Representing God Rightly

Silicon Valley Reformed Baptist Church

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We'll open your Bibles, please, to 1 Thessalonians. We're now in chapter 2 of 1

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Thessalonians. I will read verses 1 through 8, but the preaching text this morning is verses 3 through 5.

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In this chapter, in chapter 2, we find the Apostle Paul defending his ministry, both in general as well as specifically to the

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Thessalonians. In the first two verses of this chapter, which we covered last week, he denies that his visit had been useless, or that he had been timid when they had gone there.

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He said it was not in vain, and they were bold in God to declare the gospel of God. And now in verses 3 to 5, he continues to defend himself, and this time he's going to defend his integrity, his, and Silvanus' and Titus' integrity, how they represented

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God rightly, a fact which he calls them, and calls God, as witness to prove the truth thereof.

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So I'll read 1 through 8 in 1 Thessalonians 2, and we'll preach 3 through 5, so please stand now in honor of God's Word.

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This is the Word of the Lord. For you yourselves know, brothers, that our coming to you is not in vain.

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But though we had already suffered and been shamefully treated at Philippi, as you know, we had boldness in our

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God to declare to you the gospel of God in the midst of much conflict. For our appeal does not spring from error or impurity or any attempt to deceive, but just as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the gospel, so we speak, not to please man, but to please

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God, who tests our hearts. For we never came with words of flattery, as you know, nor with a pretext for greed.

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God is witness. Nor did we seek glory from people, whether from you or from others, though we could have made demands as apostles of Christ.

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But we were gentle among you, like a nursing mother taking care of her own children. So being affectionately desirous of you, we are ready to share with you not only the gospel of God, but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us.

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Please be seated. And before we begin, let us pray to the

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God we worship this day, Heavenly Father. Be with us now as we seek to open your word.

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I pray, Father, that the word is preached to hearts that are prepared to receive your word and grow thereby.

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I pray that preacher and hearer alike would be prepared to come before God and to know your will as we look once more to your word.

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So by your spirit, Father, open your word to us and bless us as we seek to know you better and your son,

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Jesus Christ, in his name. Amen. You know, ever since the fall of man, which we read of in Genesis chapter three,

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God has been misrepresented. The serpent misrepresented God and misrepresented what he had said, but more importantly than the actual quotes that he misquoted or caused to be misquoted was the fact that he misrepresented

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God himself, God's purpose, God's nature, God. He misrepresented what

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God had said, and the man and the woman fell for it hook, line, and sinker. And since then, man has been constantly misrepresenting, misconstruing

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God. And in my reading of Genesis three, this is more of the problem than the minor misquotes.

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This misrepresentation of God, this God who had provided for all their needs, and the

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Satan said, Satan misrepresents God and causes them to believe while he held something very important back.

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He didn't want you to have this knowledge. He didn't want you to have this blessing. He's actually kind of a stingy

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God, isn't he? They fell for it, and since that time, men have blatantly followed in those footsteps, misrepresenting

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God. And until Jesus Christ became God in the flesh and represented

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God perfectly in his person and in his nature and in his works, this has been the case.

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Until Jesus Christ came in the flesh and represented God perfectly, there could be no voice from heaven that would say, this is my beloved

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Son in whom I am well -pleased. We could not read in Colossians 1 .15

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of anyone other than Jesus who is the image of the invisible God, or in Hebrews 1 .3,

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that he is the exact imprint of his nature. In Jesus, men beheld or behold the glory of God, that's

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John 1 .14. Jesus' glory is God's glory, that's Matthew 17 .2

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in the Transfiguration on the Mount. In Jesus, God is perfectly represented. In Jesus, God's people are represented.

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And we need to note in what the Apostle Paul says here, that what he is really trying to bring forth to the

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Thessalonians in defense of his ministry, and we only know that he's being attacked by the fact that he's defending himself, we don't know exactly what the attacks were, but this is certainly a defense, that he lays claim, and calling the

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Thessalonians and God as witness to this fact, that he represented

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God rightly. He represented God rightly. And note carefully that he says this in the plural.

