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Sermon: Boldness in Our God Date: February 7, 2021, Morning Text: 1 Thessalonians 2:1–2 Series: Awaiting Christ Preacher: Josh Sheldon Audio: https://storage.googleapis.com/pbc-ca-sermons/2021/210207-BoldnessInOurGod.mp3
Our scripture this morning for the preaching will be 1st Thessalonians chapter 2 and verses 1 through 2, though I will read verses 1 through 8 to get us started. So as you open your Bibles there, know that this is the beginning of the Apostle Paul's defense of his work there in that city of Thessalonica.
We don't know exactly who is maligning his work there, or why he had to answer these charges. We don't know exactly what the charges were, but we can surmise it from the answer that he begins giving here in chapter 2.
His visit to Thessalonica was productive. It was not a waste of time as his detractors seemed to have accused, and the message was delivered with a boldness that overwhelmed the risks that came and still come with the gospel.
Our message this morning is about boldness in God. Boldness in God. So please stand for the reading of God's Word, 1st Thessalonians chapter 2 and verses 1 through 8. This is the word of the Lord. For you yourselves know, brothers, that our coming to you was not in vain.
But though we had already suffered and been shamefully treated at Philippi, as you know, we had boldness in our 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 God who tests our hearts.
For we never came with words of flattery, as you know, nor the pretext for greed. God is witness. Nor did we seek glory from people, whether from you or from others, that we could have made demands as apostles of Christ.
But we were gentle among you, like a nursing mother taking care of her own children. So being affectionately desirous of you, we were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God, but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us.
So God bless the reading of His Word. Please be seated. Heavenly Father, as we come now to your Word, I pray that you would open our ears to hear the truth that you have for us in this Word. And you would bless the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart.
May they be pleasing and acceptable in your sight. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. So I want you to imagine that I was going to give you this morning a survey. You know, a survey like the ones that you get all the time.
You get this online survey where you agree that you're going to rate the service that you got from a customer service rep. And they say, OK, now one means that you're completely dissatisfied and whoever hired this person should be fired along with this person.
That's how dissatisfied you are. And a 10 means that you're ecstatic and you received everything. There was good communication. There was a quick answer and everything is peachy, kino. And you're going to recommend this company or this service to another.
You've all seen those, right? One through 10. So I want to give you a 1 to 10 survey. I want to give you a 1 to 10 survey where a 1 means I am unworthy. I'm a worm who will never measure up. And a 10 means I've arrived.
I am now the paradigm of excellence. A 1 means I'm unworthy. I cannot measure up. I will not measure up. It's impossible for me. Totally dissatisfied with myself. And a 10 means I'm so satisfied with myself.
People should line up behind me and follow my example. Are you ready for the question? I am satisfied with my boldness in the gospel of Jesus Christ. Rate yourselves on 1 through 10. Are you satisfied with your boldness in the Lord Jesus Christ?
The one is, obviously, no, I am not satisfied. I never will be. I am miserably inadequate at this. And a 10 is the other way. Well, I would guess that few of us would be able to go so high as a 5. We might be given a 6 if yesterday we had a really good, bold day.
And I'll bet that if I did send out such a survey, and I am emphatically not going to send out such a survey, but if I did, I would guess that my average score, tallied them up, would be about a 3 .75.
Something like that. You see, we all want to be bold for Jesus Christ, but few of us are as bold as we think we should be, or maybe as bold as we think we could be. And unless I miss my guess, most of us will rate our personal boldness in the gospel pretty far down the scale.
Are you bold for Jesus? Do you want to be more bold, or do you just want to become bold in the first place? All of us must be bold for the gospel of Jesus Christ. And I would imagine few of us are satisfied with our boldness, but this question of boldness in the gospel is incredibly important.
It's of great importance to us in our walk with Christ, in our daily lives as Christians. Now, we have too many examples in the scripture of bold witnesses for God and His Christ to even begin to cite them.
And even in our two verses here, there's this example of great gospel boldness in the Apostle Paul and Silas and Timothy who are with him. But we need to understand there's no express command given us that says something like, therefore be ye bold the way ye old Apostle Paul was bold.
We don't have that express command, but we do have is Jesus Himself in, for example, Mark chapter eight, verse 38, saying this, He's saying, for whoever is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of Him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when He comes in the glory of His Father and with His holy angels.
