According to the Scriptures

Damian Kyle: So we ask ourselves this morning in the privacy of our own hearts, as not a guilt gotcha: Do I love Christians with a brotherly love as Jesus not only commands us but as he promises to others that we will and that they will experience in coming into contact with us?

And is that love growing or is it diminishing? And not as a feeling, not as a feeling. And sometimes we can in this culture feel like I am a loving person solely on the basis of a feeling.

Guest (Male): As Christians, we are watching and waiting for the Lord's return. And while we wait, the world is to see that we're living a quiet life, minding our own business, growing in brotherly love.

Today on According to the Scriptures, we pick up where we left off in Damian Kyle's series While We Wait: Living in Anticipation of Jesus' Return. It's a study in First and Second Thessalonians. We join Pastor Damian today in First Thessalonians chapter four and verses nine through twelve.

Damian Kyle: Now I do want to make a couple of observations concerning this before we move forward with it. I think first of all we want to recognize because our culture and because our society has increasingly sunk so far below the historical norm for our country in terms of how it defines family in its estimation of the importance of family, and I would say that our society indeed does everything that it can virtually to undermine the vitality of everything that's needed to produce a healthy family.

And it works, it seems to work nonstop to nurture rebellion in children against parents. It works nonstop then in telling those same parents that their personal dreams and their aspirations are way more important than giving their child a childhood and a healthy family to grow up in. And the family unit is so badly broken in terms of how it's defined and practiced in our country that we can't make it the model for what we understand Paul to be calling us to be here as the household of God toward one another.

So we have to go back to the Bible to understand what are the characteristics that God desires for a family as is revealed in his word. Without doing so, and without looking and saying we cannot take the model of family that's been redefined away from God, the priority that it is and say okay God is telling us now to take that model of the culture and make it the model of the church in terms of brotherly love toward one another. Otherwise we will end up with a church that bears the same in the body of Christ that bears the same flaws where you will have a church in which Christians have no commitment to it, the body of Christ as a whole, no willingness to make a sacrifice for it, no denying myself for it until the church just becomes one more sacrifice to the materialism and the pleasure seeking and the selfishness and the individualism of our culture.

And so I'm not talking about this church in particular, I'm just talking, I'm just talking. In the health of a local church, a personal desire to be a part of fulfilling Jesus' promise to other Christians that they will find not only salvation but a family in Christianity always must be a priority for us as Christians no matter where we attend church. And it will cost us the most valuable thing that we possess in life and that is our time. A healthy family takes time because people require time and relationships require time. And that's another truth that the culture disesteems, the idea that as long as the quality of time can overcome any neglect in terms of quantity of time and take that then to an extreme until there's no time being given at all.

So we ask ourselves this morning in the privacy of our own hearts, as not a guilt gotcha: Do I love Christians with a brotherly love as Jesus not only commands us but as he promises to others on our behalf that they will find not only salvation but a family in Christianity? And is that love growing or is it diminishing? And not as a feeling, not as a feeling. And sometimes we can in this culture feel like I am a loving person solely on the basis of a feeling.

So I can sit at home and I can conjure up thoughts of this church and the people that attend this church and then I get this warm feeling of love for you and that's wonderful but that could just be old age. You want to be warned, as you get older you can find yourself crying watching advertisements on the TV or some of the goofiest movies that have ever been made. That's nothing, an emotion we say well okay I feel that, I feel that toward the body of Christ. And it's more than just that emotion, something that is not based in a practical expression at all. That love that he talks about here needs to express itself practically.

And so I wonder, and now I'll go from preaching to meddling: How can I be an able-bodied self-sufficient Christian living close enough to a local church to attend it and I forsake the assembling together of the saints? How can I show brotherly love if I'm never in contact with them and I decide that my entire church experience is going to be online and it's going to be from that vantage point? Or how can I express brotherly love, how can I fulfill the promise that Jesus has made to other Christians on my behalf by the moment a church service is over, I am in my car and driving out of the parking lot in seven seconds?

So I know there can be a lot of reasons for that happening. I'm just talking about the fact that brotherly love requires time and it requires contact and we need to search our lives related to it. Now I don't want anybody judging anyone that is in their car and pulling out of that driveway in seven seconds today. You have all kinds of people are heading to work immediately, they know which service they're going to, they've got other commitments that have to happen and there's a lot of dynamics that are in play. I don't say that to make it a test of spirituality in our lives. But if that's habitual and then that wouldn't be a good sign. There has to be connection and it requires time.

