1 Thessalonians 5:19-28 (Part C)

That's what God was looking for. Without faith, it's impossible to please God. Abraham believed Him. I believe Him. When he says the Son, Jesus Christ, if He says you are clean, you are clean indeed.

I believe it. I accept it by faith. And there's nothing hell can do against it because it's written in heaven. It's been said by a saint, now with the Lord, Jesus does not know what to do.

He does not parole us, He pardons us. To hear more information about Cross Reference Radio, specifically how you can get a free copy of this teaching. But for now, let's join Pastor Rick in the book of 1 Thessalonians Chapter 5 with today's edition of Cross Reference Radio. See what God says to the world. We don't test with the spirit of suspicion, you know, until God sets it right, it's wrong.

That's how I approach things. But once God sets it right, then it's time to be loyal, and supportive, and edify, and build up, and do something with this. But some never lose that critical spirit.

They do not. spirit of suspicion, you know, until God sets it right, it's wrong. That's how I approach things. But once God sets it right, then it's time to be loyal and supportive and edify and build up and do something with this. But some never lose that critical spirit. They remain judgmental and self-righteous their entire sourpuss Christian life. As Tozier said, they've been baptized in vinegar.

I might have said lemon juice, I think I upgraded it to vinegar, but it's a free upgrade. Anyway, hold fast what is good. That's old school. Hold on to what is good.

He does all things good. This is what Jeremiah said, thus says Jehovah, stand in the ways and see. Ask for the old paths, where the good way is, and walk in it. Then you will find rest for your souls. But they said, we will not walk in it. Then you're not old school. Our old school goes back to eternity past.

That's how far it goes. Paul again, are you so foolish, having begun in the spirit, are you now being made perfect in the flesh? Can you imagine the day they read that letter in the Galatian churches, and they get to that line?

Are you that foolish? I think there was a lot of hearts repenting at that moment. We hold fast to what is good because there are forces that move against us to force us off the path, to the right or to the left, just to get us off the straight and narrow. Joshua chapter 1 verse 7, God says to this mighty man of God, he says, only be strong and very courageous. This is what God is saying to Joshua and to us, that you may observe to do according to all the law which Moses my servant commanded you. Do not turn from it to the right hand or to the left, that you may prosper wherever you go.

What Christian does not want that? Then verse 22, he says abstain from every form of evil. The older King James translation has abstained from all appearances of evil. Which one is right?

They both are. That word there for every form in the new King James and appearances in the old King James, the Greek word, means a look or an appearance. But listen to what the Greek scholar A.T. Robinson says, quoting another Greek scholar and agreeing with him, he says, if so taken, it is not semblance as opposed to reality. In other words, don't touch this stuff. Don't have any evil, it's toxic, it's nuclear. It radiates evil. Stay away from it. Avoid contact, avoid appearance.

Don't even inhale it. You say, well, Satan uses sin against us. Absolutely. The Bible teaches that very clearly. That's the name. Satan is a title. It means he's the enemy.

That's what it means. Or you think of a prosecuting, if you're the innocent guy on trial, the prosecutor is trying to take away your freedom or your life. That is the prosecutor. Now, that's acceptable when justice is being administered, but Satan, Satan is the cause of it all.

It's because of him he's accusing us. He stands before God at night and says, this one did this and this one did that. And God says, yeah, you're the one that did it.

So I'd love to see that happen. So we read Revelation 12, 10, the accuser of our brethren who accused them before our God day and night has been cast down. That time will come.

It's not here yet. And so all he needs to do to prosecute us, every single one of us, is tell the truth about us, the whole truth. And even when he's telling the truth, he's lying because, again, he's withholding all the information that he is the catalyst. But listen to what scripture says. Who shall bring a charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies.

It is the prerogative of God to deal with sinners the way he sees fit and he's told us how he deals with them and he has invited us to partake of what he's made available. We need a deliverer and there is only one. There is only one to whom we can go for deliverance from our guilt.

There is no other. Isaiah chapter 1, verse 18. All Christians know this verse.

