1 Thessalonians 2:1-4 (Part B)

God knows how to influence us to do what he wants us to do. He says our exhortation did not come from error. Paul's opponents were accusing him of being wrong in his theology, of being deceitful even, of trying to get other things from people by preaching, telling them what they wanted to hear. Well, who doesn't want to hear that God loves me and will receive me even if I'm a sinner?

Who doesn't want to hear that? Why is something, well let me put it this way, not every time is something too good to be true. And Christianity in many circles is so damaged or witnessed that many folks are actually saying, I'd rather destroy Christianity and be destroyed by Islam than to give Christianity the satisfaction of being right.

They don't word it that way, but that's what's going on. Just go onto Wikipedia, look up anything scientific or religious and listen to the lies and the hatred in there. I was just looking at some things, you know, we think about how large this universe is, we have Genesis, Genesis 1, in the beginning God created. And you think about how big space is. First off, what is space? I mean, what is it? Is it a gas? What is space? Anyway, it's a place for my wife to put things.

Men, you want to laugh louder but you're afraid. And I have great regret that I said that out loud. But anyway, you can put Earth, you can put it in the moon, I don't know, a million times, I mean the sun, pardon me, not the moon. The sun is like a million times bigger than the Earth. Then you can take the sun and you can put it in some of the other sun stars that are out there like epsilon like 3,000 times or more. These things are huge.

And then the space in between them, light years apart, this greatness of God. How can someone write the things they write in these articles? I'm fact checking, I'm checking some facts and I have to swim through all of this billions and billions of years ago. And I want to say, do you have the printout sheet on that? Do you have the time stamp? Have you found where it says made or evolved in my mind 19 billion years ago?

No, they don't. But they're so turned off to Christianity, they're willing to believe any lie they can get their hands on as an alternative to Christianity and this is the cause of persecution against Christ. Because who out there is saying, who out there is preaching, God loves you so much, He's willing to die for you, in fact, He did.

And even though you are a sinner of the worst sort, no matter what kind you are, He'll take you in and He'll make you His own. Who else is preaching this? Who would reject this? And yet it is being rejected. Paul was able to understand early on, you know, this is incredible, I've been a part of Judaism but the development of my own religion is so wonderful in Christ that I renounce it all.

In fact, I count it as trash, that's what he said. Forgetting those things which are behind, reaching forward. All of his education in the universities, he had to toss it away. Moses did the same thing. When Moses writes Genesis, he was educated, incidentally, in the schools of the Egyptians.

But he doesn't write about their theories of creation, about, you know, turtles swimming through space holding up the earth, he doesn't write that stuff, he throws it all away. And rather than human reason, he goes with divine revelation. And he begins to share with what God told him.

We're supposed to learn from these things. And so in verse 3 where he says, for our exhortation did not come from error or uncleanness nor was it in deceit. Well that exhortation is preaching and it's preaching the very things that Moses preached, that Jeremiah lived.

Christ came and developed and revealed to us our exhortation. Not an exhortation too good to be true or one with false promises and mistakes and lies, it's true through and through. You say, what about all of the, you know, and there are many great meaning scholars out there. Listen, just because a person is a scholar doesn't mean he knows everything, even about the subject he claims to be a scholar in. Imagine if I, your pastor, you asked me a question and I gave you the answer and you didn't like it and I said to you, well I'm a pastor, you have to agree with me.

I mean you would laugh at that, I hope you would. Well, just because a person is an expert doesn't mean they know it all. Well who does then? Well God does.

But the individual that we, the individual must approach knowledge cautiously, humbly, not looking for a fight, not with an attitude. And understand when they can't go any further that they just don't have to go any further, that God is taking them as far as they need. There will be a lot of men and women and children in heaven who did not know half the things I know about the scripture. And may have been better servants than me.

I'm sure there, I'm sure there are. I know you say no, no way pastor, not you. I know, but you know, let's be humble.

I was going to wear my humble badge but they took it from me when I said I was going to wear it. Anyway, this, I exhorted you from a man who had every natural right to charge God with letting him down and he did not. I've repeated that several times or in different ways because that's what we do as you get older. We charge God. If God says, you know what, I'm going to come down here and hit you upside your head the next time you do that, we'd stop doing it. But he doesn't do it that way.

