FOUNDATIONS FOR PEACE

July 9th—11th 2011
2 THESSALONIANS 2:16–3:5
Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
Pastor Tim Smith

16 May our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who loved us and by his grace gave us eternal encouragement and good hope, 17 encourage your hearts and strengthen you in every good deed and word. 1 Finally, brothers, pray for us that the message of the Lord may spread rapidly and be honored, just as it was with you. 2 And pray that we may be delivered from wicked and evil men, for not everyone has faith. 3 But the Lord is faithful, and he will strengthen and protect you from the evil one. 4 We have confidence in the Lord that you are doing and will continue to do the things we command. 5 May the Lord direct your hearts into God’s love and Christ’s perseverance. (NIV – 1984)

Pray for the spread of the Gospel

In my own heart
Throughout the whole world

Reread 3:1: Finally, brothers, pray for us that the message of the Lord may spread rapidly and be honored, just as it was with you.

Pray for the spread of the Gospel. That’s what Paul asked of his friends the Thessalonians. Please bow yours heads and pray with me now:

Lord God Almighty, Creator of the Heavens and the Earth and who formed each one of us in the wombs of our mothers, who brought the Gospel of Jesus Christ to each one of us and made us your own, we ask you to bring your gospel everywhere it needs to go into the whole world. Bring it into our own hearts, and bring it to the whole world, through any and every means possible. Make it do your wonderful work wherever you send it; make every one of us strangers in the world so that we will all be natives of our heavenly home. Amen.

Why do Christians pray? If God knows everything in our hearts and if he knows our every need and if he provides for us as the Bible says he does, and if he does whatever pleases him, as the Psalm says, then why do we pray? Why do we need to?

When it comes down to it, there must be one of two reasons: Prayer must either fulfill something that God needs from us, or that we need from God. It’s a pretty easy answer, once we ask the right questions. God does not need our prayers, but he invites us to pray. He even coaxes us to pray. And we even have the example—many examples—of Jesus our Lord praying, at the beginning, middle and end of his ministry on earth. From the day when he emerged from the Jordan dripping with the water of his baptism to the night he knelt dripping with his own bloody sweat in Gethsemane, Jesus prayed. He prayed for the will of his Father to be done. He prayed for the success of his mission, and for the spread of the gospel throughout the whole world.

To help us understand why we pray, let’s imagine a world in which we couldn’t pray. What if prayer were forbidden? What if God had closed off all communication with mankind from the moment Christ ascended? What if he had said: “I’ll be coming back, but until I return, leave my Father in heaven alone; he’s got lots to do and he can’t be disturbed.”

We would begin to wonder whether he were even there. Our faith would be in a constant state of crisis. If we were unable to communicate with God, we would stop listening to God communicating with us through his holy word and through his sacraments.

In fact, our sins do just that. The prophet Jeremiah warns again and again that when people reject God—when people close themselves off from God’s word, then God himself says: “Although they fast, I will not listen to their cry; though they offer burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them.” God doesn’t want us to go through the motions, he wants us to follow him and trust him, heart and soul, body and mind, intellect and spirit. Because through Jesus, we have access to God, we have permission to pray and a commission to pray. Jesus’ blood, shed for our sins, has opened the channel of communication, and he invites us to pray.

So why on earth would anyone ever stop praying? When the danger is the very health of my immortal, eternal soul, why would I ever run the risk of hurting my faith by closing off my channel of communication with my God?

What a blessing it is to be invited to pray!

And so we pray. We pray for the success of the Gospel in our hearts. Paul tells his friends: God our Father loved us and by his grace gave us eternal encouragement. The “eternal encouragement” is the gospel itself. We see it at work changing hearts and turning people back from sinful lives to knowing their Savior. Think of the woman at the well in Samaria. She was a woman who was caught in a tangle of sexual sins and she didn’t know how to get out of it. She had gone from man to man, not knowing what else to do, and when Jesus found her she was living with a guy who wasn’t her husband—she already had the guilt. She only needed to hear the gospel, and when Jesus told her who he was, and what he had come into the world to do, her heart melted in the bright light of God’s grace and forgiveness.

That’s what God has done for each one of us. Maybe you’re a child right now, struggling with hidden sins of selfishness or maybe you’ve fallen into a habit of stealing. Maybe you try to survive with your friends by putting them down just a little bit, or by picking on someone because it makes you feel better. That’s called bullying, and it’s done with words and looks, and not really by fists or kicks.

Maybe you’re an adult with a bad habit; something that you do because you’re bored or because you don’t know anything else that makes you feel better, or because there’s somebody you’re trying to either impress or else you’re trying to show them up. Please—it’s a waste of time. Turn your guilt to the mirror of God’s law and see that it’s a sin, and grab onto the hand of Jesus held out to you in forgiveness and peace. Don’t turn away from your Savior. He loves you, and he wants you in his kingdom, in his family; in his heaven.