Can we say here, for whoever is not bold for me, not bold for me in this adulterous and sinful generation, we must be bold in the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. The Apostle Paul could have heard Jesus say that, and he could answer that he indeed was not ashamed of Jesus and His words, and so must you and I be able to answer as well.
Boldness in the gospel. Would you like to be more bold or maybe just become bold in the first place? The two verses that we have in 1 Thessalonians chapter two would pave the way for you. They help you resist the temptation, or maybe I should say the excuse, that this was the great Apostle, this was Paul, Paul who could say, well, you know, I was zealous as a Pharisee, I'm zealous as an Apostle, and I'm organized, and I'm highly intelligent, and by the way, I was inspired directly by the Spirit of God, and it helps us to take away Him as the excuse, and God willing, if you're one who looks to Him and says, well, I can't ever measure up to Him, we will eliminate that this morning.
It helps us to stop saying, well, I'm just a mundane Christian who fails at every point. You may be mundane, and you might fail at every step, but you still must be bold in our God to declare His gospel.
Boldness in God. What is boldness? What is it to be bold? A simple definition in a secular reference I found was not hesitating or fearful in the face of actual or possible danger or rebuff. Courageous and daring.
Wouldn't you love for that to describe you? I would, me, because when you say, he's courageous, he's a daring pastor. I have a dear friend who is a pastor, and his motto is, dare to do nothing. By that, he means don't make rash decisions, let things settle down, and he seems like sort of a passive sort, but impugn Christ's name.
Say something against the nature of the eternal Son of God, and you'd be safer tangling with a she-bear over her cubs. What is boldness? Not hesitating, not being fearful. The definition there works really well with our text.
The NIV takes that text and says, we dared to tell you the gospel. The NET Bible says, we had courage to tell you the gospel. The Greek word behind those translations means acting with an attitude of openness that comes from freedom and lack of fear.
Openness in speech, to speak freely and openly and boldly. That word that we have for boldness is used nine times in the New Testament. One time of the Apollos, eight times of Paul, and all nine times in relation to declaration of the gospel.
Dear ones, we must be bold in the gospel. And God willing, this message this morning will help us to get there. What is the first thing we see here is that to be bold, we must be confident that God's word is never a waste of time.
God's word is never an empty thing for you to declare. You look at verse one again. For you yourselves know, brothers, that our coming to you was not in vain. That word vain is the Greek word for kenosis.
Emptying is from Philippians chapter two, verse five, where Christ emptied himself of his prerogatives in heaven. This is a word for emptying something, for pouring out his contents. Paul is saying here that his coming, his visit there, that three or four weeks he spent in Thessalonica with Silas and Timothy was not purposeless, was not vain.
It accomplished something. He wasn't there long enough to teach them all the deeper things of the Lord. We know that because it was a short visit, but apparently his detractors immediately started telling the new convert that Paul's visit had served no purpose.
So they're denigrating Paul and what he taught. They're denigrating the gospel and the God behind it. They're denigrating the converts and saying you've given yourselves over to nothing. This all served no purpose at all.
It was a mist. It was a vapor. It's empty of any meaning or real content. And these poor converts, their friends, their old friends are telling them they had wasted their time with fantasies, that this invisible God was inferior to the idols that they could see and touch, the ones that they turned away from.
Paul's visit had been a vain enterprise and was soon best forgotten. He says to the Thessalonians, you yourselves know, brothers. That it was not a vain, empty thing. It was not purpose. You know this.
How did they know it? Well, they knew it, first of all, hallelujah and praise God, first of all, because they were converted, because by conversion to the gospel of God, the spirit had come upon them and they knew that Paul's visit, the declaration of the gospel, for faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God, the words that he used, the words that Paul spoke, the spirit of God used to convert them.
So Paul could say, you yourselves know this. Don't believe these others who are telling you that we serve no purpose because you got converted to Christ. You got saved. Therefore, the purposes for which we came were fulfilled.
You know that it wasn't vain. Brethren, your hearing of the gospel was not in vain. If you're here this morning, taking time out from your day to be here, what does that tell you? That tells you that you can step right into this verse and say, my hearing of the gospel was not purposeless.
The person who worked with me, the person who came alongside that Christian brother or sister and prayed for me and studied the Bible with me, you yourself can say it was not in vain because you, like the Thessalonians, got converted by it.