He wants us to follow out of love. Jonah, for example, that was an exception. God pretty much, instead of smacking him upside his head, had the whole head and body swallowed by a whale. But he didn't do that every day to Jonah.

That'd be a bit much. God knows how to influence us to do what he wants us to do. He says our exhortation did not come from error.

Paul's opponents were accusing him of being wrong in his theology, of being deceitful even, of trying to get other things from people by preaching, telling them what they wanted to hear. Well, who doesn't want to hear that God loves me and will receive me even if I'm a sinner? Who doesn't want to hear that? Why is something, well, let me put it this way. Not every time is something too good to be true. It is sometimes when it's a telemarketer on the other end of the phone.

It's too good to be true. Okay, never mind. Back to this. I want to read from Charles Spurgeon here. Spurgeon wrote this in October of 1888, almost 125 years ago to the month. He says, I have preached God's truth so far as I know it and I have not been ashamed of its peculiarities that I might not cause ridicule to my testimony. I have cut myself clear of those who error from the faith and even from those who associate with them. To me, one of the strongest parts of this quote is where he says, I have cut myself clear of those who error from the faith and even those who associate with them. It's disfellowshipping them.

That's what he's saying. So he's saying that I really don't spend a lot of time with Christians or people who claim that they're Christians and run with those who violate Christianity. I just separate from them. That's what the Scripture teaches. It was the whole idea behind God's saying, watch your alliances with the people in the land that I'm bringing you to. You're not to have ungodly alliances with them. They have been judged.

You're not to get close and chummy with them because they will defile you. Now every parent, you know that there are other children that you say to yourself, well, you know, I don't know if I want my child around that child because I don't want certain things to rub off. You have that right as a parent, incidentally. What you don't have a right to do is belittle the others and take away from them their right to say the same thing about your kids. But we understand the concept that there are influences out there that are harmful.

And just because we are adults does not mean we are excused from practicing these very things. So Paul's motives, his methods, his message were unassailable. No one could come against what he was saying, what he was doing, and how he was doing it, so they sought to hurt him. E. M. Bounds wrote perhaps one of the most definitive works on prayer, his first volume.

It's a six-volume set, but the first volume you get the whole thing. I don't know that I would follow his type of prayer. I mean, this is a man that was up like four o'clock in the morning every day, would pray for two hours.

I'd run out of things to say, and I'd fall asleep, actually. But still, it's a good read for all Christians, and he certainly was a great Christian man. And he says this, men are looking for better methods. God is looking for better men. Well, he's going to have to look somewhere else. He's going to find better men unless he makes them.

He does. Any man who's in Christ, he's a new creation. Old things pass away, old things become new.

Anybody here been dealing with the same problem for years? All right, that's understandable. What's not understandable is that you go from the faith because of it.

In fact, it should be the other way around. You should attack the problem continuously in Christ. Do what you know is right. If you are a person of principle, if you know what you believe and why you believe it, then stick to it no matter what. The alternative is to be tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine.

Have you ever met that person? They go to one church, they like it for a little while, they go off to another church, they like it for a little, they go off, and they just never stop, tossed to and fro. Never can stick their stake in the ground and say, here's where God has planted me and here's where I will labor. We call it a place on the wall. It's a castle wall.

It's a place to be part of the fight against the devil. It is not good for Christians to be rolling stones. It is not good for us to be restless to a fault. Some can do it wisely.

They are gifted in that way. Paul was one. Paul could not stay in one place long. If he wasn't driven out of a city, he said, well, you know what?

I've pretty much got everything stabilized here. I need to take what God has given me and create it somewhere else. And so he would move on to the next town, next place, and then do it. There are those today that are the same way, but their motives, their motives are right. They're to the glory of God and not because they are simply restless and have sort of worn out their welcome. Some people have this feeling, you know, if I stay anywhere too long, people will be on to me. They'll find out that I'm a fake.

They'll find out that I'm this. Well, if you keep that attitude, you'll always, first off, you'll always see yourself that way, which is probably not the whole story. It's probably the story Satan has sold to you sometime back and you've latched on to it. There may be parts of it that's true, but it's not the whole truth. And secondly, you're burying your talent that way.

