1 Thessalonians 5:19-22 Playing with Fire

Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsak takes us through his series Hope Rising from the Book of First Thessalonians. Let's listen in.

Good morning. Welcome to Recast Church. I'm Don Filsak. I'm the lead pastor here, and I want to start off just by welcoming everybody and saying thank you for gathering together to worship our great God together this morning.

My voice is rebelling against me for some reason this morning, and so I just want to get that out of the way and just say, hey, if it sounds like I'm going through puberty, it might just be that I am.

I don't know. So if we get that out of the way. I hope that at least part of the reason that we are in this room and gathered together is to hear from God this morning, that you can see past the things that are going on around you to the God who desires to speak to you, that even as I just think about his sovereign providence over the events and the things that are going on around us, it's no mystery that he has my voice a little bit shaky this morning, but I think in part it might just be so that we can hear his voice, in part so that you can see past me and see past the things that I'm saying to listen to him, and so hopefully we're able to do that and not allow that to be a distraction this morning.

The fact of the matter is we serve a God who speaks to us. Have you ever thought about that? We serve a God who speaks. He is communicative, and he desires to communicate with his people, and he has decided in his grand wisdom to record written words for us to hear from him, to grab a hold of, and think about, and to wrestle with, and to dive into his character and understand who he is.

And in these words he discloses for us, of course, primarily who he is, but also he discloses who we are, what he has done, and how we ought to in turn respond to that revelation. So in our text this morning we're going to see that God is still speaking to his church.

For the church in Thessalonica, they needed to be reminded to pay attention to God's words, and in our text we see an impressive and very important balance beam that every church needs to walk. And he's talking to a church, and he's speaking to the church in Thessalonica, but no less is he speaking to us here, Recast.

We are to listen for God to speak, but we are to make sure that what is said is indeed from him. That's the balance beam. To listen for God to speak, to be eager to hear from him, to be eager to listen to him, to be eager to hear what he has to say, but equally in balancing that is to make sure that what we're hearing is indeed what he's saying.

Do you hear that balance beam? And that's what we're going to see here in our text this morning. So as we walk through this short text, I believe we will see that the calling of the church is to play with fire.

We are not to quench or to extinguish the spirit's words. We are not to despise or ignore or consider worthless, according to this text, any prophecy without first testing it. And once tested, we are to hold to what is good and to abstain from that which is evil.

So let's open up our Bibles, if you're not already there, and read from the very prophecies that we are being told to hold fast to. We have those prophecies in our hands, and our text this morning is 1 Thessalonians 5, 19 through 22, a very short passage, but turn there, navigate there in your app.

If you don't have a Bible on your lap or a means to navigate there, please do me a favor and just raise your hand so Mike can bring you a Bible. We want everybody to have a copy of God's Word there so you can see that the things that we're saying, you can read along, you can follow along and see that the things that I'm saying this morning are actually coming from the very Word of God.

But recast, we have such a privilege, such an awesome and glorious privilege to take in His Word, to read it. It's astonishing to me to just think that we have the riches of God's self-disclosure to us, and we have a chance to read them together this morning.

1 Thessalonians 5, 19 through 22. I'll probably read it a couple times. Do not quench the Spirit, do not despise prophecies, but test everything. Hold fast what is good, abstain from every form of evil.

Again, do not quench the Spirit, do not despise prophecies, but test everything and hold fast what is good, abstain from every form of evil. Let's pray. Father, I thank you so much for this gathering.

I thank you that we have the opportunity as Recast Church to gather in this place. We look forward to a time when we're not setting up and tearing down, a time when we're in our building, but for now you have us here and you have gathered us together here on this summer morning to reflect on your self-disclosure, your revelation.

And I pray that we would not be a church that extinguishes the fire of your prophecies. It's very easy for us to go and do that in the sense of not trusting your Word to be sufficient for us. But Father, I pray that you would create in us a hunger and a desire for your Word that is consistent with just how powerful and mighty you are and how glorious it is that you are a God who speaks to us and shows us who you are.

And Father, I pray that you would move in our hearts as we have an opportunity to worship you and praise you, to see you as you are exalted and high and worthy of our praise and worthy of more than just singing to you on a Sunday morning.

