Bible Guys Classics: 1 Thessalonians 4

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Well today can be summarized by saying, Holy living Batman.

Okay, that was not how I thought you were going

to introduce this. Well, let's find out what we're going

to talk about. He's Chris, I'm Jeff, and we're the

Bible guys.

Did you know that Robin said holy whatever?

Yeah, the original Batman.

Yeah, well today Paul's talking about Holy living Yes.

Hey, yeah, you just caught me off guard there. That

was not how I thought you were going to induce that.

And I don't want to say nothing.

By the way, Jeff never knows what I'm going to say.

No.

In fact, just so you're wondering in case anybody wonders

at all, we don't really know what anybody's We don't

rehearse these at all, So these are just prepared the

whole thing.

Other than other than the Bible part. But yeah, I know.

But but a lot of these, but a lot of

the questions, every single one of them that we ask

each other, for the most part, we don't know the

other person's going to.

Okay.

So today is another segment on Stump the pastor where

people have sent in questions, and we're doing this all

week and so if you have any questions that you'd

like to send in, please send them email us at

info at the Bible Guys dot com and we would

love to just take any questions and maybe in a

few weeks we'll do another segment with your question. So

this comes from Michael V. And the question today is this,

what is the difference between an Israelite and did you?

Wow?

Yeah?

So manlife. There's so many answers to that. Can we

just throw in Hebrew?

Yes?

Can we just throw that one into yes?

Well, the word Hebrew Israelite in jew just to sort

of give you the short answer first, are all used

interchangeably synonymously almost with Paul and and and the word

Hebrew started with Abraham, and it's referred to as descendants

of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In fact, nobody really knows why,

but Abraham was actually called the Hebrew and but it's

it's it's really referred to the descendants of God's promises

and the promises of Abraham specifically.

So the word Hebrew comes from the the root word

that means ever. So it seems like you know that

God is saying because remember God said your your people

will last forever. It seems like maybe that might be

the root of that part of it where Hebrew really

references relationship to to Abraham specifically. But then from there

Israelite winds up being more of a nationality. We would

say Israeli today it's the same same word. That's a

nationality thing, But that doesn't necessarily mean you're Jewish.

Right now, the word the word jew was Jews were

first used when in the second Kings, when when the

nation was divided and you had Israel and you had Judah.

The people in Judah referred were referred to as Jews.

Right and Judah is where Jerusalem is Judah is where

Bethlehem is. Well, Bethlehem is in Benjamin. But Judah and

Benjamin were one group and Israel was the other group

up above.

Yeah, yeah, and so and so.

And then later on when they became one nation again,

then they were all referred to as Jews and uh

and and some suggest the reason why is because there

were more in the southern region than there were in

the northern region.

But either way, and not long after that time that

they came back together, the Greeks came in and took

them all over, and so they're all Jews now. Yeah,

So the answer is.

This, So Hebrews and Jews and Israelites are used synonymously

to refer to the same group of people. However, there

is some confusion. In fact, it's been a debate for

thousands of years. In fact, I have very good friends

who are Jewish, and they would even tell you that

even people in their own families disagree on some of

these things, because sometimes you can say, oh, I'm Jewish,

and what you're meaning is I'm religious, Yes, I'm of

the Jewish faith, right, I belong to Judaism. And then

some people would say, oh, I'm Jewish, and they're referring

to nationality, ethnicity, ethnicity, yesity, yeah, So.

The word jew references ethnicity and or religion.

And which is why it's so confused, right.

For Jewish, But in the Jewish culture of the New

Testament and of the Old Testament, you couldn't separate the two.

It's like I was with a Sicilian lady when we

were in Sicily, and I asked her if she was

a Christian, and she said, I'm Sicilian, I'm Catholic, right right,

those two in her mind are synonymous. You can't. You

can't separate Catholicism from being Sicilian. You can't separate Secilia

as being Sicilian from being Catholic.

Right.