How can you ever invest in something if you do not stay long enough to see its return? What if you had a pastor that the first time he was disgusted with somebody's treatment of him in the church that he left? What if they all did that? You'd have no pastors. And Satan would have won because God could not say of that church, I have given some to be pastor teachers for the work of ministry, for the edification of the body of Christ. He needs people that stick to it because they know him, not simply because they've gotten a pep talk. There's a great difference between a coach in the locker room giving his team a pep talk versus a pastor under the anointing of the Holy Spirit telling it like it is.

You and the pew processing it, filtering out what might not apply to you and laying hold of that which God has given to you and then going off and doing something with it. And this is the story of Christianity. This was the story of those in Thessalonica. When he came into the synagogue, he began to preach. Much of the Jews rejected him.

Many of the Gentiles said, we want more. And that became the church in Thessalonica. And so he says, nor was it in deceit. There was no guile in Paul. He was not trying to manipulate people into the faith, bait and switch, not trying to line his own pockets. 2 Corinthians chapter 7 verse 2, open your hearts to us, he wrote to this church who was giving him grief. We have wronged no one.

We have corrupted no one. We have cheated no one because there was a great group there trying to undo everything that he said. And so every one of us who shares the gospel, who teaches, whether it's in the children's ministry, whether it's in a pulpit, whether it's in the workplace, in the community, wherever you are, everyone who teaches or shares the gospel must decide if they're going to do it with deceit or not.

Your decision. You're going to tell it like it is? You're going to cover it up because you're afraid of your feelings getting hurt? Does this not mean you walk up to anybody and just say, I'm going to tell you the gospel of Jesus Christ, whether you want to hear it or not? That is not being led in the Spirit. But when you know God is saying, tell them what you believe. They want to come into the workplace, they want to tell you about all the drinking that they've done and the potty rousing and the fornication. They want to boast of all that, boast of righteousness, counter-strike.

Don't just sit there and go, what happened? Verse 4, but as we have been approved by God. Oh, this is the first I've been wanting to get to since we started Gospel of Matthew. But as we have been, I'm serious, this is one of those gem verses in scripture, but we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the gospel. Even so we speak, not as pleasing men, but God who tests our hearts. He's not saying only we have been approved by God.

He's not at all saying that. He's actually saying, we've been approved by God and if we can be approved, so can you. This is the prophet's seminary and it doesn't cost cash, it just costs devotion to Christ. The ABG, approved by God, university.

That's the shirt, the t-shirt that I want. Back to Amos when he's standing up to those false priests. Amaziah was the priest at the time, Amos chapter 7. He says, Amos answered and said to Amaziah, I was no prophet, nor was I a son of a prophet, but I was a sheep breeder and a tender of sycamore fruit. Then the Lord took me as I followed the flock and the Lord said to me, go prophesy to my people Israel. And God does the same thing. He says to you, go speak to that person because that might be a convert in waiting.

You don't know. They've heard enough wrong things out there. Now, in America, again, I say this all the time, when you're sharing your faith, much of your work is first excavation. You have to dig out of the way all the junk and the debris that is false and fake and misguided and without the spirit that's in their head about Christianity. One of my children was telling me about sharing the faith with someone and the other person was saying things about the Christianity that were just like, who told you that?

Kind of a response you'd get. That's not Christianity. That's a lie. But you think it's the truth and therefore you think you're justified in rejecting Christ.

And therefore you will be rejected by Christ because it is your responsibility to familiarize yourself with the laws and will of God Almighty. If you were to go to England and get in a car and drive on the right side of the street, you'd be arrested. You'd stand before the magistrate. And you'd say, well, in America, we drive on the right side of the street.

You guys are driving on the wrong side. I didn't know that you did this. He's going to say to you, you didn't know?

It is up to you to familiarize yourself with the laws of the land. And so we have a bunch of dum-dums out there. What are you going to do about it? It's not said to belittle them.

This is how it is. They know nothing about Jesus Christ and what they know so often is false. Now also in that number are apostates. They know the truth. They have decided they don't like it.

They have rejected it. How many of you have, that are going to the universities, how many of you have Professor Wagtongue who thinks they know what it's all about? And you sit there and your guard is down if you're not careful and you're going, hmm.

And they're just downloading into you lie after lie after lie. Listen, say, you know what, Professor? I signed up to this course to study English or literature or whatever it is. I did not come here for you to preach to me.

I go to my church for that and you should come with me. Now I know it's probably not going to happen that way, but what if it did? What if you took out a club?

