1 Thessalonians 3:1-5 (Part B)

You're going to be a Christian and this is what might happen to you here. Acts chapter 14. This captures the story after Paul had suffered stoning. And we read there in verse 21, to continue in the faith and saying, we must, through many tribulations, enter the kingdom of God.

First Thessalonians chapter 3 is the portion of scripture Pastor Rick will be covering today on Cross Reference Radio. I'm not trying to be cocky or anything. I'm just disgusted with the stupidity that's on the throne in the hearts of so many people who have more power than they should ever have. And, you know, not enough brains to bait a fishhook, but that doesn't stop them from running for office and getting elected. I mean, this is bad. You have to watch it as a Christian. We used to, you know, go someplace else.

And, you know, not enough brains to bait a fishhook, but that doesn't stop them from running for office and getting elected. I mean, this is bad. You have to watch it as a Christian. We used to, you know, go somewhere and you look at someone and, well, is he saved or not saved?

Now it's like, who'd you vote for? And you can't allow that stuff in. So, anyway, that no one should soon be shaken by these afflictions. Now the Greek word here for shaken is to wag the tail.

If the Greek were writing about my dog as kind of cowardly and he wags his tail and fawns over me whenever I show up because I've broken his spirit, that's the Greek word he would use. And so Paul is saying to them, no one should be wagging their tail in these afflictions. We're not going up to people, oh, I'm sorry I'm a Christian. You tell me how I should live.

I'm sorry you don't agree with my views on homosexuality and Islam. You tell me how I should think. And that would be certainly spineless and faithless and it would break the heart of God for people who claim his salvation to live in this way.

And Paul was on top of this. And so he said, look, it's not going to be easy being a Christian, but it's going to be harder living in hell. Wouldn't you like to just sometimes take wings and fly away from all this political stuff and all the things that are going on in the world? But you can't.

Why? Because Jesus commands us to go into the world. I mean, when we say, oh, look at that fireman run into the fire, aren't we happy for them?

Well, same thing with us. We're running into the fire for the same reasons, though ours is spiritual more than physical, to save souls. And I don't think there's anything attractive about a church sneaking around apologizing for what it claims it should believe, but to be strong in the Lord. Again, this is not bravado.

There's no alternative to this. When Paul came to this church, they knew that his back was bruised from upholding Christ. So they knew what they were getting into when they converted.

And this is why we admire the testimonies of the martyrs, because we ask ourselves, will we be this way, too? The temptation to abandon Christianity and purchase exemption by renouncing our faith is from Satan and not the Lord. Satan tempted these Thessalonians to purchase peace, to not stick with it. Paul knew what they were up to, and this is why he's so relieved to hear that they're not backing down.

And by the time he writes the second letter, they're still not backing down. And so he says, for you yourselves know that we are appointed to this, not a cheap gospel. He never wavered at the cost of Christ, and in his presentation of the gospel, he did not extract that. Well, I can't tell them about the difficulties in Christianity, because they might not become Christians.

That's deceptive. Look, you want to be a Christian, then this is what might happen to you here. Acts chapter 14, this captures the story after Paul had suffered stoning. And we read there in verse 21, and when they had preached the gospel to that city and made many disciples, they returned to Lystra, Iconium, and Antioch, strengthening the souls of the disciples, exhorting them to continue in the faith and saying, we must, through many tribulations, enter the kingdom of God. So when they appointed elders in every church, they prayed with fasting. They commanded them to the Lord in whom they had believed.

They said, well, the Lord's now going to be your Lord. Trust him. As you go through these difficult things in life, trust the Lord. Now, you've got to live it. You can't.

Well, you can, but it's not advisable. Don't wait for the bad news to come and then start loading up your faith. Be ever ready. Be a minute man. Be a child of the word, a child of the Lord.

Commune with him. Stop letting your moods always have the last say so. They're going to yap.

There's no way to shut them up. Moods are going to come. This morning, I stopped by to get something on the way in, and I had a moody person, so I'm still irritated by it.

No. I just noticed it, and I got a little moody, too. I'll be honest with you. And, well, I mean, I hope I'm always honest with you up here, especially, because I do fear the Lord. He might not use lightning on me here.

