Series Theme: Meditations in 1 Thessalonians

This Page: PART 2

PART 2: 7 Big Principles – picking up some of the ways God works

8. Motivation – faith, love and hope, driving forces

9. The Work of God – the work of salvation from the beginning

10. Facing Idolatry – the alternative to worshiping God

11. Judgment – Accountability before God

12. Building the Church – the outworking of salvation

13. Spiritual Blindness – the example of the Jews

14. To Please God – why we DO

8 : Motivation

1 Thess 1:3 We continually remember before our God and Father your work produced by faith, your labor prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.

We said in the previous meditation that we would consider in Part 3 of these mediations in this particular series, the instructions that come in this letter to work out your Christian life and we noted a number of verses that cover such things. However, before we do that, here in the second part we will consider a number of principles that come in verses in this little book and to start, in order to avoid falling into the trap of legalism, we need to consider the whole subject of motivation. Legalistic Christians take the instructions found in the Gospels and letters of the New Testament and turn them into ‘laws' to be followed. The problem with trying to keep laws, as Paul found and showed in Romans 7, is that we constantly fail to keep them and failure produces a sense of guilt and guilt stifles a relationship with the Lord.

So how are we to see such instructions? Well, they should come as guidelines that come AFTER we have committed our lives to God through Jesus. The Christian life starts from a point of surrender. At conversion, or rather leading into it, there has to be repentance and confession and a willingness to throw yourself entirely on the mercy of God, putting yourself into His hands for Him to lead and guide you through the rest of your life. Anything less than this causes problems.

So, we put ourselves into His hands for Him to bring us into a good place with Him through the work of Jesus on the Cross. He forgives us because He justifies us and He adopts us. From that point on He is working into our lives to bring good to us; He is bringing blessing upon blessing into our lives, His decrees of goodness for us. Because we are so tainted with Sin we struggle to believe this but it is true. He is working to restore us to Himself and to the image of the person He has designed us to be. Within that overall process He has given us many what I have called guidelines because they are indeed instructions on how to live a life where His goodness and blessing flow. They are NOT the means of our salvation and keeping them does not mean He loves us more and failing with them does not mean He loves us less.

It is important to understand that we don't keep these instructions to win His approval or win His love. We don't keep them to make ourselves feel more approved or more loved or more worthy of His love; we keep them simply as a means of developing our relationship with Him, so that His blessings can flow more and more in our lives. We are, after all, talking about a relationship with the One who has given His one and only Son to bring us to Himself so He can love and bless us. As the apostle John wrote, “ This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (1 Jn 4:10) Our love is a response to His love.

And so we come to this verse which is all about motivation, at the beginning of the letter which speaks of “work produced by faith, your labour prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.” We have noted it previously but we need to think more about it now. We have three end products – work, labour, endurance and each of them is brought about or motivated by something else – faith, love, hope . The Greek word for ‘work' is the general term for work or business, employment, task. The word for ‘labour' means toil or hard work. It is easy then to see the flow to ‘endurance' or ‘tough struggle to keep going' in our work. What we find, therefore, is Paul moving on from easy work to tough work or toil to really tough work or a struggle to keep going. That is how life can be sometimes.

If the outworking of the Faith is work (meaning any expression or outworking of the life of Jesus in and through us) and we also know it is a battle, sometimes, as the Thessalonians well knew, it could be really tough. But at whatever level we are at, there is something provided for us that helps and motivates us. Initially whatever we do is a response to what we have heard from God (which may come through His word or through His Spirit.) That response is faith because Paul tells us that faith comes from hearing (Rom 10:17). So initially we start off motivated by what we have heard from God, but then, perhaps, the going gets a little harder and we have to toil at the Christian life it seems. But now there comes an awareness of the love of God. That had been there at the beginning but now we seem to appropriate it more fully. Aware that we are loved we find strength to continue.

But then the opposition digs in and we find ourselves seeking to look beyond the present circumstances to the long-distant future when God will come and deliver us for eternity. It is what Paul does again and again in the letter as he talks of the Lord's second coming which, as we have seen previously, he does to take their eyes off the present and realise they are in it for the long haul which WILL mean good. The writer to the Hebrew showed this is how Jesus worked: “ Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame.” (Heb 12;2) As he faced the Cross with all of its awfulness, Jesus looked beyond it focusing on the wonder that would be on the other side of it. Thus we look beyond the present trying circumstances to realise that one day we are going to be with Him and all these present things will be dealt with by Him.