You are worthy that we would work on Monday through Friday at our jobs in our positions for your glory and for your honor that all that we do, the way we interact with our spouses, the way we interact with our friends and our co-workers and roommates and children and children to parents.

Father, all of these relationships can be rendered to you as worship. So Father, I pray that you would be with us as we have a chance to do so in singing. That Father, this would be more than an exercise of our singing skills, but it would ultimately be an exercise of worship to you.

In Jesus' name, amen. You can go ahead and be seated. And I encourage you to get comfortable. If at any time during the message you need to get more coffee juice or donuts, take advantage of that. And again, if the chair that you're sitting in gets uncomfortable, you can get up and stretch out in the back if you need to.

But I do ask that you please keep your Bibles open to 1 Thessalonians chapter 5 verses 19 through 22. Again, 1 Thessalonians 5, 19 through 22. Short passage, but you're going to see that even in the short passage, the words matter.

There's a lot here. The notion of playing with fire in our culture, that phrase, is something that is dangerous, right? It isn't a phrase that we use in the English language for a good thing. We don't often think of playing with fire as a good thing.

It would be a negative illustration, a negative statement. If someone plays with fire, they're likely to get burned. Okay, yeah, we know that. But I'm intentionally using that phrase as a title of my sermon because the church is being told to let the fire burn, to fuel it, to continue to allow it to burn.

And fire can obviously be a dangerous thing, but it can also be a beneficial thing. And I think in the context of the Spirit of God, it is both. It is both a powerful thing and also equally a very good thing.

But it is that the Spirit is a power that is fueling the church and is something that we're allowed to continue. We're allowed to continue to have, let Him have His way in our hearts. As a church, we are keepers of fire, if you will.

And don't leave this sermon saying, Don encouraged us all to head over to the fire keepers and hit the slots. He said we're fire keepers. I mean, come on, right? But the way that Paul in our text speaks about the revelation of God through the Holy Spirit conjures up images of fire that we are being commanded to continue, to allow to continue in our midst.

So our text outlines into two main points. Two main points. Don't let the fire go out is my first point. Verses 19 through 20 explain that. Don't let the fire go out. And the second is to make sure that the right fire is burning.

Don't let it go out, but make sure it's the right fire. And that's verses 21 through 22. And so that's really, hopefully you can see that outline as well as we read it and you think through it and spend a little bit of time dissecting it.

But so look at verse 19 with me and see why in the world I'm talking about fire when the word fire doesn't even appear in our text. Like you don't see it there. You can read it and you go, I don't see the word fire.

Why in the world would it be using fire as a metaphor? But our first verse tells us this. Do not quench the spirit. Do not quench the spirit. Where the word quench there in the Greek language is a straightforward fire word.

It is to extinguish. It could easily, and I think some of the translations in English use that concept of extinguishing. It was what would be used for a torch. If you wanted to put out a torch, if you were being commanded to extinguish a torch, you would use that word there to quench a fire, to pour water on it, to put it out.

And the ESV of course translates it, do not quench the spirit. But the idea is that there's a fire going on. Paul issues this command, by the way, remember to the Thessalonian church. This is a young church who is new to the Christian faith.

They had little to no experience with the Old Testament. They didn't go to Sunday school. They didn't know all the old stories. Most of them were raised in households. Put yourself in that context and think about it.

They were raised in households and families where mom and dad, maybe grandpa and grandma, sat around the fire as they were getting ready to go to bed and told stories about the tales about the Greek gods and goddesses and demigods as if they were true.

This was their religion. This is what they believed. This is what they held to. And so they would have heard those kinds of stories and kind of tales as children. And now they have come into the faith and they've accepted Jesus Christ as their savior.

They've forsaken those other gods. But interestingly in Greek culture, flame and fire were often associated with the revelation and prophecy of the gods. There was an eternal flame, a eternal flame. It was not allowed to go out.

It was kept there until it was attacked and destroyed at the Oracle of Delphi. How many of you ever heard of the Oracle of Delphi? It was a place in Greek history where people would go and that were involved in the worship of the Greek pantheon of gods.

And they would go there to hear prophecies from, maybe you didn't know this, it was the god Apollo that they would go to offer sacrifices to. And he as the messenger of the gods would bring them the telling of the future or what was going to happen for them.

