I Thessalonians

Paul will get me on turn, please to first Thessalonians 5. How many of you are still tracking with the little Bible reading cards? They're yellow right now. Ah, good. Who's going to tell me what was the New Testament chapter for today? You said you were tracking with it? Oh, it's before bedtime that you track then. What was yesterday's first Thessalonians 3 was yesterday. First Thessalonians 4 is today. This is just the New Testament reading. And the reading for tomorrow is first Thessalonians 5. And the show of hands was encouraging, but the eagerness to remember what the New Testament reading was was a little tough, but that's okay. At any rate, not because it's the Bible reading for tomorrow, but this is sort of a sneak preview for you. You need to read it tomorrow still. But this week, as all a lot of different events have gone on and the focus of our attention was on the issues that were at hand relative to the men coming last week and the things that we shared on Sunday and all of the stuff this week. And we know that there are lots of telephone calls and people concerned about others and so on. And now that the Lord has come through and just in marvelous ways, revealed to us the error of what we as a body were being exposed to, has restored beautifully everybody who was, in one way or another, touched by the teaching that was there. And I think that I can feel free to say I wasn't free to say last Sunday, but because we really, although we sensed in our spirits that we needed to say what was said last Sunday, we didn't feel free to use the word cult last Sunday that it's absolutely clear and evident from correspondence we've received in the mail and conversations that have been had, and from the testimony of a young man who had been involved in that very ministry and who was graciously provided by the Lord to come and minister to some this week, clearly we were dealing with a cult, a strong cult influence that God protected us from. And now that that victory is there and Satan has attacked us, and it's been confirmed in so many hearts that what Satan intended for evil, God intended for good. And so much grace is beginning to work out of all these events. What's on my heart tonight is just really to share what Paul says in First Thessalonians chapter 5, Because I believe that there is here for us a gracious ministry of the Holy Spirit to all of our hearts. Kind of in the wake of all that has gone on in the last 10 days or two weeks at Northway. And even as Satan has been frustrated in his frontal attack, I believe that as the one who prowls around like a roaring lion seeking those that he might devour, he will try and find some cracks between the siding. He will try and sneak in a window or wherever. He'll try and catch us unawares. And I believe that even in the wake of the victory, we need to be, as Paul says in Ephesians, circumspect in our walk. We need to be alert and persevere. Read beginning in verse one. But as to the times and seasons, brethren, you have no need to have anything written to you, for you yourselves know well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. When people say there is peace and security, then sudden destruction will come upon them as travail comes upon a woman with child, and there will be no escape. And here Paul sets for us the atmosphere in which we live. The passage that I referred to just a minute ago in Ephesians, Paul says a very similar thing. Let me just read it to you. This is Ephesians 5:15. Look carefully then how you walk. Not as unwise men, but as wise, making the most of the time because the days are evil. And actually, Jay had asked me on Sunday to share just the thought that our concern needs not to be just for this one group of men who happen to be here at the time, but as believers, we need to be alert on every hand and a discerning people, sensitive to error when it might come, and with a heart to see that our days are spent wisely in light of the fact that the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night. And we don't know how long we have as a fellowship. And we can't afford to say to ourselves, everything is peaceful and secure. And we don't need to be vigilant. We need to be a people who are alert to the wiles of the devil, eager for the coming of the Lord, and with hearts that are willing and available to reach out to the world around us. That's the context in which he would minister to our hearts tonight. So when people say there's peace and security in verse three, then sudden destruction will come upon them as travail and comes upon a woman with child, and there will be no escape. But that's not the end of the message. That's only the context. That's the evil world in which we live and the destiny to which it is headed. But you are not in Darkness, brethren, for that day to surprise you like a thief. For you are all sons of light and sons of the day. We are not of the night nor of darkness. You are all sons of light and sons of the day. Now, girls, don't be left out of that. Allow yourselves to be included in that generic mankind. We are sons and daughters of the light. We are sons and daughters of the day. This is what we are now. How did we become that? Nothing that we did made us that we are sons and daughters of the light and of day. Because God in His mercy has come to us and redeemed us and bought us with his own blood and drawn us back to Himself, Said, I am light and I want you to walk with me. I make you a son and a daughter of light, so that you and I can have fellowship together and so that you can have fellowship with one another. This is the message that John brings us in his first Epistle. And it's so tremendously important that we see ourselves basically and fundamentally believers in Jesus as sons of light and sons of the day, so that we are not vulnerable to someone coming along and saying to us, you don't understand, or your security is threatened, or I call that into question. You see that to know that we have been bought with a price, even the blood of Jesus, who makes us sons and daughters of the day. So then let us not sleep, verse six, as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober, for those who sleep sleep at night, and those who get drunk are drunk at night. 