So here we find examples (and there are more in Scripture) of things that will motivate us on. It's not by ‘trying harder' but by receiving the grace and goodness of God by word and by the Spirit, and so we prevail and overcome Hallelujah! 

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9 : The Work of God

1 Thess 1:4,5 For we know, brothers loved by God, that he has chosen you, because our gospel came to you not simply with words, but also with power, with the Holy Spirit and with deep conviction.

Yes, we have noted something of these verses before but now we consider them in far more depth. There is a sense whereby it would have been better to take this meditation ahead of the previous one but we are simply going to follow the order the verses are found in the letter. The previous verses were about the motivation that steers us through the Christian life; these verses spell out how the Christian life comes into being.

Paul speaks, first of all, about these believers in Thessalonica being “loved by God.” Now I think there is a sense whereby God loves every human being as a member of His created world, hence, “ For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” (Jn 3:16) and one reason God does that is because, “God IS love” (1 Jn 4:8,16) and therefore everything that God thinks, says or does comes out of love. Even when we witness the discipline or even the judgment of God, it comes out of love (and therein we really need to enlarge our understanding of love).

However, I would suggest that when Paul says they are “loved by God” in the context of what follows, he means that everything they are experiencing is an expression of God's love. It's as if he is saying, “I see you are being loved – and are experiencing the practical outworking of love – through the things I witness about you.” This love isn't just in the mind of God, it is visibly being worked out in the lives of these people.

Then he says, “he has chosen you.” There are those who would wish to take the application of this expression to mean God chose and MADE these people respond and thus rejected everyone else. People take such verses as, “I have loved Jacob, but Esau I have hated,” (Mal 1:2,3) and “Yet, before the twins were born or had done anything good or bad--in order that God's purpose in election might stand: not by works but by him who calls--she was told, "The older will serve the younger,” (Rom 9:11,12) and of Pharaoh, “Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden.” (Rom 9:18) and use these to suggest a sovereignty of God that precludes human free will, yet free will is very clearly revealed in scripture.

The answer to this conundrum comes when we read, “This man was handed over to you by God's set purpose and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross.” (Acts 2:23) God knows from the outset everything that happens. God's knowledge of all things is seen throughout scripture. So when Peter spoke of God's “set purpose” he was speaking of the plan of God that was formulated before the foundation of the world with the knowledge of all that will follow.

It may be worthwhile to quickly note that: Jn 17:24 you loved me before the creation of the world, 1 Pet 1:20 He was chosen before the creation of the world , Eph 1:4 For he chose us in him before the creation of the world, Rev 17:8 The inhabitants of the earth whose names have not been written in the book of life from the creation of the world, Rev 13:8 the Lamb that was slain from the creation of the world, 2 Tim 1:9 This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time, Tit 1:2 eternal life, which God, who does not lie, promised before the beginning of time. Six times we are told that God formulated salvation BEFORE the creation of the world because He KNEW what would happen and what would need to happen.

We struggle to understand how God can have such knowledge and it was C.S.Lewis who painted the picture of life and history being like a road through the desert and above it, looking down on it and seeing it all in one go, is God. Of course He is above it and sees and knows all and also comes down and interacts with all that is happening on this ‘road'.

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10 : Facing idolatry

1 Thess 1:9 They tell how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God .

It is very easy to pass verses or words by with little thought – especially when we don't like the word! Idolatry is just such a word that we mostly don't like because it seems to us (mistakenly) to come from a bygone age and to have little relevance to us. How wrong we can be.

The Ten Commandments start off, “ You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them,” (Ex 20:3-5) and therein is the clue to the heart of idolatry. It is the bowing down to worship a thing or person. Now to fully appreciate that, we need to think what ‘worship' is because this may be very much more common than we realise. Worship is the acknowledgment that something or someone is greater than we are, and the subsequent exaltation of that person or thing. Now hold on to that definition because it very important. Put aside the thought that singing spiritual songs on a Sunday morning is all that worship means; it is much bigger than that!

