1 Thessalonians 4:1-8 Holiness in the Bedroom

Of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filczek takes us through his series, Hope Rising, from the book of 1 Thessalonians. Let's listen in.

And I like to preach through entire books of the Bible, and I think it's helpful for us to understand the whole thing, to hear the whole book in its order, in the way that God revealed it to us. I think that there's some value in that.

We have all of these messages so far in 1 Thessalonians recorded for you, and they're posted online, so if you haven't been able to hear these, hear this series, I'd encourage you to go back and maybe pick up the ones that you've missed, primarily because you've missed a chunk of the flow of what Paul has been trying to communicate, and really what God is trying to communicate through Paul to us.

That's why the chapters build on each other, and it's very important that we grab all of that together. A lot of times, especially when we come to a chapter like this, this chapter can be taken out of context, as it many oftentimes has, and then it's just blasted on people, as we're gonna talk about sexual immorality this morning, it's something that can often be something that, boom, is just used like a two-by-four to people, without all of the understanding of the first three chapters, where Paul has been building, building and building, to set a certain stage and a tone and a feeling to what we're gonna see this morning.

You see, Paul has spent three chapters expressing his deep love and affection for the Thessalonians, his deep love and joy and enthusiasm for what God is doing in their midst. He's woven through these chapters gratitude to God for the establishment of this tiny church in that Greek town of Thessalonica, and they are rooted and established in the faith, and he's excited about that.

He's spoken in terms of their hope expressed through willing suffering. They're a church that's endured suffering, and he commends them for that, and says, you are doing what Christ has done, and you're rooted in Christ and in a relationship with him.

He commends that is expressed toward one another, and their faith expressed toward God through trust in the gospel. All of this has taken place before he ever opens his mouth and begins to identify some areas in their life that need to change, and we could take a good lesson right from the start on the way that Paul addresses people at their point of need and rebuke and need for conviction.

And then only once that he is, only at the point that he has established firmly his love and thanks for what God is doing in their life, then he addresses sin in their midst. Then he addresses what he sees as a need for them to allow God to change them from the inside out.

Holiness in the Bedroom and the Need for Careful Hearing

This morning, we're gonna be talking quite directly about sexual sin. If you have young children with you, and you usually keep your children with you, I would recommend that you consider their own level of understanding.

This is for you as parents to discern. Weigh how willing you are to answer questions in the van or in the car on the way home. By keeping them in here for this message, I would almost guarantee that you're gonna have a couple of questions.

So if you're ready to answer those questions, then by all means, keep them in here if you'd choose, and then consider whether or not you want them here or would like this to maybe even be the first Sunday that they would go to class during the connection time, and I'll give you that out.

I'm not gonna be intentionally graphic. Just for those of you that are staying here, you're like, maybe I shouldn't be here, I don't know. I'm not gonna be unnecessarily shocking, but I am not gonna shy back from speaking to the adults in this church about a subject that God, I believe, through the revelation of his word and by his Holy Spirit, wants us to talk about this morning.

He desires for us to communicate and to have this discussion where his spirit is communicating to us what he desires of us as a standard for those who are in Christ. I believe that what we're talking about this morning, our culture needs to hear from the church, and the church needs to hear from the church on this, and we need to hear more specifically from the Bible on this.

You don't need to hear from me on this, but you do need to hear from God's word on this, and really on the subject of holiness in the bedroom. I think that might have just been a disclaimer, so take it for what it was.

But there are some very important insights that God wants to offer to us this morning from his word, and these are intended to be for your discomfort and for your edification. The word of God does not exist to validate our feelings about life or the things that we're passionate about or the things that we love.

The word of God has been given to us to call us into an ever-deepening relationship with our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and that is defined. That ever-deepening relationship is defined by an increasing holiness, an increasing sense in which our lives are set apart for his purposes, and we recognize that he is the one who calls the shots.

So let's open our Bibles. If you're not already there, to 1 Thessalonians 4, one through eight. Again, 1 Thessalonians 4, one through eight is our text this morning, and if you don't have a Bible or a copy of God's word or a means to navigate to the Bible on your lap, could you do me a favor and raise your hand?

Mike has some Bibles here, and they're already open to that passage, so he'd like to get one to you if you'd like to follow along and see the things that I'm saying and the things that we're reading are coming from God's word.