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Not just him, the famous inspired Apostle, but he says our appeal.

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He says we have been approved. He says we never came with falsehood and so forth.

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It was them, it was them, the team, Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy, who are in view here, and whose integrity is being defended, and it is our integrity and our right representation of God that is at stake here for us this morning.

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If the Apostle Paul can rightly represent God, not perfectly, only Jesus Christ is the exact imprint of God's nature, but rightly, rightly represent

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God. If Paul can, we can. If Paul should, we should.

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What's wrong with the gospel today? What is wrong with the gospel today? With the gospel itself, obviously nothing is wrong.

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It's the gospel of God, so there could be nothing wrong with the gospel. The gospel which is God's message of forgiveness to sinners.

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The gospel which said God forgives sinners because his son Jesus Christ paid the due penalty for their sins when he suffered on the cross.

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The gospel which says it pleased God to bruise him, Isaiah 53, rather than we who would be bruised forever and could never cease paying for our sins.

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The gospel which says Jesus Christ in his own body bore the curse due to us.

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This wonderful gospel, what could be wrong with it? This says that if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is

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Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, that he's raised him after he died on the cross where he suffered for our sins, you will be saved.

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What could possibly go wrong with a gospel as glorious and as beautiful and as wonderful as that?

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It could be misrepresented. That's what could go wrong with it. And this is exactly what the

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Apostle Paul says they did not do. They did not misrepresent God and by saying did not they say what?

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That he represented God rightly. Too often God is so misrepresented by his people so as to make his appeal sound like some kind of a parody.

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Most of us know people who say this saying, we've all heard it, I don't want to go to church because it's full of hypocrites.

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How often have you heard that? And how often have you heard the response that is something like, well then do please come because you'll feel right at home.

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You ever hear that? I want to ask you after studying 1 Thessalonians chapter 2 verses 3 through 5 where Paul makes such a strong defense of having rightly represented

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God, why do we use such a humorous quip? Why do we make light of such a thing?

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As they come into a room full of hypocrites knowing what Jesus Christ himself in the gospel says against hypocrisy.

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How can personal hypocrisy just to choose that one common accusation be taken so lightly when it so badly represents

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God, when it so profoundly misrepresents God? One way to sum up the

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Apostle Paul's claim in 1 Thessalonians 2, 3 through 5 is that he was not a hypocrite, that he rightly represented the

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God he claimed to present to them. And representing God rightly is more than just explaining the gospel.

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What Paul has in view here, what Paul defends here, what we need to be able to defend, what you must be able to defend when you proclaim

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Christ to anyone is to have the right motivation, to have the right heart, to be representing

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God rightly. It means to have a pure motive. It means to know that your heart is open to God's review.

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Paul says in verses 3 and verse 5, those two verses on the outside of our passage this morning, what their conduct was not.

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You remember from last week, the laetotes, the accentuation of the positive by the negative.

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How was your day? Not bad. What does that mean? That it was good or great or something like that.

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He does the same thing here. He does the same thing here where he's saying it was not from error, not from impurity, not from deception.

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And then in verse 5, they were not flatterers. They were not greedy. And between these two verses in verse 4, he lays their hearts before God to confirm what he's saying here.

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He holds to God's review, not just their actions, but their motives. And I think we could sum up these verses and we could say that his motive was to represent

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God and his gospel rightly, as we must do. We must represent

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God rightly, the gospel of God being a sacred trust. And it is your duty and my duty to rightly represent it to those to whom we proclaim it.

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Now, can we manage this? Is this too much to ask of a common Christian like you or me?

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I would suggest to you that if Paul could, and he did, if Paul could, then you and I both can and must.

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He was commissioned by Jesus, if we read in Acts chapter 9, he told Ananias that he shall be,

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Paul shall be my instrument to bring the gospel to the Gentiles. Paul was personally commissioned by the

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Lord Jesus Christ. But that does not lay you off the hook. Because at the end of Matthew's gospel, in Matthew 28, he says,

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Jesus says to you, go therefore and make disciples of all nations. And how do we make disciples? But by representing

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God rightly. You see, a message is neutralized when the messenger's conduct denies the message he purports.

