The Church 2

What are our responsibilities? (1)

(1 Thessalonians 5.12-28)

Jason Procopio

We’re in our second week in our series on the church. Last week we looked at the goal of the church, and how God plans to bring that goal to fulfillment. His goal is to display his wisdom and power to the entire universe through the church, and he will make that happen by putting in place leaders to train up the saints for the work of ministry, that they may build one another up in love.

Following this, at our Dimanche de la form’, Joe gave us an excellent overview of Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians. We saw that this letter displays the marks of a healthy church, which are:

• Faith which accepts the Word of God.

• Love which cares for others.

• And hope which lives for Christ’s return.

If you missed it, go find last week’s Dimanche de la form’ if you can—it was both an excellent response to the sermon last week, and an excellent introduction to this week’s sermon, because he went through 1 Thessalonians up to chapter 5, verse 11, and our text today begins at 1 Thessalonians, chapter 5, verse 12. What we’ll see today is basically an extended application of what we saw last week in the Dimanche de la form’.

So if we want to start wide and focus in: God seeks to display his infinite wisdom and power to all of Creation. He does this through the church. Jesus Christ suffered the penalty for our rebellion against God, gave us his perfect sinless life, and reconciles us to God, who declared us righteous on the basis of Christ’s work for us. In this reconciliation, God made us into a people—his people, his body, manifested in local churches all over the world. And in these local churches, we Christians help one another grow in maturity, grow into the image of Christ, by serving one another in love. This is how God’s wisdom is displayed in us: by taking the sinners we used to be, and transforming us into a body of believers who look more and more like Jesus Christ.

The big question we left off with last week is, what does this look like in really practical terms?

And that’s what we see in this final passage of Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians.

Just a bit of context before we get into it. The church in Thessalonica was a young church that was enduring persecution for their faith, and because Paul, Timothy and Silas—the missionaries who started the church—had to leave very quickly after getting it started, the Thessalonians were lacking certain important truths about Christ’s return, and the hope they could have in that day. So Paul writes them to encourage them to work out their faith in acceptance of God’s Word, in their care for one another, and in their hopeful expectancy of Christ’s return.

So after telling them all of this (everything we saw in Dimanche de la form’ last week), he gives them very practical instructions on how to do it: how to encourage one another and build one another up, as we see in v. 11.

Paul’s going to talk about three basic areas in which we work to build one another up. He’s going to talk about what should characterize our relationships to our elders, what should characterize our relationships to one another, and what should characterize the church as a whole.

Our Relationships to Our Elders (v. 12-13)

So first: our relationship to our elders. I always feel awkward preaching on this topic, because I am an elder, so in my ears it all sounds horribly self-serving. So here’s how I’m looking at it, and it’s important to keep this in mind.

I’m the one you see most often up here because I’m the one who’s on staff full-time for the church. But I am not the only elder. We have four elders at Connexion—myself, Arnaud Weulassagou, Paul Arsac and Joe Tandy—and all of us have absolutely the same authority as elders. I’m not the boss of the elders, just because I’m here full-time. They are my elders. And Joe, Paul and I are Arnaud’s elders. (And so on.)

So everything I’m about to say, I’m saying to myself as well, regarding my relationship to the other three elders here.

V. 12:

12 We ask you, brothers, to respect those who labor among you and are over you in the Lord and admonish you, 13 and to esteem them very highly in love because of their work. Be at peace among yourselves.

The word “elder” isn’t used explicitly here, but the Greek is pretty unambiguous; “those who are over" a local church, whenever they are given a title in the New Testament, are the elders of that local church. And Paul is very clear about how we are to go about our relationships with them.

Firstly, he says, we are called to “respect” them.

When we think of respect, our minds jump quickly to the question of obedience (which we do see in Hebrews 13), and that’s definitely an implication of what Paul’s saying here, but it’s not the main thing.

He’s talking about the way we consider them: the word “respect” in this context means to recognize and accept their position as elders in the church.

Paul draws attention to what elders do, to show what response that should produce in us. He says that elders “labor among you”, they are “over you in the Lord” (i.e. directing the church), and that they “admonish you.” The question is, why should the direction and admonishment of elders be worthy of this respectful consideration?

In part, it’s because they didn’t take these roles on themselves—the church has appointed them to these roles. Every elder—even back in the apostle Paul’s time—has gone through a process which confirms that respect is deserved. Every elder in Thessalonica has either been set up by Paul, Timothy and Silas when they came, or (more likely) by the church itself. The same is true for all of us—we did not appoint ourselves elders; the church voted for us to be elders.

Even me. I was the lead planter of Connexion—the only leader when we started—which always seemed a little unfair to me, because the people who came at the beginning didn’t get a say in having me as their pastor. So on the day that the church voted for Paul and Arnaud to be elders, they also voted me in.

