Take your bobbles if you would and turn to 1 Thessalonians, chapter 2. We've been studying this great epistle from the Apostle Paul to his new brothers and sisters whom he has just evangelized in the city of Thessalonica. And you will remember that he has parted from them because he got kicked out of the city just as he didn't fill a pie. And he now is writing back to them hoping that they still exist, that there is still a church there, and that these people have persevered in their profession of their faith. And he doesn't really know for sure until Timothy comes back with a report telling him that these people are not only surviving, but they are abounding in the Lord Jesus Christ, and therefore the Apostles heart abounds with joy. Now as he gives thanks to the Lord in chapters 1 and 2 for what he sees among these Thessalonians, we have the opportunity to discover the contours of a genuinely converted life. What does it look like? Because in the Apostle's thanksgiving he fights some of the reasons for which he is thankful, and those reasons become the very ways in which we can look into his heart and his mind, and see what a truly converted person really looks like. Now in the text before us, the Apostle has been presenting himself and reminding them of his coming to them as a mother, as a father, he tenderly cares for them, and here he presents himself as the herald. But what he rejoices in is the way in which they responded to the message he was preaching. And it is precisely in their response to the message that he is assured they got it. They've got the real thing that got Christ himself. So as we look at his thanksgiving, we want to ask ourselves this morning, has this happened to me? And am I growing in these ways? And so we'll be able to see that as we read the text this morning and study it for a few moments. Let us begin our study with prayer that God would indeed make his word dwell richly in our hearts. Let us pray. Gracious God, we thank you that you do not leave us nor forsake us, but rather, when the storms are blowing and when the wind is high and when the mountains seem unsurpassable our God is with us. You go with us into the valleys and you go with us into the mountains and tops and you are with us when the seas are a storm. We ask now, O Lord, that you will abide with us as always and strengthen our hearts and minds that we may truly believe what we read and believe it so much that we would live it out with gratitude in our hearts for Jesus Christ. Thank you, O Lord, for your servants listen, Amen. First Thessalonians chapter 2 verses 13 through 16, hear the Word of God. And we also thank God continually because when you receive the Word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the Word of men, but as it actually is the Word of God, which is at work in you who believe. For you, brothers, became imitators of God's churches in Judea which are in Christ Jesus. You suffered from your own countrymen the same things those churches suffered from the Jews who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and drove us out. They displeased God and are hostile to all men in their effort to keep us from speaking to the Gentiles so that they may be saved. And this way they always heap up their sins to the limit. The wrath of God has come upon them at last. All men are like grass and all their glory is like the flowers of the field, the grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands forever. One day, Linus said to Charlie Brown, there is no problem so big nor so complicated. They cannot be run away from. But folks, I want to disagree a little bit with Linus this morning, maybe a lot, that there are some things that you cannot run away from. And you cannot run away from God nor can you run away from his eternal Word because it is eternal. And it is here before you. And we're assembled in the name of Jesus Christ to hear his Word, and you cannot but make a decision about it. And the important decision that you and I have to make every time we hear the Word of God is, are we going to accept it as a nice history lesson or a theological truth, or are we going to accept it as it really is the voice of the living God thundering to us from heaven? Those are the two choices. And you will find that most of the people in this world, when they hear the Word, they receive it as a very interesting book. They receive it as a very interesting lesson, some nice suggestions for how to be a little bit more successful in life. You can have all of this and put the Bible on as a little icing of your cake. That is the way that most people listen to it. And of course, we are aware just in recent weeks, as of course, Mr. Watson would know, in the public schools, the great debate, shall the Bible be in the public schools? And the debate is, well, if we have it, shall we teach it as history or as literature or as religious? And dear friends, I understand the problem, of course, in a public school system where we would not presume upon other people nor impose our faith on them. But don't take your lessons about the Bible from the public schools, take your lesson about the Bible from the Bible itself. And here's what those who, through whom God spoke the Bible, said about the Bible, is the Word of God. Is it religious? Is it inspired, authored, ultimately, by Him? And the apostle Paul says, you know, I could tell, I could tell you folks really know Him in my heart of bounds and thanksgiving because you don't take this as just my Word or Peter's Word or John's Word or Amos's Word or Moses's Word, you take it as the very Word of God. And dear friends, this is the fundamental decision that you have to make, whether it is just something you're going to hear on a Sunday morning, like any other book or whether it is divine in its authorship. And it seems to me that there's