1 Thessalonians 5:1-3.8-18 Dedication Sunday
Elizabeth M. Deibert 16
November 2014
1 Thessalonians 5:1-3,8-18
Now concerning the times and the seasons, brothers and
sisters, you do not need to have anything written to you. 2 For you
yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in
the night. 3 When they say, "There is peace and security,"
then sudden destruction will come upon them, as labor pains come upon a
pregnant woman, and there will be no escape!
8 But since we belong to
the day, let us be sober, and put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for
a helmet the hope of salvation. 9 For God has destined us not for
wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, 10
who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep we may live with him. 11
Therefore encourage one another and build up each other, as indeed you are
doing. 12 But we appeal to you, brothers and sisters, to respect
those who labor among you, and have charge of you in the Lord and admonish you;
13 esteem them very highly in love because of their work. Be at
peace among yourselves. 14 And we urge you, beloved, to admonish the
idlers, encourage the faint hearted, help the weak, be patient with all of
them. 15 See that none of you repays evil for evil, but always seek
to do good to one another and to all. 16 Rejoice always, 17
pray without ceasing, 18 give thanks in all circumstances; for this
is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.
Grateful Christians recognize
the brevity of life – each day, week, month, year is a gift not to be wasted or
taken for granted. Go ahead and make
peace with your fellow Christians because you know you will be together for
eternity, and God will tolerate embittered attitudes. In fact, I doubt you will see much of eternal
love until you release your bitterness and forgive all the people against whom
you are holding grudges or those whom you judge. The thief that comes in the night will feel
more like sudden destruction and the labor pains will be more severe if you are
still clinging to these unhealthy, unchristian attitudes. There is no escape because God loves you and
God will have you, but God cannot force you to love, only keep inviting you
until you at last discover it is the only way.
So since we belong to the day,
we wear not the armor of defensiveness but faith and love and hope. Oh, I think we have heard those words
before. Faith, hope, and love, and the
greatest of these is….love. A grateful
Christian recognizes the brevity of this life and is focused on the eternity of
the life to come, a life in which there will be no more tears or pain, no more
bitterness, war, hatred, cruelty or suffering.
Grateful Christians knows that they have not achieved salvation by works
but by the gift of God, through grace.
But grateful Christians never, ever, ever take that gift for
granted. Grateful Christians know that they
must participate in/work out their own salvation not with malaise and
complacency – but with fear and trembling.
Because the grateful Christians
understand that they have nothing on which to stand but the grace of God, so they
are patient with the weakness and failures of their brothers and sisters. They offer encouragement more than judgment. They build each other up, knowing that when
we are enveloped in love and acceptance we become our best selves. Andrew’s University sends the parents one of
those daily quote calendars with the tear-off pages. I have been living with this one quote for
one month, thinking about it, dwelling on it. “Leadership is communicating to
people their worth and potential so clearly that they come to see it in
themselves.” (Stephen Covey) I would say that Christian encouragement is
communicating to people their worth and potential so clearly that they come to
see it in themselves. I would say that
Christian parenting is communicating to your children their worth and potential
so clearly that they come to see it in themselves. Grateful Christians encourage one another and
build up others because they never stop imagining what good God can do in them.
Grateful Christians are respectful
and peaceable. They do admonish those
who are not doing what they should. Yes
they do. For to ignore someone’s
weakness is to demonstrate a lack of love.
The word translated idler could be translated trouble-maker. So we challenge the troublemaker or person
who is not doing their part. We do it directly and in love. And we
encourage, we give courage to those who are depressed or down-hearted. Grateful Christians help the weak rather
than judging them. And most of all, they
are patient…patient…patient. Patience is not just the ability to wait,
but how to behave when you are waiting.
(Joyce Meyer) Think about it.
If I am standing at the door waiting
with a frown on my face, yelling to Richard that we are going to be late, or worse
saying, “You always…..” then I am
clearly not exercising patience but impatience.
And here’s the toughest part of
the passage. Do not repay evil for evil, but seek to do good to one another and to
all. Ummm-huh. This is the hard part. And it is not the only place where the Bible
instructs us not to repay evil for evil.