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. Sounds a little bit like Ephesians, doesn't it? Paul thinks in these terms because to the first century believers, these would be symbols of protection and defense and strength, as they would be reminded of it every day as they would see the Roman soldiers walking the streets. Okay? For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, so that whether we wake or sleep, we might live with him. One of the attacks that has been made by the men who are with us is that there is punishment and wrath somehow if you don't measure up. And brothers and sisters, we need to just soak in the reality and the truth of what the redemption is like that Jesus brings us. We are sons and daughters of the light and of the day, and he has not destined us for wrath, but he has destined us to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus. Christ and I say hallelujah. That's who we are, and that's what we are. And that's what God has in store for us even now as we walk with him. Therefore, encourage one another and build up one another, just as you are doing. The Word is not therefore criticize one another, therefore tear one another down, therefore examine one another microscopically to try and find a fault in order to somehow be pure and holy. The Word is because we are sons and daughters of the light, because we live in the day. Let's hear that and encourage one another and build one another up even as we're doing. And I thank God for the gift of love that he has given this body and for the capacity to hug one another, for the blessing of being instructed in that, just even as Jay did tonight, that those hugs would not become perfunctory, but that they would remain the expression of our hearts to one another and that we would be able to relax in one another's arms, confident that we share the life of God in Christ Jesus. Amen. Amen. But we beseech you, brethren, to respect those who labor among you and who are over you in the Lord and admonish you and esteem them very highly in love because of their work. Now, I need to speak to this because one of the clear techniques that have been used among us is the insidious focus, the weaknesses of another in order to gain a position of authority, of intimidation and of strength, in order to insert oneself as a leader and as one to be followed. So the teachings of these men who were among us were to focus and amplify on any weakness that they might perceive, whether it be in an individual or in the leadership of the body or against us as a body as a whole. So one of the things that we have to deal with now as believers called to walk together as sons and daughters of light, is we have to allow the Lord to heal those attacks that we have found ourselves vulnerable to. And there have been strong words spoken to individuals about sin in their lives. And in the measure in which those words were true, we need to hear that strong words were spoken against the leadership of this body. And in the measure in which those words were true. We need to hear that. And I can share with you from my heart, and I speak for all the elders that we've heard words, and we want to weigh those words carefully. And there will be a lot of examining and working out of things that have been spoken. And yet at the same time, we need to be cautioned against seeds Being sown of a critical spirit that would come in and say aha, rather than respecting those who labor among you and who are over you in the Lord and who admonish you, and rather than esteeming them very highly in love for their work's sake. And I have to say, and it's difficult for me to say because I'm an elder, I know that, and I'm part of the leadership body, but I want to speak specifically to the three men who are pastors here who have that calling to be full time in this ministry and who give of themselves constantly, many times to their own detriment. And I want to affirm those men. I want to affirm them for their availability. I want to affirm them for their willingness to bear in many ways. You see, the rest of us elders, we're not there in the office day by day, we're not there full time. We have jobs and those things that demand our attention and our energy. And we can't give to the body in the same way as these men do. And I just want to encourage us to support them with love and affirmation and surround them with prayer that they might be men who bear the responsibility that they bear, strengthened by God and invigorated by him and released by us to be men with their families and men who have to relax and men who have to sometimes get away. And I trust you understand what I'm saying, that we need to regard them in their humanity and don't demand of them because they've put themselves at our disposal. Let's not demand of them more than is appropriate, more than is fitting, but let's allow them to be men, okay? And their wives with them. And I also want to affirm many, many other members of the body who aren't elders, who aren't pastors, but who simply have demonstrated this week. And I've seen it, and a lot of you have seen it, and others I know haven't had the opportunity. That's okay. But there has been a freedom and a willingness on the part of brothers and sisters in this body to pour themselves out this week with energy that has been boundless and has been from God. And I affirm that, and I thank you. You know who you are much better than I do. And I just deeply appreciate, and