Well, by the word, by the spirit of God, but him using those means. So first, his experience would tell them and tell you that hearing the gospel, speaking the gospel, proclaiming God's word is never a vain thing.
It's so simple the way he says it. It was not in vain, not in vain. Now, to say it this way as a figure of speech, we call it laetotis or laetotis. I get the accent wrong on the wrong syllable sometimes.
But it's laetotis and what it is, is the affirmation of the positive by expressing its negative. It was not this. Therefore, it's the opposite. And we all use these. We all use laetotis in our speaking.
How are you doing today? How often do we hear or how often we answer? Not bad. What do we mean? We mean we're doing the opposite of bad. We're doing well. Now, there's a lot of gradations between good and bad.
But the way that figure of speech works, it's the opposite. How are you doing? Not bad. That means you're doing well. Paul is famous for using this figure of speech. Here's a famous one in Romans chapter one, verse 16, where he says, For I'm not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first, but also to the Greek.
If he's not ashamed of the gospel, what is he? He's the opposite of ashamed. He's proud of the gospel. Not proud of himself, proud of the God of the gospel, proud of the gospel that God gave, not himself.
But when he says, I'm not ashamed, he means he's proud of it. And here he says in First Thessalonians 2 .1, Our visit was not in vain. What does he mean? He means the opposite. It had purpose. The gospel, you see, is never in vain.
The gospel is never purposeless. The gospel is never empty of content. It's God's word to sinners. It's the eternal gospel. That's the Revelation chapter 14, verse six. God chose us to know this gospel before the foundation of the world.
That's Ephesians chapter one, verse four. As Christians, you are God's ambassador. God making his appeal through us. That's Second Corinthians 5 .20. The gospel is never in vain because of the God of the gospel whom we represent when we are bold in the gospel.
Representing God is never a vain or an empty thing. It cannot be a waste of time. So this is really your first brick and a foundation of boldness. If you're bold now, if you're bold just the way God wove you together to become more bold, to step out more often, to declare this word.
And if you think that you're not bold, here is your first encouragement to step outside of what you think your limited nature is and become bold. Because you have to believe that when you declare the gospel, it cannot be a waste of time.
It cannot be empty. It cannot be a vain thing. Many of you have witnessed for years to siblings and parents and friends and gotten nowhere. Whether you should keep trying or you should stop casting your pearls before swine is a matter between you and God.
But let me encourage you. If your boldness gets stymied by the response, by the tepid response you get and you start thinking something, well, if they respond this way, maybe I'm not bold enough. I'm not a bold person.
So I'm just going to stop. And this happens too often to all of us. Let me encourage you that their response cannot mean that your time in declaring the gospel was ill spent. It cannot mean that. Listen to what God says about His word through the prophet Isaiah.
These are familiar words to us. Chapter 55 of the prophet Isaiah verses 10 and 11. He says this about this word, which cannot be a waste of time. And here's why. For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, do not return there, but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, bringing seed to the sower and bread to the eater.
So shall my word be that goes out from my mouth. Excuse me, let's stop for one second. That goes out from your mouth as you speak God's word that came from his mouth through the prophets and apostles, which we have in scripture, and now goes forth from your mouth as you speak the word of God.
That's this word that we're speaking of here. It shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it. God's word will have its success.
You may not know what that success is. You may not see it with the person you're speaking to that you're being bold with with the gospel. But I understand this. And let this be your first brick in the foundation of your boldness.
If you are bold, become more so, become more explicit in your witness of the gospel, then it cannot be a waste of time because it's God's word. God didn't waste his time in giving us this word. You cannot waste your time in giving it to others.
Maybe that success that you will see would be the salvation of a sinner. Maybe that success you will not see, but it will be success in the judgment of a sinner. Success is not determined by a sinner's response, but by God.
Judging the measure of your boldness for Christ by the response of sinners who do not know Christ is completely illogical. It makes no sense. Are you confident enough in God's word to leave the results to Him?
Sometimes boldness gets stymied. Sometimes our explicit explanations of Christ and telling people about Him, about Him, they get slowed down because we just are so lacking in confidence because of past experience that anybody's going to respond.
Leave the response to God. As you speak God's word, it cannot return to Him. He promises that He cannot return to Him, but it accomplishes that for which He sent it. Leave the results to Him. Don't allow sinners who hate God and don't know Christ and do not have His spirit.