I have always been slightly bemused by one verse: “ Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry.” ( Col 3:5) That all seems fairly straight forward until you come to the end of it when Paul refers to ‘greed' as ‘idolatry. Now greed is simply wanting more and more of something, whether it be food or possessions or whatever. Now whether we like it or not, wanting more and more of something means we have exalted that ‘thing' whatever it may be and we think so much of it that we must have more and more of it. We have, without realizing it, made an idol of that thing.

Oh yes, get rid of the picture of some little wooden or metal figure. Yes, that was what was referred to so often in the Old Testament and in some parts of the world they are clearly visible, these little monstrosities that are people's ‘gods'. But the New Testament looks beyond the merely physical and looks at the reality of the spiritual. When the apostle John finished his first letter with, “Dear children, keep yourselves from idols” (1 Jn 5:21) he probably had in mind these little figures, but when you start thinking of the meaning of these things, we realise that it is a warning that is equally valid for today in the West, perhaps more so in our affluent society than for a long time in history.

So let's recap what we have said:

1. Idolatry is the bowing down to worship a thing or person.

2. Worship is the acknowledgment that something or someone is greater than we are, and the subsequent exaltation of that person or thing.

Now of course when you stop and think about it, God is The One who is greater than we are and is worthy of our exaltation, but before we came to Christ, we put our trust in a whole raft of wrong things – wrong in that they were not, in truth, things worthy of our exaltation! We trusted in ourselves and you can made an idol out of self-image, or personal status and qualification, exalting ourselves above all else. We trusted in science, in medicine, in technology, in education, in learning, in possessions, in ambition, and so on. In themselves none of these things are wrong but when we raise them to the place where we esteem or exalt them and lift them up above us, we make idols of them and, by definition, we worship them.

If we put ourselves, or other people, or things before God we have made them an idol and we are in reality ‘worshipping' them. Never seen that before? Struggling to cope with that? Well go back and look at the definitions of idols and worship and see how it fits. Whatever we put in God's placed becomes an idol and we are in our minds at the least, worshipping it. If something is so important that I must have it or do it, it has become something I am worshipping. It may be a desire to have my way, it may be a point of view or an attitude. If it is something I MUST hold on to, it has been an object of worship that replaces God, and it is an idol. I must be right, my viewpoint is always right, what I do must always be right, all of these things become something that become more important than God and we are worshipping them.

When we came to Christ we should have given up all these things when we surrendered our lives to him, but one of Satan's ploys is to say, “Did God say…..?” and he makes a particular thing seem so reasonable and before we know where we are, an attitude replaces God as first in our lives, or a behaviour or expectation or…….

If you wondered did you need the work of Christ upon the Cross, this subject drives us back to the foot of the Cross as we realise we have allowed idols to become established in our lives and we need forgiveness, cleaning and even deliverance. If you smoke or are addicted to anything, that thing has become your source of comfort that replaces God's provision of comfort. We need forgiveness, we need cleansing, we need deliverance. Dare you ask Him, “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” (Psa 139:23,24)

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11 : Judgment

1 Thess 1:9,10 They tell how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead--Jesus, who rescues us from the coming wrath

I said in the previous meditation that it is very easy to pass verses or words by with little thought – especially when we don't like the word and ‘Idolatry' was just such a word. “Wrath” is another of those words. It occurs here in verse 10 and it also appears later in respect of the unbelieving Jews: “ The wrath of God has come upon them at last,” (2:16) and then later more generally, “For God did not appoint us to suffer wrath but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (5:9)

Now before we look at what it actually means, may I deal with our psychological or ethical hang-ups about this word. We'll accept from the outset that it means righteous anger, but I want to remind you of a particular teaching that comes out again and again in the Bible – that God is perfect. Now be under no illusion that perfect means complete and faultless, and cannot be improved upon. Therefore whatever God thinks, says or does is perfect, is faultless and cannot be improved upon.