In this sense, I believe that Paul was using a very common everyday illustration for this young church. Something that they could associate from their childhood and from their upbringing and the culture around them.

And he was bringing that common day illustration for this young church to understand something. He was not encouraging, by the way, the worship of Apollo. But instead was suggesting that just as they had been raised to believe that Apollo would speak through his oracles, the one true god is a god who speaks truth to his churches.

And the flames here were a very common Greek illustration. Then they are being told not to quench them and they are an illustration simply for the revelation of the truth of God to this church. So what is the fire that the church possesses and keeps?

Think about that. What does recast have that the world around us doesn't have? What do we possess and what are we to be keepers of? What is the fire that powerfully moves us together as a body toward unity, toward love, toward service, towards compassion?

What is that fuel? What is the fire we have to spread to the world around us that has the power to transform people's destinies? Intense power that has eternal ramifications for those that you work with, for those in your neighborhood, for those that are in your friends and your peer group.

Is it not the very words of the Almighty? Is that what we're to be keepers of? Is that the flame? Is that the power? Is that the truth? Absolutely. It is the revelation that he loves us and sent his sinless son to die for you and me.

It is this gospel and this good news that is the core of a message that extends all the way back to the very beginning that God said he would send one born of the woman who would strike the head and destroy and crush the head of the serpent, the one who is the enemy of our souls.

It's this message that is what the church is meant to keep. In a real way, I mean this sincerely, it's something that's been moving in my heart as I have an opportunity. Even this morning, I've stopped walking the hallway up here.

I go out to the building and walk around the parking lot and walk around in the building and pray every morning, every Sunday morning. And I walk through that building out on Front Street without a shred of pride.

I don't walk through there thinking, wow, look at what I've built or even a pride for us. Look what we've done. Look at what we have accomplished. And I hope that we can avoid that. I walk through that building with the awe and wonder that metal has been set on metal and the skeleton of that building is built by his word.

It is built by his word. The HVAC, the plumbing, the concrete, the blacktop, the electrical system, and now the drywall that's going up slowly. And how has all of that come about? In a most fundamental way, these things are coming together as God's word has powerfully moved to gather together a people for his glory and for his name.

In a very real way, that's the way that a building is being built. Now, you can go, well, that doesn't give the carpenters a whole lot of credit and, you know, the people that are working out there. We know in a very material sense that there's thanks for the money that's been given.

There's gratitude for the way that it's been provided and all of that. But in a very real sense, it is, if you could see what I have seen since the foundation of this church, and some of you have. A handful of us were here from the very beginning and some of you came on early and some others have come later.

And some of you, maybe this is even your first week. But from the very beginning, from that small group of five couples who moved to Matawan to start Recast Church, we didn't have anything. We didn't have anything to give out to people, to get them here.

We didn't offer free iPads or we didn't offer free gimmicks or anything to get people to come and stay. And yet I'm convinced that the reason that people are here is because the word of God has gathered us.

It's the power of the word of God to create a church. And that's an awesome and glorious thing. His word has powerfully moved to gather people together for his honor and glory. We, I hope, are a people hungry for his word.

I've seen that. And it is nothing less than the very dangerous, powerful, blazing hot fire of his spirit that is found in the revelation of his words that our church has been formed as a gathering of people from various backgrounds and various walks of life.

I've thought somewhat incorrectly, by the way, and incorrectly and generally about this verse since I first memorized it years ago, do not quench the spirit. I mean, I know that's pretty easy to memorize.

Some of you already had it, right? You were like, oh, I've already got it memorized. It's already there. But since I first memorized it years ago, I've thought incorrectly about it because I've thought too generally about it.

I've always had some general and vague notion that quenching or extinguishing the spirit was a personal, internal, moral issue for me personally. That I just take it straight to me. I didn't let it filter through the the avenue that God was trying to speak it to a church, to a gathering, but rather, oh, he's just saying that to Don.

And so I've, in that process, sometimes we can misapply things. So I could, I thought, I've thought for many years, oh, I know what quenching the spirit looks like. Quenching the spirit would look like watching a raunchy TV show or saying the wrong thing to my spouse.

Or I could quench the Holy Spirit just by ignoring him and not reading my Bible in the morning. And that's quenching the Holy Spirit, and that's the extent of it. But I never thought much about what extinguishing meant, aside from just maybe putting out his influence over me in some general and undefined way.

