One of the things that’s become clear during the pandemic is that people in England long for community. They long for human, loving contact. They long for family. They long for relationships that are real. And for all that social media and Zoom and other tools in technology can achieve, ultimately people want actual friends.
And this is one of the things that marks out a Christian church — or at least should mark out a Christian church. It’s certainly one of the things that marked out the Thessalonian church. Paul praised God for them for the depth of their love for each other. And this is also one of the things that makes a healthy church very attractive indeed for outsiders.
And this morning we’re going to look at how that works — how that loving relationship and friendship and family life can work itself out in the life of a local church, and how that will be an attractive appeal for those outside.
Recap
But before we look at the verses that Katie’s just read for us, let me just give a little recap of where we are. You’ll remember, if you’ve been with us, that Paul spent just about three weeks in the city of Thessalonica before violence and riots meant that he had to flee under cover of darkness. He’s not been able to get back there since. But finally Timothy, that Paul sent back to Thessalonica to find out how this young church was doing, Timothy’s come back to Paul and reported that the church is in great health and is doing really well. And Paul is just so encouraged and overjoyed that he writes this letter to praise God and encourage them to keep going in the way that they are.
And the first half of the letter is all about encouraging and reassuring them, and it starts and ends with a prayer of thanks to God for the health and life of this church. And those two prayers of thanks form sort of bookends around chapters one to three, the first half of the letter.
So here is Paul’s prayer of thanksgiving at the start of that section. He writes: “We always thank God for all of you and continually mention you in our prayers. We remember before our God and Father your work produced by faith, your labour prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.”
And then as he brings those first three chapters to a close, he has another prayer of thankfulness to God, in which he says: “How can we thank God enough for you in return for all the joy we have in the presence of our God because of you?” Whenever I come to pray for you, he says, it just brings a smile to my face that I cannot stop from breaking out, because I so love to think of you and I’m so thankful to God for you.
So that’s the first half of the letter. It’s bracketed by these two prayers of thanks, and it’s full of encouragement that Paul’s ministry and their response and their life as a church are the genuine article and are going in the right direction, in spite of all the suffering and opposition that they’ve been experiencing.
A Prayer for Growth
But all that is going well is not grounds for complacency. Before Paul closes part one of 1 Thessalonians at the end of chapter 3, he ends with another prayer — this time not a prayer of thanks, but a prayer to ask God to do things for the Thessalonians. Here’s what he prays in chapter 3, verses 10 to 13. He says this: “Night and day we pray most earnestly that we may see you again and supply what is lacking in your faith. Now may our God and Father himself and our Lord Jesus clear the way for us to come to you. May the Lord make your love increase and overflow for each other and for everyone else, just as ours does for you. May he strengthen your hearts so that you will be blameless and holy in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus comes with all his holy ones.”
Paul prays for their growth, and the topics of that prayer turn out to be the topics that he will then cover in chapters four and five — the rest of the letter. The areas that in chapters four and five he will encourage the Thessalonians to keep working on and to grow are exactly the topics that he’s just prayed for at the end of chapter three. And so the second half of the letter is set up.
And last time we looked at chapter four, verses 1 to 8. We started that second half of the letter, and we learned that the Christian life is actually all about living to please God. Now, how do we know how to please God? What kind of life pleases God? We don’t just make it up. We don’t just say, “Well, if it feels good — if I imagine this is the kind of thing God ought to like — then that’s all well and good.” No, no, no. There’s a way we can know what living to please God looks like in practice, and the answer is: we listen to the apostles. The first disciples of the Lord Jesus, and the apostle Paul and a couple of others, they will tell us what living to please God looks like. And that’s why we read the New Testament half of our Bibles. We read the Old Testament as well of course — that’s for a different reason; that’s because the Lord Jesus himself taught us that it has ultimate authority — but the New Testament documents are precisely those that have survived, that were written by Jesus’s apostles. And that’s how we know how to please God.