We need to let this truth sink in. Let's see it as it crops up through the Bible: “He is the Rock, his works are perfect , and all his ways are just. A faithful God who does no wrong, upright and just is he.” (Deut 32:4 – song of Moses). “As for God, his way is perfect ; the word of the LORD is flawless.” (2 Sam 22:31 – song of David). “From Zion , perfect in beauty , God shines forth.” (Psa 50:2 – song of Asaph). “O LORD, you are my God; I will exalt you and praise your name, for in perfect faithfulness you have done marvelous things, things planned long ago.” (Isa 25:1 – Isaiah). “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect ” (Mt 5:48 – Jesus). “You will be able to test and approve what God's will is--his good, pleasing and perfect will.” (Rom 12:2 – Paul). “Although he was a son, he learned obedience from what he suffered and, once made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.” (Heb 5:8,9 – writer to the Hebrews)

There you have it: Jesus was begotten and was thus perfect because he was God. God is perfect and everything He says or does is perfect – they cannot be improved upon! Now start thinking about these difficult subjects from that angle or through that lens if you like. If God is angry about something then it is right, proper and appropriate to be angry and we can even go further and say it would be wrong not to be angry. We tolerate wrong and shrug our shoulders over it, but God sees it and sees it spoils the Creation that He made which was “very good” (Gen 1:31) and if God says something was “very good” you may take it that it was perfect. And now sin spoils it. The wonder and the beauty and the perfection has been spoiled and marred and desecrated. Imagine you were a master painter and you had spent months creating a most beautiful masterpiece and a teenager, say, comes in spits on it, writes on it in felt pen, throws paint on it and finally cuts it to pieces with a Stanley knife. Would you still be as calm and equitable about it as we so often are about wrongs in our world? No, we would be livid that this wonderful masterpiece with all its beauty has been utterly desecrated.

Why don't we get angry? It's all a matter of perspective. If we could see the whole picture with the completeness and perfection of God our emotions would be different. It is right to be angry, it is right to be upset and indeed, to go further, it is wrong not to be. Righteous anger is, as a dictionary puts it, “right and just passionate displeasure”. Please distinguish angers from hostility or revenge. Righteous anger is simply an objective emotion that responds rightly to wrong. What follows, when it is God, is a dispassionate assessment of what to do about it. God's judgment is His dispassionate assessment of what to do about the wrong which has been highlighted by His anger. Anger is instinctive. Our passionate displeasure rises up in the face of something awful, something wrong. If it is us, we react and may over-react and get it wrong but God, we saw, is perfect so He looks and He assess what is the right thing to do, the perfect thing to do, the thing to be done in the light of ALL of the facts of both past, present and future, for only He can do this, for He knows all things and He knows how things could work out and how they can work out and how they will work out, and all the differences depend on His actions now. He chooses that which is perfect.

So when we look at His acts of judgment in the Bible, realise you don't have all the facts, your emotions are stunted, you see imperfectly, but God has seen, God has assessed perfectly and even though you cannot see it, know that what He has done has been The best, The only right thing to be done.

Bear ALL of this in mind when you think of the Judgment of God.  This may give us a great deal of fuel to ponder on WHY God brings a particular judgment and why having made a dispassionate objective assessment of what to do about it, God's judgment is this particular thing - which, with all the facts and information available to Him, is faultless!

So note again what Paul writes in this letter: Jesus, who rescues us from the coming wrath (1:10) and God did not appoint us to suffer wrath (5:9). The Old Testament reveals a “day of the Lord” when He will come to judge all sin and unrighteousness. Rev 19 shows us Jesus coming again to bring in that ‘day'. But we, now as God's people do not, as Paul says, have to suffer wrath for Jesus rescues us from it by his death on the Cross dealing with all our guilt and shame, so we no longer fear a punishment. The second reference to the Jews, “ The wrath of God has come upon them at last,” (2:16) can be rendered, “upon them to the uttermost,” or “on them entirely” or “on them fully”. It is suggested that this simply refers to them being rejected while they stay in unbelief. Scripture seems to indicate a possibility that before the end they will turn and believe and those will be saved, but salvation follows belief; wrath and judgment follows rejection and unbelief.

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12 : Building the Church

1 Thess 2:11,12 For you know that we dealt with each of you as a father deals with his own children, encouraging, comforting and urging you to live lives worthy of God, who calls you into his kingdom and glory.