all of us in leadership appreciate the freedom and the willingness to sacrifice and to give and to love and to share. This is the life of God. This is what characterizes his heart. Loving, sharing and giving, and be at peace among yourselves. Let us brothers and sisters, put away from among us a spirit that would focus on the weaknesses of another or on the weaknesses of this body. The Lord knows we have weaknesses in this body. We have not arrived. We've got a long way to go. But let's encourage one another along the way. We're on a journey here. The Christian life is never to be viewed as that which enables us to arrive, but it's always to be viewed as a journey. We're on our way home, and someday, by God's grace, we're going to be there. And what a glory that will be. And along the way we are called to be to each other what we need to make the journey and to make it victoriously and successfully that our little caravan not be ravaged by wolves or by our enemies. And we exhort you, brethren, admonish the idlers, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with them all. Now there is another vulnerability that we have that we're exposed to here in the wake of these events, and that is that those who were impacted by this ministry in one way or another, and there are a whole varying range of degrees, those who seem to feel that there was something here and for a while went for it, are vulnerable to great senses of guilt. Why was I so foolish? How could I have been so blind? And we need to recognize that part of the attack of the enemy, I believe, was to blind some eyes. And that's okay. The Word says that even the elect can be deceived, you see. And those who were deceived can need not bear the guilt of that. And those who were not deceived dare not view those who were as somehow spiritually less than them. You see that? Because the enemy can come in now and cause us to criticize one another or to feel above one another or to feel below another. You see that we are called together to walk in the light. And we saw almost literally scales of deceit falling from eyes. You see that? That's God doing that. And we need to rejoice in that and not hold one another up or down or anything but. But understand that we all are partakers together in this life. We're strugglers together. And we're to encourage and support and to live together with one another, forgiving. And as it says here, if there are idlers, they need to be admonished. If there are those who are faint hearted, they need to be encouraged. If those are weak, they need to be helped. And in all of it, we need to be patient with each other. And give God time to work. Give God time to heal. Give God time to rebuild. Give God time to give understanding to the leadership and to all of us that we might be able to be more than what we've been. That we might be able to be to each other, in fact, what we need. Rejoice always. Let us set our hearts, brothers and sisters, to have an atmosphere in this place of rejoicing. Let us choose to rejoice. God is our strength. I appreciate so much Bob's song tonight. He's our strong tower, and in him we rejoice. We don't rejoice in all the hot stuff that Northway is. We rejoice in the salvation that God has brought us. We rejoice in his victory. We rejoice in his faithfulness. We rejoice in the reality of his life among us. Always rejoice. Pray constantly. Let's continually grow in our capacity to endure in prayer, to be prayers, to be a people who don't have to turn on the radio in the car every time we get in, but maybe use that time to pray, to be housewives who don't have to have the TV on because somehow the house is quiet without it, but who know how to pray while you work. Pray before you work, pray after you work. Let's begin growing in our understanding that victory is had through prayer. And our growth as a body is going to come a lot more from prayer than it's going to come from exhortation or from instruction or anything. It's going to come through prayer. Now, we need exhortation, we need instruction, we need teaching. But even the exhortation and the instruction and teaching needs to be surrounded by prayer, or it'll just roll off. We can be so full. You know, you go to pour water in a pop bottle and you pour it too fast and it just bubbles off the top, won't go in. We need the ability to understand what needs to be said and when it needs to be said. And God can give that to us as we pray. Do not quench the spirit. We can quench the Spirit by insisting on our way of thinking. I want to continue the thought. Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise prophesying. There were words of prophecy, lots of them, in this event, prior to it and surrounding it. And we need to be careful that we don't despise any word that comes from God, regardless of the vessel. And I know that there are people in this body who were ministered to, and I don't understand this, brothers and sisters. I just don't understand it. But there are people who were ministered to by these men whose ministry as a whole would have brought us into bondage. But the fact is that somehow, by God's grace, he can use the word of a man who is deluded. Now, in a sort of a strange way, I'm encouraged by that because his grace can flow through me even when I might not be thinking straight. See that I don't have to have all the answers. I don't have to have all the revelation about the heart of God for Him to use me. And we can speak death to the attitude that so many of us burden under, that I'm just a young Christian, God can't use me, or oh, I made some mistakes in the past and I've done this and I've done that, and God cast me aside and I'm useless and all that, and it's garbage, brothers and sisters, his grace. And if we could get a hold of this, his grace has so much potential, so much power in it. He is so eager and willing to touch