Turning To Serve and To Wait
1 Thessalonians 1.9-10
As you know, I was away this past week for a study leave. Because of that
and because we were unable to find someone to preach for me, we’re going to
take a break from James and look at a passage of Scripture that I’ve been
thinking about for the last while. What aroused my interest in this text is
that Paul summarizes the whole of the Christian’s life in one sentence.
There are obvious limitations to summary statements. Much of the detail is
left out, and that can be a problem if you aren’t careful. But there are
certain strengths to summary statements. For one thing, you get the
essentials. Here are some of the things that are really important. It’s good
to consider these summary statements that the Bible contains. It gives you
the opportunity to get your bearings again. It gives you the opportunity to
understand the details in a simplified context. Hopefully, the Spirit will
use our text in these ways for your good.
Let’s start with this. Do you see how Paul labels the whole of pagan life?
Idolatry. Their whole life is explained in terms of the First Commandment:
You shall have no other gods before me. Pagans ignore that and set up idols
to worship. Sadly, we aren’t struck with the enormity of this sin as much as
we should be. Imagine yourself in the arms of someone in the most intimate
of embraces. Then imagine that this other person is not your spouse! Then
picture yourself returning to your home. There you are greeted by the person
who is your spouse and, by and by, you find yourself in the most intimate of
embraces with this person. Here we have an emotional reaction. But what is
idolatry? God describes it using the same imagery as I just have. And He
calls it adultery. As God’s creatures, we are to have the closest of
relationships with our Creator. And yet, we embrace some other god. We are
to find life in relationship with the living and true God. He is to be our
chief joy. He is to be that warm blanket that comforts so. He is to be our
first audience from whom we are to seek applause. Whenever someone looks for
these things somewhere other than the Creator, that person is an idolater.
That person has committed adultery of the most grievous sort. Paul
summarizes the life of someone who is not a Christian in these terms. What a
picture! The Thessalonians to whom Paul wrote this letter were such people,
vile idolaters, embracing gods that they should not. But… they turned from
such idolatry. They turned from these idols to the living and true God. They
became Christians.
All of this describes you. Some of you can remember a point at which the
Gospel came alive to you and you finally understood your sinfulness and you
finally understood that a Savior had come to rescue sinners like you. At
that time you became a Christian. But what were you before? I was converted
when I was sixteen. Before that I was one of the good kids. I stayed out of
trouble. I was active at my church. I gave the appearance to all, including
myself, that I was doing just fine. But Paul tells me that I was an
idolater. I embraced different gods of the heart. I was a vile adulterer,
seeking in these empty gods what can only be found in the living and true
God. And so were you. And that’s true even if you have no recollection of
any moment of conversion because it happened when you were oh so young. But
the seeds of idolatry were in your heart just as they were in mine. What
made the difference is that, by the grace of God, we turned from such idols
to the real God, the God in whom we will find all those things that we
sought elsewhere. Paul has described us.
But please notice that this turning is not the end. This is important. This
turning is not the goal. It is the means to the goal. We all turned in order
to do something. We turned in order to live as Christians, to live as those
who have put away idols and now, instead, embrace the true God. And how does
Paul describe this? How does he explain the purpose of our turning? He
summarizes the whole of Christian living just as he summarized the whole of
pagan living. He uses two phrases to do that: to serve and to wait. We have
turned ‘to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from
heaven’. Here is Paul’s summary statement of what it means to live as a
Christian. Let’s look more closely at these phrases.
First, we have ‘to serve’. The first thing that I want you to notice is that
this covers all of your life. Unbelievers slice up life like a pizza. ‘This
slice is my career. This slice is fun and games. This slice is the things I
really don’t like doing, but I have to. And this slice is my religion.’ Now,
the religious slice might be small, or it might be large. But whatever it’s
size, it’s a separate slice. The Spirit tells you, though, that this way of
thinking about life is just a lot of baloney. All of life is included in
this phrase ‘to serve the living and true God’. There is no religious slice.
So, if something that you do doesn’t seem to fit under this phrase of
serving God, then either you shouldn’t be doing it or you need to do it
differently. All of life is serving God. That is the purpose of your life.
There is no other purpose. That leads, then, to the second thing I want you
to notice. Serving God is hard. It’s hard, and it’s painful. Jesus said so.
‘Narrow is the gate and hard is the way that leads to life.’ [Matthew 7] And
the reason is clear. Serving God, according to Jesus, means self-denial and
cross-bearing. And these things just don’t come naturally to us. So, what do
we find? We discover ourselves embracing idols and then come to our senses.
We are overwhelmed with deep sorrow at what we have done and with Paul we
cry out, ‘The good that I want to do I don’t do and the evil that I don’t
want to do, that’s what I do. Wretched man that I am! Who will save me from
the body of this death?’ And we yearn for change. But it’s not as if you can
learn how to change by reading some book. Rather, we walk along and bark our
shins, stub our toes and sometimes stumble so badly that we break an arm. We
learn by the different experiences that the Spirit leads us into as we
interpret those by the Word. And these lessons hurt. Which saint in the
Bible learned how to serve God without any pain? Even of Jesus it says, ‘He
learned obedience by the things which He suffered.’ But bit by bit we learn
what it means to serve God with the whole life. And we thank God for the
lessons that He has taught us. We come to see that learning how to serve Him
is worth the pain. But there are those who want to avoid the pain. To serve
the living and true God isn’t that important. So there is no dealing with
sin. There is no learning. There is no serving. But then a question needs to
be asked. Has there been a turning from idols? Has there been a turning to
the living and true God? True turning has a distinct purpose. True turning
is for the purpose of serving. Can there have been a true turning if there
is no true serving? Can there be true serving with no pain?
This leads to the other phrase that Paul uses, the other purpose for
turning: to wait for His Son from heaven. This equally defines all of life.
We live all of life in the context of waiting for our Lord. This isn’t some
secondary doctrine that you bring out when you want to argue about
something. It defines the life of a Christian. It defines your life. That
only makes sense if you take that first phrase, to serve, seriously.
Scripture describes the Christian life using different images. One of these
images is wrestling. We wrestle with sin and Satan and all that goes with
them. Have you ever watched high school or college wrestling? It’s intense
and drains away energy very quickly. Wrestling is hard. Your life is a
wrestling match. And sometimes it is very intense and wearying. Scripture
also uses the imagery of war. I have never served in the military. I have
never been in combat. I cannot imagine what it must feel like to be on the
battlefield. When the bullets fly, you want to hide somewhere. And yet, what
does a good soldier do? Instead of running away he moves forward further
into harm’s way. At times a soldier finds himself locked in hand to hand
combat. And he knows only one will live. That’s your life! It’s war and your
enemy is not about to give up. It is warfare to the death. Sure, there are
times when you are pulled back from the front lines for some rest. But you
will be sent back at some point. You will find yourself back where the
fighting goes on.
So, what do we tell ourselves in the midst of all of this? What do we tell
ourselves as we wrestle and fight? ‘One day Jesus will come back. And when
He does all of this will be over. No more wrestling. No more standing
faithful while others are shooting at you. No more lessons to learn. No more
pain.’ We wait for Jesus’ return because that is our hope, our hope of
victory. That’s when we arrive at the end. And so we press on. We continue
to strive to serve and to wait. And when we return to the battlefield after
a little ‘R&R’, we utter the same prayer. ‘Even so, come Lord Jesus.’
