Night People/Day People, Part 1 B

Our future is all bright, our future is all light, our future is all day and when the day star comes and the dawning of our eternal day arrives, we will reach the destiny for which we were redeemed in the past and are sustained in the present. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. Wanting Republicans to give people a clear choice in elections, Ronald Reagan said that voters need a political party raising a banner of bold colors, not pale pastels. His point, sharp contrasts reveal clear distinctions. Well, Scripture knows the importance of contrasts and it uses them to highlight differences between believers and non-believers, and in that there is no gray area. You're either saved or you're deceived. And what awaits you if you're on the wrong side? Find out in John MacArthur's series from 1 Thessalonians titled The Rapture and the Day of the Lord.

Here now is John. The domain of the lost, the domain of those without God, without Christ is the domain of darkness, dominion of ignorance, sin, wickedness, and rebellion, the realm of the fallen sinful nature in Adam and unredeemed. But you, he says, brethren, are not in that darkness.

You're by nature, not darkness. We have risen, Paul says in Romans 6, to walk in newness of life. We are new creations, he says in 2 Corinthians 5, 17, old things have passed away, all things have become new. We are a new creation again, he says in Galatians 6, 15.

We have been created in Christ Jesus unto good works which God has before ordained that we should walk in them. Our life is hid with Christ in God and therefore our life is different. No need to fear missing the rapture, friends. No need to fear that you might get caught in the day of the Lord. No need to fear wrath.

No need to fear condemnation. We have nothing to do with the darkness. We have everything to do with the light. We're day people.

Can I put it to you simply? We belong in the day, we live in the day, and the future for us is the dawning of an eternal day. So we don't need to be anxious then about our future because of the distinctiveness of our nature. Second point, because of the distinctiveness of our behavior.

Consistent with our nature is the manifest behavior which should be to us a confirming, confident evidence of our secure future. This follows right on the first theme and is linked by the words in verse 6, so then...so then. This is a good reminder of the relationship between the Christian's identity and his conduct, between his nature and his behavior.

Those two are inseparably linked all through the New Testament. What we are dictates how we act. We are day people, so we act like day people. That's our character, therefore that's our conduct.

That's our behavior. Verse 6, so then let us not sleep as others do, others meaning unbelievers, but let us be alert and sober. Let's be different. Let's be who we are. Now while we want to celebrate the fact that we are different, we also want to admit that this is an exhortation. And the fact that it is an exhortation is very important. He doesn't say in the prior verses, please be alert and sober. In the prior verses, please be day people.

He says, you are day people. Our character, our nature is fixed by the transforming, regenerating power of the gospel. But even though we are day people, we still have the fallen flesh and so even as day people, it is possible for us to have some night life, isn't it? And so we need to be exhorted to let that pattern of righteousness which is normal to our nature be uninterrupted. So he says in verse 6, so then let us not sleep as others do.

And he adds another component here. We've been talking about night and we talked about darkness and now we add another component, sleep. The unregenerate are in the night. The night is pitch black and they're asleep.

That compounds their insensitivity, doesn't it? It's night, that's bad enough. It's pitch black, that's doubly bad and they're in a coma, absolutely insensitive, insensible to spiritual reality. The fourth dimension is added in verse 7 when he talks about drunkenness.

If you want to see the depth of insensitivity of an unregenerate person, see the compounding of those four concepts. It is night for them. It is pitch black.

They are asleep in a drunken stupor. We have nothing to do with that kind of life. We're day people and wouldn't it be absolutely ridiculous for us to conduct ourselves as if we were night people?

That's his whole exhortation here. Day people shouldn't act like night people. That's not the pattern of your life, so why interrupt the normal righteous pattern with night life?

There's no place for night life with day people. There's a comparative passage that comes at it from a little different angle and I just want to point out the parallels, not the differences. Romans 13...Romans 13. And here is another exhortation to day people, to act like day people.

Down in verse 12, middle of the verse, as I said, he comes at it a little differently but there's a similar kind of exhortation, the middle of verse 12. Let us therefore, referring to believers, lay aside the deeds of darkness, the night life. We don't have any part with that.

That doesn't belong to us. Let's put on the armor of light and let us behave properly as day people, not in carousing and drunkenness and sexual promiscuity and sensuality, not in strife and jealousy. Let's put on the armor of light.

