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Reading 1 Thessalonians 5:16-28, finishing up our study of 1 Thessalonians with final instructions pertaining to basic Christian living. Visit wwutt.com for all our videos!
The Bible says to rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. Difficult to do, right? They're actually very basic Christian instructions when we understand the text.
You're listening to When We Understand the Text, committed to sound teaching of the Word of God. For questions and comments, email whenweunderstandthetext at gmail .com. And don't forget our website, www .tt .com.
Here's our host, Pastor Gabe.
Thank you, Becky. We are looking to conclude our study of 1 Thessalonians today. I'm in chapter 5, starting in verse 16 and reading to the end of the chapter. Paul says, Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.
Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise prophecies, but test everything. Hold fast what is good. Abstain from every form of evil. Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
He who calls you is faithful. He will surely do it. Brothers pray for us. Greet all the brothers with a holy kiss. I put you under oath before the Lord to have this letter read to all the brothers. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.
So coming back again to verse 16, this is where we concluded yesterday with Paul saying, Rejoice always, a similar instruction he gives to the Philippians, although a little bit more pronounced. Philippians 4, verse 4, Rejoice in the Lord always, I will say it again, Rejoice.
Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God.
And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Little bit deeper instruction there to the Philippians, but nonetheless the same, that we would have a joy in our lives that is so abundant.
It displays in the exercise of faith that we truly believe our God is sovereign. We know that he is in control of every situation. There is nothing that is taking him by surprise. So even the worst of our circumstances, God is using for his glory.
He is achieving some ultimate good with it. And so therefore, even in those worst of times, we can rejoice in God, which Paul is doing here in prison. As he is writing this to the Philippians, he has been placed under house arrest in Rome.
And yet he says to them to rejoice in the Lord always. And as he goes on, verse 5, it just kind of shows his reliance, his faith on God as sovereign in the way that it comes out in every other area of his faith.
Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand. You become a reasonable individual, not somebody who is a worrywart or who is panicking, who is anxious about the situation because you know God is ultimately going to work this out.
He is at hand. And this is what leads Paul then to say in verse 6, do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, a peace that comes to you in such a way that it's not at all like the kind of peace that we think we can get from a new gadget that we just bought or getting a bill paid off or getting a job promotion or any of these other kinds of things.
This is a peace that surpasses all understanding because it's peace with God, knowing our sins have been forgiven. And on the day of judgment, we stand before him justified, a peace that surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus from guarding your heart from being afflicted by this world.
Nothing in this world can separate you from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus, our Lord. And it is a reliance upon those promises and those assurances in the scriptures that we can rejoice always and will not be anxious about anything.
So again, a little more thorough command that Paul gives to the Philippians. But you can read that also into this instruction that we see given to the Thessalonians because we use scripture to interpret scripture, right?
So rejoice always verse 16 and then verse 17, pray without ceasing. So Paul, when he said this to the Philippians, also had a command on how they were to pray to present supplications, intercessions with thanksgiving before the Lord with a thankful heart.
And we get to the command of thanksgiving here with the Thessalonians as well in the next verse, verse 18. But first of all, 17, I mean, how, how complicated is this? Pray without ceasing. It's actually not quite as difficult as it seems.
What Paul is simply instructing here is that every word that comes from us and every thought that we have would be in full submission to the Lord. So whether we are gathered in formal prayer or whether we are going about our daily tasks, having conversations with friends and family, on and on it goes.
May every thought that we think and word that we say be as if we are in constant prayerful meditation with the Lord. Is every prayer that you pray or every, let me say this again, if there is every word that you say and also every thought that you think pleasing unto God, do you want that?
Don't you aspire to that? I don't, I don't want to be a kind of person who flies off the handle when things don't go my way. Because once again, that displays that I don't believe God is sovereign when something doesn't go my way and I have to respond angrily to that situation or curse about my circumstance or anything like that.
It displays in my reaction to that, that I have not fully embraced in my mind and in my heart, in my walk of faith, that God is sovereign. But when I submit my mind and my heart fully to him, that what comes out of my mouth is the fruit of the condition of my heart, which has been washed by the Holy Spirit of God.
This is why Jesus said, out of the abundance of the heart, out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks. So what's coming out of the mouth is what's in a person's heart. And we have these words that have been written by David for us in the Psalm concerning our mouths.
Psalm 141 .3, set a guard, O Lord, over my mouth. Keep watch over the door of my lips. Psalm 1914, let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.
And as David is praying to God for repentance in Psalm 51, he says this, verses 14 and 15, deliver me from blood guiltiness, O God, O God of my salvation. And my tongue will sing aloud of your righteousness.
O Lord, open my lips and my mouth will declare your praise. So submit even your mouth unto the Lord. God, change my heart and my mind in such a way that the words that I say would be pleasing to you. You cannot have your pocket areas of your life where over here I can behave this way and over here I can behave that way as long as I'm acting like this around my Christian friends or everybody at church sees me behaving in a godly way.