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People can see our conduct and the message can be neutralized when the heart has the wrong motive and it's

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God who tests the hearts. We need to check ourselves here. We need to look to our own heart.

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We need to lay it bare before God and see if we are representing him rightly and repent where we are not and then get back on track.

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We'll see how the apostles' delivery of God's gospel represented God rightly, and we're going to see how we can follow in his pattern.

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We'll go through the verses one at a time, verse 3, 4, and 5, verses 3 and 4, by the way, relate to Paul's ministry in general.

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It wasn't just in Thessalonica, wherever he went, verses 3 and 4 would relate.

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And verse 5 is where he calls them to witness what they specifically and particularly saw in him.

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And we'll see for ourselves what should be seen in us as we represent

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God as his people, as his church, as his bride. You represent

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God by appealing to people without error, impurity or deception.

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Verse 3, for our gospel does not spring from error or impurity or any attempt to deceive. Now, if this sounds like too tall an order for a sinner to fill,

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I can relieve you just a little bit here. Paul means the motivation that compelled him was right.

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Phillips paraphrase gets it right where he says our motives were pure. It is our motives, not perfection that's in view here.

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We must be like the God whom we represent in our conduct, otherwise the message of the cross is robbed of its power.

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Now, we must be like the God we represent, but like him only by analogy. We can represent him.

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We can be like him in our conduct. We can show forth the goodness of God and what he's done in us.

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Perfection will never arrive in this lifetime. We know that. We're talking about pure motives.

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We're talking about a right reason for going out. We're talking about glorifying God and not the self.

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Motives, not perfection. We need to keep that in mind. We're like God, but only by analogy.

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It's like how we bear his image. But are we perfect image bearers? Of course not. And yet, image bearers we are.

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Now, it would be good to stop here for just a moment and look at some of the words here in verse 3, for our appeal does not spring from error or impurity or any attempt to deceive.

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Remember, we're representing God and we're trying to represent him rightly. And the first word we need to look at is appeal.

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Our appeal. And everything that follows that the motive was not from error, impurity or deception describes how that appeal was made.

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The appeal on behalf of God. Second Corinthians 5 .20 says, therefore, we are ambassadors for God.

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Making his appeal, imploring you to come to Christ. This is an appeal. We need to know what an appeal actually is.

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The word itself means calling to one side. In different contexts, it can mean to exhort or to give solace or to give comfort.

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Well, of course, context is king. Context is the best way to understand any passage in the scripture.

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In this usage here, it means to induce men to put away their sin and accept the gospel message.

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That's an appeal. To induce men to put away their sin and accept the gospel message that Jesus Christ died for your sins and by faith in him,

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God forgives those sins. So what is an appeal? It's to come alongside calling to one side.

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It's not a demand. Do you understand this? It is not a demand. It's a gently persuasive description of God's hand to sinners.

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Paul makes an appeal. You know, I was at a conference once, many years ago, and one of the preachers, preaching from Galatians, got very animated.

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He was up there on the pulpit. And when he got to the part where Paul says, if they preach another gospel than the one that I brought to you, let them be anathema.

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Are you familiar with that passage in Galatians? Well, this preacher got very excited and very animated and started repeating over and over, let them be anathema, let them be anathema.

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Let them be anathema. And he finally got to the point where he said, let them be anathema. Louder. He said, you know what

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Paul means? Let them go to hell, loud. And I could actually see spill coming out of his jaws as he shook with excitement.

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And I ask, was that an appeal? Someone came to me afterwards and said, wasn't that anointed?

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I thought, well, no, because that's not the way

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Jesus spoke the gospel. That's not the way Paul seems to have spoken the gospel.

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That's not an appeal. You see, if we're going to represent God, the first thing we need to understand is we need to sound like God.