some ways in which you and I can test ourselves to see if we really have taken it as the Word of God. In Acts chapter 2 and Peter was preaching on the day of Pentecost, they said to him, brothers, tell us what must we do to be saved and he gave them the message of the gospel. And then we are told that with many other warnings he pleaded with them to repent. And thousands of them, three thousand of them believed. And then in the next verses, beginning with verse 42, to the end of the chapter, you'll see how their life changed. They took it as a Word of God. They devoted themselves to the apostles' doctrine, to the prayers, the breaking of the bread, and fellowship. They devoted themselves to praising God and they were effective in reaching out to those around them. Their lives were changed because they took the Word in as it was, the very Word of God. Your entire world view, your core values, your underlying assumptions, your purpose in life changes when you take the Word of God as it is the Word of God. It certainly affects major decisions, doesn't it? It can even affect where you decide to go to college. It can affect whom you decide to marry, couldn't it? Oh, but she's so beautiful. She has such a wonderful personality. All but he's tall, dark, and handsome. All but he has such a wonderful education and it's delightful just to sit down and chat with him. He's so intellectually stimulating. But do you know the Word of God has something to say about marriage, doesn't it? And you're confronted with whether the Bible has some interesting perspectives and a nice suggestion or whether it is God speaking to you personally. You certainly have this to deal with this when you face your jobs. I remember as a young believer being confronted for the first time with the fact that someone could actually choose a job based on what it meant for the Kingdom of God. I was in New England at the time and a young lady had found a nice job in another place that was paying a whole lot more, had much more upward mobility and so on. And I said to her, why don't you take it and she said, well, because in that area there's no place where I could see myself as a servant of Christ, really advancing the Kingdom. And there wasn't a strong church there with whom I could associate and help and build up the Kingdom. I said, you're not going to take the job because of that? She said, yeah, why not? And I realized that everything in life is centered around the Word of God. It's that way if you take it for what it is, the very Word of God. And certainly it affects us when we have difficult decisions to make. I remember some years ago in the theological seminary that I attended, there was a very well-known New Testament professor that I and others love very much, but he always seemed to border right on the line of orthodoxy. He liked to tease heterodoxy every once in a while and every once in a while to set this toe across the line. He made a huge mistake. He actually published one of his views that was not in line with the statement of faith of the seminary I attended. And everyone wonders, well, he's been here 25 years. He's been here as long as anybody on the faculty. What will they do? Well, they ask him to leave. And of course, there would be a lot of alumni like myself who would be upset, you see. So they decide, well, we'll get the only other person who's been here that long and our faculty to write all the alumni and tell them. And that was my friend Dr. Roger Nicole. And Roger wrote the alumni and explained to us what had happened and why his good friend had been dismissed from the faculty. And he concluded his letter with these words. Let goods and kindred go. New Testament professors also. And you see how the man was saying, we have some transcendent commitments. And even go beyond our closest friendships and professional linkages. And we find this, don't we, in families? When someone in your family is being challenged as to their moral life or their spiritual life, and it gets out in the open and you're embarrassed about it, you can get very angry at some elder who confronted your brother, your sister, your child, your parent. And you can see it oftentimes in major decisions or major confrontations that happen in life or major temptations. It comes true, doesn't it? Almost every time we confront the word of God, think about just this past month, some of the issues we've thought about last week, world evangelization. Some of you were here with us on Sunday night when I simply said there are four basic truths of the Bible that lead inevitably to the fact that every single individual must be whole heartedly engaged in world evangelization. Number one, every single person on the earth goes either to heaven or hell. Secondly, Jesus Christ is the only one who can save sinners and send us to heaven. Thirdly, in order to receive Christ, people must hear and believe the gospel. They've got to hear it from somebody. And fourthly, we're the ones to be sent or to do the sending. Now all those things are absolutely clear in the scriptures and they lead to an inevitable conclusion. And yet, some see world evangelization is an interesting thing for some people that aren't cherished and involved in, unless you realize that the Bible is truly the word of God. And that's when Jesus Christ said, all authority and heaven on earth is given to me. Therefore go. Are you under his authority? Think go, make disciples or enable them to go and make disciples. We have this clearly in the case that we studied just two or three weeks ago from Acts chapter 10 on the issue of racism. Well, sure, we were convicted and so many of you are very vitally involved in confronting this disease in our own city and yet isn't interesting when the particular issues come up. It's so hard. It's so hard, isn't it? It's a repent of some habits or