Come now, let us reason together, says Jehovah. Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. Though they are red like crimson, they shall be as wool. I'm going to make you look like a little white lamb that's stained, that blood-soaked stain all over your wool because of what sin has done.

I'm going to wash it clean. The New Testament picks it up. Acts chapter 4, verse 12, the message of the New Testament church to which we belong. Nor is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved. Romans chapter 4, verse 3, what does the scripture say? Abraham believed God and it was accounted to him for righteousness.

That's what God was looking for. Without faith, it's impossible to please God. Abraham believed him. I believe him when he says, the Son, Jesus Christ, if he says you are clean, you are clean indeed.

I believe it. I accept it by faith, and there's nothing hell can do against it because it's written in heaven. It has been said by a saint now with the Lord, Jesus does not parole us, he pardons us. Thank God. There is no purgatory.

There's no go to step B. It's either you're right with Christ or you're not. And that's what Jesus said, he who is not with me scatters abroad.

You're either with me or you are not. And his work is finished work. It is complete work. John, his gospel, chapter 1, verse 12, but as many as received him, to them he gave the right to become children of God to those who believe in his name. It's a gift. Ephesians chapter 2, for by grace you have been saved through faith. Listen to what he goes on to say, and that not of yourselves.

It is the gift of God. You can't save yourself. You're too messed up.

I am too. We cannot save ourselves, but there's one who does. There's one who will. His name is Jesus Christ, and we accept that by faith. And if you do not like it and you reject it, you go beyond quenching the Spirit, you go into blasphemy. And so, again, you may say it is too good to be true.

That's a lie from hell. God says it is too good to reject. That's the gospel. Verse 23, Paul continues, now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely and may your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Completely. There's no, oh, you're almost there.

I've already made the point. You either are washed in the blood or are not. God is the only one. The God of the Bible, the Lord of the New Testament, is the only one that can completely sanctify us, to separate us from all the filth of sin and its condemnation unto himself.

We call it heaven. Now he makes another point that's doctrinal, though. But he says your whole spirit, soul, and body. Man is an inferior trinity. There are three things that really make us tick. A body that is physical, the tent, palpable, the soul, that is the mind and the feelings, and the spirit, that is an awakened conscience to God.

Not all have it. The spirit is the immaterial part of man that worships and communes and has friendship with God. It gives us God consciousness. In Ephesians chapter 2, Paul made it clear that before Christ, your spirit's dead. But the spirit is that part of me that interacts with God.

Without my spirit alive, I cannot speak to God as opposed to the soul. So men worship and serve God with the spirit, not the soul. That's why Jesus said those who worship God must worship him in spirit and in truth. Notice he did not say he did worship him in love. Well, if you get the truth and your spirit is alive, that's all love.

It's taken for granted. Romans chapter 1 verse 9, for God is my witness whom I serve with my spirit and the gospel of his son. You can't serve the Lord without the spirit being alive. Proverbs chapter 20 verse 27, the spirit of man is the lamp of the Lord.

It's Jehovah, the lamp of Jehovah, searching all the inner depths of his heart. Those outside of Christ are spiritually dead even if they are spiritually active. In other words, man can be, you know, get a Ouija board or any of the occult practices or any of the false religions of the world. Those are spiritual things according to definition, but his spirit is still dead. He's got the wrong God. There's no life in him. And let me point this out for again from scripture.

I build this up as critical. Originally, God breathed his own life, his own spirit into man in Genesis 2.7. God formed man out of the clay of the earth and breathed, that word breathed in the Hebrew is Baruch for spirit. God breathed his spirit into man and the scripture says, and man became a living being. That was Adam, no sin. God's spirit was in him.

God made man to be indwelt by God. Then sin came and the spirit of God and man died. When God said, in the day that you eat of this tree, you will die. Now, they ate of that tree and they did not drop dead.

That did happen. The body did suffer victim to the spirit also, but spiritually they died. And so when Paul talks in the Ephesian letter, he says that man died and the spirit of the devil came alive. And I need to read that from Ephesians 2, 2 so you understand the strength of the language. Verse 2, if you will, let's start at verse 1, Ephesians chapter 2, and you he made alive.