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Does that sound too much? Does that sound over the top? You say, Pastor, you need to sit down. You're out of your mind.

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We cannot sound like God. Well, yes, we can. And I don't mean his voice because none of us know what his voice is like.

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I mean, the demeanor by which he makes his appeal. The demeanor by which he makes his appeal, which we have in scripture, we know what he sounded like, not the the auditory sound, but the emotion behind it.

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The gentleness behind it, the appeal that it was or is.

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You know, Jesus is the image of God in the flesh. In Matthew chapter 11, verse 28, how does he describe himself?

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As hollering at people and demanding that they put away their sin, fall on their face before you and confess themselves a sinner.

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Anything that gets someone to confess their sin might be considered to be productive for the gospel, but Jesus described himself there as gentle and lowly in heart.

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In Mark chapter 10, verse 21, before Jesus answers the rich young ruler who goes away sad, what does

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Mark note? He says Jesus loved him. Now, the message is not about love and the message is not for you to put away the excitement that you have in the gospel or your own personality and your own particular way of presenting things, because God uses all of us.

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We're all parts of a body. We all have a different function and we all function in a different way.

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And God uses us all. I'm not trying to put aside your personality or your own particular talents.

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What I am trying to bring across here is this appeal is where he begins for our appeal.

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It's not a frothing at the mouth, pounding on the pulpit, hammering people with a sledge, demand.

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It's an appeal. Read Hosea 11. We've been going through it in the Sunday school where the appeal of God, Yahweh, the bereaved husband, appealing and gently trying to woo his bride back to himself.

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Different contexts, different forms where we may be, might require different levels of volume.

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But remember to rightly represent God as Paul did.

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And this word appeal appears in the inspired text. What are we going to imitate?

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It's an appeal. If we represent

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God, we might need to sound like him. I don't mean to compromise. We don't go into emotionalism.

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It means that God, who is love, appeals to men to be saved. We had a conference here at this church once some time ago.

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And a guy came in and parked from one of those other churches that joined and had that van with those slogans on it, those terrible slogans that say

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God hates certain people. I'm not going to use the word and, you know, repent or go to hell where you deserve to be and all these terrible things.

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But at one level, they were true. God does hate sin. We know that.

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But were those slogans written there and the anger that was obviously behind them, would that match what

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Paul says here? Was that an appeal? I would argue not. And he says that their appeal does not spring from, it does not have a source in error.

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Error, that doesn't mean mistakes, it means delusion or delusion means trickery.

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It means intent to mislead. There was no impurity to it, he said, for our appeal does not spring from any impurity.

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Impurity means impure motives. He wasn't promoting himself. He wasn't taking any advantage of people.

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He was not there for personal gain or financial gain. He wasn't trying to pump up his own ego. Excuse me.

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The word here for impurity could mean ethical excellence. We weren't there for, our ethics, our motives behind them were of the high standard.

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We're trying to get money from you. We weren't being greedy. It could also have a sexual connotation. Or in that day, cultic prostitution was so widely practiced.

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And we didn't take advantage of anybody in that way either. I would go more with the ethical side, but both of them are possible, both nuances.

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But he said there was no impurity to his motives. It didn't spring from that, nor any attempt to deceive.

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He was guileless. He was plain spoken. The term was used of actually catching a fish.

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Tricking the fish into thinking, here's lunch. And what does he end up with? A hook that draws him out. Paul's saying we didn't do anything like that.

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Like Jesus said when he was arrested, this is your hour because I was in the temple and I spoke openly during the day.

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Not trying to deceive, but telling people plainly why God sent him and giving them God's word openly in language they can understand.

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No attempt to deceive. And so why not these things? Why are these things so eliminated that they cannot possibly be there?

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Because God does not deceive. God does not speak error because Jesus spoke plainly and publicly.

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And this is what it means to represent God rightly. This is what it means to reverse what happened in Genesis chapter 3, where God was so badly misrepresented and man fell into the ultimate disaster.

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So it means to represent him rightly. To speak the gospel without error, without impurity, without any desire to deceive.