So Paul said in the passage that we looked at last week: “For you know what instructions we gave you by the authority of the Lord Jesus.” So that’s how you know how to please God. But how do you actually do it in practice? It covers so many areas of life. You know what you want to do — but the ability to actually put it into operation is another thing entirely. Well, Paul told us last week as well: we have the power to live to please God in practice, because God gives us his Spirit. So here is chapter 4, verse 8. Paul says: “Therefore, anyone who rejects this instruction does not reject a human being but God, the very God who gives you his Holy Spirit.” And so God gives us his Holy Spirit to allow us to actually live, in practice, in ways that please him.
Love for One Another
And then we get two areas of life — how we live to please God. And last week we looked at the first area of life as to how we please God, and that was all about self-control in the area of sexual immorality. And then today, chapter 4, verses 9–12, we move to the second area of life as to how we live to please God in practice, and that is all about our love for one another.
And Paul will explain what living to please God looks like as we seek to love each other in these verses that we’re looking at this morning. First of all he’ll give us the general principle of what it looks like, and then he’s going to give a very specific application of how this fleshes out in daily living.
A Love that Grows
So first of all then: the general principle. Living to please God involves a love that grows.
Paul says in chapter 4, verse 10, that we should do this more and more. Here’s chapter four — actually, before we get to verse 10, I want to just show you how this links back to what we looked at last week. So as Paul — that’s Paul Mayo, not the apostle Paul — opened up for us the writings of the apostle Paul, chapter four, verse one: the general headline for living to please God. The apostle Paul says this: “As for other matters, brothers and sisters, we instructed you how to live in order to please God, as in fact you are living. Now we ask you and urge you in the Lord Jesus to do this more and more.” And then we get that same phrase today: “In fact you do love all of God’s family throughout Macedonia, and yet we urge you, brothers and sisters, to do so more and more.”
And Paul opened up very helpfully for us last week how this language of “more and more” reminds us that this is something that is not like keeping rules. It’s not like filling in your tax return. It’s not like doing any administrative tasks, or following the Highway Code as you drive your car, where you can reach the end of the journey and say, “I’ve done the job — job done. I’ve done my dose of love. I’ve done my dose of living to please God.” Living to please God is the kind of thing where there’s always scope to do more, because living to please another person is a job never done. And it’s the same with loving our fellow Christians — it’s a job that is never done. There’s always scope to do more and more.
But wonderfully, the fact that Paul’s using this language of “more and more” highlights that this is not something he’s writing to nag and have a go at the Thessalonians. No, it’s not at all. This is something that they are already doing and are already good at, and Paul just wants to encourage them to do more of what they’re already good at.
And this love that they have for one another comes from the idea that the Christian church is a family. To be church is to be family. So here’s verse 10 again: “In fact you do love,” Paul says, “all of God’s family throughout Macedonia.” And yet we urge you, brothers and sisters, to do so more and more. They’re family with each other. They’re in the same family as the apostle Paul. Although he has the Lord Jesus’s authority, he writes to them also as brothers and sisters. And they’re in the family of God.
And this love is the work of God’s Spirit within us. So here’s chapter four, verse nine. Paul says: “You yourselves have been taught by God to love each other.” Now, this could just mean that Paul teaches with God’s authority — you’ll remember that the Thessalonians were praised that when they received the word of the apostle Paul teaching them, they received it as it actually is, not just as a human word, but as the word of God. So this could just be Paul’s way of saying that they were taught by Paul to love each other, and as Paul taught them, this was God teaching them. That’s certainly true, but it would be a slightly odd way to say that. So I think this is more saying that God gives us his Spirit — the Spirit of sonship, Paul says in Romans chapter 8 — so that as that Spirit works in us, he makes it a natural desire and longing to love our fellow brothers and sisters as members of the family. One of the Spirit’s unique works is to bind the family together in love. And so God’s Spirit, living in the hearts of every Christian, makes it something that we are just taught to do. It becomes part of our new personality as we grow as Christians.
