When Have We Loved One Another Enough?

Let's turn our attention out of the Word of God, stand if you would for the reading of Scripture. We are, of course, studying through the Apostle Paul's letter to the church at Thessalonica, we're in chapter 4 and verse 9. Now concerning brotherly love, you have no need for anyone to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love one another. For that, indeed, is what you are doing to all the brothers throughout Macedonia. But we urge you brothers to do this more and more and to aspire to live quietly and to mind your own affairs and to work with your hands as we instructed you so that you might live properly before outsiders and be dependent on no one. The Word of the Lord, you may be seated. The title of the message this morning is when have we loved one another enough? I'll ask the question, you answer it for yourself. When have we loved each other one another enough? Paul moves now to the subject of brotherly love and his practical application is going to be something about work and idleness and industry and dependency and so forth. Just like last week, we saw the main subject was holiness in pleasing God and the practical application that Paul gave was that of marriage and morality within marriage now he comes to talk about brotherly love and the practical application that he'll speak of is work and industry and self-support. It's interesting to note that both of these practical applications are what we call creation ordinances. That is that each of these things are dealt with before you ever get out of the first few chapters of Genesis. God ordained marriage, male and female created he, them and God set up an eternal order of how that should be carried out with men and women throughout the generations and of course that's what we saw last week. Paul was speaking about a biblical morality, a morality that had been given by God in the creation order and this subject today also is a creation ordinance. God gave man and mankind the orders to have dominion and to rule over his creation. Adam's job, Adam and Eve's job in the garden was to dress it and to keep it that meant they were to work it and to teal it and to make it prosper and to see what kind of productivity they could bring forth and then protect and guard that productivity, to dress it and to keep it, to teal it and to guard it. In other words there was to be an industry working and then there's also to be a stewardship taking care of and even after the fall which is recorded in Genesis 3. Even after the fall there's a continuation of the creation ordinance for work. Work was not abated, God did not withdraw the command, it's just this time work is going to involve some toil, some sweat of the face and so Paul's going to deal with that as a practical application but the general subject like pleasing God and holiness was the general topic last time we looked at this passage. Now it is brotherly love. In fact the term that's used here, he says now concerning brotherly love, it's that famous word Philadelphia. Philadelphia, does that make you feel at home Tom? Philadelphia, it's not used in the Bible before this instance but yet it's a very common term in the ancient world. It is a term that had to do primarily specifically with the love of a family between a brother and a sister. We had already seen the supreme violation of Philadelphia before we ever leave the first chapters of Genesis with Cain and Abel and all through the years God has always put into the created order a love for brother and sister for families and God expected this to continue. Even in the fallen world, even in the world of sinfulness and personality shortcomings and disorders and defects we see a brotherly love and Paul will urge later when he writes the Romans that this would be increased more and more and that's what he's saying here. He wants the brotherly love between a family member to be to be expanded and to be enlarged and to be enriched. So he uses once again the term more and more. There's an abounding, there's a growth, there's a progress, so much so in fact that the early church was considered almost at the very beginning as a family. The church members saw themselves as brother and sister, fathers and mothers, children and parents even though they came from diverse backgrounds and many different families, they saw themselves as one family. And it's interesting here that Paul says to them, you really don't need me to tell you this because you already know this. Not only do you know it, you're practicing it. He's already mentioned it in an earlier portion of scripture if you remember that they were well known for their love and he mentions here throughout all of Macedonia which would be the cities of Philippine, Berea and others. You are known for your love. The church has always been known for its love. In fact where there's very little brotherly love, there's very little church. In fact we know and we won't get sidetracked, I'll try not get sidetracked on this but we know that Paul pushes us even beyond a Philadelphia to an agape love, a love that is serving that is sacrificial, that is a measure of affection and behavior toward one another that far exceeds brotherly love and goes to a new realm and he speaks of it in other epistles of the agape love of the Christian fellowship because this is a reflective of a love of God, a love that God has for us, a sacrificing, giving, saving, enriching, helping love, a love that fills and fulfills the needs that we have in our hearts to not only love but to be love. This is the nature of the Christian body, that it is a fellowship of love. Now Paul says in this particular passage here he says you really don't need us to write to you, you don't need apostolic instruction on this Paul says because you're doing it and you've been taught by God, it's another interesting word. Now Philadelphia was used for the first time in this word here means God, it's literally it's one word, a compound word, God taught. You've been taught by God and this is of course given some people a little bit of a pretext to go off and say oh we don't need deep Bible study, we don't need a lot of things because we have this teaching that God directly teaches us, we can have an intuition