us. You see, he could use an ass to speak to Balaam. He can use his people no matter where they are. It's amazing to me that it says back in an earlier verse, verse 10, he already had cautioned us not to be sleepers, but to be awake and alert. And then he says, there's graciousness in this verse 10. He died for us, that whether we wake or sleep, we might live with him. Now you see, this is not license for indulgence. It's not license for sinning or anything like that. It's just the encouragement that he can use us. And we're not to despise prophesying, but what are we to do? Test everything, hold fast what is good and abstain from every form of evil. Now there is implied here the reality that good and evil are going to come to us sometimes intertwined, and that we have got to be a people capable of discerning which is which. Now, it's interesting to me. Do you know what the name of the tree in the garden was? It wasn't an apple tree. Any of you who think of that tree and think that Eve ate an apple, you need to rethink. It wasn't an apple tree. What was wasn't the Tree of Knowledge. It was the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Now, what was Adam essentially doing when he went for that? This. The lie of the serpent to Eve was this. Listen, God knows That when you eat that you will be as God, knowing good from evil. That if you eat that, you're going to know the difference between good and evil. And then what? You won't need God anymore. Do you see the essential nature of that thing? And that what Adam was doing was he was trying to be able to deal with the realities of life apart from God. I don't need God if I have that tree. Because I'll be able to tell the difference between good and evil. I can pick good and I can leave evil alone. And everything's set. It didn't happen that way because when he violated God's command, he became blind. He became characterized by evil. And so unable to discern it. Now there's another fascinating verse. Look at Hebrews, chapter 5, Verse 13. This is the famous, well known passage. You don't need to be. You need to be taught. You should be teachers because you've been Christians long enough, but you need to be taught. And so on. Then he says, verse 13. For everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, for he is a child. But get this. But solid food is for the mature. For those who have their faculties, trained by practice to distinguish what good from evil. Here is the hallmark of maturity that God wants to grow us up into to be men and women who, because we have practiced walking with him, because we have practiced applying the word of God, he has developed in us, by reason of our training, by reason of our practice, he's developed in us the capacity to distinguish good and evil. Test everything, hold fast what is good. Abstain from every form of evil. So I say, brothers and sisters, if through this last two weeks you were ministered, good walk in that good. At the same time, be very alert to any mixture of evil that might have been there and avoid it like the plague. And finally, Paul closes with this marvelous doxology, this blessing. And I, just before God tonight, would receive this blessing for all of us right here at Northway. May the God of peace himself sanctify you wholly. And may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless. Blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who calls you is faithful and he will do it. Amen. Amen. We can trust him in that. What freedom there is to know that we don't have to examine one another with a microscope. He will do it. We're his children. It's his light that we walk in. Let's rejoice together. He will do it. Amen. With the physical capacity to establish a moving ministry. This happens really almost every week or two weeks. Somebody's moving from one point to another. And it would be great to have some of you bears just say, hey, I'll do it, and we'll tie in with you on that. Grant exhorted us, as the word does, to pray constantly and a reminder that we. It was a beautiful thing on Friday morning as we met after the very long night of meeting with the elders and so on, to confront this. This was a week ago, one of the brothers shared as we began to pray, lord, we thank you that we don't have to have an emergency prayer. Meeting. But that we are assembling as we have assembled regularly for the last three and a half years. And we know that your grace is going to keep us through these times. And beloved, it's a wonderful thing that when you face a crisis, you don't have to learn how to communicate with God. It's okay if the Lord uses a crisis to teach you, but it's wonderful to not have to learn it then. So I want to encourage you right now we, you know, get up, you have to get up a little bit earlier than the other brother to get a seat on Friday morning, but things are packed right up to the gills. But do it anyhow. Ladies are continuing to meet and our prayer is that if the Lord will release this office over here, we'll have a lot more space and we can do a lot more on regular prayer meeting times. August 31st, I believe is the last Friday of the month. We're going to have an all night season of prayer and that's in your newsletter if you've gotten that by now. So just be planning on that and we'll tell you more about that as it draws near. Okay? I know I forgot one thing, but it'll come. Hallelujah. Are you encouraged tonight in the Lord? Can I respond in my heart? Grant, when you see the heart of God towards you and you understand the liberty in which he sets you. Does. That make you want to run and do your own thing or does that draw you to God? You see, that's the thing. I just marvel at God. When you recognize that he loves you, it draws you. We need the revelation of that. There's just no better thing than that. Amen. So let's stand and sing. Behold what manner of love.