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Again, young in the faith, one time I was invited by a mature Christian, a man who could be described as a pillar of that church

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I was at. And he invited me to join him for some very special ministry. And I thought myself too new in the faith to be able to do much good or to help out very much.

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But he wanted me to see. And I was very anxious to learn about how to share my newfound faith. We went in his car, we went to the home where he had made this appointment.

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And I was excited when we prayed for success before we got out of the car. He told me before we went in the door that what he was about to show me was more important to him than anything.

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He hoped to be able to leave his successful optometry practice and do this full time. This thing

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I was about to witness. And he hoped I'd catch the vision and that I would join him. I could hardly wait.

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And we're going to give witness to Jesus Christ. I was going to see and learn how to evangelize. Could we even say

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I was going to see and learn how to represent him? So he grabs a case of materials and we knock on the door.

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We go inside and he gets started. And he didn't get too far into his presentation when he lost one of the people who was listening to him.

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He lost me. Because he was just getting going when he opens up his case and you know what he presented?

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Amway. It was Amway. I was flabbergasted.

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I was flabbergasted. I didn't even know then at the time how much Amway was associated with Christianity. But I had been enticed by the chance to learn about ministry when multi -layered marketing was really his agenda.

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Oh, that bothered me. I felt like I had been, he'd been disingenuous me at the best and dishonest at the worst.

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And it made God seem somehow commercial as though matters of eternity can wait until you get your place in this multi -level marketing scheme.

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And now studying 1 Thessalonians chapter 2 verses 3 through 5, I can state the problem a bit more definitively.

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That wasn't God. That was not the gospel. I don't have anything against Amway, though I know people who had garages full of Amway that never got sold.

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And that's another story. I have nothing against Amway, but that's not God. And to bring the gospel in and mix it with that is to misrepresent

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God. You see, we need to be sure when you tell people about Jesus, that Jesus is really the point.

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Not just a better way, not just a more beneficial alternative. He's the way, the truth, and the life.

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No one comes to the Father but by Him. Your goal is not to win the argument.

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Your goal is not to succeed in bludgeoning somebody else's objections. Your goal is to honor

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God by winning a soul to the gospel of God. We need to be sure of our motive.

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We need to be sure that when we represent God or we say we're representing God, we truly do. Do we have to do so perfectly?

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If so, no one could ever open their mouth. So that's clearly not what we mean. We're talking about the motive of the heart.

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We're talking about the desire to glorify Jesus Christ. We're talking about appealing sinners away from their headlong dash to hell.

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We're talking about God's gentle drawing them out of this dangerous path that they're on.

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I really appreciate the way the apostle calls it unappeal. There's so much to that. Not perfection.

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We don't have to speak every word exactly right. We have to have a right heart open to God.

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We did have a dear brother of mine preaching as a guest preacher at this church some years ago, and he got very excited and he said something about the unity of God and how we're not polytheists.

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We don't believe in multiple gods. There is the Father who is God. There's Jesus who is God. There's the Holy Spirit. He got it all backwards because God the

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Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. He did it backwards. And then he sort of saw his mistake.

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He said something like, OK, so it's three gods as unified. We just worship one of them. He just got all flubbed up.

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But we knew what he meant. Listen, if we have to be mistake free, all of us have to zip our lips closed, right?

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It doesn't mean perfection of expression. It means simply having that right heart that wants to represent

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God rightly. Have we ever slipped in any of these errors where it's me who

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I've put ahead of the gospel, it's me who wants to just win an argument, who wants to be right, or any of these other things that would sully our motive in presenting the gospel?

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You may have been inadvertent. You may have gotten caught up in the moment like my friend, the guest preacher here.

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You may have been so anxious to hear a loved one repent that you watered down the message or made too much of the person or made

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Jesus seem like he's simply a better alternative to things. And if we're honest, we've all fallen into this, especially the one of just wanting to win the argument.

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I want to prove that I'm right and that you're wrong. Now, the prophets often did something like that.