And there’s always scope to love God’s family more — the people that we already love and care for — there are always fresh ways we can love them, fresh things we can do for them, that arise not from our own selfishness but from what would be good for them. And we all have our friends within the church family. Our church here is not huge, but even in a church our size you can’t know everybody well, so you end up with a little circle of people that you feel you know and get along with, and it’s natural to love them. But there are always people beyond our immediate orbit that we can love, and unless that happens, there’s a danger that people within the church are not in anybody’s particular orbit and are out on their own. But if we’re looking to love more and more — to reach beyond the circle of people that we naturally mingle with and spend time with, to find fresh people to love — then our love can grow and it will be healthy.
The danger Paul is countering here is that we get complacent — that over the years in the life of a church, we find ways to show love to our little circle of friends, and it becomes sustainable, routine, and quite easy to accomplish, to do certain things for certain people. We know how that works. And the apostle Paul wants to break us out of that and encourage us to think more widely, to have our love as a love that grows more and more, so that we love fresh people and we love people in fresh ways, and we don’t become complacent and start to think of ourselves as having arrived.
So there’s the general principle from Paul: we need a love that grows.
A Love that Grafts
Now for the very specific application: we need a love that grafts — a love that grafts.
So here’s chapter 4, verses 11 and 12. Paul says: “Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life. You should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody.”
Now, it’s possible to try to reconstruct the situation that was happening in the Thessalonian church. It seems that there were some in the church there who wouldn’t work — not couldn’t work. We’re not talking about people who were made redundant and can’t find themselves another job. These were people who were choosing not to, who for whatever reason wouldn’t work.
Now we’re not sure why — we’re not told. We could guess from the rest of the letter what a few possible reasons might be. It seems from later on in chapter 4 and in chapter 5 that there was some confusion in the Thessalonian church about Jesus’s return. Maybe some of the Christians misunderstood what Jesus and the apostle Paul had said, to imply that Jesus was about to return at any moment. Jesus never said that; Paul never said that. But it’s something that people have misunderstood from time to time in the history of the Christian church. And because Jesus is about to return tomorrow — well, why would I bother sending my CV off to apply for that job? By the time they even do the interviews, the world will have ended, and it will all be irrelevant. So that’s just not important.
Maybe the Christians in Thessalonica were so enjoying the fellowship and the loving friendship in the church — the very fact that love was so strong in this church meant that they wanted to do nothing else than hang out with their Christian friends from the church all day — and the idea of actually getting off their backsides and going to do a hard day’s work just didn’t appeal, because the fellowship was just so wonderful. Maybe that was it.
Maybe they were so gripped by Paul’s example of great sacrifice to tell other people the good news of Jesus, and they were so struck by how wonderful Jesus is, that daily work had become a bit mundane and boring and they’d like to spend all their time telling other people about Jesus, like Paul did — although of course that would be to misunderstand Paul. You’ll remember from chapter 2 that Paul worked hard with his own hands so that he would not be dependent on anybody; he made tents whilst also preaching the gospel.
Those are possible reasons why this could have happened, but we don’t really know. We do know the effect. There were two negative effects. First of all, these people who wouldn’t work were being a drain on the church — they were dependent on the financial support of others. And secondly, they were meddling and interfering. Paul has to tell them to lead a quiet life, to mind their own business, and to work with their hands. We have a phrase in the English language that the devil makes work for idle hands, and that seems to be what was happening in Thessalonica. These people who were not working had too much time on their hands, and as a result they were just interfering and meddling in the lives of others rather than getting on with their own lives.
And all of this is tied into Paul’s teaching on love — it’s part of this same paragraph. This is ultimately the problem. This is a very practical example of how to love your church family. This idea of loving your church family is not all about feeling nice about people; it boils down to practical, nitty-gritty things like money and hard work.
Love in Practice
And therefore there are three things from these verses that love means in practice.