And recast, this is God's word for us. It may be uncomfortable to some, probably not in its reading, but maybe more so in its explanation, and at the same time, it is a very important subject that God desires for us to interact with this morning, and God is gonna speak to us now as I read his word.

1 Thessalonians 4, one through eight. Finally then, brothers, we ask and urge you in the Lord Jesus that as you receive from us how you ought to walk and to please God, just as you are doing, that you do so more and more, for you know what instructions we gave you through the Lord Jesus, for this is the will of God, your sanctification, that you abstain from sexual immorality, that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness and honor, not in the passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God, that no one transgress and wrong his brother in this matter because the Lord is an avenger in all these things, as we told you beforehand and solemnly warned you, for God has not called us for impurity, but in holiness.

Therefore, whoever disregards this disregards not man, but God, who gives his Holy Spirit to you.

Let's pray.

Father, I thank you so much for your concern for our lives, that there is not an area, there is not a part, there is not anything that we do that is not covered by the principles of your word, that you guide us lovingly and carefully, that you, even just through the model of Paul in demonstrating love and hope for the Thessalonians, here now models for us a way of addressing and addressing sin that he sees in their midst.

And Father, I pray that you would be working in our hearts to convict us as we seek to honor you, and you're drawing us more and more into your holiness, that we would be more set apart this week than we were last week,.

Next month than this month,.

Next year than this year. Father, that we would be understanding more and more your call on our lives, and that the content of your word would become the drive of our hearts, and the very engine that moves us moment by moment and day by day, that we could say no to the unhealthy passions that we experience in our hearts, and say yes to your word, to the power of your Holy Spirit, and I thank you for your Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

Father, I just pray that as we have an opportunity to praise you, to lift up our voices together, as Dave leads us in song, Father, that these songs would flow from hearts that recognize your great mercy and grace that has been given to us, and yes, we are broken, yes, we are messed up, yes, our lives to a person in this room are in some way already sexually broken, and Father, I pray that you would help us to see your great grace and mercy and your blood that covers our sins,.

That we could,.

We can repent from our sin and turn to you, and may that be the fuel that makes our hearts and voices rejoice this morning in worship together, that we're being a redeemed people, bought by the blood of Christ, that we might do works of holiness.

In the world around us,.

In Jesus' name, amen.

Thanks again to the band for leading us in worship, I appreciate their time and energy, and I do encourage you to get comfortable, I know we just had a break, but if at any time during the message you need to get up and get more coffee juice, donuts, you're not gonna distract me, but in the process, I mean, obviously the goal is to keep our focus on God's word, and so I can't promise that you won't be somewhat uncomfortable at times during this message, but don't let the chair be the reason if you need to get up and stretch out in the back or whatever, and keep your Bibles open to 1 Thessalonians chapter four, verses one through eight, so that we can see that what is coming at you this morning is coming from God's word, and that it is him speaking to us this morning.

Now, I think all of us know to a large degree that God is concerned for the way that we as his children walk in this world, the way that we behave, the things that we do, we have some notion of that, some of us, as a matter of fact, that's the only thing we ever heard, like maybe growing up, like maybe you attended a little bit more of a conservative or maybe even the word might be legalistic kind of church where everything was rules, rules, rules, and that's all you ever got out of it, and the fact of the matter is, praise God that the good news isn't that you have a bunch of rules to follow, the good news is that Jesus Christ died on the cross because you couldn't keep those rules, so that's the point, and I just want to be clear about that, but now that we are in with him, he does have a desire for us, now that the church has been planted and established in Thessalonica, and they've given their lives to Christ, then Paul is now moving out into some things that they ought to exhibit or even abstain from in their lives.

See, his children, us included, who are called out by the good news of Jesus Christ have been placed on a pathway of ever increasing faith and trust in him, that's why we say that one of our, one of the aspects of our growth plan here is grow in faith, grow in community, grow in service, but that growing in faith is a very vital part of what it means to be an ongoing follower of the Lord Jesus Christ, and a major part of that faith and trust.

Is believing,.

Hear me carefully, is believing that what he desires of us is good.

It's good.