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They lame -basted people for their wrong beliefs, the stupidity of idols. But the point was always to turn men to God, to get them to consider what they were doing and to incite repentance, not to surrender to the superior argument.

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When we've been there, what do we do? When we look at this and we see how Paul appealed to the

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Thessalonians, Paul, this zealous, this fiery, organized man who makes this gentle appeal and wait till next week when he likens himself to a nursing mother, what do we do when we overemphasize the self?

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And our own motive is to get ourselves and our arguments put forth. We know that with God, Psalm 130 verse 4 tells us there is forgiveness.

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Verse John 1 9 says when we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and restore us from all unrighteousness.

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When we find ourselves having fallen into these errors, we dare not stop testifying of Jesus Christ because once we misrepresented

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Him, you repent of it, you get back on the mill, you go back to work, you pick up that cross and carry it.

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The gospel is too important, it's too valuable to declare with motives that do not rightly represent

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God. When we make God's appeal, we're handling a treasure. You're handling something precious when you represent

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God, when you seek to please Him and not men. There's one thing it means to represent

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God, to seek to please Him and not men with this precious gospel. Verse 4 now, look at verse 4.

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But just as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the gospel, so we speak, not to please man but to please

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God who tests our hearts. Now you just picked up a key to this whole representation of God that we're preaching about this morning.

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What does it mean to want to please God, to want to please God and not men, to not be a respecter of persons as we like to say, a man fearer is another way to put it.

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Well this is the positive side of all those nots in verse 3. If the source of Paul's appeal was not from error or impurity or deception, what was it?

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Where did it spring from? Paul was moved along in his preaching by the knowledge that he had been approved by God and entrusted with the gospel of his forgiveness, his forgiveness to sinners.

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And so he speaks with God's and not with man's approval in mind. And two words here of special interest.

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He says we've been approved. The word approve harkens back to a word that is used of coins that were put to the test and found to be legitimate.

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Back in the day coins would be put to a test to make sure that they weren't counterfeit. They'd proven their worth under fire.

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It was also a technical word used for someone who was examined and found fit for public office. He said we've been approved by God with this gospel.

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So he's been under the fire of testing. Whether it came from storms or the shipwrecks that those storms caused, whether he was beaten or imprisoned, whether he was stoned or slandered, his faith in God, his confidence in God only grew and grew and grew.

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He was approved by God. Well you cannot be approved by God, not the way

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Paul was, if you duck the test. And too often this is what happens.

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We see it coming and what do we do? We just step out of the way and let the whirlwind go by us.

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Well our ultimate approval comes from being in Christ. We know that by Christ and that's by grace and that's through faith.

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The approval Paul speaks of here is a little bit different sort. It's the Christian who endures the trials, the

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Christian who doesn't break or bend the message no matter what comes. It's what Peter writes of in first Peter chapter one verse six.

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In this you rejoice though now for a little while if necessary you have been grieved by various trials so that the tested genuineness of your faith more precious than gold though it is tested by fire may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

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And James says much the same thing when he says that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness.

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Paul had gone through all this. It was approved by God, not because he's better than you, because he would confess himself a sinner in need of Jesus Christ as much as any human ever was.

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The other word is entrusted. And trust is a very interesting word also. It comes from the word pistuo, pistuo which is the word to have faith.

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It sounds almost if you just read it like that like God had faith in Paul. Well of course God has faith in nothing.

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God is the object of all faith. There's a profound word to be using here.

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God entrusted Paul and his team. He had been tested and he emerged the stronger for all the testing.

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So the Lord did with Paul as in the parable of the talents where the faithful steward was entrusted with more of the

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Lord's resources because he'd been faithful with the little. Paul could be trusted to what? To represent

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God rightly, because in the face of trials he continued to do just that, to preach the true

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God to sinners in need of hearing that. Now I ask you, would your representation of God be strengthened if you were absolutely certain that God had approved and entrusted you with the most important message that any courier could ever carry?

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Think of it that way. That God has put on your lips and in your heart because of the spirit within you, this message of eternal consequence.