What's the armor of light? Verse 14, it's the Lord Jesus Christ. Let's start acting like He acts. Let's not make provision for the flesh. By the way, night people are in the pitch dark, in a coma, drunk, but they are wide awake to the flesh and sound asleep to spiritual reality. He says, don't be like them. Don't conduct yourself like the night people, your day people.

To me, it's so wonderful how this exhortation is built on our character and not on fear. God could have said...could have changed the whole plan and said, look, you either act like day people or you're going to wind up in the day of the Lord. You either act like day people or you're going to feel my wrath. You're going to feel my condemnation.

You're going to feel my damnation. And He could have made the plan go that way and motivated us by fear. Or He could have even said, well, you won't go to hell eternally, but I'll tell you, if you mess around with night activities, you're going to go through the day of the Lord and you're going to get blasted in the day of the Lord. He could have said that and tried to move us by fear, but He doesn't. He tries to move us by a sense of spiritual dignity.

He says, you wouldn't want to do that, would you? After all, you're day people. You belong to God and He lifts us up above the motive of fear to the point of dignity and honor where we say, look, I belong to God. I'm a child of the day. I'm a son of the light.

I don't act like that. There's no place for night life among day people. We're above that by God's grace and the power of God's Spirit. I say no to the carousings of my flesh, its sensuality, its sexual promiscuity, its strife and jealousy. And I say yes to the day, to virtue, purity. And I will put on the armor of light, which means putting on the character of Christ and putting on the conduct of Christ.

Your conduct then must demonstrate your condition, your character. So let us not sleep as others do, others meaning non-believers who are asleep foolishly, unwitting and unwary of what is coming. Remember the parable in Matthew 24 where Jesus said, if the head of the house had known at what time of the night the thief was coming, he would have been on the alert. But they're going to be asleep. We don't want to sleep. We don't want to be spiritually witless. We don't want to be spiritually unwary. We want to truly be awake to spiritual reality.

That's the point. Let us be, verse 6, alert. That's his first statement.

Let us be alert. Now sleep is natural to the night people, but not the day people. By the way, the word sleep here is different from the word sleep he uses back in chapter 4. Back in chapter 4, 13, 14 and 15, he uses the word sleep several times to refer to the death of believers, that believers who have died are only asleep because it's temporary and they're going to awaken the rapture. Here he uses a different word that actually doesn't normally mean death.

There are a few places where it can be used to mean death, but it normally means just sleep. And so he says, this is the sleep of spiritual indifference, living as if there is no judgment. They're asleep. They can't see truth. They can't live virtue and they aren't even aware that judgment is coming. They're absolutely tuned out, living their lives as if there would never be a judgment of God, living their lives as if there never were a God. We expect night people to do that, people who are insensible, helpless, but not Christians.

Now this is a part of our comfort too. Even though I am a day person, if I am living the night life, I'm going to lose my confidence that I'm a day person. And when my life is characterized by righteousness, my confidence is high. When my life is characterized by unrighteousness, I begin to question whether I am a day person and I may wonder whether I will escape the day of the Lord. It is not possible for Christians to be caught in the day of the Lord. It is possible for sinning ones to think they might be because confidence can be lost. So if I'm to be comforted and encouraged and strengthened with hope, I have to live like a day person. Titus 2 is a good parallel where Paul says the grace of God in verse 11 has appeared bringing salvation to all men. And that salvation carries with it instruction about denying ungodliness and worldly desires and living sensibly, righteously, godly in this present age, looking for the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Christ Jesus.

You see, part of our ability to look for that hope and that blessed hope and that glorious appearing is to be living holy lives. So the apostle says, don't sleep like unbelievers do. Be alert and sober. The word alert, very simple, be awake.

The Greek word is gregoreo from which the name Gregory comes. Be awake. Be alert to what's going on in the spiritual dimension, truth and virtue.

See what's happening. Don't be sleeping, slumbering, witless. 1 Peter 1 13 says, gird your minds for action, keep sober in spirit, fix your hope completely on the grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

That's the same kind of injunction. Get your mind together, see truth, perceive truth, be sober in your spirit and then you'll have hope for the coming of Christ without fear. As you look to the future, Peter says again in 2 Peter chapter 3, and you realize what's going to happen in the end. You see the day of the Lord coming.

You ought to be found in peace, spotless and blameless, waiting for the patient Lord to reveal His final salvation. So I'm to be alert and awake to truth and righteousness and reality, not living in some inebriated condition or some stupor of sleep that I have been induced into by getting involved in the nightlife, the world. Then he adds sober, and I'm sure these words could be flipped back and forth in a synonym fashion. I don't think he intends to make a difference between the two of them, but I would just point out the word sober means free from the influence of intoxicants.