traditions that we have. I don't know everything about the public debate about consolidation of school systems. I don't know which side the Mr. Watson is on and that's not important for our learning today. But I do know that there are some issues that need to be listened to and people need to come to a deliberate decision over studying the thing. But I hear a lot of people saying, you know, it's really an issue of race. And as I read between the lines and sometimes read the lines themselves, isn't it true? Isn't there some of that there? And isn't it true that the Christians will say, well, there may be many issues to discuss here, but one thing we're absolutely clear on, that we are going to be disabused of any of that sin in our community as far as I have anything to do with it. Wouldn't that be the stance of a Christian person? I had a dear friend of mine this past week, an African-American friend that had come to me and say, what is it? What have we done? They cause you folks not to want to be in the same government and the same school system with us. And my heart went out to him as a lovely Christian man. And at the end, I just said to him, well, you know, there are lots of issues here, but you know, I do know the bottom line. You've got to go back out there, and I've got to go back out there, but both got to be Christians. And our forefathers and our foremothers throughout the ages, who our Christians have always suffered, and they've always persevered, and we've got to keep holding up Christ. That's the answer. You just keep at it. And you say, you're right, but you see the hurt and the pain because of the sin. Well, the question is going to come, what do we think of the word of God? It will be revealed when you and I face our toughest temptations, our toughest challenges in life. And certainly, it's not going to be that way unless we're reading and studying our Bibles. You know, if you took the Bible and read it, at the same rate that I read just a moment ago, it would take you 71 hours. I believe that's 12 minutes a day and get through it in a year. You know, we must be taken the Bible in because it is the word of God. Now, you will see what happens when you take the Bible in as the word of God. And this is such an important issue that's in our text this morning because some years ago, I was talking to a dear friend of mine, he's a writer for a newspaper. This was years ago, not in Memphis. And I shared Christ with him, and I said, do you want to receive Christ today? And he said, I don't think so. I said, why not? He said, I'm afraid what he's going to do to me. I said, you know what? You've got a lot of reasons to be afraid because he will definitely change you. And how about you? What is it that holds you back from giving that part of your life that's been held back completely to Jesus Christ? Are you afraid what he's going to do to you? Well, let's look at the text and see what he will do to you. Because you see in verse 13, at the very end of the verse, that if you make that basic decision and receive the Bible as the very word of God, and not the word just merely the words of men, you will see here in verse 13 that the word of God, which is at work in you who believe. So I say, as I just to you, verses 13 and 14, and he goes on to say, you will become imitators of God's churches in Judea, which are in Christ Jesus. If you make that basic decision to receive the Bible as the very word of God, you should expect some life changes in your experience. You should expect the very soon, God will begin working in your life. He is at work in you. You see, the Bible is not just a record of history or a record of good theology. We're told in Hebrews 4, it's living an active, sharper than any double-edged sword. It divides even between the indivisible, even between spirit and soul, even between marrow and joint. It makes these clean discernments and divisions, we just say to us, if you receive the Bible this way, you read it, it will begin to read you. Because you are taking the living Christ into your heart when you receive the Bible as the word of God, and it will read you and interpret you and reveal you, and sometimes it's not real pretty, but it is a joy because God is showing us, He's turning the light on in our dungeons so that we may flee from that which is destroying us. So it does reveal us, secondly, I want to give you five things that will change in your life. When you receive the Bible as the word of God, first of all, it reads or reveals you. Secondly, it liberates you. If you have received the word as the word of God, it is a word of peace that is spoken to your soul. Because it shines the light on all the dirt and all the filth and all the mistakes and all the failures and all the errors, all the sins, transgressions. But there's the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ shed for the forgiveness of sins, and you find yourself liberated because the word lives in you. It does not honor Jesus Christ for you to go around and just be miserable because you now know how bad you are. Certainly, there's a misery there, but it's not the same grief of someone who does not know Christ. The sociopath or the hypocrite can grieve and shed tears, but never change. Why? Because they don't know that they're loved and forgiven. But the one who really receives the word of God as the word of God believes when we're told that we're forgiven our sins, and we're liberated, thirdly, it guides us. When the word comes into our lives, it becomes a lamp into our feet, a light into our path, it shows us how to live and it changes our direction. So certainly, it reveals us, it liberates us, it guides us, and then you'll find that it motivates us. The word of God moves us because it tells us about Jesus Christ, it's an announcement of his kingship and his love for us. The king