It's kind of the same thing that in Jesus Day

and before Jesus Day, Jewish meant this is my nationality

and my religion. Today Jewish can mean my nationality and

my religion, or my nationality or my religion, right right.

Israeli is purely Israelite. It's purely nationality. So you could

be a Muslim Israeli, you could be or you could

be an atheist Israeli because Israeli Israelite just means nationality,

and then Hebrew would be recognizing I'm you know, my

ethnicity comes from Abraham. So there's some complexity in that

each of those words has its own precise meaning, but

we find ourselves sometimes interchanging them.

So I was corrected by a good friend of mine, Brian,

who I used to work with at my church in Georgia.

He's Jewish, and I had made some kind of joke.

We met up.

I went down for a conference and we met at

at a restaurant called the Varsity by the way. Yeah yeah, yeah,

for sure, and among other things that wake you up

at two.

O'clock in the morning to eat it. But we were down.

There talking and I had made a reference and he

had told me he's like, hey, he said, you know,

former President Trump recognized this, and he actually signed a

decree or passed some sort of a thing where he

was trying to take an identity crisis away from this conundrum.

And so he actually with regard to how the State

Department used the words yes, yes, and.

So he tried to dissolve it by saying, every time

you say he's Jewish, you are referring specifically just to ethnicity, nationality.

That's it.

So Jewish is now supposed to be. Although I'm sure

whether or not it was effective.

Or not, I'm not sure the US government gets to

make those definitions. But what he was saying is it

was for the sake of how the State Department yes

wrote the word.

Yeah. Yeah. And then if you were to describe your faith,

then you would have to specifically refer to it as that.

Yes, say like I'm the Jewish faith, as opposed to

I'm Jewish, right right, So that's I think that more

of the standard. Lately, at least among my Rabbi friends,

they would say I'm Jewish and they would say I

practiced the Jewish faith, which those two things would be

would be, you know, somewhat separate.

Now, yeah, so I bet you a lot of our

listeners didn't understand that.

Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of complexity in that. So

just understand, Jewish usually means both nationality and or I

mean ethnicity and or faith. Hebrew means connected to Abraham's family,

Israelite means or Israeli is part of the nationality of Israel.

Those be the three. So good question. Hey, as you

read through the Bible and come across those, those kinds

of words. It's fun to ask them and try to

figure out what it means. And you know, we will

take seven minutes to answer a two minute question if

we can. Yeah, wow, yeah, okay. So what verses are

we reading today? Chris?

The First Thessalonians, Chapter four, verses one through twelve.

One through twelve very good. So remember now Paul is

in corinth yep, he's there for a year and a half,

and he writes a couple of letters back to the

church in Thessalonaika that he had helped start in you know,

a couple of years before that, and he loves them

so much. Right, this is so great, So he says, finally,

dear brothers and sisters, we urge you in the name

of the Lord Jesus, to live in a way that

pleases God. As we've taught you. You live this way already,

and we encourage you to do so even more. For

remember what we taught you by the authority of the

Lord Jesus. God's will is for you to be holy,

so stay away from all sexual sin. Then each of

you will control his own body and live in holiness

and honor, not in lustful passion like the pagan's who

not know God and his ways never harm or cheat

a fellow believer in this manner by violating his wife,

For the Lord avenges all such sins. As we have

solemnly warned you before, God has called us to live

holy lives, not impure lives. Therefore, anyone who refuses to

live by these rules is not disobeying human teaching, but

is rejecting God, who gives his Holy Spirit to you.

But we don't need to write to you about the

importance of loving each other, for God himself has taught

you to love one another. Indeed, you already show your

love for all the believers throughout Macedonia. Even so, dear

brothers and sisters, we urge you to love them even more.

Make it your goal to live a quiet life, minding

your own business and working with your hands, just as

we instructed you before. Then people who are not believers

will respect the way you live and you will not

need to depend on others.

That's interesting. Does your version say believers are Christians?

Believers?

Yeah?

Is it the NLT Yeah, mind's of NLT and it

says Christians.

Well huh and I'll tee yeah.