How can we let them be our gauge of boldness? We cannot. Let God be the judge of it. Are we confident enough to leave the results to Him? Too often other people's apathy eats away at our zeal. We begin to question ourselves and self-doubt creeps in and gives us a case of lockjaw.
And then we remember what Jesus said about us when we were so ashamed of Him that we won't take any risks. And we end up in this dark French prison with no escape and no idea how long the sentence is because that's how they used to sentence people.
You were put in prison, but you weren't told how long, and you didn't know how long till you got out. And we end up in that kind of a cell room, if you will. All because we're looking at other people's response to gauge our faithfulness to God or our boldness in the gospel.
Let God be the judge of that. What is boldness? It's to be accurate, to be free in our speech. The last Passover that we hosted at our house, I was going along and I was leading in the Seder, which simply means the order of service.
And of course, my wife and I are Christians and my niece, Jessica, who many of you know, was there. And so there was three Christians and the rest of the Jewish friends and family who always come to the Passover.
And as I'm going through and I'm getting ready to do the four questions, I'm getting ready to say, and so forth. All of a sudden, my niece, Jessica, just burst forth and she said, Say, before you go on, I just have to tell you that everything we're doing here points to Jesus Christ who came and fulfilled all of this.
And everyone's looking and going, what? She says, I just want you to know that. OK, go on with the four questions, Josh. There's some boldness there. Did it convert anyone? Not that I know of, but she spoke truly.
As I went on to the four questions in Hebrew, which I'd memorized since I was 13 years old. We cannot let people's response be the gauge of our boldness. And there's an example of this I want you to think about.
In Mark's gospel, in chapter five, verse five, we read of Jesus Christ that he could do no mighty work there, that being his hometown of Nazareth, except they laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them.
So what are we to think of that? That is coming to them and that his activities there was vain, that it was a waste of his time, that their rejection was his fault because he lacked some boldness. Maybe Jesus should have said to his father, Father, I repent of having not been bold enough with his people.
Father, I'm sorry that I didn't get anything done here that was of any productive use. Of course not. Of course not. Jesus Christ himself leads the response to God. Christ himself had tepid responses.
But would we even for a moment think that he was not bold in declaring the gospel he was sent to enact? Of course we wouldn't. Verse six of that chapter of Mark says he marveled at their unbelief. Even if the Thessalonians had rejected Paul, his visit would have been not in vain.
It would have been productive. It's no different for you and for me. We feel dejected when our efforts are rejected. And that means when we feel that way, that we're maybe thinking that the results depend upon me.
Let me dispel that notion. They don't depend on you. They depend upon God. Let God be the measure of whether your boldness is adequate. Secondly, excuse me, you and I must do our best in our clarity, but to change men's hearts is God's alone.
Be confident that the risks are worth the price you might pay. If you're speaking God's word, it cannot be a waste of time, it cannot be a vain thing. It serves God's purposes. And second, be confident that the risks that you're taking are worth the price that you might pay.
Might is an important word. We don't know what God has in store. But be confident that the risk is worth the price. That's verse two. But though we had already suffered and been shamefully treated, excuse me, at Philippi, as you know, we had boldness in our God to declare to you the gospel of God in the midst of much conflict.
You know, boldness is not recklessness. The bold gospel witness is realistic and takes the measure of the risks. He holds them up against the eternal matters that the gospel addresses and proceeds with confidence.
We're looking at gospel, immortal souls versus derision, embarrassment, or worse, which one's going to win out? We need to be confident that the risk that we take is worth the price we might pay because of the weight of the glory of the gospel that we're declaring.
Confidence in the message and more importantly, confidence in God who sends the message. That's not recklessness. It's knowing the risks and be willing to take them because of the possible benefits that might come to the hearer or even yourself.
As your confidence in God grows because you simply step out and boldly declare his gospel. But it's not reckless. It's knowing the risks. When I was a very little boy living in Oregon, the family went to the beach once.
And while we were on the beach and they're setting up the umbrellas and all the stuff for the picnic we were going to have, I saw a mound out there. It was a sand dune of sorts or it's just a mound of sand out there about 40, 50 yards away, higher than the rest.
So I walked out on the sand and got up on the mountain that I just conquered. I was about six, seven years old and I'm playing away and I'm just having a grand old time. And after a while I turned around, I saw my dad back where he had been about 30, 40 yards away.
And he's yelling and he's throwing his hands this way and he's just all animated. He's jumping up as much as he was able to jump up and down, which wasn't much. But I could see that something was wrong and I was probably the cause of it.