If you'd ask me what I thought I was extinguishing when I quenched the spirit, I would have said something like his influence, or his conviction, or something kind of general, right? In my lazy generalization, I had ignored the context of this verse and just applied it directly to my own life as if it isn't part of a larger point that Paul is trying to communicate.

But Paul is speaking to a gathering of God's people. He's speaking to us together. He's speaking to Recast Church this morning. And of course, certainly that is made up of individuals that we all need to take something on.

But Paul is speaking to a gathering, and he wants to speak to all of us corporately together as Recast Church. And only once we understand what he wants to say to us as a group, can we rightly go out and live it out as individuals.

So we need to move on to verse 20 to understand more clearly what he means by not extinguishing the spirit. I believe that verse 20 clarifies what is meant by verse 19. We can't just take that verse, put it on a coffee mug, and every day make sure that we don't quench the spirit.

We need to understand verse 20. We are not to extinguish the spirit, and we are not to despise prophecies. Those are parallel in tandem statements. And hopefully this text snaps into focus for us when we read verses 19 and 20 together in this one point.

Paul is saying, church, don't put out the fire. Don't put out the fire. Don't extinguish the fire. Don't despise the revelation. Let the fire of revelation play in our church. Let the fire of God's word and his revelation play itself out in our gathering.

Let God's spirit play here among us. And the fire is the revelation of the spirit of God. But I think we need to be clear about a couple of things regarding the word prophecies here. How many of you have some questions about the word prophecy?

Like you're like, what does that mean? Where's Don going with us? Are we going to start having like, you know, a meeting every Wednesday night so that you can come and I can be the oracle, oracle Delphi?

Is that where we're going with this? Or, you know, something like that. We need to understand a little bit more what the word prophecies mean. Paul is writing this to a church without the written word.

They have no, they haven't had the full New Testament revealed. They had the Old Testament, maybe, maybe. And that's only in as much as maybe some of the Jews that had become Christians had brought that along with them.

But maybe not. I don't know if you've ever considered that, but we are far removed from Israel where Thessalonica sat. And where it is in predominantly, we see that it's predominantly a Greek background context.

And so maybe they didn't even have the Old Testament, but they had at least the Apostle Paul's teaching. We know that he was with them for a few weeks, had an opportunity to share the good news and proclaim some of the word of God to them.

But with First Thessalonians even. First Thessalonians is one of the very first books of the New Testament written. They didn't have Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts. They didn't have the book of Romans to turn to.

They didn't even have the book of First Thessalonians to turn to until it was delivered to them by Timothy. So, I mean, as we're, as we're reading this, as they were reading, as they're reading this for the first time.

So how were they to discern truth? How would they know when God was speaking to them? How could they discern the difference between false teachers and those who taught the truth? And so I believe that image that we have in this young church is that some were tempted to shut down and close off the possibility that God was even still speaking at all.

He has to tell them to not quench the Spirit because what's implied is that some of them were quenching the Holy Spirit. He has to tell them to not despise prophecies because some of them were despising prophecies.

Maybe some were jealous of those who received revelation from God. Maybe some were doubtful about the revelations and prophecies. Have you ever, have you ever had somebody prophesy something for you? Have you ever had anybody say something or just say God's told me blank?

Anybody ever have that and you doubted it? I have. I'm going to share a couple of those here in a moment. But, you know, you kind of look at it, you go, well, what is he getting to then? It seems sensible that some of them would be doubtful when somebody said God told me fill in the blank.

Maybe others just found it more simple and less messy and confusing to be more orderly. And maybe some were just even saying let's wait for Paul to show up. Let's wait for Paul to come and tell us what to do.

Others maybe found it to be too much work to test the prophecies against the apostles teaching in the Old Testament. And so they, they just kind of threw up their hands and dismay at the whole thing. But for whatever reason, Paul tells the church don't let the fire of the Word of God go out.

Fundamental to this text is that God is still speaking. And the church is to have a humble and eager stance of listening to His Spirit. Are you eager to hear from God? Are you eager to hear from His Spirit?

The word despising here in the text is a strong and picturesque word of annihilating something. Making it, taking it down to nothing. Taking it down to ash is the idea. It is causing something to disappear.