So you get people to become Christians and that's it? Not according to the New Testament. We find here the apostles' activity described in order to achieve some change in the lives of the new believers, so let's consider first the end result, what the apostles are seeking to achieve in these new believers.

Paul describes the end result as “ lives worthy of God, who calls you into his kingdom and glory.” When we speak of being worthy, we speak of ‘being up to an approved standard, a quality that would be acceptable'. So the apostles are teaching these new believers to live new lives, lives that will be approved by God. One of the best descriptions of the old life we lived before we came to Christ is found in Eph 2: “As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts.” (Eph 2:1-3) That's how we used to be, spiritually dead because we transgressed or strayed for God's right way and lived lives characterized by sin, led by the nose by Satan in a life of disobedience to God and simply following our self-centred desires all the time.

Very well. Let's consider the opposite to those things: alive to God with lives following God's way for living, led by the Spirit and thus following God's purposes for us. Do you see the four things there: 1. God related, 2. Learning God's design for living, 3. God led, and 4. Realizing God's purpose for us as individuals. If you reverse that order for a moment we see that when we come to Christ we realise that He has a new purpose for our lives which is revealed as His Spirit leads us and teaches us a new way to live and we realise the reality of living out this new daily relationship with God.

Now Paul expresses that in our verses above as living lives that are approved by God as we learn to live under His reign (his kingdom) and realise the wonder of His presence in and with us (his glory). This is why it's not just rules but relationship. We have His Spirit within us and we are led on a daily basis by His Spirit. As we let Him do this we realise more and more the wonder of His presence with us. This is what the apostles are seeking to teach these new believers, how to enter into this new relationship with the Lord which has practical outworkings in daily living.

So a little practical application. Have we learnt or are we in the process of learning to be led by His Holy Spirit, learning to be sensitive to Him as He prompts us, chides us, convicts us, teaches us, trains us? Have we realised that he has a unique plan for each of us? Are we aware of the gifts and abilities He has given us and the things He has put on our heart as He works to lead us into a place of blessing and service, becoming Sons of God, those who enter into the Father's heart and the Father's business? Are we aware of things that are good and things that are bad for our lives? Do we work to rid ourselves of those things that are bad whether they be things we might consider as mundane, like gossip, criticism, jealousy (but are things that are really harmful to both us and to others) or things that we might consider more serious like theft or adultery etc.

The New Testament has lists of things to be rejected from our lives, e.g. No. “falsehood .. anger.. stealing.. unwholesome talk …bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice,” (Eph 4:25-31) or no “sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed… anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language …lying.” ( Col 3:5-9) But the teaching is positive. Replace these things with, “compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.” ( Col 3:12-14) Thus in the Christian life there are negatives – to be rejected - and positives – to be cultivated.

And how did the apostles go about this teaching? By encouraging, comforting and urging. The word that the NIV translates as ‘encouraging' some other version translate as ‘admonishing' which has more of a corrective element to it. As Paul elsewhere speaks of the function of scripture is for “teaching, rebuking, correcting and training ,” (2 Tim 3:16) it is likely that this first word will have a stronger feel than just a pat on the back. The analogy of them acting like a father would suggest a more directive approach that is backed by comfort or support in difficult times. The word ‘urging' brings an urgency or importance to the work of change. Yes, this work brings correction and change, and we do need support or comfort to keep at it in the face of enemy distractions and doubts, and we do need urging on to remind us how vital it is, for this is the reason Christ saved us.

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13 : Spiritual Blindness

1 Thess 2:14-16 You suffered from your own countrymen the same things those churches suffered from the Jews, who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and also drove us out. They displease God and are hostile to all men in their effort to keep us from speaking to the Gentiles so that they may be saved. In this way they always heap up their sins to the limit. The wrath of God has come upon them at last.

There is a sense whereby we should be grateful to the Jews of the Bible for making so obviously clear to us the effects of sin, the sin that contaminates all of mankind. The only reason to pick on the Jews is that they are the people God chose in the period of Old Testament history. Throughout the Old Testament the message from God was that they were intended to be a light to the Gentiles, a light to the rest of the world, revealing God. His intent was that they would reveal His love and goodness although He must have known that, in the event, with some notable exceptions – say David, Solomon, Josiah etc. – so often they would reveal the awful realities of Sin – rebellion, stupidity, self-centred godlessness.