Paul gives clear qualifications for elders in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1, and these qualifications almost universally have to do with character, not with skill. An elder in a church may not be the most talented individual—but if your church has recognized the biblical characteristics for eldership in this man, he’s someone who is worthy of respect, and whose counsel you should esteem.

Anyone in the church can give me advice, and I promise, I’ll always take your advice and consider it carefully—I’d be dumb not to, because you often see things I don’t, and you think of things I hadn’t thought of. But if I made a list of those people whose counsel I will take the most seriously, these three men would be at the top of that list, second only to my wife. Why? Because these are the men God has given to me to be my elders (like he gave me this woman to be my help).

That’s what it means to respect your elders—when they direct you and admonish you, you welcome that direction, you welcome that admonishment, and you take it seriously. When your elders work for you, you acknowledge their work, and you esteem them and love them for it.

You will never know what these guys go through in order to love you well. The amount of time, and effort, and energy and love that they devote to you is staggering—although many of you never see their efforts. That fact alone makes them deserving of your respect and your esteem and your love (as I respect and esteem and love them).

And still under this heading, I think, is the next thing Paul says at the end of v. 13: Be at peace among yourselves. I think he says this here, right after speaking about respecting our elders, because conflict in a church often springs up when church members don’t respect and esteem their elders. Nearly every church split in history has happened in just this way.

Let me give you one quick example of how this respect fosters peace in the church. A few years ago there was a young man who had been coming to the church for a while. He loved us, loved the church, but he was a confirmed and convinced pedobaptist. (That is, he believes the church should baptize babies.) That was an issue, because we’re not pedobaptists—we believe the Bible calls us to baptize upon profession of faith, which babies can’t do.

He came to me, and we had dozens of really helpful conversations over a long period of time. In the end, although he showed me great respect and esteem, it was too big a disagreement for him to get past, because it would impact the way he lived the life of the church in his family (this was before he was married). So he found another church in Paris which aligned more with his view on the subject, and went and joined that church.

I miss him, but I was honored by the way he went about this, because what he didn’t do was publicize his disagreement, or slander us behind our backs, or try to contradict our convictions to the rest of the church, to bring them over to his point of view. And he always took what I said very seriously—it took him almost two years to come to the decision to leave, because he respected me as his elder to that extent.

So despite this disagreement, he made sure that there was peace in the church. He took care of the church. It was extraordinary to watch. And it’s not the only time that’s happened.

If respect and esteem characterizes our attitude towards our elders, that attitude will filter into every aspect of the life of the church: it will help ensure that we remain at peace among ourselves.

Our Relationships With One Another (v. 14-15)

Next Paul turns to the relationships Christians should have with one another—with other members of the same local church.

V. 14:

14 And we urge you, brothers, admonish the idle, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with them all. 15 See that no one repays anyone evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to everyone.

There’s a lot here, so we’ll take it point by point. The first three in the list all have one thing in common: in order to obey them, we must be aware of what our brothers and sisters are like, and what they’re going through. We have to know them well. Like we often say, we can’t do this with everyone, but we can do it with a handful of people. (This is why we have community groups.)

And every one of these points has a corresponding implication we shouldn’t ignore.

First off, Paul urges us to admonish the idle.

When he says “the idle,” he means those who are undisciplined : who aren’t pulling their weight regarding their own responsibilities toward God and toward the church (as he’ll say in his second letter to the Thessalonians, 2 Thess. 3.6-15).

If I could point to one of the biggest problems most Christians face today, and definitely one of the biggest problems the members of this church face, it would almost definitely be this one.

Here’s why this is so hard. Someone meets Christ and they hear the gospel and they accept the gospel and it fires them up. They’re passionate about Christ. And that’s a wonderful thing.

But it’s very easy to mistake passion for holiness, to mistake passion for Christlikeness.

That’s a problem, because if you pay attention to the commands given to us in the Bible, most of them have to do with really mundane things. They’re about where we allow our eyes to go. How we spend our time. How we speak to each other (down to the tone of our voice). What we put into our minds—the things we read or the things we watch or the things we listen to.

These aren’t exciting subjects. They are things most people take for granted.

And because they’re not exciting, many Christians don’t pay them much attention. They keep on practicing the same habits they always have, digging themselves deeper and deeper into the same ruts, and they don’t even see it, because they feel passionate about their faith.

But then twenty years go by, and that passion fades a bit, and they start seeing areas of their life where sin has gotten a solid foothold, and they wonder why they haven’t grown more in holiness.

Discipline and order in our lives are like life jackets on a raft. No one plans to fall out of the boat. No one plans to see their passion for Christ fade. But when it does—and sooner or later, it happens to everyone, because we’re imperfect human beings living in a fallen world—you will need that discipline, you’ll need that order, to keep your head above the water.

And the church needs your discipline too, because if you can’t keep your head above water, you’ll never be able to help someone else who’s sinking.