Remember the day that you were baptized? Most of us don’t because we were too small to remember. That’s one reason why we like to baptize babies during Church, if possible, so that the rest of us can see it happening again, can see the miracle taking place in that little one there at the font, and know that once, however many years ago, that was us. That was me. And my faith today is the proof.

So we pray for the spread of the Gospel, so that the whole world will be turned away from their sins, and come to faith, and be saved. We pray for the success of the Gospel because we know that the success of the gospel in the world is what God himself wants.

He will take care of how his word works, and where. God’s love is clear in Christ; God’s perseverance reminds us that the road ahead is no easy cobblestone path, it’s a long, often antagonistic and sometimes even hostile road that’s not always clear, and rarely what we think it’s going to be. But God is faithful, and we remain in his word for strength as he prepares us for lives of service.

Do know the difference between the prophets Jonah and Nahum? Nahum lived about a hundred years after Jonah, but both men were called on by God to preach to the city of Nineveh, the capital of Israel’s great enemy the Assyrian Empire. One difference you can probably guess at is that Jonah tried to say “no” to this call from God, got into a storm, got thrown overboard, and was saved from drowning by being swallowed by a huge fish or whale. Nahum, on the other hand, said “yes” to God the first time. But that’s not the difference I’m thinking of. It’s the difference in their messages. Through Jonah, God was giving the people of Nineveh a chance to repent; a chance at God’s grace. There was a chance for the gospel to do it’s strange and wonderful work. And it did. It made a difference. People repented, and people were saved. But when Nahum preached to Nineveh, there was no longer a chance to repent; no longer a moment for God’s grace. There was no gospel for Nineveh anymore.

But both prophets carried out God’s will.

We don’t always know what God’s will is when we proclaim his word. Will the Law work and stop sin? Will the Gospel work and turn hearts back to the Lord? Will the word harden hearts like Pharaoh spitting at Moses or the people of Nineveh caught going back to their old sinful habits? That’s for God to decide, and for the Holy Spirit to carry out in the world.

As for us, we pray. We pray for the spread of the gospel, in our own hearts, and throughout the whole world. And what a privilege it is to be invited to pray, by Jesus Christ himself. Amen.

DECEMBER 13th-15th, 2008
1 THESSALONIANS 5:16—24
3rd Sunday in Advent
Pastor Tim Smth

1 THESSALONIANS 5:16—24
16 Be joyful always; 17 pray continually; 18 give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus. 19 Do not put out the Spirit’s fire; 20 do not treat prophecies with contempt. 21 Test everything. Hold on to the good. 22 Avoid every kind of evil.

In the last two years my family has been blessed with the companionship of three cats. Giacomo, Maximelian and Spartacus—that is Jack, Max and Sport. They are brothers, from two consecutive litters. We got the older ones, Jack and Max, first. They were timid, they were small, and they liked to hide in my son Peter’s sock drawer.

Then last winter we lost one. Some workmen came to our house last January, and while my wife was away at Bible Class the workmen came and went and kept leaving our door open, and Max got away. Many of you children saw the poster our son made up at school. My wife and I searched with flashlights and cans of tuna fish in the darkness whenever we could in some of the bitterest cold nights of last winter, but we couldn’t find him. Hour after hour night after night we called and called, up and down streets and alleys, through back yards of unoccupied houses. We even set live traps but all we caught were other cats and a lot of disappointment. We even took out his twin brother on a leash, but Jack slipped out of his leash and it was miraculous that we caught him again and brought him home.

Then Max turned up, more than a mile across town, at the barn where he was born. He had gone home to his mother. No amount of coaxing, chasing, begging calling bribing or sitting perfectly still worked. With almost 40 cats on the premises, a trap was not the solution, and invitations didn’t work. He’s still there.

We got another kitty a month or two ago. Sport was spending a little time in our bathroom whole undergoing medication, and he actually pulled up the floor vent and got into our hot air duct that leads back to the furnace. He spent a whole day running under the floorboards and we had no idea how to get him back, but finally my wife and I unscrewed some small access plates in the ductwork and put out some food and some flashing Christmas lights and a 2×4 so he could climb down, and he did—or else he fell. But we’ve got him back again.

With some patience and some love—and duct tape on that floor vent—we’re gradually winning our way into Sport’s heart.

For those of you who may not be cat lovers, just appreciate that the six of us in my family are. We want these cats to love us and let us take care of them. And that’s what God wants to do for you.