Read the Old Testament and see God's side of it. Again and again He purposes blessing, He purposes doing good for Israel , but time and time again they turned away and fell into disarray and defeat before their enemies. The presence of the miraculous in their midst and the awareness of amazing testimonies of God's power and love, there on their behalf, seen so clearly through such times as the Exodus, failed to keep them on track, failed to stop them drifting away, failed to stop them relying on legalistic or mechanistic religion instead of a wonderful relationship with the living God.

Stephen, the first Christian martyr, declared of them just before they stoned him to death, “ You stiff-necked people, with uncircumcised hearts and ears! You are just like your fathers: You always resist the Holy Spirit! Was there ever a prophet your fathers did not persecute?” (Acts 7:51,52) Jesus himself declared, “Woe to you, because you build tombs for the prophets, and it was your forefathers who killed them. So you testify that you approve of what your forefathers did; they killed the prophets, and you build their tombs. Because of this, God in his wisdom said, `I will send them prophets and apostles, some of whom they will kill and others they will persecute.' Therefore this generation will be held responsible for the blood of all the prophets that has been shed since the beginning of the world, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who was killed between the altar and the sanctuary. Yes, I tell you, this generation will be held responsible for it all.” (Lk 11:47-51) Was the fulfilment of Jesus' words the destruction of Jerusalem and the casting the Jews out into the rest of the world until the mid 20 th century? But that was the truth: they had rejected all those God sent.

Wherever you look in the New Testament there is this condemnation of the unbelieving Jews, e.g. “Men of Israel , listen to this: Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know. This man was handed over to you by God's set purpose and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross.” (Acts 2:22,23) What a condemnation that was in the midst of Peter's first sermon on the Day of Pentecost. Jesus had done such amazing things but the unbelieving Jews of Jerusalem, the very hierarchy of Judaism, the chief priests and keepers of the temple, rejected all of that, ignored it and distorted the truth and killed Jesus. In that respect they are like the modern crusading atheists of today who find fault with the extreme edges of the Christian world and ignore the wonder of transformed lives in the middle of it, and all the good they have done through the centuries. And they do this all to maintain their own godless prejudices.

This is the truth and it was true of those Jews throughout the Bible. Although there was always a believing remnant (and those became the foundation of the Christian church – all the apostles were Jews, as were all the early believers) the majority preferred to rule their own lives and do their own thing, ignoring God and ignoring His Law that He had provided for them. So they killed prophets when they came and they killed Jesus when he came. Jesus told a parable that could not be more pointed: “Listen to another parable: There was a landowner who planted a vineyard. He put a wall around it, dug a winepress in it and built a watchtower. Then he rented the vineyard to some farmers and went away on a journey. When the harvest time approached, he sent his servants to the tenants to collect his fruit. "The tenants seized his servants; they beat one, killed another, and stoned a third. Then he sent other servants to them, more than the first time, and the tenants treated them the same way. Last of all, he sent his son to them. `They will respect my son,' he said. "But when the tenants saw the son, they said to each other, `This is the heir. Come, let's kill him and take his inheritance.' So they took him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him. "Therefore, when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?" "He will bring those wretches to a wretched end," they replied, "and he will rent the vineyard to other tenants, who will give him his share of the crop at harvest time." Jesus said to them, "Have you never read in the Scriptures: " `The stone the builders rejected has become the capstone; the Lord has done this, and it is marvellous in our eyes'? "Therefore I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit.” (Mt 21:33-43)

Wherever Paul and his team went they received opposition from the Jews in the town. This is the tragedy of history, that those who should have been the first to see, failed to see and instead became those who opposed the Gospel, opposed Jesus and opposed God. Even in Israel today, orthodoxy exists, a few believe in Jesus but the majority are not known for their spirituality. The best we can say is that in this, they reflect the rest of the world. If we look at them and see their failure beware complacency. Their day may yet come. Paul warns of these things in Rom 10 & 11.