And so he's just extending his illustration. He talked about the ungodly being asleep and drunk and so now picking up those two things, he says be awake and sober. And really talking about the same kind of thing, as their sleep and their drunkenness are simply two ways to define their insensitivity, so are being awake and sober are two ways to define our sensitivity to spiritual reality. Being sober means what alert means, under control, self-control, having a proper balance, maintaining a settled confidence, having your priorities carefully laid out, being filled with spiritual and moral seriousness, being zealous for what is true and what is right, not overexcited and not indifferent but sane and balanced and consistent and calm and steady spiritually.

We have to be that way as we live as people of the day. William Hendrickson has an excellent paragraph in which he writes, the sober person lives deeply. His pleasures are not primarily those of the senses, like the pleasures of the drunkard, for instance, but those of the soul.

He is by no means a stoic. On the contrary, with a full measure of joyful anticipation, he looks forward to the return of the Lord, but he doesn't run away from his task. He writes, the Apostles' exhortation then amounts to this, and here's his translation. Let us not be lax and unprepared, but let us be prepared, being spiritually alert, firm in the faith, courageous, strong, calmly, but with glad anticipation, looking forward to the future day. Let us, moreover, do all this because we belong to the day and not to the night." We have to live like day people, alert, awake, balanced, godly, under control by the truth, not like the sleeping, drunken people of the dark night who will be jolted out of their self-induced coma by the day of the Lord.

And by the way, all the tenses and the verbs here are present. The Thessalonians are being told to live continuously these kinds of lives because they will not experience the day of the Lord. What an elevated motive that is.

This is the highest call. This is calling us, like Paul in Ephesians 4, want to walk worthy of our calling, not out of fear, but out of the nobility of spiritual identity. We're different. We're different.

So we live in a completely different way. These are patterns of behavior which must characterize us. And as if we still don't understand, Paul teaches us further in verse 7, for those who sleep do their sleeping at night, and those who get drunk get drunk at night.

He just looks at a simple, common, everyday observation. People sleep at night, people get drunk at night. So he's saying, sleep and drunkenness go with night. So we expect night people, unsaved people, to sleep and get drunk, because that goes with night. It's their nature to be dark, so their conduct follows. They will sleep, that's passive indifference. They will get drunk, that's active sin. So passively and actively, they're going to act like night people, because they are night people.

Luke 12 45, Jesus telling a parable, and maybe Paul also had this in mind when he was writing. Jesus said, if the slave says in his heart, my master will be a long time in coming, begins to beat the slaves, both men and women, and to eat and drink and get drunk. The master of that slave will come on a day when he doesn't expect him, at an hour he doesn't know, and cut him in pieces and assign him a place with the unbelievers. We expect the night people to sleep. We expect the night people to get drunk. We expect them to be passively indifferent to truth and morality.

We expect them to be actively engaged in cultivating sin. But verse 8, we'll stop with this first line, but since we are of the day, let us be sober. Supper of the day, same thing he said in verse 5, sons of light, sons of day, let's be alert, let's be watchful.

You notice how repetitive this is? It's probably an indication that this was a very serious issue with the Thessalonians. In fact, it's so serious that even after he said all of this, apparently, he has to write the second epistle in part to again tell them they're not in the day of the Lord.

Somebody was really after them to confuse them about this issue. We are day people. As day people, we have nothing to do with the darkness.

The thief will not come in the night of our ignorance because we're not ignorant. The day of the Lord will not come in the night of our immorality and unrighteousness and ungodliness because we are marked out by righteousness and godliness. That's our character. And the distinctiveness of our nature sets us apart from the darkness and the distinctiveness of our behavior does as well.

For the pattern of our lives is righteousness. Foolishly, we inject it with the nightlife. We ought not to do that. For when we do that, men may not see our good works and glorify our Father who is in heaven, right? And thus, we not only dishonor the Lord and bring upon ourselves chastening, but we certainly detract from the attractiveness of the transforming power of the gospel in the eyes of those who watch our lives.

We are day people. We're to act like it. It is our nature.