and that's what this God taught material is it's something God just places within our deep within our heart and our soul and we don't need objective instruction, we don't need anything there Paul didn't need to write because it's just in our innards it just sort of comes up and we all kind of know it. Now there's a certain truth to that Paul had just spoken in the previous passage as he concluded about the work of the Holy Spirit in their life to teach and as we mentioned last time in one of the passages in Ezekiel but let me point out a couple of the major prophets, the prophet Isaiah prophesied all your children shall be taught by the Lord. That was one of the promises that God made to Israel that your children would be taught by the Lord and in Jeremiah one of the features of the covenant, this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days declares the Lord, I will put my law within them, I will write it on their hearts, I will be their God and they shall be my people and no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother saying no the Lord for they shall all know me from the least of them to the greatest declares the Lord. So there is an element in Scripture that God places as part of the new covenant within us his word, his laws and that we have them buried deep within our souls and we don't need just head knowledge and instruction but do not believe that this word God taught rules out God's work of mediation. Sometimes we think we're God talk we think it means immediate that is without anything in between, without any mediation, without any means whatsoever and I don't think that's what this means and I don't think that's what the Bible teaches, the Bible teaches that God always uses means, the means of Moses giving the law, the means of the prophets expounding the law, the Proverbs applying the law, the Psalms praising God and living in terms of the law of God, the teaching of God and then the greatest mediator of all was Jesus Christ himself, the one mediator between God and man who himself was the very word of God, the very expression of God and he teaches us all things that we need to know and then moving beyond Christ to keep the residual of the important things that Christ said in the great oral tradition were the work of the apostles, the man who were eyewitnesses and ear witnesses to what Christ said preserving within the pages of Holy Scripture the things that Christ said, we're God taught for sure, that's how we're God taught, we're God taught through his word and through the prophets and through the apostles and through Christ himself and that's what Paul is telling us, we've got this, sure we do, go back to the Old Testament law, look at the passages that have to do with loving your neighbor as yourself, part of the essential bedrock of the keeping of the law is the loving of the neighbor and then come to Jesus what Jesus taught, he said a new commandment I give to you that you love one another and look what the apostle John says he says we know that we have passed from death to life, we know that we've been regenerated that we've been brought from the death of our sins to the life of the Spirit in Christ, alive before Him, why? How do we know that? Because you love the brothers, you love the brothers, brotherly love is one of the evidences of our regeneration, our salvation, you have no love for the brotherhood, there's no love for the brothers and the sisters, there's no Philadelphia, no brotherly love, there may not be any real life, spiritual life in you, this is bedrock, in fact the early writer Tertullian says that look at the faith, look at the church, look at see how they love one another, it was not an indicative statement, it was a statement of explanation, see the abundance of the love of one another and so with this love Paul admonishes them and tells them to increase more and more, we urge you brothers to do this more and more and he doesn't even put a period, this is one long sentence and he immediately goes into an interesting application of brotherly love and it has to do with work and industry, let me briefly just sort of outline what he says in three ways, he says aspire to live quietly, to mind your own affairs and to work with your hands, now there's a background here that we don't have time to go into this morning but let me just mention it to you and that is that one of the problems in the ancient world was when someone really got into philosophy, when they really got into things like that they would sort of leave their mundane labors and toils and become a teacher, someone that seemed to have a higher degree of knowledge or a higher level of spirituality and they would become teachers and they would have a disdain for mundane everyday toil and labor and work, especially manual labor and this of course could have been one of the little creeping factors that moved into this church in Thessalonica because your memories already told him that they have done a marvelous job of preaching the gospel all over Macedonia, so it could be that there were some people here that had sort of given up their call, their jobs to accept the call to preach and have started traveling around preaching and there had come a class and a category of Christians who were basically living off of the largest and the generosity of their brothers and sisters and of course this kind of idleness and this kind of sloth is condemned by the apostle all the way through and he deals with it here in the very next little letter that he'll write to them in chapter three, let me read the few verses there in chapter three of 2 Thessalonians, now we command you brothers in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ that you keep away from any brother who is walking in idleness and not in accord with the tradition that you receive from us, for you yourselves know how you ought to imitate us because we were not idle when we were with you, nor did we eat anyone's bread without paying for it, but with toil and labor we worked night and day that we might not be a burden to any of you, it was not because we do not have that right but to give you in ourselves an example to imitate, for even when we were with you we would give you this command if anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat, for we hear that some among you walk in idleness not busy at work but busy bodies, now such persons we command and encourage in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and to earn their own living, that's really a little more developed of what Paul is telling him here in this first letter, he says for them to aspire to live quietly, it's interesting this is kind of an oxymoron in the language because he says be ambitious to not be ambitious is literally what he says, it should be your ambition not to be ambitious, what a tremendous exhortation that is for the believer to not be ambitious which leads us so often to to use others and to abuse others and to step on others and to move others aside because we have our goals in our ambitions of where we want to be and what we want to do and our achievements at the forefront but he discourages that attitude, he says don't have that attitude of ambition but instead take care of your own business be quiet, quiet be reticent to push over, this is an application of brotherly love to live quietly not braggadociously not ostentatiously but quietly reserve modest and he says live quietly mind your own affairs notice how many times he had mentioned earlier about busy bodiness taking care of it so easy when you're not taking care when you're when you're not busy taking care of your own business you tend to mind somebody else's business and that's what he's saying to what it's an expression of brotherly love not to mind your brother's business in fact that's one of the admonitions in the qualifications for the decon, there's several decons here this morning the decon qualifications is outlined in the pastoral epistles you should be better be careful not to be a busy body because you're kind of in people's affairs you're kind of helping people you're working with people you know some things about people you get a little closer to people and it's easy then to become busy body to become gossipy and to become a little too involved of in other sort of making their decisions for them this is what he's speaking against it says mind your own affairs and thirdly to work with your hands Paul uses himself as an example that he labored with his hands we all know that Paul was a brilliant theologian we know that he was an ardent evangelist we know that he was fervent in everything he did but we also know that he was a tent maker by trade we're not sure what that is maybe worked with canvas and awnings leather there's been all kinds of theories as to what a tent and awning and kind of work it was in the ancient world but it was necessarily needed because of the it was one of the base industries one of the base products of the commerce of the ancient world and Thessalonica and Corinth from which Paul writing this letter were towns of industry and business they were boom towns in this generation and Paul employed himself self employed in working in the tent making trade and in the craft and probably worked with others and he said he did this in order to do what to support himself and to not be a burden to the church and that's the example he said he said we should not be a burden to others living off the generosity the large s the philanthropy of others and he he says for two reasons so that you may live properly before outsiders and be dependent on no man Paul was concerned about at all times those outside the church and those inside the church for those outside the church we need to have a good example we need to be people of integrity of industry busy productive providing goods and services for the whole society doing quality work having an excellent reputation serving a clientele or a customer base with the highest order of ethics and quality it brings a good reputation on the church slothfulness indolence laziness all of these things have infected the human race from the very beginning and the new testament church falling back upon the old testament work ethic forbids this Christians are called to industry and to work into productivity there's absolutely no place for us to be dependent and he moves that to the inside those that are insiders that we be dependent on no one the church is such a generous community the church is such a in some cases a prosperous community and a blessed community that it is easy to find places all around the church where there's generosity and someone that does not have this point of integrity will find themselves deep becoming dependent and living off the largest of the church and I think that's one of the things that has started in the church and infected at least affected but infected the whole of our society well the whole culture that feels that it is okay to live off the largest of others to live on the dough not think anything about it at all think that they are a part of the system there's money in other people's pockets and those people have an obligation to contribute in such a way that I'm able to receive it I can be supported by others this is not the position of the Christian church it never has been but has built the church and built the societies where the church has dominated in a society has been what's known as the Protestant or the biblical work ethic and one of the little lines and Paul's letter said if a person doesn't work person should need it's pretty stark but it's pretty clear here's what it the way Paul wraps it up when he writes to the Romans he said oh no man anything do not be dependent be self-supporting mind your business take care if they support yourself in order that you might have to give to others but he said oh no man anything but what you've got an obligation you got a debt there's something you do oh man to love one another brotherly love how will we know when we we're loving enough well I don't think we'll ever love enough but we're on the way when we find that we love our brother enough to support ourselves and be able to help him and he loves us enough and he will support himself and not take advantage of us and help us if we need oh that's a good place to be isn't it that's a solid productive wise prudent place to be and that is to love each other enough that we can take care of ourselves and we do and we can take care of each other and we do