1 Thessalonians 4:9-12 A Hand Out and Hard Work

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

Well, good morning.

Church Announcements, Building Plans, and the Day's Text

Welcome to Recast Church. I'm Don Filsak, I'm the lead pastor here. And I just wanna start by welcoming you to this gathering of God's people here in Matawan, Michigan, Recast Church. We only have a couple of more months meeting here in this building.

We're hoping to be in our new building over in Front Street sometime in the month of August. And so, so far, the builder thinks that we're on target for that. Next week, we're gonna be having time to go out there as a congregation after the service, just to pray again like we did formerly in the wintertime.

And just to go out and maybe get a chance to see the progress that's going on out there. And again, we'll just gather into groups there and pray for what's going on. You'll see those details are in the worship folder there, too, about that.

But let me encourage you all, even on your own, aside from next week, to be in prayer for the finances and the timing of that building. Even though the builders are currently saying we're on track and on target, any of you who are familiar with building projects know that it doesn't always, you know, the end date, projected end date, doesn't always line up with the end date.

So just pray that we get the occupancy on time and all of that. We do need to be out of this building at the end of August, and so there is a little bit of a time crunch there for us. So we'll figure out what we need to do in September, if we need to go to a plan B or something like that.

But right now, just be in prayer for all of that. God has provided for us in amazing ways so far, and I look forward to what God's gonna continue to do in this community here in Matawan through us in the future.

And so it's an exciting next step. This morning in our text, we're gonna be in, I almost said Philippians, I don't know where that came from, 1 Thessalonians, chapter four, verses nine through 12. If you wanna take a second to turn over there while I introduce that text to us, we're gonna shift gears significantly from the text last week on abstaining from sexual immorality.

Those of you that maybe missed that message, those are available online. You can podcast that through iTunes, or you can go straight to our website. Under the teaching tab, you'll find the sermon archives there, and you can check out what's going on there.

You can catch up on the whole series in 1 Thessalonians up to this point if you'd like to. But it's a shift that seems pretty radical to talk about abstaining from sexual immorality this last week, and then to talk about working and the way that we just kind of generally live our lives this week.

And it's simply because Paul was responding to the real needs of a real church. These letters are set in the context of Paul pouring his heart out and hearing back from the things that are going on in a real location, in a real church, in real time, in real space with real people, and he's finding out that there's issues with them.

And then he is, through the power of the Spirit answering them and helping them to grow in faith and community and service together. And we have the privilege of listening in, and we see that a lot of the same problems that these churches faced then are problems that we face now, and it's no wonder that God has written this down and kept it for us and preserved it for us so that we can, in turn, grow too.

You see, Paul started the church in that Greek town of Thessalonica, and then was asked to flee for his life by that church when they caught wind that there was a plot to execute him. So he fled in the night, literally the text in the book of Acts about the founding of this church says that he fled in the middle of the night at the recommendation of that local church, the small body of believers that had been founded through the gospel that he had proclaimed.

And so he left them in the night, but a few months later, he sent Timothy to check up on them, kind of like a covert operation. Timothy the spy goes into Thessalonica to check out what's going on with the church and how they're doing, and Timothy brought back a report that included good, a lot of good, but some bad, some things that weren't going well.

And so we saw those first three chapters commending them for the good, and talking about the deep love and affection that Paul and the team that had planted the church had for the Thessalonians. But now, after those three chapters, we got to chapter four, and he gets down to the task of addressing some of the issues, some of the bad things that were going on in the church, some of the struggles, and in tackling these issues, we'll find that over the next two chapters, he's all over the map in terms of addressing these real specific things that Timothy comes back and says, they're doing great in this, they're doing great in this, they're doing great in this, but man, they're doing this, this, and this, and it's actually not honoring to God, and so Paul's addressing those.

What Paul addresses in our text is a straightforward issue that all churches have to face down through the ages, and the church, as a gathering together of people, has to face the same issues time and time again.

It seems that in Thessalonica, the church there was doing a great job loving each other, and even loving outside of the four walls of the church. They were meeting the needs of those who were going through hard times within the body there, but there were some in Thessalonica who seemed to always be on hard times.