It is our behavior. And I'll only mention it this time, it is our destiny. Please notice verse 9, God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ. Our future is all bright. Our future is all light. Our future is all day and when the day star comes and the dawning of our eternal day arrives, we will reach the destiny for which we were redeemed in the past and are sustained in the present. We became children of day. We must live as children of day until we enter into the eternal day. We have nothing to fear, beloved.

We are day people, not night people. Let's bow together in prayer. Father, this is an encouraging portion of Scripture for us. We realize that we are unworthy of such unimaginable goodness that You have bestowed upon us to make us day people, children of light, children of the day, to make us the very habitation of light as the light of Christ has come to dwell within us. We are overwhelmed that we have been taken out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of God's dear Son. We are overwhelmed that we shall never walk in darkness but always have the light of life. We have hope in our hearts that someday we'll enter into that eternal light where none of the deeds of the night life will ever exist. Father, help us to act like children of the day, particularly as we live in the world of darkness around us, that men may see the light like a city set on a hill that cannot be hid. These things we ask in the name of Christ.

Amen. This is Grace to You with John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary, and his current series is covering the rapture and the day of the Lord. Now, John, you made the point today that who we are and what we believe dictates how we act. So I know that some people listening today who do believe the gospel, they have repented, they follow Christ as Lord, but they don't follow perfectly because none of us does. But some people struggle with sinful habits, which leads them to wonder if they're truly saved.

So what counsel do you give to a person like that? How should he or she deal with those doubts and those habits? Well, first of all, I think it's important to say this, that doubting is not inevitable. It's not as if you're going to spend your whole life in doubt because that's just the nature of things.

I don't believe that. I believe God intends us to experience the fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, gentleness, goodness, kindness, meekness, self-control. The full panoply of spiritual blessings would include security.

It would include the peace of God reigning in my heart. So if you're not experiencing that, I want to find out why. Number one, maybe you're not a Christian, and so you're looking back not at a real transformation but at a prayer you prayed or a quote-unquote time you felt emotional about Jesus.

So that's the first place to start. When somebody has doubts, you would say, look, Paul says, examine yourselves whether you're in the faith. As you examine yourself, you're struggling to accept the fact that this salvation is real. It's coming perhaps from the fact that there are things in your life that are robbing your assurance. That would be habitual sin, patterns of habitual sin.

That's going to take away your joy. That's going to take away the fruit of the Spirit in your life, and it's going to make your life vapid and hollow, and there'll be anxiety and fear. You can't have assurance and disobedience going on at the same time in your life. You will enjoy assurance when there's obedience. You will enjoy assurance when there's pursuit of the things that are righteous, when there's worship, when there's love toward God, as we said, and toward his Word and his people. The one other thing that I think I always need to say to someone who doubts is Satan wants you to doubt.

So it can be that you are a Christian. You're even an obedient Christian, but you're being tempted because Satan wants to strike you with blows of doubt. That's why Paul said you need to have a helmet of salvation.

When Satan comes and strikes you with the temptation to doubt, your defense is the helmet of salvation. You understand the truth about salvation. You understand the doctrines of salvation. You understand the reality of the work of God in your own life, and so you resist his temptation in the knowledge of salvation and in your own experience of that salvation. You're probably not going to make it through life without some doubt, but it shouldn't be debilitating, and it shouldn't be a gnawing, nagging doubt, because that calls into question the integrity of God in his Word. Salvation is forever. Start there, and it's manifest by the fruit of the Spirit in your life, the things that we talked about, and where you see those, you're seeing the direction of salvation, if not the perfection.

That's right, friend. You don't need to struggle with assurance. You can know that you're saved.

In fact, John has written an in-depth book specifically on that subject. It's called Saved Without a Doubt. I encourage you to order a copy when you contact us today. Our number is 855-GRACE, or visit our website, gty.org.

Saved Without a Doubt is not only for people wrestling with the question, Am I saved? It's also great for mature believers who want to help others find assurance. Saved Without a Doubt includes a built-in study guide, and it costs $10.50. To order a copy, call 800-55-GRACE, or visit our website, gty.org. And while you're at the website, remember to download the Study Bible app. It not only gives you access to multiple Bible translations, it also connects you to thousands of Grace to You's online resources directly from the passage you're reading. No matter what book of the Bible you're studying, the Study Bible app can help you understand it better. To download the Study Bible app, visit gty.org. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson, reminding you to watch Grace to You television this Sunday, check our website for airtimes, and join us tomorrow when John looks at what it means to be separate from the world. It's another half hour of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time, on Grace to You.