Hard Work, Not Idleness
First of all, love means hard work, not idleness. When God made the world at creation, God made us to work. When God put Adam and Eve in the garden, it was to work it and to take care of it. It’s true that sin and the fall have made our work frustrating and painful, but work itself is good. And as I said, some Christians today get so excited by church life — either by evangelism or by fellowship — that normal work somehow feels inferior. In our day, we are very fortunate in this country to have a very good benefit system that takes care of people who can’t find work. It’s not perfect; I’m sure it could be reformed in many ways. But it’s better than many countries, and better than in British history. But then some people prefer to rely on that system of benefits and choose not to look that hard for work to do.
And actually, all of this explains why it is ultimately demoralising to be out of work. God made us to work. When God said that everything he had made was very good, that includes our work, and therefore when we work we are the people that God made us to be. And not to be working is not to be functioning in the way that God made us to be. And so loving life is hard work as opposed to idleness.
Giving, Not Getting
Second, love is all about giving, not getting — that’s to say, the attitude that asks, “What can I contribute?” not “What can I get?” A few years ago I did a topical sermon series on the subject of money — what’s a Christian, biblical view of money. People found it quite helpful, and those talks are on the church website if you want to dig through the sermons section and find them. But in one of those talks I stressed how we need to be giving our money to help those in need, but first and foremost we give to support and help our own church family. And somebody asked what was a really good question. They said: wasn’t there a danger that if you have a particularly wealthy church with lots of wealthy people, that people might be tempted to join it and drift towards it in the hope that they end up with a free car or something like that, because of their membership of that church? It was a really good question.
Well, in this passage comes the answer to that question, because Paul is saying that in a loving church two things will be going on: those who have plenty will be looking to give generously to support their brothers and sisters, but everybody will be looking to work hard so that they are not dependent upon others. Everybody has to have the attitude of “What can I give?” and not “What can I get?” And then that problem that that person asked about simply doesn’t become a problem.
Independence, Not Dependence
So a loving church is all about hard work not idleness, giving not getting, and third: independence, not dependence. And this is exactly what we’ve just been saying — that Paul says, “So that you will not be dependent on anybody.”
So: the world longs for family, for real friendship, for community, for relationships that are authentic. And this is something we can always do more and more — we’ve never arrived. And as we seek to do this more and more, it’s very practical. For example, it’s all about our attitudes to work and to money. And as a church gets this right, it will become extremely attractive to other people.
Conclusion
Some Christians and some churches choose to live by the moral standards of the wider world, so that we can appear attractive to the world. Again, a really good question I was asked — when I did the evening in mid-January talking about my reasons for leaving the Church of England, because I felt that the Church of England was no longer holding to the Bible’s teaching on marriage — someone asked the question and said: “Well, if the church you’re moving to teaches the ethics that you’re saying, surely nobody from the unbelieving world in Scarborough would ever want to join it. Why would they go to a church that teaches such old-fashioned moral standards? It would look outdated, antiquated, and just rather quaint.” And so it’s tempting, isn’t it, to adopt the moral standards that other people adopt, just so that we can be attractive.
Well, let’s contrast a verse from last week’s passage with a verse from this week’s passage. So last week Paul said this: “Each of you should learn to control your own body in a way that is holy and honourable, not in passionate lust like the pagans who do not know God.” We don’t take our cue from people who don’t know God — that’s not the standard by which we live. And then today, chapter 4, verse 12, Paul says that all of this stuff is so that “your daily life may win the respect of outsiders.” This kind of gritty, practical, earthed love will be very attractive to those outside the church who don’t yet know the Lord Jesus.
So paradoxically, as we seek to live not like those outside but by the standards of the Lord Jesus, so we become attractive to those outside.
So let’s love, let’s work, and let’s do this more and more.
And just as we finish — to say: if you’re listening to this this morning as someone who is still on the outside looking in, come and join us in following Jesus. Come and join the family.