And Paul expected this early church to encourage prophecy, not to allow it to disappear or even cause it to disappear. But when I say prophecy, you may have the notion of telling the future. You might, how many of you just quite honestly, when you hear the word prophecy, something about future telling comes to your mind?

I think probably three of us. Okay. Anybody else? More than a few of us. About double a few of us. But it's this, it's not this idea of future telling at all. I don't believe that that's what Paul would have had in his mind when he used the word.

Certainly some prophecies are about the future and that's where we get hung up because that's the really sensational prophecy, isn't it? When we see prophecies in the Old Testament about a Messiah, that He's going to be born in Bethlehem.

What? Are you serious? And so it just grabs our attention when we see Old Testament prophecies that came true or are fulfilled. We see the prophecies about the future in the book of Revelation and we're going, whoa, this is so cool.

And we get really hung up on that kind of stuff. And some prophecies are about the future, but they only account for a very small portion of what is prophecy in the Old and New Testament. Prophecy to Paul, remember, who was trained in Old Testament Judaism, when he uses that word, he probably would have meant the revelation, simply the revelation, the revealing of God's words.

If God was talking about the future, then that is what the prophet spoke about. If God was judging the sins of His people at that time, then that is what the prophet spoke about. If God was encouraging and commending His church, guess what the prophet spoke about?

Commending His church. So the prophet is the mouthpiece of God and is speaking His words to His culture around Him. That's primarily what prophecy is. So what does that mean for recast church? What does that mean for us?

If that's the definition of prophecy, it's just simply God revealing something to someone and then they share it. Does it mean we should expect a prophetic ministry here, where people can come to someone like an oracle to get a message from God about the future?

Do we quench the spirit? Are we quenching the spirit? Are we despising prophecies here, recast, by not having a time each week for people to come and ask me who they should marry, where they should go to college, whether or not to take that new job or to quit their current one?

Do we despise prophecies? That's a genuine question. I had to wrestle with that this week. Do I despise prophecies? Am I quenching the Holy Spirit? At the risk of sounding to some of you like I'm towing a party line, which I never really, I'm not a party line tower.

You can ask my wife about that. I don't like to tow the party line. I like to follow the truth. I like to follow the Word of God and see where it goes. I don't like to have allegiances to theological concepts, to theological constructs, to big long drawn out arguments.

I like to see what the Word of God says and follow that. And so that's what I'm trying to do here. The party line that I grew up with, though, and I'm going to kind of tow it a little bit just because that's where I see the truth going.

I see that as the pathway for this. I grew up with, the party line I grew up with said that God primarily speaks through His Word and prophecy in our current era is centered on His Word. It's centered here.

In other words, we really do genuinely have all that we need to hear from God here to live a godly life, to believe and embrace the gospel, to be forgiven, and then to walk with Him. Everything that God desires for you to know of Him is already here, written for your edification, written so that you can research it, so you can study it, so you can go back to it time and time again.

I'm going to let you know that a verbal word is pretty cool, but it's something about those old love notes from my wife. To be able to go back and see those again and again is very different than just the verbal one-off here or there.

You know what I'm saying? And that's what God has given to us is a word here that is in writing that we can dig in and get down to it. And I largely agree with that idea that the primary place for God's prophecy, the primary place for us to know what God desires to say to us, is found here.

Now, I'm not saying that God cannot speak to you about specific things. I'm not saying that at all, and I would never put God in a box like that and say, He cannot speak, He doesn't speak, He won't speak.

I'm just saying that the biggest problem for me is knowing and discerning when it is Him and when it isn't. How many of you know that most often when people go to God, it's about the things that He hasn't revealed that concern us the most?

Do you know what I'm talking about? Like who to marry, where to go to college, whether or not to take that new job in St. Louis, or whatever. Like, there's all different kinds of things that are out there that we want to know, we want to know.

But I would suggest to you that often we are more concerned with the things He hasn't revealed at the exclusion of that which He has. Does that make sense? We are more prone to go to Him for those things and not even pay attention or at the exclusion of paying attention to the things that we know He has said to us.

Now, we live in a different context than the Thessalonians. They didn't have this amazing book in print. They didn't have it searchable on a device with many translations and commentaries and study notes that are given to us by scholars for free and all different kinds of resources available.