His rules, his commands, the things that Jesus desires for us to walk in are good. Do you believe that? Do you trust that? If you're listening to our culture at all, you're hearing the exact opposite routinely and regularly, consistently now, that the things that God desires for you to abstain from are foolish, that's a foolish notion to the world around us, but think about it this way, just like a three-year-old, some of you here in the room have raised a three-year-old, some of you are trying to raise a three-year-old right now, some of you were a three-year-old at some point, but a three-year-old might get angry, might even kick and scream because they wanna play in the road, it's a nice flat spot to play a game, it's a nice, it's kind of fun, and not only that, but because parents have told them not to, they might be more attracted to it, do you know what I'm talking about?

So you see the road and it's like, I was told not to go there, so let's see what happens if I go there, and those of you raising three-year-olds know exactly what I'm talking about, so they might be angry, why have you prohibited the road from, why are you keeping me out of the road?

But hopefully their attitude has changed by the time they're 20, hopefully they could actually maybe identify that playing in the road would have been bad for them,.

And they might even,.

They're probably not gonna be moved to say thank you in their 20s to mom and dad for something as petty as, like, thanks mom and dad for not letting me play in the road when I was three, but I think their hearts could communicate that, like, thanks for loving me enough to protect me from that,.

We are to grow in a faith like that, that believes an ongoing more and more reality that God's rules are honestly and truly for our flourishing, they are honestly and truly for our benefit, they are honestly and truly motivated by his love for humanity,.

By his love for his people.

We live in a culture that says that any restraint on sexual expression is abusive to the individual being restrained.

You guys seeing that?

Am I overstating the case, or is our culture really identifying that? To restrain sexual expression, to suggest that some sexual expressions are sinful or wrong, I believe is soon to be declared hate speech in our culture.

It's moving that way rapidly around certain issues, but then I think it'll increase, the issues will only multiply of what we cannot say is inappropriate. Or what you ought to do or ought not to do. I would suggest to you that in our heads, even us, be careful, because it's very easy to talk about the world standards out there, but think about ourselves for just a moment.

I would suggest to you that everyone in this room could probably get there by logic and reason about some of the sexual issues in our culture, that God's boundaries make sense for human good. I think I'm like, just take the topic of adultery, for example, as one illustration, or one of the particular sexual sins, and I think we could identify why that might be better for society to say adultery is wrong, right?

Can you see the benefit in that? Those of you who are married are like,.

Yeah, I guess I kind of see that.

They make sense for the greater good. But we can do that in our heads, but then why do people commit adultery? Because we're not just a head walking around, right? We're not just a brain. But we have emotions and passions and things that drive deep, and we have a fallen human sinful nature that's in here.

Yeah, it's really sad, isn't it?

So sad, Breton, it's terrible. Sorry we had to go there. But yeah, it just has a tendency.

To be different between our heads and our logic, and there's something about our passions that war against the things that we know to be good and true and right. And so even in this room, even here in the church, even the redeemed of God still have this ongoing battle, and you fight it, and you're hopefully fighting it.

Hopefully you haven't given it up. It's one of the things I wanna encourage you this morning is to keep the fight going in this area.

Don't give in.

Don't give a quarter, don't give an inch to Satan. Just keep that battle going. But in our hearts, in our passions, if we're being honest with ourselves, there are times when we have felt that God might be a cosmic killjoy, that he might just kind of, you know, just kind of be pushing pleasure aside and just kind of saying, yeah, don't do that.

Don't do this, don't do this, don't do this. And why is it always, you know,.

Why isn't bacon good for you? Why is it broccoli? Why does it have to be broccoli or Brussels sprouts?

Like, why can't we just have that one thing that tastes really good and is good for you, right? Like, have you ever noticed that? And some of you are like, what are you talking about? I love Brussels sprouts.

Good for you. Aren't you so pious? Thank you. Yeah, there you go. Good for you. Brussels sprouts, excellent. I want to share with you two presuppositions that I have in my heart and in my mind as I go into this message so that you can kind of share with, so that you see kind of who I assume and how I'm talking to you.

Some assumptions that I have at the start, these two things. The first is that this message is for those who have faith in Jesus Christ. It's fundamental that Paul is writing this to the church, and it's important.