We need to have godliness in the sense that everything that we think, say, and do, no matter what circumstance that we are in, is pleasing unto the Lord. Even when nobody is watching, even when no one can call us out for our behaviors or the words that we say.
God knows and he searches the hearts and minds of man. The parts of you that you try to keep from everybody else and you put on that self-righteous front and you think that that's enough. As long as everybody thinks I'm a Christian, I'm good.
You cannot be acting like a depraved sinner in secret and still be able to call yourself a Christian. The Lord knows. He knows if your heart is truly genuine for him, if you have really submitted your whole self unto the Lord, or there's still a part of you that you're trying to keep secret away from everybody else and no one gets to know about that sin.
I tell you to confess your sins before the Lord and follow the instruction that James says in James 5, to confess your sins to one another. The prayer of a righteous man has great power as it is working.
As the elders pray for you and anoint you with oil that you may be healed. This is something that comes from a confessional heart. Somebody who does not want sins to be kept in secret, but wants to have the whole self.
That part of the self that is public, the part of the self that nobody else can see. Everything submitted fully unto the Lord. Present your bodies as a living sacrifice unto the Lord. As Paul says in Romans 12, 1, and this is your spiritual act of worship.
So even in the words that we say, the thoughts that we think, all of these things would be as though we are in a prayerful state of mind. This is praying without ceasing. It's not a complicated concept to understand.
It probably is a little bit more complicated to execute. This is where we need the Lord's help. So certainly submit yourself to the Lord. Understanding as David prayed, again there in the Psalms, set a guard, oh Lord, over my mouth.
Let the words of my mouth be pleasing to you. Oh Lord, open my lips and my mouth will declare your praise. Submit these things unto the Lord and he will change your heart. Pray without ceasing, verse 17, and verse 18 goes right along with that.
Give thanks in all circumstances. For this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. Now when we were in chapter four, I mentioned that whenever somebody comes to me and says, Pastor Gabe, what is God's will for my life?
There's one of two verses that I might give them. One of them is 1 Thessalonians 4, 3. 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 bodiness in holiness and honor, not in the passion of lust like the pagans do 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. And as Paul said to the Colossians, you were bought with a price.
So honor God with your body. Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, whom you have from God, the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit. So you must submit your body unto the Lord. So again, I've kind of rabbit trailed a little bit because it's such an important issue.
People struggling with sexual immorality, and I'll hear from them all the time. I just can't seem to conquer this and well, you must. And the Bible says that you must and submit all your ways entirely unto the Lord and he will cleanse you.
He will purify you. If you are still struggling with looking at porn or lusting after something, it's just because you don't want to stop. Now there definitely has to be a transformation of the mind that has to happen.
But you make the decision to look at things that you should not be looking at. So that is something that you have to conquer and you must stop cold turkey. End it now. It is such a prevailing issue, even within the church, that I find it a necessary rabbit trail to have to go down to issue that to you again.
So again, when somebody asks me, what is God's will for me? I might give them that verse or the other one I will give them is this one. First Thessalonians 518. Give thanks in all circumstances for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.
When we ask what is God's will for my life, oftentimes we're asking, you know, what kind of career does God have in store for me? Who am I going to marry? Where am I going to live? Should I drive the red car or the blue car?
You know, something like that. That's typically what we are asking about whenever the question gets presented. What is God's will for my life? God's will for your life is that you give thanks in all circumstances.
The Bible is not going to tell you where you're supposed to locate yourself to and live in that geographical area. If you are if you have a job offer on the table and you're not sure whether you should take it or not, there is wisdom in an abundance of counselors.
Ask somebody's advice. Pray to the Lord for him to give you a clarity of mind as to whether you are supposed to take that or not. And if it's not God's will, maybe doors will start closing. I don't know.
But whatever decision you make, do it cheerfully. Do it thankfully unto God. This is God's will for you in Christ, that you be thankful in all circumstances. Again, it's a tall order. Easy thing to understand, a little bit more difficult to try to execute.
But we do this with the Lord's help. Do not quench the spirit, Paul says, verse 19. And by the way, that's a verse that gets misused. But the explanation for verse 19 is in verse 20. Do not despise prophecies, but test everything.
Hold fast what is good. So do not quench the spirit simply means that what the what the spirit is doing. Do not ignore. Do not try to stifle. Stifle what? Well, in verse 20, the prophecies do not despise the prophecy.
So earlier this week, I mentioned to you, we were talking about eldership. There's the pastors and overseers of the Thessalonian church, and some of them may have been gifted with prophecy of speaking prophetically to the church because the apostolic teaching was not yet complete.
And so during this particular apostolic age, prophecy was a little bit more common. We see examples of this in the book of Acts, in which there were prophets who were given a vision from the Lord about a famine that was about to come upon the land of Judea.