So when we see someone who is lacking discipline, we need to help them grow in it, and admonish them to set up the structures they need to stay faithful over the long haul.

(This commandment of course implies that the person being admonished should accept the admonishment, and respond with humility.)

Next, Paul says, encourage the fainthearted.

The “fainthearted” are those who are emotionally, spiritually or physically exhausted. There could be a million reasons why this can happen to a person, and the reason does not matter. They might even be fainthearted because they’ve been undisciplined—so we admonish them for their lack of discipline, and then we encourage them in their exhaustion.

A lot of people are afraid to do this, because they’re afraid of messing it up, but encouragement is the easiest thing in the world, if we’re growing in Christlikeness and our knowledge of the Word. Because it simply consists in reminding the fainthearted of what is true. “I know you’re exhausted. But we’re here to help carry you, and God has not let you go. He promised to help you, and he will.”

This can happen in five minutes—just a conversation, and a prayer—or it can happen repeatedly, over days or weeks or months.

This commandment to encourage the fainthearted implies that the fainthearted accepts to be vulnerable enough that others see they are fainthearted.

After that, Paul calls us to help the weak.

The “weak” are those who maybe aren’t as far along in their faith as you are, people who may be burdened or bothered by things they shouldn’t (like Paul says in 1 Corinthians 8 and 9, when he talks about young Christians who felt guilty about eating certain kinds of meat, because of preconceived ideas they may have). It could be younger Christians who are fearful of things they shouldn’t be.

This is another conversation I feel like I have every other day: talking with young people who are profoundly troubled by things that really don’t matter at all.

Age, experience and most especially maturity in the faith tend to give you perspective, and your brothers and sisters need that perspective.

So Paul’s saying, if you’re a little further along in your faith, help your brothers and sisters see what’s truly important—keep their eyes fixed on the goal.

This command of course implies that the weak accept to be helped—that they do not arrogantly assume they understand everything, or that older folks couldn’t possibly understand what they’re going through. (Not easy to do, I know, but there it is.)

Next: be patient with everyone.

This might be the most difficult, because of course it implies that some people will test our patience.

This is going to be harder for some of you than others, and I’m sorry about that. But allow me to be the bearer of bad news: if you belong to a local church, you will have many conversations, dozens of times…with the same people. And it will be the same conversation, every time. Changing—going from undisciplined to disciplined, from fainthearted to energized, from weak to strong—is not a matter of days or weeks, but years.

And we are called to be patient with the process.

Don’t make the mistake of believing that in order to be patient, you have to understand what the other person’s going through. Patience does not require understanding.

Some people are patient with those who have struggles they understand, but get fed up very quickly if someone else’s struggles seem mysterious or silly.

But again, sorry to be the bearer of bad news (or rather, bad news that’s actually good news): the fact that patience is a command, and not a suggestion, means that you have everything you need to do it.

You have everything you need to be patient. Today. Because if you’re in Christ, then you know that we are all sinners, and our sin has impacts on our minds and our bodies in an infinite variety of ways. It creates habits that are hard to break, fears in us that aren’t logical, doubts that have no basis in reality. It clouds our vision in confounding ways.

Sin is our common struggle. And if we belong to the body of Christ, we all know it. So be patient with your brothers and sisters who are still growing into maturity—even if you don’t understand why it’s hard for them to grow in one particular area or another.

Lastly (in this category at least): Do not repay evil for evil, but always seek to do good.

This will often show up in our hearts more than in our actions. Someone hurts us, and we want to hurt them.

Make no mistake: they deserve it. If they committed evil against you, they deserve to be punished. But if their faith is genuine, that punishment was placed on Christ. And if their faith isn’t genuine, God will exercise judgment on them. In either case, punishing them (either in action or just in our imagination) is not our job.

Our job is to treat others as Christ treated us. To take the hit, and trust God to judge sin.

That doesn’t mean letting sin slide; it means addressing it, and even administering its consequences, in the right way, and for the right reason: because our prayer is that God would use us to help them feel conviction of their sin, and bring them to repentance.

But in our hearts, our desire must be to not replay evil for evil, but to seek to do good.

The “Aroma” of the Church (v. 16-22)

I’m going to go through these last ones quickly, because we’re running out of time. These commands are not for interpersonal relationships, between the church and the elders or between Christians in the church; these commands simply concern what our church should be like.

This past Monday Loanne organized a surprise dinner for my birthday, in a restaurant that serves Texan barbecue (which, if you know what that is, has nothing to do with the sauce and everything to do with the way they smoke the meat). As soon as we walked in the door, the smell of that smoked meat was everywhere. It was wonderful : the smell was still on my clothes and on my skin when I got home, and I didn’t want to wash up. (Don’t worry: I finally caved in and washed up.)

These verses are kind of like that. They describe what the “aroma” of a faithful church should be—what characterizes the church as a whole.

