Studiesin

1Thessalonians Presentation 07

Living asSons of Light

Chapter 5v1-11

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IntroductionFor centuries people have sought to predict the date of Christ’s return. In the last hundred years the Jehovah Witnesses cult has made three different predictions - clearly all unsuccessful!.

A number small non mainstream religions have persuaded their followers to sell up, climb some obscure mountain and await Jesus’ coming. Events such as these expose those involved to open ridicule. The biblical doctrine of the second coming loses the value of its currency as a result and society is desensitised to any expectation it may have of the real thing. For this reason we need to pay careful attention to what the Bible has to say on this issue

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The Day Of The LordPaul uses a significant term to describe the return of Christ. He speaks of the ‘day of the Lord’. The term that originates in the O.T. It is a day associated in prophetic and apocalyptic literature with divine judgment and deliverance, and the ushering in of the kingdom of God.

The N.T. writers continue to make use of it in exactly the same way, as does Jesus in Matt. 24V43-44 where he likens his arrival to that of a thief. Clearly no thief will put a flier through your letterbox saying, “I will be stealing from houses in your street next Friday between 1.00 and 4.00am”.

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Paul tells his readers that there was no need for him to write to them of the times and seasons surrounding Christ’s return and what it will usher in. We live in a different world today, when many, even within the church, reject judgment as distasteful. But no one has the right to empty biblical words of their plain meaning and still claim to hold to a Christian gospel.

Paul did not blaze a costly trail across the ancient world preaching salvation from something that was imaginary. He shared the apostolic burden that, without Christ, men and women would be separated from God for eternity.

We need to recover that note of urgency in our gospel proclamation!

The Day Of The Lord

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The disturbing point Paul makes is that Jesus’ return will take place when people feel safe and secure saying, “peace and safety”.

Belshazzar, king of the great Babylonian empire, thought himself the safest man on earth. He held a great feast to celebrate his rule and he sought to underscore the unassailability of his position by blasphemously deciding to use, as drinking vessels, the holy utensils captured from the temple in Jerusalem. That night a hand appeared and began to write on the palace wall, “You are weighed in the balance and found wanting”. Within hours his kingdom fell as the Persian forces infiltrated and destroyed the city.

The Day Of The Lord

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Now in order to stress the solemn realities of God’s judgment, Paul speaks in terms of contrasts, ‘light and darkness’, ‘day and night’.. This makes many people feel uncomfortable and is thought to be distasteful because, it divides mankind. It forces them to take sides in the eternal battle between good and evil. A minister of an earlier generation writes:

“We do not like to think of anyone as absolutely bad, any more than we find anyone absolutely good - Jesus apart. We do not think of human life as black and white, but as of all shades of intermediate grey, darker or lighter in various degrees of good or bad...”

Light And Darkness

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God sees only black and white, because he sees every man as ultimately belonging to Christ or to the devil. In the end there will be no such thing as a grey life just black or white. This is hard to take in but it is better than the delusion that living in the murky greyness of human life, we serve a common end. We don’t! We must take sides, for even if we try not to, we will find that by refusing to choose Christ, in fact we choose his enemy. This is the significance of the Paul’s words here. And so the task of the Church is to win men from the one allegiance to the other.

Light And Darkness

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The unbeliever is described as ‘asleep’ - oblivious to spiritual reality. Ironically such people will describe Christians as not living in the real world but in a “fantasyland”. The hymn-writer asserts that the opposite is the case - “solid joys and lasting treasure none but Zion’s children know”. To the unbeliever solid, objective, spiritual realities are a dream. He may be wide awake in commerce or a ‘whizz kid’ in the business world, yet remain dull and insensitive to spiritual issues! Speak to him of God, his eternal future and he is embarrassed, ill at ease, out of his depth. These things are ‘too heavy, too difficult, too complicated’. Why is that? He is in a sleep of death, from which nothing but the quickening Spirit of God can awaken him.

The Sleep Of Death

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And when the Spirit does so, what a shattering experience it is to be awakened from sleep and to enter a real world, which hitherto had not appeared on our radar.

The hymn-writer commenting on how his own appreciation of the world in which he lived had significantly altered writes, “Something lives in every hue Christless eyes have never seen”.

Sadly, not all respond positively to the Spirit’s wake up call. They choose to go back to sleep in an attempt to escape what they see as the intolerable glare of spiritual reality.

Someone has said, “It is one thing to wake up, and another to get up”. This return to spiritual sleep is an attempt to avoid spiritual reality. Now who is the realist!

The Sleep Of Death

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The Conflict ProducedIt should therefore come as no surprise to discover that the Christian lives out his life on earth in an environment of conflict – light against darkness! It is for this reason that we find a reference to Christian armour in v8ff [a much fuller treatment given to the subject is found in Eph. 6v10-17].

Scripture constantly reminds us of an on-going conflict that exists between the powers of light and of darkness and it is in this hostile environment that the Christian armour is absolutely vital.

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We are encouraged to put on a breastplate of faith and love. Faith in the salvation that God has provided is our defence against an accusing conscience. Satan attempts to heap condemnation on the Christian. He points to our past sin and says, “Because of that behaviour how can you possibly speak out for God?”

That is when the Christian needs to point away from his performance to the performance of Christ and say, “It is because of my faith in Jesus’achievement that I am acceptable in God’s sight”. Paul writes, ‘there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus’. Rom. 8v1.

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The Conflict Produced

The ‘love’ referred to in v8 is God’s love for us and not ours for him. God’s love for us is unconditional, inexhaustible, unfathomable and everlasting. You see in the midst of conflict we are often tempted to think, “If God really loved me would he let me go through all this. Surely he would shelter me?’

But Jesus did not promise us bubble wrap Christianity. He never said it would be easy. But in the midst of conflict we can be absolutely assured of his great love for us.

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The Conflict Produced

Finally, we are encouraged to put on the helmet of the hope of salvation. How important it is to protect our minds in this conflict. Satan attempts to infiltrate our minds and to cause us to think from a standpoint of worldly unbelief rather than that of faith.

Satan injects insidious ideas into our minds in order to undermine our confidence in God. Just as he did at the beginning with Eve, Cf. Gen. 3 "Did God really say, 'You must not...’”

And today he whispers, “Forgiveness, salvation, eternal life, a new kingdom, the judgement seat of God, you surely can’t belief all that stuff!” We need to guard our minds!

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The Conflict Produced

ConclusionPauls purpose at this point is surely to say, “Be on your guard. Your life is being lived out in an environment of conflict, not a picnic-field but in a battlefield. But you are not left to fight on your own. God has equipped you for battle. The same Spirit, who raised Jesus from the dead, is at work in the lives of the children of light. We live for another kingdom. We anticipate the day of our Lord’s return. And what a day that will be. But until that day we are called upon to live distinctive lives which are not muddied by many shades of grey. We are not the children of twilight but children of light!”

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