And so to look at that. There are all kinds of meetings all through the week where brotherly love is even easier to express toward one another because they're smaller groups than the Sunday morning. But it doesn't mean we neglect it in the Sunday mornings because there are a lot of people that are only here on the Sunday mornings. So I'm just talking, just saying. It's an amazing thing what Jesus has promised on our behalf and the responsibility that we have to that and to be reminded that we have that responsibility.

And so I also as I look at this love growing and diminishing in the contact with the body of Christ, I am very well aware that some Christians are a handful and if we were being honest we could even say they're quite unpleasant to be around. And I'm very fond of the old saying in this regard in likening a church to Noah's ark where somebody said it was only the flood on the outside that it made it possible to endure the stench on the inside. And there's some truth to that.

But Jesus loves his children, he loves each of us despite all of our spots and all of our wrinkles, he remains committed to us for all of our very unattractive flaws that we have, each and every one of us. And so we cannot love in this way in our own nature, we're too selfish and conditional to do that. So God will supply the love to us but we just have to ask him for it. Say God, this is a, if this would represent you, Lord, this is a at least undeveloped area of my Christian life and it may be non-existent and I don't have that love for the rest of the body of Christ or the church I attend. Would you produce that in me? And he will absolutely answer that prayer.

You, I think that next to having God and a relationship with him in this world, the next greatest thing that exists on this planet is the body of Christ. When it's functioning right and when it's the way that God wants it to be, I pinch myself over the privilege of being a part of the body of Christ and the blessing that it is. Now concerning brotherly love, we also need to be careful not to allow the carnality of a very few Christians proportionately to cause us to view all Christians as being the same. And people do this all of the time.

And so there's this blowing things out of proportion is so common it has a clinical definition, it's called catastrophizing. And so you know you have a bad experience with one Christian or five Christians and then now I don't want anything to do with them and any Christians at all. They're all alike, you know, that whole kind of thing that some could be familiar with and we forget that there are probably hundreds of millions of Christians in the world and thousands and thousands and thousands of Christians in the city of Modesto. And yet we'll paint the entire group on the basis, just the way the world does, on the basis of just a very small few proportionately.

It's been my experience, it may not be your experience at all, that those who create a challenge in me to love they're a very, very small number compared to the number of very easy to love and a blessing to know and to love. In obeying this commandment and to be fruitful in any way related to Christian ministry and to have any longevity in obeying this commandment, we always have to keep our eyes on the ones that are doing well, where the good fruit is and not just on the problems. Otherwise we'll start to catastrophize the local church that we attend or the body of Christ as a whole.

I also find that very often in my own life concerning and you may share it my love for Christians that very often what I considered at the time to be the greatest obstacle to loving that person with brotherly love was some failure on their part. If only they would wake up to this then I would love them the way that I'm called to love them. And then I think that's the solution then to me being able to love them with brotherly love. And then by the time God gets done, he gets done with us the revelation of what the problem is related to loving with a brotherly love is not that something would change in them but it is to have God expose how small my love is, how conditional it is, and then to make me realize that's where the problem lies. You need to grow in love toward my people and he's always so wonderful to produce that in our lives.

It's not a fun thing to look back on situations where I thought the greatest obstacle was some unloveliness on their part when actually it was an embarrassing lack of love on my part. But that's the process of sanctification. So you live and learn and you learn and we move on. Now having said that, I do have to mention that each of us as Christians in all of this, we have a responsibility within this household of God, which is what a name for the body of Christ in the Bible, we have a responsibility within this household of God not to be needlessly difficult to be loved by other Christians.

And by failing to grow as a Christian, by failing to grow in Christian character, grow in Christlikeness and spiritual maturity but instead for a person to remain carnal and selfish and bitter and judgmental and critical of everyone else, unforgiving and angry, perpetually cranky and so forth, you can fill the list in. It's one thing to be these things by nature and to bring them into our Christian life when we were born again. It's an entirely different thing to still be that way years later. And I've found that people will find it relatively easy to maintain a relationship with any of us if we are consistently growing spiritually and gradually out of those things. But if we cease to grow spiritually, we make it very difficult for people to love us in the way that God calls them to love us.

Christians do not have a right to expect perfection of other Christians but we do have a right to expect growth in that direction in the life of another Christian. And so our responsibility in this regard is not to be any more unlovable than necessary. Now in verse eleven and much more briefly on these final couple points, he tells us that we're to aspire to lead a quiet life and to mind our own business. How about that? That's known as clarity. Get a lot of clarity in the Bible but we need clarity.