is laid down his life for us, and so we're moved to obedience, and fifthly, it empowers us. You see, the word is not just data, like it's communicated from one computer to another. The word is actually organic, it's alive, he's alive. The word incarnate is the Lord Jesus Christ, and he gives us power. That's the reason that God said through Isaiah, just as the rain comes and waters the earth and so the flowers come forth, so my word goes forth, and it accomplishes what I desire and achieves the purpose for which I sent it. By God's relentless power, the word brings forth fruit out of our lives. It's going to happen to you if you receive the word of God as it really is, the word of God. But then notice also not only, but we must, we make a decision about the nature of the word and our relationship to it, but we should expect changes in our lives, but let me say thirdly if you look at verses 15 and the first part of 16, if the word of God does change you, you can expect some opposition. The Apostle Paul says that the word of God which is at work in you who believe for you brothers became imitators of God's churches in Judea, which are in Christ Jesus, you suffered from your own countrymen, the same things those churches suffered from the Jews, and then the Apostle enters into a diatribe in verses 15, especially in the early part of 16, about the five accusations that he has against the Jewish people in Judea. First of all, they killed Jesus Christ, secondly, they killed the prophets, thirdly, they drove the Apostles out of Judea, fourthly, they displeased God and fifthly at the end of verse 15, they are hostile to all people because why, they are keeping the gospel from those people. This is such a severe condemnation of the Judean Jews, that some scholars have a hard time believing that the Apostle Paul actually wrote this, because scholars as well as themselves are familiar with Romans chapter 9 where the Apostle so loved his own countrymen, his fellow Jews, that he said, what did I would be at first? So that they might be saved. He said in chapter 10 of Romans, I eagerly desire that they may come to a knowledge of Christ, and he laid down his life so that many of them would become Christians, and so we asked why in the world would he make such a sharp condemnation, here's the reason, because the primary opposition to the Christians in Thessalonica was from Jews. Paul always went to the synagogue first, and so your first opposition is going to be from those in the synagogue, rather than those in the lecture hall, because you go to the synagogue first, and the Jews tend to be very jealous of what the Apostle was proclaiming about Jesus Christ, because it undermined all of the Pharisees, all of the rabbinical traditions are a good number of them, and it really, really upset the Jewish residents in Thessalonica and in many other places, and so the Apostle is saying to them, don't be surprised that Jewish folks are resisting you, they're resisting in other parts of the world, and you are going through just what the people in Judea go through. Now why is this important? It's important for this reason, dear friends, it's important for us that you and I must not be surprised when a life that has changed to be more like Jesus Christ provokes opposition around you. And if Paul were writing to those of us in Memphis in the year 2001, he wouldn't speak of the Jews because that's not our concern here, that is not where our opposition is coming from primarily. He's coming from a very secular world, and the Apostle Paul might likely say, well, this is true in Western Europe and it's true in other parts of the world, let me tell you about the Muslim world, let me tell you about the animus world and the Buddhist and the Hindu world where your brothers and sisters are being put to death. Don't think that you're unusual and don't think there's something wrong with you because people are opposing you, that's his point here, because he makes the same point to Timothy that anyone who seeks to live a godly life will be persecuted, anyone, and it is a great blessing so to be persecuted. Dear friends, back in the fourth century AD, there was a great preacher in the city now known as Istanbul or in those days Constantinople. His name was Chrysostom and the name itself means golden mouth. His name was John, but they called him Chrysostom because he was golden mouth, he was the greatest preacher around. People would flock them all over to come here, the golden mouth, preach on Lord's day. And he was a man who was deeply convicted about the truth, he believed that the Apostles doctrine was the word of God and he took it into his life. He did not want to be bishop, but he was made bishop in 386 AD. And being made bishop, he had to address whatever issues came his way. It just so happened that the pagan wife of the emperor, her name was Eudoxia, wanted to put a little silver statue of herself to near the church. And Chrysostom was very aware of Caesar worship that had been taking place for centuries in the Roman Empire, and he addressed it forth with on Sunday morning. And he talked about Herodius, who you remember beheaded John, not John Chrysostom, but John the Baptist, and he suggested there might be a Herodius in their own culture, and that our worship was due to God alone. Well, Eudoxia didn't take very long to see that he was exiled out of Constantinople, he was actually exiled twice. When all these problems were going on and he faced the sin that was confronting him with the word of God, because the word was in his heart, he said to his good friend one day, he said, what shall she do to me, shall she banish me, the earth is the lords and the fullness thereof? He said, what shall she do, make me naked, he said, naked I came into this life and naked I shall leave it. He said, shall she behead me, oh