He might get it when no one's looking. Anyway, the Lord rebukes. He chastens, and I try to give him no reason at all to chasten me. The last thing I want the Lord to say, come on, let's go to the woodshed. No, I've been there with you once.

I'll meet you somewhere, but anyway. Now, in verse 4, he says, for in fact, we told you before when we were with you that we would suffer tribulation just as it happened, and you know. See, that's what we've been talking about this morning, being strong in the face of tribulation, because that's what our text is talking about. You say, well, you've been on a rant about tribulation this morning.

No, I'm not on a rant. That's what the Scripture demands. We consider this. One of the benefits to going through the Scriptures, we have to talk about everything that God chooses to talk about eventually. Now, God has a history of allowing his servants to suffer, and his servants have a history of allowing God to allow them to suffer. The world has a history of suffering. That's it. That's the end of it.

They just suffer. And there's a difference, though, between here he says we would suffer tribulation and what the Scripture also has to say about the great tribulation, two different things. There's tribulation now in life. Jesus said in the world, you will have much tribulation, but be strong. I've overcome the world. He says, be of good cheer. You cannot be of good cheer if you're weak in spirit.

You have to be alive. And Matthew 24, 21, I'll read this. There will be great tribulation such as has not been since the beginning of the world until this time, no, nor ever shall be. So we make the distinction between tribulation and our life while we are preaching the great tribulation to come.

And we have never been this close. I don't know at what time the Lord is going to say to his beloved church, come here. But there is nothing remaining to be fulfilled, not only prophetically, that has been the case for a long time, thousands of years, but there's nothing to be fulfilled physically. We now have the technology for the things in Revelation that have been prophesied to be implemented. Though what is the purpose of the book of Revelation? To tell the believer that God knows what he's doing.

He's calling it before it happens. So that when Satan comes, don't you doubt the word? You've tried to do it, but you keep failing. Every time you leave the church, you make this pledge to yourself. You're going to be stronger. Then you fall flat on your face. And it must not be true, right? That's the devil.

The Lord says, what do you think my grace is for? Do you love me? Follow me.

Work at it. Get back up. I'm not going anywhere.

Are you? Now there are those that say, you can not. You're stuck with the Lord.

Once you're in, you're in. It's not the mob. God will always treat us with respect. He'll always give us a choice because he wants us to follow him through our election.

We choose to follow him. Anything less cannot be loved. We know of no such love in the world. We know of lusts like this. We know of molestings like this, but we do not know of a love that is jammed down someone's throat.

You can't even do it with your pet fish. Well, in verse 5, he says, for this reason, when I could no longer endure it, I sent to know your faith, lest by some means the tempter had tempted you and our labor might be in vain. We did all this for nothing.

That was his concern. What does that mean? It means just what it says. There's no, I don't care how many theological degrees you might think you have. There's no way to make verses like this go out of the Bible.

It means exactly what it says. The person that comes to you and says, you have to be educated to know what the scripture says. God does not set it up that way. He says to come to him, not as theologians. One of the messages behind the altar that was a part of the life of Abraham was that it was made out of anything he could put together, pretty much.

That was a pile of dirt or rocks. That would be the altar. And the idea is that anyone could come to God when he says men shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. If you have a degree in divinity. He never says that.

He never even hints at that. Now there are benefits to education without question, but that comes from time in the scripture and in the presence of the Lord and around God's people and around people who are not God's people. It's collective. There are things that contribute to who we are. So man is created and man is made. He's made by what he goes through. What are you made out of as a Christian? What are we going to find out? You don't have a choice. You youngins again.

Once you start getting out into the world on your own and mom and dad is not standing over your shoulder for everything, we're going to find out what your faith is made out of. But you can hear that so many times you don't hear it. It's no longer real. All you want is the fun bucket and there's no power.

There's no glow. There's no meaning to your life. You're miserable all the time. You're cantankerous around believers.

You're jealous of them. You don't like what they represent to you. They remind you that you're supposed to be walking straight and squeezing through the narrow and that when you're not doing this, you're in jeopardy of not finding favor with your Lord. And that if unchecked leads to backsliding.

And once you start sliding back, if you keep sliding back, you fall away. That is apostasy. I do not believe there's a way back for a full apostate.