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And if you knew, if you really knew in the deepest part of your person that you have been entrusted by Lord God Almighty with this message, would that strengthen you or intimidate you?

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It has to strengthen you because God has entrusted it to his people.

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God has entrusted you with this message. God has approved you with this message because you're in Christ Jesus.

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This is how Paul could be sure that he was not pleasing men but keeping the Lord Jesus always in view.

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And no less does God entrust it to others throughout the ages. How do we please God? How do you please

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God and not men? God testing the hearts. We join the psalmist, we say, try me, O Lord, and see if there's any wicked way in me.

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If the goal is to please God, remember that we're presenting an all -pleasing God, an all -pleasing

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God, and too often pleasing God rather than men can be an excuse to presenting our Lord in a most unpleasant way.

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I want to please God, and so I'm not going to please you. I would ask us to repent of that if that's ever been our attitude, because I want to be pleasing to you.

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I want this message to be pleasing to you. Does that mean I have to compromise it? No. Who am

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I trying to please by preaching this? Who are you trying to please when you tell of Jesus Christ to your friends, to your neighbors, to your loved ones, to your children?

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We are pleasing God, but that doesn't mean we need to be unpleasing to the people we speak to or the people we evangelize.

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It's God who tests the hearts, God looking to the heart. We know why he chose

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David over his older, more experienced brothers, because God looks to the heart where no one else does.

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Jesus Christ knew it was in a man. Jesus Christ knew all men. It's the heart, the testing of the heart that is continual, approved by God as those that he trusts.

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God trusts us with this wonderful, glorious message. We please him when we tell it, and that does not mean we have to be unpleasing to those to whom we tell it.

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Well, to even want to please God, excuse me, want to please men rather than God, would be spiritual adultery, really.

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James chapter 4, verse 4 says, do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God?

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And once more, I warn us not to use this as an excuse to make enemies of those to whom

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God might be trying to make a friend of by declaring to them through your lips this gospel.

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We're speaking of representing God rightly. We're speaking of speaking in the way God speaks or spoke through Jesus Christ.

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What Paul says, appealing to God, imploring men, you represent

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God when flattery gives way to sincerity, when flattery gives way to sincerity.

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And that's verse 5, for we never came with words of flattery, as you know, nor with a pretext for greed.

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God is witness. Can you even imagine

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God offering someone specious compliments, trying to get on someone's good side? How easy is flattery to slip into?

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It doesn't have to be that overwinning, slavish sort of thing. It is anything where the fear or respect of man entices you to compromise somehow how you represent

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God, how you give forth the gospel. When Paul says, we never came, he leaves himself open to the charge that he slipped even once.

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He never had to say something like, oh that, oh yeah, that was just a minor slip. That was just that one time

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I didn't do it again. Okay, so two out of ten times I did that, but eight out of ten times I didn't do that.

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No, nothing like that. He says never, and he means never. We stand as God's representatives, representing

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God. We do need to do this constant check of self, not be afraid to speak, then no one would be able to speak.

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Looking to our own spirit, looking where we can only look with God's help, and seeing that we're looking to God, and not being afraid of men.

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We're not wanting to flatter men, and you know what happens when we flatter men, is we draw them into a false gospel.

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We don't tell them their true condition before God. We ignore the fact that all men are born in iniquity and sin.

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We get that from Psalm 51, and many other places. He never came with flattery.

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That doesn't mean he insulted men. It means he didn't flatter them. He didn't give them false compliments.

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He didn't give them false hopes. We never came with a pretext for greed.

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You know what a pretext is? It could have to do with a mask. It's concealing the truth that lies behind the outer demeanor.

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Flattery would be the smooth tongue order making a favorable impression. Is there anything wrong with that?

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I'm trying to make a favorable impression upon you, that I'm saying something about the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ that will have some effect in your lives, and bring you closer to him.

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We all like to make good impressions, but the goal of ministry is what's in view here, and the goal of Paul's ministry is to see men and women saved, to come to Christ.