What happened was the tide come in. I had no idea about tides. I had no idea about waves or drowning for that matter, but I could tell that my pop was pretty excited. So what I do, I came off my sand hill, this land that I just conquered and was playing out so much.
And I went into the water and I got tumbled around by the water and it didn't scare me because I didn't know I could be hurt. And I kept getting knocked down by the waves. I finally got to my dad and I got to him.
I said, what is it, dad? And he says, stay there. So what did I do? OK, and I turned around, went right back out and they had to get one of the rangers to get me. Was I bold? No, I wasn't being bold. I didn't know the risks.
I knew nothing about death by drowning. I knew nothing about waves taking you out and anything like that. It wasn't boldness. A bold gospel witness does not ignore the risks that they might take, but they compare them to the benefits that a soul might have from what he is able to say.
Be confident that the price is worth the possible benefits. Paul and his companions knew what they risked. Not like me at that beach. They knew what they risked. They had already met that risk at Philippi.
And we've talked about Acts chapter 16 a few times and what happened to them in Philippi. But it bears us well to do this again just briefly because Paul's boldness in the gospel was not recklessness.
He wasn't just charging in unthinkingly. He knew it might happen because it already had. Now, this is in Acts chapter 16 and in verse 22, we read that the Philippian magistrate had the lictors and the lictors were sort of like the beat cops.
They were like the ones who walked the streets and they had these rods with which they could beat malefactors. In Acts 16 .22, the Philippian magistrates tore the garments off them and gave orders to beat them with rods.
This is because of their declaration of the gospel, their boldness in the gospel. Now, it's possible they had only their outer clothes removed, but the chances are that they were stripped naked. They're stripped completely naked, then tied to a post for everyone to see and then beaten with these rods.
The police were called lictors. The beat cops were called lictors and they carried these rods that they used for this purpose of beating these malefactors at the magistrate's orders. This was the suffering that he risked in Thessalonica.
This is as you know, he told the Thessalonians. How did they know? Because they still saw the bruises. They saw the agony with which the arm was raised because of the bruises on the shoulder. They knew what had happened because they heard about it.
And this is what he put at risk to be stripped naked. There's the shame. This is what Paul and the others put to risk, not ignorantly, but something they had known and experienced. Not brashly, as though they had been warned of a theoretical possibility and chose to ignore it.
They compared their pain and humiliation and what might happen again in Thessalonica to the eternal weight of glory awaiting them in Christ. And then they boldly proclaimed the gospel, come what may. So we have to be sure that we look at the risks that we take because the Bible would have us to be very realistic about that.
What risks do you take? We be rejected by someone very close to you? It could happen. It happened often with the Lord Jesus Christ himself. Will you be derided? Will you be mocked? Usually we have to admit that's the worst that happens to us.
They were called silly. Sometimes it's even being called hate speech to believe what the Bible says. That may be your suffering. You might get punched in the face. You don't know. Whatever that realistic risk that is before you.
If you want to step out boldly and declare the gospel, despite the risk, spend a few moments in prayer and compare the risk to the gospel. Compare what might happen, what God might have decreed for you, what might happen to what you know is certain.
That these words are life. That this gospel brings eternal life. If only the one who would believe, and we can leave that to God. They beat him with those rods, him and his companions. Strip them as I described, and all to stop them from proclaiming this gospel, and it could have happened again at Thessalonica.
At the end of one of my favorite movies, Braveheart, the narrator with classic dry Scottish wit describes how William Wallace's body was chopped into pieces and sent throughout the land as warning against others who would rebel against the king.
And then he says with that dry Scottish wit, it did not have the desired effect. As the beating of Philippi did not have the desired effect upon Paul or his friends, that they went and kept declaring the gospel.
You see, we all want to be bold for Christ. We all want to be bold for Christ. We're just not sure we can endure the shame of rejection, being derided or being outcast, so we hold back. The old saying is nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Do you want to know how to be bold for Christ? To become more bold for Christ, but especially you who think that God wove me together in a timid and timorous way. I just cannot do this, even knowing I must do this, even hearing the force of the scripture and the message I'm preaching this morning.
Do you want to be bold for Christ? Do you want to know how to do it? Well, I'm giving you some pegs to hang on to. Be confident that it is God who accomplishes His purpose. By the words you might speak, it's God whose purposes you fulfill.