It's important that we understand that at the get-go. He's writing to people who already acknowledge that Jesus Christ is their King and Lord. Paul shares this message with those who know they are loved and that they're eager to know what their King desires of them.

Because he's their King. Because he's loved them. Because he's sacrificed for them. Because he saved them. Therefore, they are eager to obey and to follow him. They know Jesus died for them, and they have sworn allegiance by faith to him as the one who loves them and has saved their souls.

Now, the reason I share that as a presupposition, and I think it is important, is that the church has abused the world, I believe, with our sexual ethics. I think, and I say big C church, not necessarily specifically recast.

We haven't taken out any ads or anything like that or done anything that I think is overtly, but I think in general, the church in America and the church across the globe, the church in our darker moments has implied to the world out there that what God desires of the world is restriction of sexual freedom, full stop.

Like, that's what God wants of them. And if they could just come in line with that and just come in line with our sexual ethics and our morals, then we'd be okay with them. We have not done a fabulous job expressing a glorious Savior who loves them and wants their heart and cares for their flourishing.

We've expressed a judge who hates them and despises them for their practices. Paul is not telling the church about the world out there. He is judging the behavior of us in here. By this text, he is calling all of us to conviction, and that leads to my second presupposition, and that is that this message is for every single one of us in this room.

Every single person in this room should walk out with some level of conviction because every single person in this room is sexually broken. I take for granted that this is true of you, and that's a presupposition in this text.

I take this for granted that you, that we haven't been blessed, that that happens to be that the one model of pious human sexuality happened to grace our church this morning, that you're the one. Rather, I assume that everybody, to a person in this room, needs correction.

And so let's get into this so we can get corrected by God's word this morning because that's what this text is about. That's why it exists. That's what it's here to do. It's not here to make us feel comfortable, not here to give you, you know, just kind of like your booster for the week of like, oh, I'm gonna just feel great after this message.

It's here primarily to convict. To draw us out. And God is gracious to do that for us. And the start of verse two, or verse one, in our text here, you notice that it starts with finally, and if you're perceptive at all and you've kind of looked ahead, you kind of go, well, finally, and there's a whole lot of words after this.

Paul, it doesn't mean that Paul is wrapping up. I think that there could be a better translation for that word finally, and that is simply to say, and what remains to be said is. You see, there's a big shift that's happening here in chapter four.

I mentioned that the first three chapters are really focused on thankfulness, love, the feelings between the Thessalonians and Paul the Apostle and his team that started that church, and how he longs to get together with them, and how he sent Timothy to report, and all of that stuff, and now he's getting down to the nitty gritty of kind of the purpose.

It's taken him three chapters to get to the point. And all of us probably know somebody like that, or we are somebody like that, who, you know, can talk around the issue, and then boom, finally, we get there.

And it's usually in the last five minutes of that hour-long meeting. Any of you ever have those meetings? And it's within the last five minutes that you get to the purpose of the meeting, which is always fun when that's your boss, right?

Like, I mean, how many of you love that? But that's what Paul is doing here, and there's a sense in which that is important, right? Like him sharing his love for them and all of that, and then now he's saying, there's some stuff that needs to be still said here.

We're gonna get serious here for a moment, and I'm gonna get down to this. Paul has encouraged them, and now he launches out into other areas of correction. He commended the Thessalonians in verses one and two.

He commends them by saying, keep up the good that you are doing. He even starts his conviction of sin with you are doing some things right, and keep doing, don't give up on those things in order to come over here and do the things that I'm telling you here in this text.

Keep doing the good. Paul is urging them in the Lord Jesus to walk in a manner that is pleasing to God, and I think it's very important for us to point out a word that occurs in our text that is very significant in our culture should be significant to us, and it is the word ought.

There is a way that they ought to act. Paul apparently had at least broached the subject of sexual ethics with his young church, as you see in verse two, even in the very little time that he had with them.

According to verse two, they had already been given instructions through Jesus on these matters, about these things, but now that Timothy is back and has come back with a report from Paul, it appears that there were probably some specific issues with sexual ethics going on in Thessalonica.

No surprise there, because they're just like any church made up of humans. So Paul begins in verse three with his instruction, and we need to camp out here for a while, at least for a few minutes, to really plumb the depths and the beauty of what God is saying to us here in this text.