And the scripture doesn't present it to us that way. Balaam for example was an apostate. He fell away and that was it. He was thrust through by the army of Israel. God gave him every chance. You know this guy, maybe if a donkey speaks to him, he'll snap out of it.

That didn't work. I mean come on. You would think if, imagine you go home, well, some of you may have pets that actually talk to you.

And you've been hiding it because you know the rest of us are going to giggle and then get you a jacket with the buttons in the back. But really, they look like they can talk and it's easy. Dog language is so easy. And they look at you, I don't care how they're looking at you, it's I am hungry.

And there's no other anything. And when watchdogs, they're just saying to the person coming in, I just want to eat. Well anyway, we're not here to talk about dogs talking and animals. But don't be pulling a Christian doodle on us. I don't mean Jimmy, I mean doctor.

If I could talk to the animals. Balaam did and it got him nowhere. Anyway, and he's dialoguing with the beast no less. But okay, so back to the verse. Consider these foreboding words that we come across in Scripture. Here's Paul later on writing to this Timothy. Timothy, I mean when he sent him back to Macedonia and then back to Corinth, that's a 400 mile round trip.

And there was no cars and this is just the hard way. And so here's some of the things he wrote to Timothy concerning pastoring. In 1 Timothy chapter 1, he says concerning the faith, some have suffered shipwreck of whom are Hymenaeus and Alexander whom I delivered to Satan. Oh man, he's a hard pastor. He's a meanie, meanie, meanie.

He delivered them to Satan. What does that mean? I don't know and I don't care. It's bad.

That's all I need to know. It's like the house is on fire. What color is the flame? I don't care.

It's on fire. And so here's the apostle saying I delivered those dudes to hell. That's like handcuffing them and carting them down.

Here you go. Pretty sobering. And so when you hear words like this, you say you know I just can't sashay into my Christian faith. Just waltz into it like there's no big deal. I have to be in it.

I have to pay attention. Now 1 Timothy continues chapter 4 verse 1, the Spirit, the Holy Spirit that is. Now listen, anybody comes talking about the Great Spirit, that is not Christianity.

That is an 11. That is someone trying to steal his identity. He is the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, equal with the Father and the Son, self-existent, all-knowing, omniscient, all-powerful and worthy of our praise.

And you talk about the Great Spirit, you're trying to leaven into the Christian faith, language, verbiage that doesn't belong here. That lines him up with some other spirit. Well what is his name? Where is he from? What's he like?

What does he do for me? I'll tell you what he does, our spirit. He testifies of Jesus Christ and not of himself.

And so coming back to this chapter, chapter 5 of 1 Timothy, here's another thing Paul wrote to this passage. He says having condemnation because they have cast off their first faith. What does that mean? It means just what it says.

It means that in English, in Chinese, in Spanish, in Greek, in Hebrew, they cast off their faith. And you'll get commentators that don't like it because it doesn't sit right with what they've gotten in the seminary. And so they'll come out and say it doesn't mean that.

Yes it does mean that. And I disagree with you and I disagree emphatically because it's not just one verse, there's a string of them. Many Christians are uncomfortable with this and why is that? Because I think their faith is childish, it's puerile, it's immature, it's stunted. That's one section, the ones that like to hear it. The other group is teaching it because they've been taught it and now they can't abandon it.

Many have written books about it and now they can never let it go. It's not an essential but it still irritates me because there are too many scriptures in here to ignore like this. We're not even talking about what's in Hebrews and some of the others. Well he continues 1 Timothy 5 verse 15, he says they turned aside after Satan.

What does that mean? That means they were following the Lord, they turned aside. And then they weren't following the Lord anymore, they were following the teachings of Satan though they're not in Satan's name. Satan, he doesn't sign his name to anything.

He forges it. He's like an empty chair, he's not there. It's like I didn't know that was going on.

I wasn't even there to do it. And all the time it is him. We see this in our politicians. Not all of them but many of them.

All the way up to the top. I didn't know about that. You're supposed to know about that.

And that you don't know about that makes you double guilty. Well coming back to this, why would I inject that into a spiritual sermon? Because we have to always think about what's going on serious issues. There are times to veg out but there are times to not veg out.