Can't even draw a picture of a club anymore. Alright, that's a little mockery. But let's finish this verse. So Paul says we've been approved by God. That's the seminary we've attended.

We have his approval. That's called anointing. Each Christian should have that. When you preach the gospel, the anointing is upon you. Now if you have motives, if you have sinister motives, there are some that when they preach Christ, they're trying to indoctrinate them to a system that is not the scripture. They're trying to get them to a lifestyle. What we're supposed to do is to get them to Jesus Christ, not our church.

That would be good too, but we're getting them to Jesus Christ. And so the truth is truth. We have a mandate to never water it down, to never water down the truth to please men. Now he's going to later on say that he was gentle towards them. If you tell the truth to those who don't want to hear it, they're going to say you're harsh. Okay, so I'll lie to you. I'll tell you a lie, and you'll feel better about things, and I'll feel worse about things, and we'll both be worse off. There's a little children's book. I don't remember the name of it, but I love reading this to my daughter, the older one, not the younger one.

I'm kidding. Anyway, there's this little poodle, and she gets this hat, and she comes up to this other dog, and she says, Do you like my hat? He says, No. And a good story moves on. And throughout the whole book, she's coming in, What about this one? And, No. And he's just, No. And finally at the end, of course, she gets to say, I like it.

And he likes that hat. But my point is, he's not lying to her. I had to use children's books to make these points.

You'd think the Bible would be enough. The point is that telling the truth is not a spirit of meanness, simply because it's not pleasant to those who are listening. And so he says, Even so, we speak. And he spoke, and what he spoke and how he lived deepened his message, and that's what will happen to you. If you become in your workplace the best at what you do or close to being the best, just because you execute your job with your utmost, when you speak, what you say will go deeper than what it would have gone had you been a lazy slob in the workplace.

I have proven this. In my own, when I worked in the steel industry, had no friends, went into an industry that was very clandish. If you weren't part of the cliques, if you weren't an Irish Catholic or a Mohawk Indian, you better know somebody else. You just weren't going to be taken under someone's wing. You weren't going to find jobs, the good jobs. But if you worked and you worked hard and didn't get anybody killed or hurt, they respected you.

They take you under their wing. And so when I preached the gospel in that industry, men listened to me. When I rose to the highest, as high as I was going to go as a worker in that industry, when I was coffee break and I sat down and we would engage in conversation, when I got the conversation to Christ, they would listen to me because they respected me as a man. I look back at those days. I don't want to go back to them. I look back at those days and I say, well, I got some of them right, but this is today and I can't live in the strength of yesterday. I have to move forward and I have to make sure I'm not messing it up now. I have to forget those things which are behind in that sense and reach forward to those things which are ahead while there is life in me.

Listen, if you are strong enough to sit in a service to hear the gospel, you're strong enough to preach it to someone. There's life still in you. And if you've wasted decades, so what? They're gone. Move forward. They're converts in waiting.

And so I'm going to stop. Well, we'll just take these last few verses and brush it up. Not as pleasing men. As I mentioned last week, if you have a pastor afraid of anybody in the congregation, get a new pastor. He's supposed to fear God before he fears anyone else. And so here's the strength of such a statement.

Not as pleasing men. It was not a popularity contest. Many pastors, you know, Jesus warned. He says, don't be like the Pharisees who go to the marketplace and look for people to say, oh, that's Rabbi so-and-so. You're not a celebrity. You're one of the flock with a little sharper teeth.

That's the only difference. And you know, teeth are only sharp because I've done it to you because that's what I need you to be. I need you to be part sheepdog, part sheep. So you're like one of the sheep, but if one of them says something that is blasphemous, you can't let it pass.

You've got to deal with it. And that's the way it's supposed to be with all of us who are in Christ Jesus. God who tests our hearts.

This is the ultimate test for every message. An alternate rendering is God who approves our hearts. One is just as strong as the other, but let's read it from Jeremiah chapter 17. The heart is deceitful above all things, desperately wicked. Who can know it? I, the Lord, search the heart. I test the mind even to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his doings. Someone said, when someone says, bless your heart, that heart is deceitful, desperately wicked above all things. No man can know it. I, the Lord, search the heart. And when he searches it, it will yield that heart is made right.

It's up to us to not mess it up later. 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.