Some in the church, apparently, were content to sit back and let others meet their needs. That was fine with them, and what I think the image that we have in Thessalonica is two groups of people within the same church.

Thessalonica was a bustling port city with a harbor, and it was one of the gems of the Roman Empire, and so you had wealthy individuals who were in this church. You had people who were well-to-do, and very well-to-do, according to the Roman standards.

There was an east-west trade route that went through this town, as well as a port, which you can imagine in those times would have been significant for commerce, and so you would have had people who were wealthy, and then you would have had people who were down and out, and the people who were wealthy were well-capable of completely supporting those who had nothing, and so those people who had nothing were getting used to living off of the generosity of others.

They were fine to sit back and let other people meet their needs, and Paul addresses both the entire church regarding their love and care for each other, and in our text this morning, he's gonna address the entire church regarding the need to work, to not be satisfied to remain independent mooches who always forget your wallets when you show up to go out to eat.

It's interesting that this sermon will skirt along the edges of the contemporary political subject of welfare, but I wanna be sure that we don't get political with this, that we all keep our frame of reference centered as much as possible on the church.

The principles in this passage could reasonably be applied to a variety of organizations, to the place that you work, or to the state government, or even to the federal government, but please, oh please, Recast, let this text deal with your own heart.

Don't go to others, don't go to the person sitting next to you, don't let your heart go to a people group or an individual in your extended family who you're like, man, they needed to hear this message,.

I wish they were here.

If you're honest, I think that sometimes you've done that, I've done that, and I'm preaching it, so like, man, where are they, where are they? No, wow, that was ugly. But this is meant to correct our hearts, it's meant to correct the church, and what is the church, Recast?

People, church isn't buildings, the church isn't facilities, the church isn't a bunch of programs, the church isn't the leadership, it's not the board of elders, that's not the church, we are the church.

And so what is the text trying to correct? Us, so let's take it on personally, as we read this, as God speaks to us through 1 Thessalonians 4, 9 through 12, if you're not already there, or you don't have a means to navigate to that text, can you do me a favor and raise your hand, Mike's got some Bibles back here, they're already open to this text, so you can just grab it and check it out if you don't have a Bible, but 1 Thessalonians 4, 9 through 12, a shorter text, but again, Recast, God's very words to us, he speaks to us through this reading, so listen up.

Now concerning brotherly love, you have no need for anyone to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God.

To love one another,.

For that indeed is what you are doing to all the brothers throughout Macedonia, but we urge you brothers to do this more and more, and to aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands as we instructed you, so that you may walk properly before outsiders, and be dependent on no one.

Let's pray as the band gets ready to lead us in worship through song. Father, I thank you that you are a God who is concerned for the daily life, and the daily grind of our ordinary and routine lives, I think we live in a culture where it can just be so emphasized that it's great and awesome things that you honor, not aspiring to live quiet lives, to mind our own business, and to work with our hands, to love one another in common and everyday ways, so Father, I pray that you would press on our hearts the value of the life that you are giving to us now, and the great concern that you have for our Monday morning, and Monday afternoon, and Tuesday morning, and Tuesday afternoon, and the evening times, and the early morning hours, and Father, everything in between.

It's not just Sunday morning, but Father, it is to be a lifestyle of worship to you, not just in singing as we're about to do, but a lifestyle of worship that comes down to the aspirations of our heart, the things that we're striving after, that the things that this church strives after, the things that we as people here that represent you strive after, would all be fueled and flavored by the gracious and glorious gospel, the way we serve our employer, the way we serve our families, the way we drive our cars, the way that we interact with others, the way we talk on the phone, the things that we put before our eyes, Father, that everything would come and bow before you in our lives.

And Father, that we would aspire to live quiet lives. Father, I pray that you would be with this worship time that we have now, an opportunity to lift up our voices before you, an opportunity together to do something that we cannot do alone, but you have called us into this room this morning, that we together might see that we are not alone, but we worship you together in community.

And I ask this in Jesus' name, amen. Go ahead and be seated and get comfortable, and please keep your Bibles open to 1 Thessalonians 4, verses nine through 12. That's our text for the morning, and we're gonna just walk through that verse by verse and kind of think through what that implies and means for us.