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The goal is to accurately convey God's message in his son, and to conduct oneself in a manner commensurate with he whom you represent, which is

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God. The pretext for greed.

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Greed is usually used of money, but it can also mean an insatiable appetite that grasps for any sort of self -satisfaction.

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Second Peter chapter 2 and verses 1 through 3 address this sort of thing. He says, but false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction.

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And many will follow their sensuality, and because of them the way of truth will be blasphemed. Which makes us think of Romans 2 24, which says the

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Word of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you, because of the hypocrisy, because of the misrepresentation.

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And to finish that off, Peter says, and in their greed they will exploit you with false words. Their condemnation from long ago is not idle, and the destruction is not asleep.

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Oh, flattery is so easy to fall into, and like I said, it's not just that overweening thing where we just draw somebody or build somebody up in a false way.

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It's anything that puts fear of man over fear of God. Where we're so anxious to get them to say something like, okay,

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I believe in Jesus, they will say anything to them to pump up their ego to entice those words out of them, representing

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God rightly. It's been a problem since the fall of man in Genesis 3, where God was misrepresented and man said, okay,

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I'm going to go with the misrepresentation rather than what I know of him. Adam and Eve who walked with him in such intimacy as cannot be restored except by faith in the

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Lord Jesus Christ. We need to represent

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God rightly, not perfectly, but rightly. There's a man

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I will not call a false prophet, God only knows, but recent revelations over the recently deceased

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Ravi Zacharias, his behavior puts him dangerously close to this camp of being false, of being a flatterer of men.

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And the things that are said of him, and you can look it up yourself sometime later, if they're true, then he used his fame as a mask for immorality and perhaps even greed.

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It's so easy to slip into, to misrepresent God. Do you know the

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Lord Jesus Christ? If you know the Lord Jesus Christ, if your faith is in him, if you've repented of your sins and come to him, you have the

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Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit is he who looks to the heart.

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It is he to whom you must open your heart and ask him if it would be appropriate each time you have opportunity to speak for the

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Lord Jesus Christ, to stop and say, Lord, am I rightly representing you?

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Is there in me any error or impurity? Am I trying to deceive anyone?

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Am I flattering? Am I using the gospel as a pretext for greed? If we stop and pray and let the

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Lord reveal to us where we need to repent and cleanse ourselves even before we open our mouth that moment, we'd be a better representative of God.

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We all want to speak in a way that's pleasing to people. I want to speak in a way that's pleasing to you, you who do not believe in Jesus.

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I want for nothing in me to be an obstacle to your hearing of God's Word, but the message itself demands that you regard yourself as something, as a sinner, as a sinner in need of redemption, as a sinner who is miserably unable to improve your state, that only by something outside of yourself and impossible for your own attainment can you be corrected.

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I want to say this in a way that's going to please you, please you to come to the Lord Jesus Christ as you see that you are in this headlong dash into condemnation, and that God makes an appeal to you to repent of your sin, to believe in the

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Lord Jesus Christ, and that He died for you. Well, it's not a flattering truth, but the temptations to mask it, to camouflage it are too real, but the dread consequence of disbelieving this message, of remaining in your sin are too great.

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Amen. We need to resist the temptation to misrepresent

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God, much as Adam and Eve did not in the garden.

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Let's be those who represent God rightly. Let's be those who look to our own heart before we even open our mouth, and prepare ourselves rightly before God, so when we do, we use our words that represent

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Him and His Son, and His work on the cross in a way that is honoring to Him. Amen.

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Heavenly Father, thank you for bringing us together. Thank you for the day that you've given us, and for Jesus Christ, the redemption that we have in Him.

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I pray, Father, that we would be those that would stand rightly for Him, that would represent Jesus Christ, and the love of God that sent

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Him, and the love of God that put Him on the cross, where He died for our sins.

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I pray, Father, we would live a life worthy of the which we've been called, and in all this,

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Lord, that you would be honored by your people, as we represent you in a way that would bring fame to your name.