V. 16:

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. 19 Do not quench the Spirit. 20 Do not despise prophecies, 21 but test everything; hold fast what is good. 22 Abstain from every form of evil.

So first: rejoice always.

I’ll be the first to admit that this is incredibly hard to do—but like it or not, it’s not a suggestion, but a command.

Why? Because in every circumstance, we have reasons to rejoice. I don’t want to minimize anyone’s suffering, but the reality of our situation is very simple: every day we’re alive, we’re not in hell (although we deserve it)—so it’s a good day. This is a call to keep our eyes firmly fixed on what is always true—not our circumstances, not our feelings, but the hope that we have in Christ. We always have reasons to rejoice.

Next: pray without ceasing.

Is Paul speaking literally here? Sometimes you have to work, you have to speak to people. So how can we pray without ceasing?

We’ve all been with people who will sit in the room with us, and who will stare at the ground or at the wall as if we weren’t there: not acknowledging our presence, not saying a word.

If this happens, it’s because something’s gone wrong. When everything’s going well, information flows freely. Communication is open. You may not speak to everyone every second, but those lines are always open.

Isn’t it strange, then, that our interaction with God is so stop-and-start?

He is literally always with us, living in us…and yet we only speak to him in the twenty or thirty minutes when we have our “quiet time”—and even then, prayer doesn’t always factor into the equation.

And when we’re together, we often forget God is there too. We forget to pray with him together. This is another reason we’re always encouraging you to go to prayer meetings: prayer isn’t something you learn to do from studying or reading a book. You learn it by observing it—by being around it—by listening to people pray, and by participating in that prayer.

Paul’s telling us to remember that God is there, and to keep communication open, whether you’re alone with him or not. Talk to him. Ask him questions. And—

Give thanks in all circumstances.

This is the same thing as before: in every circumstance, we have reasons to be thankful. Our circumstances change nothing regarding the finished work of Christ for us, or the hope that we have in him. We always have reasons to be thankful.

Next: Do not quench the Spirit.

To put it simple: obey what the Spirit says to your conscience! Don’t shrug him off or pretend like you didn’t hear him—do what he says.

A quick note, just in case: the Spirit will never put on your conscience something that is contrary to what the Bible commands. If you feel like your conscience is telling you to go against something the Bible clearly commands, that’s not the Spirit talking.

The next one is connected: Do not despise prophecies, but test everything—hold fast to what is good.

We don’t have time to explore the ins and outs of the theology of prophecy, so let me put this another way...

If someone tries to tell you something they feel that God has “put on their heart” (as they say), be humble, and always entertain the possibility that God really is trying to use the brother or sister in front of you to tell you something you need to know. If it seems useful, don’t jump on it right away—but put it in your pocket, and bring it to the Lord: pray about it, weigh it against the Bible.

Often, what some would call “prophecy” happens in the context of ordinary conversations, in which someone says something they’ve barely thought about, but which God uses in a profoundly helpful way for the person in front of them. So take it seriously; bring it before God, and ask him to teach you.

And at long last: Abstain from every form of evil.

It’s very simple: do what you know God calls you to do. Obey his Word. And if you’re not sure whether a particular action is a good idea or not, be on the safe side and wait. If something even feels fishy, steer clear. Better to be weak (and be helped by someone stronger) than to go against your conscience.

Our Responsibilities and God’s (v. 23-24)

Now this is the point in the sermon when we usually turn to application. This text is almost nothing but application, so I love how Paul closes it out.

He’s just given this long list of things to do and not to do amongst believers in the church—how we are to be responsible for one another and accountable to one another, whether we’re elders or deacons or members.

The problem is that very often, our efforts to do these things and live this way won’t seem like they’re having the desired effect. We’ll do our best to obey…and there won’t be any change in the other person. Or worse: it will seem to backfire, and cause us more problems (in the short term) than solutions.

We mustn’t worry about this, because God doesn’t call us to get results. He calls us to be faithful, and he will take care of the results.

V. 23:

23 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. 24 He who calls you is faithful; he will surely do it.

And he will. He will sanctify us, he will preserve us, he will keep us. He is faithful.

This is how God makes the church grow. This is how he displays his infinite wisdom to Creation. He takes groups of very imperfect people, and he causes them to accept his Word, to love and care for one another as Christ loved and cared for us, and to stay firmly anchored in the hope they have in him. When a church lives like this, that church, and all of its members, become individually and collectively like Christ.

It’s a miracle to behold, and the incredible thing is, this miracle takes place through the obedience of God’s people. When Paul tells us to esteem our leaders, to admonish the idle, to encourage the fainthearted, to be patient with one another, to always be praying and always be thankful and always be rejoicing, he is telling us how to watch a miracle play out in a group of people we love.

It’s my prayer for Connexion that we’ll all see it.