Remember that if you need to get up and get more coffee or juice or donuts, feel free to do that at any time during the message. If the seat that you're sitting in gets uncomfortable for your back, just get up and stretch out in the back or do whatever it takes to keep your focus on God's word for this time that we have together this morning.

The Call to Ordinary Faithfulness

I'd like to start off just by saying, making a suggestion that we live in a day and an age where radical things are held high. I think that goes for outside of the church as well as inside the church.

I would suggest to you that discontent is almost held up as a virtue in our culture, and it seems to want to protect all of us from the status quo, right? Protect you from the status quo and just keep you striving for better, faster, higher, more.

Even in Christian circles, it seems like the expectation is that God only really moves in big ways. He wants big things for you. He wants you sold out. He wants you abandoned. He wants you to do radical, earth-shaking things for his kingdom.

Have you got that message? Have you heard that message from our culture? Have you felt that in your heart? Have you felt that pressure? Have you felt that discontent that breeds in your ordinary, everyday life?

Have you ever woke up and thought, I was made for more than this? God has to want more for me than this nine-to-five, everyday kind of life. We're bombarded by these kinds of messages. But when we're bombarded by these messages, we can find ourselves becoming discontent, like I just said, with our Midwestern, kind of dull, nine-to-five, wash, rinse, repeat kind of lives.

And here are some titles found by Christian authors that I think if you were to read, and it's not just the titles, but it's some level of the content, and I'm thinking that many people in this room have read at least one of these titles.

Crazy Love. Crazy, just crazy love.

Radical.

Anybody familiar with that book?

Radical.

How about this one?

There's a probably less known book by a Christian author called Restless. Restless, it's subtitled, because you were made for more. Restless, because you were made for more. And then there are lyrics to Christian songs that say things, although well-meaning, and I think all of these things are well-meaning, and I'm not at all even criticizing the authors of those books.

They're saying, don't read them. I'm just saying, read them with your brain intact. Read them with scripture in mind, especially scriptures like the one we're gonna be looking at today. But Christian song, the lyrics say, we know we were made for so much more than ordinary lives.

It's time for us to more than just survive.

We were meant to thrive.

Does that sound like a rah-rah song? Does that sound like, wow, yeah. Some of you know the song, and I'm not trying to, again, it's not fundamentally to be critical of all the lyrics in that song, but it's something to say,.

And it's something that needs to be balanced.

With an understanding of what God desires for your everyday life. We know we were made for more than ordinary lives.

Then why in the world are we living ordinary lives?

What is the gist of that, right? How many of you would say your life is fairly ordinary? Just being honest. I mean, I don't know if there's any presidents in here. I don't know how many of you are princesses.

I don't know how many of you have inherited bazillions of dollars or are flying out on your private jet tomorrow.

I don't know.

Maybe some of you in the room, but I think the majority of us would confess to living relatively ordinary lives, so what in the world does the author of that song mean to communicate to you and me? I guess we kind of suck, right?

Because we're made for more than this, but that's not what this text is gonna say. It is gonna dignify your life. It is gonna suggest that your life is something to aspire to.

It's worth it.

And God says it's gonna say through God's word that what you're doing day in and day out matters to the king, even if it's ordinary, even if it's quiet, even if it's just minding your own business. We'll see that here in the text.

To the church, through the word, God calls us all this morning to something less radical, less than crazy, certainly not a calling to a restlessness that tells us that we are worth more than this mundane life.

It's popular and fun to believe that we were made for so much more, but that is precisely what God is going to call us to this morning. We are called to faithfulness in the midst of an ordinary life. Our text this morning starts with a change of subject.

Paul is responding to a report from Timothy, and he has heard good things and some not so good things, as I said in my introduction, about the church in Thessalonica, so again, don't lose sight of the fact that he's addressing a real situation and a real church.

But in verses nine and 10, he once again identifies a good thing that this small and young church is going for, one good thing that they're doing in verses nine and 10. They exhibit a Greek word, Philadelphia, not the city.

Actually, the city probably is relatively weak at identifying this word. Some people have even heard it called the city of brotherly shove. It actually means brotherly love. That's the name of it, and so that's the funny pun on it.