Jesus says it. Paul says it again
in Romans. It is very clear that we
must find a way to do good to those who have done us harm. Is this not what Christ himself did? Is this not what he really means when he
says “take up your cross and follow me?”
It does not necessarily mean that we literally have to die on a cross,
but that we should be willing to sacrifice our wishes for the sake of loving
others.
It means relinquishing your need
to be in control and your need to be right.
And when you do that, you cannot play the blame game. If I had a dollar for every minute I have
spent in twenty-four years of ministry and twenty-six years of parenting,
trying to help children of God see that blaming another or holding a grudge
against another or assuming the worst from another is an exercise in making
yourself miserable, pulling yourself away from God’s grace and peace, I’d have
a million dollars, and we’d be building the sanctuary right now year with my
personal gift to the church.
Here’s the thing – anger is good
if it propels us to seek solutions to a relationship problem with ourselves or
with others. But too often, we let anger
at ourselves or others or at some situation turn to bitterness because we know
we cannot act out our anger in wrath. So
instead of finding good ways to express it, we bottle up our anger and sip a
little of its bitter poison daily. We feed on bitterness rather than grace,
because bitterness is so easy to drink.
It seems so sweet to the taste, so satisfying in the moment, but it
slowly kills us – like the frog that never jumps out of the slow warming pot. Until we really decide to see and to seek the
best for every person and situation, no matter what, we leave ourselves
vulnerable to the disease of bitterness.
There will always be hurt and misunderstandings. Unless we are so focused on rejoicing always,
praying without ceasing, and giving thanks in all circumstances, we will never
become authentically grateful Christians.
You cannot be a truly grateful and loving, if your gratitude and love is
dependent on things going your way and people understanding you and being kind
to you.
We tend to treat others based on
our perceptions of them. If we see people as evil, we treat them accordingly. (notice this
phenom in all the global conflicts)
If we judge a woman to be greedy, we are unlikely to extend
aid to her. If we interpret a man’s actions as arrogant, we will probably keep him
at arm’s length. But I have the power to control my
perceptions of people. So I choose to affirm and to believe about every one created by
God: You are a beloved child of God no matter what I think of you, I will keep
repeating that to myself. I will keep
seeking to see and to know and to say what is good in you, what is true, what
is just, what is worthy of praise. I
will think on these things, as Paul said in Philippians.
I will actively refuse to dwell on what’s wrong with you or
what’s wrong with the world. I will
dwell on the amazing presence of a loving Christ and rejoice. I will not dwell on how I have been hurt by
a person, but on how I can help that person become the healthiest child of God
they can become. I will give thanks for
my circumstances because I know that if I am willing to grow, God will use all
things for my growth and blessing, turning the bad to good, and to better good
than would have been if the bad had never happened.
So, my friends, I am thankful. There is absolutely nothing that anyone can
say or do that will take my gratitude away, because God is supremely good and
God’s in charge of this world. So with
everything in me I want the mind of Christ.
I don’t want a sickly mind, full of angry or proud thoughts. With everything in me, I want the heart of
Christ -- with everything in me. I
don’t want a sickly heart full of bitterness and shame. I relinquish my right to hold onto that
bitterness and shame and all its poison in my life. I want to be free. I want to be a new creation in Christ. I want the soul of Christ, spacious enough
to hold the hurt of others and still keep loving. I want my life to spill over with love and
joy overflowing. I want to be a truly
grateful Christian, trusting God’s ability to provide everything I need
emotionally, spiritually, physically, mentally, materially,
futuristically. I want to be a truly
grateful Christian, giving back to others with a reckless generosity that refuses
to worry or calculate that I’ll not have enough one day. Because God is our Provider.
We’ve been talking about God
First for five weeks. Well, God first means I surrender my will to
God’s will. I ask God’s help to pry my little fingers of every control, so I
can surrender completely and be free of worry.
I want to be more than I am, through Christ, and the truth
is, I AM more than I am, as I make room for Christ to live in me. And so are you!
(Will you pray with me?)
Please take us, Jesus, every one of us and every part of us and
make us new. We will rejoice, we will
pray without ceasing, and we will give thanks, trusting always in your goodness
and giving as much of ourselves as we can possibly give, because we know that
as we truly give, so we truly live.
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