A Word in Season: Turning, Serving, Waiting (1 Thessalonians 1:9-10)

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The prophet Isaiah made fun of the idols of the world in his day. He talked about the people who had to get a piece of wood and some of it they used for a fire and the rest of it they carved and they set it up and they chained it down so that it couldn't fall over or be stolen away.

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And it was a way of him exposing the emptiness of the idols of this world. The idols of our world are currently being exposed.

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So many of the things that used to take up all our time and all our energy, so many of the things that we used to give ourselves to pursue, those things are being stripped away.

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The idols that we serve, many of us in our culture, aren't necessarily little statues or whatever else it may be that we bow down to, but they are the things which sit on the throne of our heart, the things that take up our time and our energy and our money, the things to which we devote ourselves, and that's really religious language.

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But when the Bible talks about salvation, it describes it with reference to idols in 1

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Thessalonians 1. Paul is writing to the men and women who'd trusted

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Jesus on Thessalonica, and he says that people declare concerning us what manner of entry we had to you.

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People talk about what happened when we arrived in Thessalonica and preached the good news of Jesus Christ to you, how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true

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God and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, even

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Jesus, who delivers us from the wrath to come. We might look at another part of this on another occasion, but what

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I want to focus on this morning is that the Thessalonians turned to God from idols to serve the living and true

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God and to wait for his Son from heaven. And those three verbs really describe for us what happens when sinners like us become

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Christians. First of all, there's a turning to God from idols, there's a leaving behind of everything to which we once devoted ourselves, there's a rejection of our putting our trust and our confidence in anyone, anything else other than God himself, and it's 180 degrees, it's a complete about face.

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Idols are left behind and God becomes all in all to us.

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There's a turning away from the idols to God and then a serving of the living and true

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God. Now there's probably a deliberate contrast there between God and the idols.

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They are dead, they are worthless, they are empty, they cannot help us, they cannot bless us.

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Again in the Psalms there's a description of idols that have eyes and ears and mouths but they can't see or hear or speak, they have hands but they're utterly powerless, but not the living and true

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God, and we have now come to serve him. He is now the object of all our concern, his glory is our great joy, and to serve him is to give ourselves to him, to pour our lives out as living sacrifices, holy, acceptable to God, which is our reasonable service.

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So a true Christian is someone who's turned to God from idols, who is now serving the living and the true

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God, their time, their energy, their money, whatever it may be, all we are and all we have, having received mercy from God, is now taken up with God, and then we wait for his son from heaven.

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The Christian life is one of expectancy, it's one of looking up and looking on.

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We know that this world is not everything, we know that the things that we have here will one day be swept away, but we know that the

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Lord Jesus Christ who rose from the dead is coming again, and so we wait for him.

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There's an expectancy, there's an eagerness, there is a delight, and these are the things that need then to characterize us in these days.

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We mustn't turn back to idols, we must keep turned away from them, and if yours are falling, then

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I'd urge you to turn to God, and then to serve him with God's people, and then to wait with us for the coming of the

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Lord Jesus Christ. That's the hope that sustains our souls under such circumstances as these.