But we are just as in danger as they were of letting the fire go out. As a church and as individual members of this church, we should be eager to hear from God. And I think we all assume we'd like to hear from God.

How many of you would like to get a letter or a phone call or text from God? Just be honest. Raise your hand. If that's you, I'll give you a second. I'll give you a second. Go ahead, raise your hand. You would like to get that, right?

I think a lot of us would. But what if it said, stop looking at porn? What if that was the text? What if the text was, stop gossiping? What if the text was, love your wife, serve your family, stop acting too busy for them?

Like, do you see what I'm saying? I mean, we were ready to hear from God. We're eager. And then all of a sudden, we're like, what if? What if the text, you received a text from God and it looked a lot like this?

What if you received a text and it looked a lot like 66 books revealed over 400 years to multiple different authors over time, and he's communicated to you? And he said, you know what I want you to know?

I want you to know me. I want you to know me, says the Almighty. And the best thing that I could possibly share with you isn't where you should eat lunch tomorrow, isn't where you should go to college or what career path you should choose.

But the best thing, the greatest thing I can share with you is myself. And so I've done that. I've showed you me. And I want a relationship with you. And I've showed you that I've gone to great lengths because I love you and I want a relationship with you.

What if, what if communication from God looks a lot like, like this? And everything that we need to know is available for us right here. We can read it every day. We could read it all day. We can, we can memorize it.

We can go back to it. We can let it roll over our minds and then memorize it. Or we can, we can study it with others. Or we can listen to others teach on it. And there's all kinds of possibilities found in this book.

Anybody here that's, that's getting, getting older like me, that's kind of would testify that you've spent time in the Word and it's still mind-boggling. It's still got depth. It's still got richness.

It's still, every time I go there, there's something for me. Some, now that's not to say every time it's just like, whew, it's an amusement park. Sometimes I go there, I'm convicted. Sometimes I've been cut to the quick by it.

Sometimes I've been there and I've been like, Leviticus, really bro? Are you serious? We're in this again? Leviticus? Okay, you're reading through the Bible in a year. And then there's some times where I've been in Leviticus and I've been like, God, I'm so glad I don't have to kill lambs.

I'm so glad. Like, I mean, it just hits you in a different way. And it's like, I'm so glad that I'm not under that old covenant anymore. And there are times where there's richness in all different kinds of parts of the scripture.

And I don't know, none of that's in my notes, but it's just a glorious and beautiful book that is worthy of our attention in our life because it's how God has chosen to reveal himself to us, church. It's what he's given to us.

That's the bedrock, the foundation. Now we can talk about him, you know, revealing to you all different kinds of things and we can get into all of that. But again, I'm convinced that that's secondary and that's to be held very, very loosely.

God told me to marry. God told me this. God told me that. We are in danger, though, of letting this go if we forget it. I think we quench the spirit when we despise this written word, when we get tired of hearing from him, when we get tired of his answers.

It's despising prophecies. It's extinguishing the spirit. I don't really want to hear from you right now. I want to go my own way. I want to do this. Or when we, quite frankly, seek out a new and fresh message to tickle our itching ears because guess what?

We already know what this says and we'd rather seek the counsel of our co-worker who's going to tell us what we like. Despising prophecies. We're extinguishing the spirit's role in our lives and accepting someone else's in that place.

Do you know what I'm talking about? I think we, you know, maybe there's some conviction. I can do that as well. I believe that many in the broader church in America are guilty of growing tired of hearing a word about God.

They're tired of hearing about God. He is faithful to reveal himself to us, but we want to hear about ourselves. He's faithful to tell us who he is, and we want to hear about us. So how can I be a better husband?

How can I be a better father? How can I be a better mother? How can I get ahead in life? Who do you want me to marry? Where do you want me to go to college? And what God offers us as a revelation of him.

Here I am, and I'm the best thing that I have to offer to you. There's an old parable that originated in India that's meant to convey that all the religions are basically groping for the worship of the same God.

I don't, I don't believe that at all, but the illustration is, I think, beneficial and helpful for us. Some wise old blind guy set out to the task of describing an elephant. Now raise your hand if you heard this illustration before.

Some of you have already heard it. There's an illustration of it up there. The first is holding the tail. He says, elephants are like a swishy broom that sweeps back and forth. He's blind. He's holding the tail.