But at another level, it's much simpler. You become bold by being bold. Do you have to be bold like Paul Washer or Ray Comfort? These men who can go out in the street and start up these conversations with people in a way that just catches them and engages them.
You don't have to be like that. Do you have to be an apologist like Dr. James White, who's just so brilliant in the way he puts the logic and the scripture all together? And he entraps you, it's like, well, I have to believe this.
I don't want to believe this, but I guess I have to. And people just walk away from him. But the way he puts it together, do you have to do that? No, we're all gifted differently. We all have different talents, different skills.
But you have talent. You have skill. More importantly, far more importantly, you have the Spirit of God. And you have boldness. If all you do is speak what you know of Christ, this is boldness in the gospel.
Do you want to become bold? Be bold. Step outside that box and see if God does not honor you by giving you more confidence in Him. Now, notice I did not say God honors you by giving you converts, that's all up to Him.
But I would argue that if you are bold, God will honor that boldness by giving you more and more confidence in Him to continue to be bold and let the results be in His capable hands. There's some common mistakes we make that would stifle us in this way.
First, we complain that God just didn't make me that way. I talked about this a moment ago. I'm by nature sort of retiring. I'm shy. I don't speak well. Well, God knows how He made you. The question is not how loudly you speak or how brashly you confront people.
The question is whether you are, in fact, ashamed of the gospel. The question is whether you're willing to trust God and declare this gospel at whatever level of skill and sophistication you're able. God knows.
Do yourself a cost-benefit analysis. See if potential gains are worth the risks. The gain may be nothing more, and I say nothing more in quotes, than you growing into the image of Christ and trusting God more as you see Him carrying you through whatever situation you're in.
Pardon me, even as He carried Paul and the apostles through the beatings that I've described a moment ago. That's the first complaint, that God didn't make me that way. And second, we tend to rate ourselves.
We tend to rate ourselves like the survey I had at the beginning. And here I am, I'm a four. Okay, let's say I'm a four, just slightly above that average that I thought we might have. I'm a four now. I was a four a year ago, and I'm going to die a four.
How do we get out of that trap? Do you feel like that? This is my boldness index. This is as far as I can go. This is the way God made me. And I would argue, no, this is where you stopped yourself. How do we get out of this?
Be bold. All I can encourage you to do here is step outside of your own little trap that you've made. Trust God, not yourself. Trust God and simply be bold. Tell the gospel. Do not rate yourself. And third error is comparing ourselves to others.
I've talked about this before with Ray Comfort and men like that, James White. And too often that other though is none other than the Apostle Paul. He's brave. He's knowledgeable. He's eloquent. He's intelligent.
He's determined. He's bold in the face of adversity and suffering. Oh, if only I could be bold like him. Do you ever feel that way? Like he's some esoteric story that we have? No, he was a real man who really got hurt by those rods.
He was a real man who was really ashamed to be seen naked before he got beaten. Can you not be bold like him? Or can we be? If it's impossible to be bold the way Paul was bold, that would then imply that the God in whom he was bold was a different God than ours.
Well, that would be ridiculous, wouldn't it? It's the same God. We don't compare ourselves to others, even to the Apostle Paul. We don't say, oh, if only I could be bold like him. So if on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 means I don't desire to do this at all, and a 10 means that this is the desire of my life, and I would love to see this fulfilled, how would you like to have the Apostle Paul's boldness?
If I gave you that 1 to 10, now you'd all say 10. If you rate yourself, we're going to be on the lower end of the scale. But if I say, how would you like to have Paul's boldness, you'd say 10. Yeah, let's be like him.
How do we do that? Because your boldness is not in yourself, it's in God. Your boldness is not your words, but the word of the gospel in which you are to be bold. We have boldness in our God, verse 2, to declare to you the gospel of God in the midst of much conflict.
Where does boldness come from? It comes from confidence that God's word is never in vain. Your boldness is in God. It's not an empty thing if you're declaring His word. It comes from the confidence that the risks are worth the rewards.
And where does all that come from? We had boldness in our God. And the boldness in God that Paul had, and that God is the same God that we serve. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
And so this puts an end to our falling short of the great Apostle. I think Paul would be appalled to see how much we hold him up. We revere him beyond all measure. He is not the example of boldness that we think he is.