In Israel we see revealed so clearly a spiritual blindness and it comes as a warning to all the rest of the world – is this how you are too? Beware.

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14. To Please God

1 Thess 4:1,2 Finally, brothers, we instructed you how to live in order to please God, as in fact you are living. Now we ask you and urge you in the Lord Jesus to do this more and more. For you know what instructions we gave you by the authority of the Lord Jesus.

In this final study in part two – the principles that we note that stand out in the earlier part of this letter – we note one final principle, the thing that hopefully motivates us in the ‘doing' side of our lives. Someone has said that Christianity is a ‘doing' religion; we don't just learn background knowledge about God or theories about spiritual life, the bigger part of it all is actually putting it into practice. But there are also other world religions that ‘do' but the truth is that they either do because the rules are there and they follow them in order to win approval, or they have rules and follow them before of fear of the awful One who has made them.

When we come to the Christian faith we find something quite different. We find all that we are and do comes out of a loving relationship and where this relationship is real and genuine, doing simply becomes a response of love. So when Paul in the verse above speaks of instructions on how to live to please God, he is providing us with a means of responding in love to His love.

The apostle John understood this well. In his first letter he wrote, “ And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make your joy complete.” (1 Jn 1:3,4) Fellowship is another way of referring to closeness of relationship. Because we have this closeness of relationship, he is saying, we write to you and explain these things so that your joy in this same relationship may be full. That's his starting point. So he goes on to write, “if anyone obeys his word, God's love is truly made complete in him.” (1 Jn 2:5) As we follow His word, His revelation to us, we experience AND express God's love.

Later he writes, “Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. …. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins… if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.” (1 Jn 4:7-12) Love is behind everything we are and do, God love. He expressed it by sending Jesus to die for us, He expressed it by drawing us to Himself and forgiving us, cleansing us, adopting us and giving us His own Holy Spirit of love to live in us. Now, as His Spirit of love lives in and through us, we express love. Ultimately it all comes and flows because we have responded to Him and we gave Him our lives and were transformed. If we ever lose sight of that, we fall back on legalistic religion.

As we move on into the third part and start looking at specific individual instructions, we must keep in mind these things otherwise we start attributing these things to means of salvation instead of simply love responses to love – which is what they should be. Sadly, the reality is that because we are the people we are, we often lose sight of this, that we are loved and everything we are receiving from God is an expression of His ongoing love for us. Indeed we even take for granted the good things that happen to us and fail to see them as specific expressions of God's love to us. Remember, here is a vital truth to hold on to: “God IS love” (1 Jn 4:8,16) and so everything God thinks, says or does is an expression of love. Everything He does with or for us is an expression of love. The enemy tries to blind us to this truth but it is the truth.

Think of your wife or husband who you love very much or a child of yours who you love very much. So much of the time we just act towards them without thought but when we do think about it we realise we do what we do because we love them so much. Love is the thing that prompts us into action and is behind every good word or deed. Perhaps it is also like that in the Christian life, we do so much of what we do without thought, but ultimately we are motivated by the starting love we have for God when He saved us. Our conforming to instructions we find in the New Testament, whether from Jesus or the apostles, flows from the feelings we have deep down, towards Him because of who He is and what He has done. We live out of gratefulness and thankfulness and our natural desire is to please Him.

When I do things for my wife or children, I want to please them, I want them to feel good about it, and when I do that I do it because I love them. I don't do it to try to love them or win their love, because I already love them, but I do it as an expression of my love for them that already exists, I do it to please them because bringing pleasure is a desire of love, an expression of love, an outcome we want to achieve because we love. As with our families, so it is with God. Our learning these instructions from the apostles, is simply a means of providing ways we can please love and we desire to do that because we love Him, and we love Him because He has first loved us. Hallelujah!

Recap:

PART 2: Big Principles – picking up some of the ways God works

8. Motivation – faith, love and hope, driving forces

9. The Work of God – the work of salvation from the beginning

10. Facing Idolatry – the alternative to worshiping God

11. Judgment – Accountability before God

12. Building the Church – the outworking of salvation

13. Spiritual Blindness – the example of the Jews

14. To Please God – why we DO