I mean being aloof and air headed is fine if you're playing, I don't know, if you're curling, you know. Who thought of that? Let's see how long we can get this piece of pottery across the ice.

Anyway, it has got to be one of the most remarkable things. If there is life, if there is an iguana on Mars, he's looking back saying that's why I'm not coming there because you people in this curling thing. Now I couldn't preach this if I was up in Minnesota.

They'd kill me after service. But I can do it here in Virginia. I'm in the land of cotton. Good times here ain't soon forgotten. Okay, we're back to this. Look away, look away Dixieland. It is a nice song.

It's the easy song to sing when you're happy. But anyway, coming back to this, 1 Timothy chapter 6. And I really thought we were going to finish chapter 3. I said, you know, there's just, you know, there's not a lot here that should bog me down with comment. And I did it. But we'll get up to chapter, the next session we should complete it. We still got some nice sections. When we get to the section he talks about the Father and the Son as equals.

You know, it's going to take 20 minutes right there. But coming back to this, 1 Timothy chapter 6. Now we're in Thessalonians, but I'm quoting Timothy because the point I'm trying to establish is that this trivializing, the handling of our faith is severe.

You noticed how many times Satan shows up with this. Things like shipwreck, turned aside, cast away, depart, overthrown. These are things that belong to apostasy. You cannot fall away from that which you were not at. You can't leave a place you were never there or at.

And so basic to all language and every understanding of language until you get the brainiacs to come in. And verse 6, pardon me, 1 Timothy chapter 6 verse 10, he says they strayed from the faith. What does that mean? It means they strayed from the faith. 2 Timothy chapter 2 verses 17 and 18, he says, Hymenaeus and Philetus are of this sort who have strayed concerning the truth saying that the resurrection has already passed and they overthrow the faith of some. You're susceptible to having a faith overthrown. That's what the Bible tells you. Now if you've got your doctrine out of the Reformation era, you can't handle any of this stuff. You're going to leave the church in a huff and you're going to go find a church where they still like to hear what Luther has to say more than what the scripture is saying.

No slight entirely on Luther what people have done with what he was trying to do in the age that he lived in. Now this naming of names. Moses did it.

We have it written for us in the book of Numbers. There was Dathan and Abiram and An and Korah. These decided Moses took too much power to himself. They had every right to be priest also.

Why did Aaron get to be? They were accusing Moses of all sorts of evil things. And the ground opened up and swallowed most of them.

Lightning came out the sky, killed some of the others and their families because their families were in on it too. And Moses said to the people, get away from them and their tents and they and their possessions are gone. So he named names as Paul named names.

You got to be careful when you do this. The spirit that it's being done with. Paul is writing to a pastor and he says you need to know in case these people show up in your church they need to be dealt with or they will deal with you. And so he names them to him.

God names them in numbers to tell the Christians you better watch your step because I'm watching your step. Now he's not saying this with this magnifying glass over us unless we drift under the magnifying glass through a spirit of rebellion. Our God does not walk around looking to thump us in the head.

He's got other things to do with us that he's very excited about. And discipline is no more fun to our God than it is to a parent. Is there a parent here that enjoys getting after their kid?

If you do you need prayer. No parent should enjoy disciplining their child trying to get them to go the straight way, training the child. I don't even like training a tree. You know you put the little rubber thing and the rope on it. It's a pain in the neck.

Why can't the thing grow the way I want it to grow? But anyway, such is life. And so stick to the Lord and the debate and the problems go away concerning how am I doing with Jesus Christ. He says abide in me I will abide in you.

I don't need anyone to break that down for me. It's right on the surface. It's like manna. I can scoop it up and consume it and be strong because of it and go forward with what God has for me. And so how convenient that there are those that reject such simple verses. Well before I close though I just want to again encourage you not to be driven by your moods. They're going to win sometimes with most of us. But that does not mean they get to have the last say. This ain't over.

Work at it. Commune with the Lord. Communion is just being in the presence of Christ on his terms and good with it. Very comfortable, very pleasant. Sometimes I like to just sit out in my woods or my backyard or wherever I'm at and just commune with the Lord.

I think it is a very healthy thing for us to do. 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.