But the Greek word just simply means a brotherly love, a love that you would expect to have between siblings, which some of you, with your brothers, you're going, I don't know quite, what does he mean by that?

Is that the kind where you punch each other and wrestle each other and fight over the last donut? I don't know. But I think you know what it means in one sense, that family has each other's back, right?

You look out for each other, you care for one another. And it's one thing for me to attack my brother, it's another thing for somebody else to attack my brother. You do know what I'm talking about? And that's that attitude, that heart of Philadelphia, a looking out for one another, a care, a genuine concern for what goes on with the other.

Paul says, I don't even need to write to you.

About brotherly love.

He's commending the church so strongly that he's like, I don't even have to write about this. And it's somewhat of a humorous teaching device because he says, I don't even have to write to you about this, but what's he doing?

He's writing to them about it. He goes on to write it, and I think this is a way that he both commends the Thessalonians and then has the freedom to encourage them on to love more and more at the same time.

He's like, I barely even need to, it's obviously a figure of speech, I don't even have to write to you about this because you are already doing this. God himself, Paul says, has taught you brotherly love.

It's apparent that he didn't get a chance to cover the type of care and concern that would happen in the structure of a church where somebody's sick and you take them meals, you do this kind of genuine help and genuine assistance, and he's like, we didn't even get to that, we didn't cover that in church 101 while I was with you before I got run out of town, and we didn't get to cover this topic, but you're doing it, you're doing the very things that God would desire of you.

God himself has taught you to love one another and to fulfill the needs of those that are in your midst that are needy and are on hard times. The church in Thessalonica had not received significant training on this, but they're getting it, and actually to the point where the church is held up as a model of love to other churches in the area.

And their love spread throughout the entire region of Greece, the region called Macedonia, which included Philippi and Berea, which are two other cities where Paul planted churches, and so in that area there.

But I think it's helpful for us to figure out in context what this form of love looked like in that early church. Did they, what did love look like there? Did they shake hands a lot during the greeting time, connection time, did they welcome visitors really well?

What did they do that was worth commending? What does love in a church look like when they're doing it right? What does brotherly love look like? I believe that the clue for what this looked like is found in verse 10, and that is simply that their love spread outside of the boundaries of their own community, even among those they didn't fellowship with on Sunday mornings.

They were caring for the needs of brothers and sisters, and I believe that these were physical needs, as we're gonna see in context by what comes next in verses 11 and 12. They were literally fulfilling the physical needs of others when it came to food and shelter and things like that.

I believe that the church in Thessalonica had a rapidly growing reputation for meeting the needs of other believers. It was likely an affluent church, as I mentioned in the introduction, really due to the geographical location of Thessalonica on that harbor that I mentioned, and a key position on a major east-west trade route.

It was a holdover spot for people who were traveling in a harbor for ships coming from all over the Roman Empire to bring in their goods. And so this church was positioned economically to help those in need in a wider swath than just those within the four walls of their church, those that were members of their church.

They were able to reach out in different ways. And there were other people in other churches in that region that were on hard times that this church pitched in to help with. And Paul commends this generosity.

He's saying this is a good thing. He calls it brotherly love, and he identifies for us all that this is the type of love that comes from God and is taught by God. And he urges them to do this more and more, to do this more and more.

It's obvious from Paul telling them to do this more and more that their love took the form of actions and not merely feelings. The big problem in our culture of really messing around with that word love and making it more about a feeling than it is about actions.

But love is not a feeling. Love is shown in its deeds and it's proven by its actions toward others. But a shift happens at the end of verse 10 that has caused some translators to literally wanna put a paragraph break in the middle of a sentence.

Some translators have literally broken up the middle of a Greek sentence and made it two different paragraphs because it seems to shift so radically in its thought. Because Paul goes from urging them to continue loving to giving them instructions and some very peculiar instructions that might at first glance seem unrelated.

Why is he telling them to continue on in love and then immediately goes into these other kind of strange commands that say, we urge you brothers to aspire, in verse 11, still the same sentence, to aspire to live quietly, to mind your own affairs, to work with your own hands.

Well, how do those things connect? How does aspire to live quietly attach to the care and the needs of others? He urges the church in this sentence that starts at the end of verse 10 and goes all the way to verse 12.