This is, by the way, the crux, the center, the main point of the text is verse three, and all the rest is supporting statements and clauses that support this main thing that God is saying to us. And I wanna point out that we need to understand as we dive into verse three that we are being given so much more than merely sexual ethics in this text.

We are being given a theological sexual ethic, and there's a significant difference. All cultures, all nations, all tribes of humanity that have ever existed have some level of sexual ethics, ethics being the study of right behavior, what is right, what is good to do.

It's about the outflowing of the things that we do and what is good, what is acceptable, what is the standard. All cultures have that set of do's and don'ts surrounding sexuality. Right now in our culture, I don't know if you're aware of this, but there's a new paradigm of sexual ethics is forming around one specific word.

I actually, it's really ironic, I wrote this sermon on Wednesday. This morning I sat down to read the paper, USA Today, article with this very word in it, significant article about this word. It's the word consent.

Any of you read an article within the last few weeks or the last few months about consent? It's a major issue. It's the crux, the center of our culture's sexual ethic right now. College campuses think they're taking a huge leap forward in sexual ethics by requiring consent training for incoming freshmen.

This is common now, and it's becoming increasingly the norm, increasingly a requirement for freshmen that they would take consent training. The ethic is simply this, because marriage is of course far removed now from the equation, right?

Did you know that, I mean, in our culture is marriage a far gone conclusion from having any, what's that got to do with sexual ethics? Well, it has something to do with it, a very significant something to do with it.

It's called like the protective boundaries of the relationship that is physical, right? There's a consent implied to a large degree when you say I do, to have and to hold, to love and to cherish, till death do us part, right?

And in that monogamous marital relationship, there's something that's there that is an ongoing physical relationship. Consent is now the high watermark for sexual ethics in our culture. This ethic simply means that in some of these training manuals, you must hear the word yes, and you must ask for it, at various prescribed stages of sexual progress.

I won't get into the details. But to our culture, what I perceive as a very extremely low standard seems like just really high ground to them. Colleges are patting themselves on the back, boasting in the protection that this training offers.

In this message, this is not meant to be a tangent. You talk about consent and things like that. It actually serves to show the difference between one example of sexual ethics and the theological sexual ethics that are being spelled out for us here in this text.

The one sets protection against rape as the standard. That's what consent is all about, making sure that rape doesn't happen. As long as there's not rape in it, okay, it's good.

It's okay.

As long as the two say yes, okay. As long as they're in agreement. Is that a pretty low standard? Anybody kind of thinking, that's what I want to teach my kids. That's what I want to teach my kids. As long as there's a yes involved, as long as you hear the word yes, you're good to go.

What?

What kind of sexual ethic is that?

But what God sets as the standard, hear me carefully, because this is a ground where we have something to offer our culture. As squeamish as we might be about the subject, man, this is a beautiful ethic.

Listen to this. What God desires in his standard is the emotional, social, spiritual, and physical well-being of the individual as the highest priority. That's what his ethic is based on. And his own glory, obviously.

And all of that ethic is based on God's will for you. It says right here in the text, there's one thing that I know that God wants for you as a follower of Jesus Christ. Paul says, this I know. You want to talk about the will of God?

You want to talk about things that, well, what does he want me to do for this? What does he want me to, this is rock solid here. There's one thing that he wants for you as a follower of Jesus Christ for sure.

He wants you to be set apart. The word sanctification there. This is the will of God, your sanctification. This is the will of God that you would be set apart for his purposes is a way to translate that.

Paul is stating in verse three in no uncertain terms that he knows something God wants for each one of us. He wants you to be holy. He wants you to be set apart, distinct, different, unique, different than the rest of the world around you.

Just holding on to a tentative biblical, theological, sexual ethic is making us more and more unique, right? Making us more and more distinct, making us stand out. And that's not because you're a jerk, by the way.

How many of you know you can stand out for the wrong reasons? Did you know that? You can be so mean to our culture around us. Oh yeah, look at me, I'm standing now. Let the word of God stand out. Let that be the truth that people see and go, wow, I don't agree with that.

Don't make it about you. God wants us all to be distinct and to stand out in the way we behave, in the things that we do with our bodies. And in that setting apart and being uniquely his, he is commanding that we abstain from sexual immorality.