When we wander away from God, because someone who should have known better left a door wide open for us to scoot out into the wide world, God has gone looking for us, calling in the alleys and streets and the bitter cold, calling us by name. He has sacrificed his time, his love, and the blood and life of his own Son calling us back to him.

Our own sins separate us from God. Do you have one bothering you today? A sin that makes you squirm; a sin that makes you ashamed, a sin that makes you worry and maybe even lose sleep?

As if that weren’t enough, the sin that we’re just born with is barrier enough for each one of us to deserve an eternity in hell. But God calls us with a message that’s like a banquet to a starving man.

There are times when God puts out all kinds of blinking lights and food and has made openings in our paths so that we will come back to him, and he draws us to him with his Word, his promise of forgiveness.

I’m going to ask you to picture our newest kitty, Sport, just one more time. He’s the one who got into the pipes and whose back again. How would you hope he would behave? Do you have a mental picture of a loving, purring, affectionate year-old kitty who is gentle and playful with our children and a good companion to my wife and me?

He’s not quite there yet. And you know what? Neither are we. Neither are you or I toward our God. When we think about our loving, forgiving God who has done so much for us; do we remember to think about how our God wants us to behave? Paul gives us a list of things that are excellent things to do. In case we didn’t know it, these are things God looks for in Christians, in those he has called back to him like kittens out of the hot air vent that leads one-way into the furnace.

God wants us to know we are forgiven—and we are. And God wants us to show our faith and our thankfulness. And listen to the kinds of things Paul lists: 16 Be joyful always; 17 pray continually; 18 give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus. 19 Do not put out the Spirit’s fire; 20 do not treat prophecies with contempt. 21 Test everything. Hold on to the good. 22 Avoid every kind of evil.

I want to just talk about one off these before we go on the to the hard part of the text. First, Paul says “Pray continually.” The Greek word Paul uses (???????????) means to do something with leaving any gaps. It’s what a housepainter does with spackling. He smoothes over all the cracks and all the little holes—my knees still remember all the hours I spent as a apprentice puttying nails holes in closets and along baseboards. When you have a moment with nothing to do, why not fill up at least a little part of it with prayer?

I say that because it needs to become a habit with us. To pray when we get a moment. So that when the moment comes and we really need to pray, we won’t wonder what to say when the storm comes along. Prayer should be like a familiar piece of clothing. Like your favorite coat. You can pick it out even in the dark without seeing which one it is—you know. And when the dark days come into our lives, prayer should be something we slip into without a moment’s thought.

Now—for the tricky part.
Following a blessing, Paul says “May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless…” This passage has made people wonder, do people have both a soul and a spirit?

There are at least six possible explanations for this “hard” saying of Paul’s (as Peter would call it).

(1) Is Paul is a “trichotomist”? That is, does Paul believe that a person has a body, a soul and a spirit, and that somehow spirit and soul are different things? This doesn’t seem likely. Everywhere else in his writings, Paul is a “dichotomist,” or a person who speaks of humans as having body and soul (or, body and spirit). See, for example, Romans 8:10, where he says “If Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness.”

(2) Are Paul’s readers in Thessalonica “trichotomists,” and is Paul “speaking their language”? This doesn’t seem likely. Paul never otherwise adapts his doctrine, in fact he fiercely opposes anything contrary to God’s word, just as we should.

(3) Is Paul saying “spirit and soul” the way we would say “heart and soul”? But this isn’t very likely, either. The phrase “spirit and soul” isn’t an expression that anybody ever uses in Greek.

(4) Does Paul mean the Holy Spirit, to which he adds “and your soul and body.” But this explanation raises too many other questions—and we certainly don’t cooperate with the Holy Spirit in any way in our salvation.

(5) Is Paul looking at the non-body part of humans from two perspectives, God’s and man’s? The spirit is the part of us that desires to worship God and which receives unseen blessings from God. From our perspective, this same unseen part of us is our soul, the seat of affections, desires, and so forth. Paul simply adds “and body” to this. This is awkward, but better than the previous four ideas.

(6) Is “Spirit” a way of talking about the complete person, and “body and soul” the Biblical and traditional view of how we are made up? This seems most likely, it doesn’t contradict anything in the Bible, it’s the simplest way to take the passage. And that makes this the best way to understand Paul’s words: May your whole ‘spirit,’ that is your whole self, which is both body and soul, be kept blameless at the coming or Advent of our Lord Jesus.

The basics of our faith are here for us. Grace. Faith. A reminder that we will go to heaven both body and soul—all of us. And we grow in our faith every day by being faithful, being fruitful, and remembering that we are forgiven. After all, the one who calls you is faithful—and he will do all these things. Jesus is our Savior.

These are the basics of our faith, and more.