saying you're not a Christian, but I am saying you're missing a beat for sure.

And it's a critical when you're out of step. The early church, they expected Christ to show up at any moment. We should have the same feeling because God designed it that way. John will write, he who has these thoughts purifies himself with these things.

It makes us clean. Christ can come back at any moment, eager anticipation. This is what love does. You have to have love to have that. Now, part of, granted, part of our desire to be raptured is to escape the corruption of this life. All of it. But the greater part of it should be the love for Jesus Christ, to see him face to face.

That's what I want. So it says, whom he raised from the dead. His resurrection is our guarantee that we're going to be risen also. And so the water baptism, which speaks of this very thing, the water baptism says that I have been crucified with Christ.

I have been buried. And then I come out of the water, which symbolizes the resurrection with Jesus Christ. We'll take that from Romans chapter six. Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore, we were buried with him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so, we also should walk in newness of life.

That's a changed life. He says, for if we have been united together in the likeness of his death, certainly we also shall be in the likeness of his resurrection, knowing this, that our old man, that is the sinful nature, that is you before you were born again, that is when you sat on the throne of your life and not Christ. He says our old man was crucified with him, that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves of sin. That is right, but it's not the whole story, because if you're not going to be a slave of sin, you're going to have to fight. You're going to have to learn how to fight. You know what?

I'm not violent. You are now, against sin, not people. And so he says, listen to this beautiful verse at the bottom of verse 10, even Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come.

I don't understand why there are those who say, you know, I don't believe that the Christians will escape the great tribulation when the Bible says he's going to deliver us from this. The wrath to come. It was already wrath.

Paul just left Thessalonica. He'd take his shirt off and say, I'm going to show you wrath. It's wrath right now, but it's not the wrath to come. That is unlike anything ever seen, and God will spare his people from it, because he says so. That's why I believe it. Not because I only like it.

Just because I like a thing doesn't mean I can't believe it. And so listen to these, this two-fold message from this verse. Wait for his son from heaven, Jesus, who delivers us from the wrath to come.

I close with a verse and a statement. Revelation chapter 6. Now I'm reading about this wrath to come, because remember, in the book of Revelation, which is the end time story, it's prophetic history. What is the book of Revelation? It's prophetic history. It's history that is recorded that has not yet happened.

Not all of it, but the bulk of it is. And so there in the sixth chapter, now remember, Revelation is the introduction chapter one, chapters two and three, talks about the churches that were in existence at the time of John, and that also speak of the churches through the age, types of the church. Then he gets to chapter four, and the church is now in heaven.

And chapter five is five and four. And then chapter six, he returns to what's going to happen on earth when the church is no longer here, after the rapture of the church. And there, riding on the white horse with a bow in his hand, is anti-Christ coming, as though he's coming as a peaceful conqueror.

And nothing peaceful about him at all. And anyway, here during that time, he says in Revelation 6, speaking of the wrath that's coming upon the earth, the great tribulation period, and the kings of the earth, the great men, the rich men, the commanders, the mighty men, every slave and every free man. That about covers every group. hid themselves in the caves and in the rocks of the mountains, said to the mountains and rocks, fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the lamb. For the great day of his wrath has come, and who is able to stand? Well, we know, we'll find out in the seventh chapter that the 144,000 witnesses will stand, as well as the tribulation saints will stand spiritually, though they will die physically. And these things are again preserved. And so, in the end, every soul must choose between life and death, to be with God, to be without Him.

The choice is yours. Thanks for tuning in to Cross Reference Radio for this study in the book of 1 Thessalonians. Cross Reference Radio is the teaching ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville in Virginia. To learn more information about this ministry, visit our website, crossreferenceradio.com. Once you're there, you'll find additional teachings from Pastor Rick. We encourage you to subscribe to our podcast. When you subscribe, you'll be notified of each new edition of Cross Reference Radio. You can search for Cross Reference Radio in your favorite podcast app as well. That's all we have time for today, but we hope you'll join us next time, as Pastor Rick continues to teach through the book of 1 Thessalonians, right here on Cross Reference Radio.