So he says we're to aspire to lead a quiet life, so a life that is marked by peace and quiet. And by virtue of our lives being marked by peace and quiet, we are an influence for peace and quiet in all of the situations and relationships we find ourselves in in life. So as opposed to being driven by selfish ambition or fame or jumping into the latest controversy or fight, whether inside the body of Christ or outside of the body of Christ or trying to stir things up and stir the pot and unrest among people and producing unnecessary drama all the time surrounding our life.

Now the Bible is full of exhortations to lead a quiet life and to mind our own business and to work with our own hands. It's always sound instruction. We find it repeatedly in the Bible and in other places. And yet here in verses eleven and twelve, I think he includes them for particular application given the dominant theme of Jesus' return at the rapture of the church in this letter and that we should give these things some application and thought and weight to apply it accordingly in that direction.

It does appear that some of these young Christians, and they were very young Christians there in the church of Thessalonica, they were taking their excitement and expectation about Jesus' return into unhealthy territory to where they began in their expectation of Jesus' return to begin to neglect some of their secular, some of their spiritual responsibilities. And so yes, Jesus did tell us that we're to be watching and waiting for his return but he also told us that we're to occupy until he comes. And the word occupy means to take care of business, live your lives as life requires us to live them.

And so the command to live a quiet life communicates that while the anticipation of Jesus' return is to fill us with great and sincere comfort and excitement, it's never intended to produce arguments and contentions with others concerning it. And so yes, we're waiting for Jesus' return as promised but the world is to see that we're living a quiet life as we do. And then he tells us to mind our own business. And again I think it appears that the expectation of Jesus' return might have turned some small number of Christians there in the church of Thessalonica into busybodies, putting their nose into other people's business and business that is none of their business.

So I put my nose into what isn't my business and then it's going to be to the neglect of my business and then I won't have any business. And it gets especially a problem when I get into God's business, for instance by trying to figure out the day of Jesus' return, which is a fact that only he knows and in his wisdom he clearly does not want us to know presently or even to guess at. And it's wonderful to be excited about Jesus' return but there are always some who go too far and then they bring the doctrine of Jesus' promise to return they bring all of it into disrepute before the world.

So there's this emotional condition that affects some pilgrims, some visitors to Israel and to Jerusalem and it's common enough that it's been given a name and it's called the Jerusalem Syndrome. You ask any guide at all in Israel and they're very familiar with the Jerusalem Syndrome where an individual comes to Israel and is so excited emotionally about it, they begin to have a temporary psychosis, they lose contact with reality, they start to act very, very erratically. Sometimes they begin to think that they're an actual figure in the Bible, Moses or John the Baptist or even Jesus. It all resolves itself when they're placed on a plane and they then depart for everybody's good, their own too. They're placed on a plane and they depart from Israel.

Obviously in that kind of a person you have an instability or a vulnerability in such a person to begin with. Now we want everybody on any trip to Israel that we lead to immerse themselves in the culture, to immerse themselves in the biblical history, to do so spiritually, to do so emotionally but never to go that far. And I think likewise it isn't unusual for a new or an immature Christian who possesses a natural instability or vulnerability in this regard to become so consumed with the rapture of the church that they then throw off all of their secular, all of their spiritual responsibilities including neglecting their own business, sticking their nose into everybody else's business and trying to make living in expectation of Jesus' return the same way they are as a badge of spirituality for everyone else.

If you were really serious about Jesus' return, you would be doing what I'm doing. And so that pressure gets put then on in that crazed emotional state where they take things into into that place. And so Paul tells us mind your own business, lead a quiet life and mind your own business, live with expectation and certainly don't get into God's business about the timing of it.

Guest (Male): Good counsel there to heed as we're living in anticipation of the soon return of Christ. This is According to the Scriptures, Pastor Damian Kyle is in the middle of our series called While We Wait, a study in First and Second Thessalonians.

For resource requests like today's message on CD, call us won't you? 209-545-5530. That's 209-545-5530. Pastor Damian Kyle's studies can also be heard online on our website accordingtothescriptures.com as well as oneplace.com or wherever you get your podcasts. We also have a church app where you can listen to Damian. Search for Calvary Chapel Modesto in the App Store or Google Play.

If you'd like to be a partner with us through a financial gift, you can do that as well through our website accordingtothescriptures.com. And thank you very much. Let me also give you our mailing address. That would be According to the Scriptures, 4300 American Avenue, Modesto, California. The zip code is 95356. Well, next time on According to the Scriptures, we'll hear about the rapture and see why it's a source of comfort to the Christian. This program is brought to you by Calvary Chapel Modesto.