And so they needed to take up an offering to help their brothers in that area. That's one of those prophecies that we see. However, we've got to be careful about this idea that God is revealing prophecies willy nilly, and sometimes prophecies are going to be wrong because it's difficult to filter and we're just human beings and he is God.
So sometimes the prophecy might not be clear to us, but it's really not that big a deal. If somebody gets it wrong, at least we're trying to honor God. Actually, the scripture is very clear about how wrong prophecy is supposed to be regarded.
And it's very, very serious. If a person proclaims to have received a prophetic word from the Lord and they say that something is going to happen and it doesn't happen, that person's a false prophet. We read about this in Deuteronomy 13 and in Deuteronomy 18.
And when somebody, when somebody especially would claim to reveal something from God or even perform some great sign or wonder, but then they try to lead people astray to follow after false gods, that person's supposed to be stoned and put to death.
So there was a serious penalty consequence for false prophecy. It is not okay to have this laissez faire attitude that that false prophecies are no big deal because it's sometimes difficult for us to understand.
Prophecy in the scripture is always clear, clear in the sense that what God has said to his prophet, they are to say to somebody else. Maybe the meaning of that prophecy, like if a vision is given to somebody, maybe that's not always clear.
Becky and I talked about this this past Friday on the Q and A, but the word that God says to his prophet, they always hear it and they always announce what it is that God has told them to say. And if they do otherwise, if they're not obedient to the Lord, there is consequence for that.
A person who has any thought pop into their mind and is coming out their mouth as, oh, hey, God gave me this vision, this word from the Lord, and now I'm going to give it to you. And it turns out to be wrong.
There is no fear of God in that person's heart because we have it stated for us in these instructions regarding how we should receive prophecy. First Thessalonians 520 that we need to test everything.
Well, it's verse 21. Do not despise the prophecies. Then verse 21, but test everything. Hold fast what is good. Now this is something that the Thessalonians were renowned for doing, testing all things according to what the scriptures say.
And as we read about in Acts 17, the Bereans were even more noble than the Thessalonians were about testing all things. So Paul is encouraging the Thessalonians to do this all the more. Test what is said to them.
Don't despise the prophecy. Somebody has a prophecy, a word from the Lord. Hear them test it. If it if if by testing it is shown that it is truly a genuine word of the Lord. And again, we have those qualifications given in Deuteronomy 13 and 18.
If the word that the prophet says does not come to pass, it didn't come from God and pay that person no regard whatsoever. The fear of God is not in their hearts. If they think that any thought that pops into their mind, they can just say it and and and claim that it comes from God.
Test all of these things and hold fast to what is good. What is proclaimed in the name of Christ that that is the stewardship from God that is by faith, the way that Paul describes it to Timothy and first Timothy chapter one.
This is good. And rejoice in the gospel of Jesus Christ that has been proclaimed for salvation to all who would believe. Verse 22, abstain from every form of evil that includes false prophecies, especially in this context.
False prophecies have nothing to do with them and do not let false teachers lead anyone astray. Now, that is the conclusion of these these kind of quick fire instructions that Paul is giving here, although there are still more instructions coming, but they come in the form of a benediction.
So as Paul is closing out the letter, here is his benediction. Now, may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
He who calls you is faithful. He will surely do it. So not only is is Paul blessing them with this benediction that he is giving, but he is also commanding them to keep themselves blameless for the day of the Lord.
Of course, we also know that according to what Jude says at the end of his book, so the doxology that he's got at the end of his letter, that it is Christ who has saved us and it is he who is sanctifying us and keeps us saved.
This is also very similar to something that Paul said to the Philippians in Philippians chapter one, beginning in verse six. I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.
So do not think we attain that perfection before the day of Christ. It's on the day that he returns that we go to be with the Lord, that we will be a perfected in Christ, sanctified completely. This is the work that Christ has started in us, and he will be faithful to complete it.
He who calls you is faithful. He will surely do it. Verse twenty four and now verse twenty five. Brothers, pray for us again. Still part of this benediction, but also a commandment. Greet all the brothers with a holy kiss.
I put you under oath before the Lord to have this letter read to all the brothers. And so we are doing that. You understand that that's what we've been doing as we've been studying through first Thessalonians.
We've been obeying the apostolic command to have this letter read to all the brothers. This is not just something that was sent to the elders. And Paul was necessarily saying to the Thessalonians that it needs to be read before the whole church, although that might be the context.
But in the Holy Spirit of God, this letter is to be read for all Christians to read it and understand the instructions of Christ, our Lord and the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you. Amen.
You've been listening to When We Understand the Text with Pastor Gabe Hughes. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, Gabe will be going through a New Testament study. Then on Thursday, we look at an Old Testament book.
On Friday, we take questions from the listeners and viewers. Tomorrow, we'll pick up on an Old Testament study, When We Understand the Text.