so is John the Baptist. He said there's nothing that she can do to me, why? Because he knew the word of God and it put all of his eggs in that basket, so he was exiled, and his body when he died on a long trip of banishments in poor health, at 60 years of age he died and he was buried far outside the walls of Constantinople. Dear friends, don't expect that things will be different for you if you live out the word of God. So we have a basic decision to make, is it the word of men or the word of God. Secondly, if you make that decision, expect your life to change, thirdly, if your life changes, expect opposition. Lastly, this, in the last verse, in fact the last phrases of the verse, the wrath of God has come upon them at last. And dear friends, I want to make a qualification at this point before we talk about the judgment that came upon these people that Paul is describing. There's a very tragic history of anti-Semitism that is a ethnic hatred of Jewish people in the history of the church. In fact, Chris Austin, who was an absolutely fabulous preacher and godly man, on one occasion preached eight sermons, making some unwarranted comments about Jewish people that to this day or a mark on his ministry. In the 13th century and a church-wide council known as the Fourth Latter-In-Council, the church fathers of that time suggested that the Jewish people wear distinctive dress and live in ghettos, does that sound familiar? 1215, Fourth Latter-In-Council, long before World War II. And even the great Martin Luther, who was one of the great harbingers of the Protestant Reformation, shortly before his death, he was ill and in bed, but that's no excuse. He wrote some died tribes called the Jews in their lives, in which he suggested that their homes and synagogues be destroyed, and their Talmudic books be gathered in the rabbis silenced. An awful, awful tragedy in the life and writings of a great man. And there is still such going on in our own day because of prejudices, because of narrow mindedness that the gospel has not yet defeated, and there's absolutely no excuse for this. And we're to love all peoples no matter what they believe, and no matter what religion they belong to, and certainly no matter what ethnic group they come from. But what the Apostle Paul is talking about here is in his own day since the Jewish people were the immediate heirs of the gospel. It had been promised to them, and so he goes first to the synagogue, and their response is typical of the response of all unconverted peoples around the world who put the death 200,000 people last year just because they were Christians. This just typifies it, and he says, dear friends, there is opposition coming but rest assured in the very end you will be validated. Because the wrath of God is already upon them and hovers over them. That's what the verb seems to suggest here at the end of that verse. He may be referring to some events that had just taken place in Judea. This letter is written in 50 AD and in 47 through 49 AD there was a tremendous famine like none other in the history of Israel in Judea, 47 to 49 AD. And in 49 AD Josephus reports the great historian Josephus reports that there was a mighty massacre in the temple precincts in Judea. And in 49 AD the Roman emperor Claudius had expelled all the Jews from Rome. So indeed there were some historical judgments that were beginning to fall upon the nation of Israel. He may have been in mind or he may be predicting what the Lord Jesus had predicted that Jerusalem would be levelled, which it was, of course, 20 years later in 70 AD. But I suspect ultimately he's saying there's this ultimate judgment for anyone who doesn't take the word in for what it really is, the word of God, and devote themselves to the Lord. Chrysostom, after he died, 30 years after he died, the son of Eudoxia, the next king, Theodosis II, with his wife, called in the coffin from far away lands to be buried right in Constantinople, and they went out to that coffin, the king and his wife, and bowed down and asked forgiveness from Chrysostom before his bones, and he was buried in the Church of the Apostles in the Imperial tomb. I think he was validated in the very end. But dear friends, you should be validated and not with dead bones either, because when your king comes out to greet you in all of the splendor of his glory, he shall raise you up and you will be alive, you will be resurrected, and the peoples of this earth will say those are the people of God. Look at them. Oh, they seem so simple and so they seem so under it. They seem so plain and ordinary. They seem so weak during the days of pilgrimage on this earth. But look at them now in the splendor of their glory. The radiant glory of the Lord Jesus Christ being reflected upon them. My dear friends, this is the reason we persevere. This is the reason for a changed life that knows where it's going because in a very short moment, just a blink of an eye we shall be validated in the presence of the living God. That is the reason the Apostle looks at this Church as he would look at this one today and say, I always give thanks to God for you because you received the word of God for what it really is, not the word of men, but the very word of God. Let us pray. Gracious God, we thank you for working your word into our hearts and even though we face the difficulties of spiritual opposition in this life, we will not O Lord cease to persevere because your word is at work in us and we can see the dawning of the new age just over the horizon. Come quickly, Lord Jesus. Come and magnify your own name. Come and lift up all of your people and validate their trust in you through the ages. Lord, as we leave this place today, we ask that you would speak to us that we may speak in living echoes of your town. This we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.