That's all one long sentence. And he urges us to keep growing in service for those around us, abound more and more in love, in other words, and aspire to live quietly, and mind your own business, and work with your hands.

And he says we should do this in verse 12 in order to walk properly before outsiders so that we will be dependent on no one. And so in verses nine and 10, Paul is strongly affirmed that the church is to be a people who care for the needs of others in our midst.

We often provide meals here at Recast. We provide meals for those who are hurting.

Or those who have a baby.

Or those who are just in need in general. We have a fund that we call the Benevolent Fund here that is available to assist families and individuals who are currently within the church family that are going through difficult times.

When people ask for financial assistance to the elders, we discuss it, discuss the need, and then decide what we can do to help out. Further, as a church, in a bigger picture way, we support the Wings of God Transition Home over in Paw Paw.

Some of you are familiar with that place, but it's a faith-based transition home for formerly incarcerated women who are looking for a fresh start. And it's a really, I think, radical and cutting-edge kind of ministry.

I'm excited about it and what's going on there. I think currently six or seven are currently living there. There's eight beds that are in that facility. We also support the Gospel Mission downtown, Kalamazoo Gospel Mission, which is an organization committed to genuine life transformation in the lives of those who are near rock bottom in their lives, a ministry that I refer people to on a regular basis, and we support financially as well.

I don't mention these things, by the way, not at all to toot our own horn or to go, wow, as a church, we're doing great. We're doing a lot of this. But I just wanna be sure that everyone understands that institutionally, we have some things in place to help those in need, but that's not enough.

We also ought to consider our own personal call as individuals to demonstrate brotherly love to one another, to help out where we can. And the first step in that process of showing brotherly love to others in our midst is to connect with others.

You have to have relationships. You can't treat this like a program. You can't treat this like a Sunday morning event or like a show that you take in on Sunday morning and then quick jet out the door.

You must be engaging. It's hard to help people with needs that you don't know exist because you're not connecting relationally with others around you. We're gonna be starting up a new set of community groups in the fall.

And maybe you would make this fall the start of something new in your life. Maybe instead of playing around the edges of church life, maybe this fall will be a time of deeper connection for you, your family, or you as an individual, where you're gonna begin to take seriously God's call on your own life to grow in community and grow in service, ultimately in honor of this text and in honor of God that is calling you to brotherly love.

Quietness, Minding Your Own Business, and Productive Work

But the text doesn't end with verse 10 because a fall in human nature and likely some specific problems in the Thessalonian church. Paul addresses the abuse of that love. He says you're exhibiting brotherly love but some in your midst are abusing it.

They're abusing that love by urging, he here in the text urges those who are taking advantage of that generosity of others to work, to get out of a dependency on the generosity of others. He's saying work toward that end.

And he does this with three commands, three commands and two desired outcomes. The first command is, you can see it in the text, aspire to live quietly. I find it helpful that Paul puts this command in the realm of aspiration.

It's not a command that we ultimately truly control. How many of you know you don't control whether your life is quiet or not? Did you know that? You can't guarantee that.

But you can aspire to that.

You can set that as your target. You can set that as your sights. We are not in charge of the trajectory of our lives but we are in charge of what we're trying to do. We're in charge of what we're trying to do.

Other translations use the phrase, make it your goal. I like that translation. Make it your goal. What is your goal? You see, that phrase, make it your goal shows that what Paul is commanding us to do is to aim for a specific target.

He's talking about in the realm of your heart and your planning. What are you planning toward? What are you shooting for? What are you aiming for? And that target, according to Paul, ought to be a quiet life.

You should aim for that. Now, quiet here is not being used about volume, right? It's not about the volume of your life. How many of you would say your household is a bit of a loud place? Some of us, mine is.

We're all loud. Philistics are loud.

What is Paul targeting for us here? What is he telling us we should set as our goal? Is it a life by the pool and the chase with our Beats headphones playing Chillstep, just kind of enjoying the day? Is that where we're at?

Is that what we're looking for? I'm a quiet life. Anybody sign up for that, right? Like, woo, all right, finally a command I could get into. Quiet life, you know, just kind of simple and nice and calm and no work and no headaches and no worries.