You see, that's what happens. When you're born again, you come to life spiritually. He says, who were dead in trespasses and sins, he continues, in which you once walked according to the cost of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, this is Satan.

And listen to this, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience. When Adam and Eve sinned, the spirit of Satan began to dominate, to influence them and we call it the flesh. We call it the carnal nature. We call it the natural man. The natural man is man without God, just born. The spiritual man is one who is born again. As I mentioned, man was created to receive God and that means now that he was created to receive God, but he disobeyed God, the spirit of Satan is now the influence, so man now has a bit of heaven and hell in him when he is born again. That's why you struggle with the flesh. God in his genius, of course, knows this and has made a provision that if you sin, you have an advocate with the father and his name is Jesus Christ.

So now there is no temptation that has overtaken you, none. There is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus because the spiritual man hates sin, may enjoy the sensations, but hates the fact that they enjoy the sensations. And for all the right reasons because Jesus said so, that's why.

Whereas a man not of Christ, they may hate what sin has done to them because they want control over their lives and they've lost it, but Jesus is not their motivation. And so the spirit is distinguished from the soul, Hebrews chapter 4-12, for the word of God is living and powerful, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the vision of the soul and the spirit, the division of the two. And so we come now to the soul. Man is a triune, an inferior trinity, his body, soul, and spirit. We've covered the spirit, now we talk about the soul.

It is also immaterial. It is the seat of the will, of the affections, of personality. It is that part of you and me that interacts with each other. It is that part of you and me that will live forever. It is intermediate between the body and the spirit, and it continues after we die whether you accept Christ or not.

Just where will it continue? That is the question. To reject God is to have your soul perish, to dwell in hell forever. And we read in Revelation 6-9, when he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the testimony which they held. The soul of man, it's who we are, it's our personality. It is what goes to heaven, it is our feelings, our intellect, it is essential to life of a human being. And we who believe in Christ, this is all the hell we'll ever have to go through.

Listen to what A.W. Tozier writes about this, he says, when Jesus spoke of the soul in his time, he was speaking about that part of man's being which is endless, which lives on and on. So safety of the soul, not of the body that God is concerned with. That's what martyrs are made out of. And now we come to the body. The body is material. It is the only part of us that is physical material, as I mentioned, the soul and spirit are not.

We don't X-ray them. There's a link, of course, between the soul, the spirit, and the body, but it is created by God. And it is an instrument of the soul, and once you are born again, it is an instrument of the spirit, and it is also then an instrument of the Holy Spirit. And it is the part of us that interacts with the physical universe. We would be disembodied souls, had we not a physical body. And it will perish, and we will receive a glorified body once we leave this life. To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. And this is what we love. Well, 2 Corinthians chapter 5, we know that if our earthly house, this tent, is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.

I love that. You never have to worry again, it's eternal. That's the trinity of man. He says, be preserved blameless at the coming of the Lord Christ, right with God, when we see him.

That's what he's talking about. Death jettisons the body, the soul lives on, and where it goes is up to the living spirit and man, or the lack, there, 1 Corinthians 15, you can look that up. Verse 24, he who calls you is faithful, who also will do it. A lot of Christians struggle with that, living through it, to persevere, to do what? To live in the spirit, to be sanctified, as he tells us in verse 23, to be completely sanctified to God, to trust God, blessed assurance. The best scriptural statement on blessed assurance, I think, is 1 John chapter 5, verse 13.

I'm not going to quote it now because we're running out of time, but I made the reference. But I want to give two others that have to do with our blessed assurance. Being confident of this very thing, that he who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ.

You don't have to worry about it. If you say, Lord, Jesus is my Lord, there's no other I love him. And there's salvation found nowhere else but in him.

And I agree with everything he says about himself and about me and about everybody else. That's being born again. You say, but I still fail. That's what the blood of Christ is for. It's not like, okay, the blood of Christ washed you, now you're saved. Don't you mess up again because I'm out of blood. You can't get it anymore washings.