He prayed three times for his thorn in the flesh to be taken away. He did not like physical pain. I think we could even say he feared being beaten again. He didn't look forward to it, but he took the risk because the gospel was worth it.
And his boldness was not in himself. And he didn't steal himself and strengthen himself to go face it one more time. His boldness was in God. We had boldness. We had boldness in our God, not his God, our God, his, Silvanus' and Timothy's, and ours.
The God to whom the Thessalonians turned when they heard Paul's bold message and abandoned their idols to serve the true living God, their God, our God, is your God. And they declared this in the midst of much conflict.
The word is agon for conflict, where we get agony. The conflict was external as men vented their rage against God's Son. You can read of that in Psalm 2, why did the nations rage? The agony was still visible in their bruises and their lacerations.
And that led to an internal conflict. Who'd want to go through that again? Who would want to? Even brave, bold Paul was not eager to be exposed and beaten again. He had to have wrestled with himself to once again risk his battered body to be bruised again.
And he's no more able to withstand the physical pain or the mental anguish than any of us are. In 2 Corinthians 12, he writes that three times, I pleaded with the Lord about this thorn in his flesh, that it should leave me.
But Jesus said, my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. How did he endure? By his confidence that any boldness he could muster was from outside of himself. It was from God.
Because by faith in his son, Jesus Christ, he was in our God and God in him. How do we become bold like that? Well, by prayer. Paul prayed three times here for relief. Whatever that thorn actually was, it was God who gave him the strength to endure and to carry on.
It was God who kept him bold. His boldness was in the gospel he declared. Let me ask you, are you satisfied with your boldness in the gospel? Are you satisfied with how bold you are with friends, siblings, children, parents, and so forth?
I hope none of us are ever actually able to say, yes, I am totally satisfied. I'm there. I'm the 10. I'm the paradigm. I'm the example. We wouldn't do that. Even if we didn't do it with all those conceited terms I just used, we still wouldn't rate ourselves that high.
We're not satisfied with how bold we are in the gospel. But how do we grow here? What Paul tells us really in these two verses in 1 Thessalonians 2, by boldness that begins with confidence in him whose gospel we proclaim.
It's God. By confidence in him whose name we proclaim, the name that's above every name, the name before whom all knees shall one day bow. And everyone can proclaim what? That Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.
How do we grow in boldness? One way is to be bold. But more than just finding that strength in ourselves, we are bold because we're confident that as we speak God's word, God has given us this word to give to others.
And if it comes from God, if he is the source, it cannot be in vain. And if there's a price to pay, whatever it may be, up to and including being stripped naked and beaten in front of everyone, done publicly, we're confident that it's worthwhile because of the eternal gospel that we declare.
Paul prayed. He prayed three times for relief. God's answer was sufficient and he stayed the course. Do you pray for boldness? Do you ask God to give me that courage to step out and speak clearly, as clearly as I'm able, about Jesus Christ?
So Paul prayed. He told the Ephesians to pray for me that I may have boldness in declaring the gospel. And he said that in other letters to other churches. God's answer to him when he prayed three times didn't remove the suffering, but gave him what he needed to endure it.
And this happened to another who also prayed three times and asked for suffering to be removed from his course. I speak of Jesus Christ, who at the Garden of Gethsemane fell on his face three times and he prayed three times, my father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.
This is Jesus Christ praying for it to pass away from him. The cup, of course, was the cross where he would suffer and die for our sins. His father didn't remove it. Praise God he didn't remove it. And Jesus did not despise the suffering and the shame that it would bring and praise God for that.
This is the same God that Paul called our God. The same God that Jesus Christ himself prayed to. The same God in whom Paul found his boldness. The same God in whom your boldness can be found. The only place your boldness can be found.
The same God that Jesus called out to, the one who could save him from death, which indeed by the resurrection God actually did. Boldness in the gospel is not confidence in self, it's confidence in God.
Boldness in the gospel begins with confidence that God's word cannot but accomplish God's purposes. The gospel is not your message. It's not your message, it's God's message. It's the gospel of God. It is his gospel.
And may we ever be bold and confident in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen. Lord God, we thank you again for bringing us together. We thank you for the day that you've given us to worship you, to hear from you in your word.
I pray that your spirit will work in all of us, preacher and hearer alike, to be more bold for you, Lord, in the gospel that your son Jesus Christ came and accomplished. And for this we give you all the thanks and the praise and the glory in Christ's name.
Amen.