Obviously, that's not gonna be it because he's gonna tell you to work with your hands here in a minute. He's not talking about laziness, not by any stretch. But I think we need to be careful to avoid stating more than what Paul means by this phrase, a quiet life.

Paul is not here endorsing the American dream. He is not suggesting a retreat into a quiet bubble for church members who just, you know, just a safe space where nobody can say anything bad to me and everything is just calm and quiet and good.

Instead, I think he's saying, like Eugene Peterson in his paraphrase, the message translates this, stay calm, stay calm. How many of you know that the injunction to stay calm or to aspire to live a quiet life, sometimes that needs to be said to me in the midst of a storm, right?

Do you see the difference? It's not that you have control over your life making it quiet, it's that you're able to quiet yourself based on faith in God in the midst of those storms. What are you aspiring to?

A quiet, calm, stay even keeled kind of life. I believe that God is here calling the church to an ordinary focus on everyday mundane things. He is saying, don't let your target in life be to really stir things up.

There is a time in life, by the way, to lay low. And for the Thessalonians who had recently endured significant persecution, this was good advice. Don't be out in the marketplace stirring things up. Don't call down persecution on yourself, Thessalonians.

Not at this time, not where you're at. But I think this equally applies to us in our context. We can live in a way, some of you maybe have seasons in your life, maybe you're in one of them now where you seem to be living from conflict to conflict.

Do you know what I'm talking about? It seems like it's just like skipping across the water of conflict, from crisis to crisis to crisis. We can get so involved in political discussions, we can get so worked up about office politics, or we can get so caught up in our attempts to succeed for ourselves that we're not living a meek and quiet life that God is calling us to aspire to, to target.

This is not to say, by the way, that a Christian is not allowed to speak into controversy, but the aim of our lives should be a calm and even-headed response to what is going on around us. And this is defined even more clearly by the second command, mind your own business.

Mind your own business.

It is so easy to get caught up in other people's business. Do you know what I'm talking about? Is that pretty easy to do? And I hate to say it, but especially in the church. Especially in the church, and we can get caught up in each other's business on the basis of prayer requests.

Oh, just sharing with each other, you know, the prayer requests.

Oh, please pray for so-and-so.

You're not gonna believe what they're going through.

Right now.

You know what I'm talking about? And Paul is saying, you probably have enough of your own business to keep you busy for a lifetime. You have enough, you have enough. Of course he's not saying, ignore everyone else.

He's not going back on his commendation. He just commended them for entering into each other's lives. He's not pulling back on that, even for a second. Because that's brotherly love that's being expressed.

I mean, you know, there's a far difference. It's a big difference between brotherly love and entering into somebody else's life to assist them and gossiping and slandering about them. Do you know there's a difference there?

Both look like engagement and involvement in people around you. One is for danger and for harm, and the other one is for good and blessing. There's a right way to engage in relationships. There's a wrong way to engage in relationships.

And here he's calling the church to engage correctly. There's a good and healthy interest in connecting with others that's available, and there's a negative lifestyle of gossip and meddling that can often happen within the church.

And it's ironic how these three commands connect, I believe, at a point of laziness. I think that that's a common thread in this second part of the text. The reality is that the less busy we are in productivity, the more prone we are to stir things up, and the more likely we are to busy ourselves meddling in the business of other people's lives, because we're not busy about the tasks of our own business.

Get what I'm saying there? If you're not busy and you're not working hard and you're not focused, you're gonna be distracted by the other things that are going on, and you'll find yourself meddling, and you'll find yourself getting involved in ways that you shouldn't.

The image that we have of the church in Thessalonica is that some were wealthy and generous, and some were happy to sit back and receive the gifts from those who were generous. And Paul is seeking to clarify a balance of brotherly love here that is encouraging everyone to move toward financial independence.

And so that's why the final command is, work with your own hands, work with your hands. The emphasis here in Greek is on the word work, not on the word hands. We can get hung up on that. Okay, some of us work in industries where it's not a product of our hands that is made, but it's numbers that are crunched.

It's different things that are applied, and so you might look at this and go, okay, I guess I need to get a second job then. I gotta get something where I use my hands, you know, not my brain, but I'm using my hands.