It's a one time shot. That's not what the Bible teaches at all. In the Greek, you know, in the Greek, there's richer language in many ways. It has this thing called the aoris tense when it speaks about salvation. It speaks about it being ongoing when it speaks of cleansing and the blood washing us.

These are ongoing events. We are set aside even for future sins. Now, it does not bar us from rejecting Christ. We never lose our free will. Contrary, I don't care who teaches you, to me it's one of the stupidest things that smart people have fallen for. Free will is everything.

Without it, you have crime scenes. Every sin is an act of going against the will of God, love. There's no such thing as love. Agape love cannot be overrated. All the others can, strogeiros, phileo, all those can be overrated.

They have their place, but they can be overrated. And so Paul says this when he's nearing his martyrdom, his last writings, 2 Timothy chapter 1 verse 12. He says, for this reason, I also suffer these things. Nevertheless, I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed to him until that day. I'm persuaded. I'm done here. I'm convicted.

It's got me. And Paul was not the kind to say, but, you know, I'm the apostle Paul. I've suffered for Christ. You haven't.

So what? You've confessed him. He's going to bless me, but not you, because you're not as good as I am.

He would never make such a foolish thought or stupid saying like that. And so my point is, you do not have to be a theologian to be right with God. You have to simply be right with God. Verse 25, he says, brethren, pray for us. With all that God did through him and for him, Paul still knew how to ask for prayer. He still knew he had needs. He still felt he belonged to the body of Christ locally and universally.

He was not a hermit under the guise of, I do it better. Do you know how many Christians there are that have no fruit whatsoever, but it doesn't stop them from criticizing those who do? It's like a drug or something.

It's like, who do you think you are? You just show up with all of these things for all of us to fix according to you, but yet God's not done anything with you. I don't get it sometimes. It doesn't mean that if you have fruit, you're right and you can never be wrong. It doesn't mean that at all. It does mean, though, that we belong to each other, not so that we can beat up on each other.

We have to understand prerogatives that belong within the house of God, within any structure for it to exist. Well, verse 26, he continues, greet all the brethren with a holy kiss. Handshake will do with me. It's cold and flu season. I'm into the whole, you know, Asian bowing thing. You don't need hand sanitizer.

Do you know how much money we'd save a year, like $10, if we just bowed instead of that whole... Okay, back to verse 27, I charge you by the Lord that this epistle be read to all the holy brethren. Oh, I love this verse.

This is serious business, this command is. He did not need a committee or a board or a bishop to do anything. He knew what his role was in the church and he did it.

And those who served with him loved it to be so. When he dispatched Timothy and Titus and Silas, those men were off and running. And when they came back, it was the power of the Holy Spirit that was over their ministry. You cannot get anything done with those who are rowing in a different direction than where the captain says to go.

You can't do it. And Satan knows it and he finds Christians all the time that were just willing to kick and to moan and to complain and to fight against God instead of with him in God's name. We're all susceptible to this. Anyway, he continues here, he tells them that this letter be read to all the holy brethren. This is the local church now he's talking about.

I'm at this moment reading this letter, complying with this charge. In the dark ages of Europe, the law was the corrupted church. They made kings, they broke kings, they were a dominant influence. The word of God was kept from the people. So serious were they about keeping the word away from the people that they made it so you had to read it in Latin.

What were they thinking? Whatever it was, it did not come from God. There were those that were persecuted for daring to read the scripture or for daring to memorize scripture verses in the name of Christ.

And yet we have people that criminalize God's word to this day and they call themselves Christians. Don't back down from them, hold your ground, if it comes up, I'm not saying go looking for them, but if it comes up, you don't owe them peace. I think it was Winston Churchill that says an appeaser is one that feeds a crocodile hoping that the crocodile will eat him last. That's what an appeaser does. They're going to be eaten.

They're just trying to get to the end of the line. We're not here to appease, we're here to preach the gospel. Verse 28, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you, Amen.

What a glorious conclusion to the first Thessalonian letter. 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.