The word abstain here is a place and space kind of word in Greek. It's not the kind of word that you would think like as far as just withholding or staying. It's actually a build distance between yourself and that thing.

Put some distance between things to keep far away from it. In other words, God's will is that you keep far away from sexual immorality. Don't draw close to the line. Don't ask how close is too close. Don't get this like playing and riding on the fence kind of thing going in your life.

Stay far away from the line is what the word implies. See, I think many of us in the room would just love a list, right? It'd be great if there was just a very concrete list. Don't do this, don't do this, don't do this.

In this context, don't do this. In this context, don't do this. You can do this, you can do this, that kind of thing. And that would, how many of you, just being honest, you'd like to have a list? Just be a lot more comfortable than the generic, abstain from a very generic word.

It's used intentionally in the text, pornea, sexual immorality is the word. Many of us want lists, but the interesting thing is I'm gonna point out here in a minute that there are so many human sexual deviancies that this list would take up a couple chapters to try to spell out.

So instead, he's drawing a very strong principle for us that is important. And notice that Paul doesn't call you to a list of things to avoid here. He calls us to a holy ownership by God. This text is ultimately about being holy, set apart, and having God as your owner, recognizing that this is not mine, your body is not your own, your life is not your own.

Who owns it?

God, Jesus Christ.

He calls us to an ownership by him as our master, our king, our Lord. And he tells us for our benefit, because he loves us, to keep a distance from what is known in the Greek language as pornea, Greek and Roman culture, a word that was used frequently.

I think it's with intention that Paul uses this widely used word. It's used in a lot of documentation. I think it's a good word because we have so much documentation from ancient historians, from people that lived in that time, on scrolls that date back to the Roman times, to the church fathers using this word.

That is, when we say church fathers, I don't know if that means anything to any of you. That is the apostles, the 12 followers, the disciples of Jesus, trained men under them who came into the faith and they trained them, and those are the church fathers.

Okay, so they're just basically one generation removed of Christians from Jesus Christ himself. And they wrote about this subject as well in Greek so we can see their use of the word, so we can know how they used it, what context they applied it and all this.

Not merely to come up with a list, but to really try to clamp down on an understanding because how many of you know that if God tells you to stay from a line, how many of you wanna know where that line is?

Like what is it we're trying to abstain from? What is it that Jesus Christ wants me to be far away from? And so that's kinda why we want a list. That's kinda why we want that. But I think it's important that we keep it as it was in general.

I cannot take the time in this sermon to adequately source all of these things that fall under the term porneia. They're things that we are to avoid and some of them I refuse to even mention. I will mention a couple by name, but I'm disgusted and truly sickened that we have words in the English language for some of the behaviors, some of the sexual behaviors that are mentioned here.

And that's, again, that's just me. I get a little squeamish about some of these things, but I'm not gonna say some of them. So let me clarify that porneia, if you're writing anything down, if you're jotting notes, let me have you write this down as your definition.

Porneia would describe any sexual expression outside of the protective boundaries of heterosexual marriage. Let me say that again. Porneia would describe any sexual expression outside of the protective boundaries of heterosexual marriage.

But more specifically,.

If we define what is prohibited using scripture instead of merely that definition, kind of more comes from the Greek culture. And so it's, again, just thinking in terms of Greek and Roman things, we can come to that definition just merely from historical sources cited.

But when we think in terms of what scripture dictates for us as believers in regard to a theological sexual ethic, God's concerns and sexual ethics are not driven by what he finds to be gross or merely inappropriate.

He's not looking down going, wow, how did they come up with that? Or why did they invent that? Or why did they do this? I don't believe God is in heaven blushing and kind of grossed out and going, I don't like that because of this, or I don't like that because of this.

Here's his standard. Three things that God values that pertain to the definition of porneia. God highly values people. Did you know that? Created us in his image and he loves us. He values us. Values people.

Second, he highly values relationships. We have relationship because God has relationship. Triune, from eternity past, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, forever and ever and ever. Hard to imagine, hard to conceive, but we are relational because we reflect his relationality.

He highly values relationship. And last, he highly values the gifts that he gives to us, including sexuality. It is a great gift, an awesome gift, because he loves us. And so, if you think about it that way, you can begin to divine sexual immorality in the basis of a better theological understanding.