Yeah. Interesting, Well, we probably have a slightly different addition.

Mine's the third edition.

Yeah, okay, that's really good to point out.

Actually it is nifty believers in Christians.

It's nifty gifty.

Well, if you're a believer, you're a Christian.

Oh that's for sure.

There you go. So that's all Christians are believers. Is

it possible to be a Christian not be a believer?

Is it possible to be a Christian and not be

a believer? I would say no?

Can it goes along with the answer we just gave

a minute ago. Well, sometimes people would use it. Sometimes

people would use the word I'm Christian, meaning I'm not atheist,

I'm not Muslim, and I go to church on occasion.

Oh it's different from being.

Well, you're talking about semantics, because I was thinking, in

my mind the true definition of a christianist to believe

that's right, which means they may call themselves Christians. But

my note meant whether they call themselves or not they

or not one.

No, I'm agreeing with you.

Yes, okay.

So so Paul here is writing and it's really a

charge to live holy, which is why I said holy

living batman. Yes, because he is asking them to be

holy in every way, and he stresses sexual sin, and

then he stresses actually, he doesn't really even stress loving

one another, although it's implied. And the best thing about

this is that he is saying, you already live that

way now. So, in other words, he's writing to a

group of people who already have evidence in their lives

that they've changed, and so he's saying, let me encourage

you and encourage you to live that way even more.

So it's really cool, Yeah, and I think it's great.

He doesn't pull any punches. He's not coming off in

a judgmental way. He's just saying, hey, there's a right

way to live, and so I want to encourage you.

I'm not trying to hurt you. I've already taught you this.

You've already been kind of heading in this direction, and

I just want to remind you there are consequences to

living in moral, unholy lives, right, And it's not like

consequences like God hates you. These are just the natural consequences.

But he does say God will avenge sexual sin when

you're going after somebody else's wife or you know, an

adultery kind of a thing. So we shouldn't be surprised when,

even as Christians, when we do choose to participate in

some sense, there are significant consequences.

Right.

What we want is we want no consequences. We only

want grace and mercy. Oh, I wanted to go with

sin and do what I wanted to do, but I

can't believe there's consequences to it. I wanted to eat

my cake. I wanted to have my cake and eat

it too. Right, And Paul's just reminding them God will

avenge these sins. So I'm not judging you. I'm not

telling you off. I'm just reminding you be very cautious

when it comes to sexual purity because there are consequences

to it.

You know, this brings up sort of the bigger topic.

In fact.

I know we joked about the fact that some people

call themselves Christians and then but are they really Christians?

But almost serendipitously, those things actually are pretty appropriate. They're

connected because there are a lot of people who would say,

I call myself a Christian, but doesn't mean that I

have to change my way of living at all. Right,

so people would say, oh, I love God. It's one

of these things.

You know.

It's like I'd like to thank my creator, you know,

you know, or whatever, and it's like it's like that's

that's their whole that you know, that that summarizes all

their dedication right there.

Right he's my good luck time God helped me hit

this home run, yes, touchdown.

Whatever it is.

And I'm not saying everybody who does that is that way,

but but but all have to say this. Paul is

saying that God still wants us to live righteously. He's

saying that it's it's not just about grace, although God

gives it to us freely. It's not just about mercy,

although God gives it to us endlessly. It's about striving

to live holy And if you have Jesus Christ truly

in your life, you're going to live that way already.

So it's not about obeying because you have to. It's

obeying because you want to. And so it's it's so

it's such a difference between the Old Testament and the

New Testament. And the Old Testament they were looking forward

to the Cross of Christ. They're looking forward to the

miss Ayah who would come and take away their sin problem.

And yet what they were, what they were, you know,

given is they were given rules and laws to obey

looking forward, you know, to to doing these things to

absolve their sins. Jesus Christ has performed all the action

necessary to wipe away and absolve all of our sins.

So we look back to the cross, and so we

realize we don't have to obey for salvation.

Right.

But but Paul, because of salvation.

We obey because of salvation.

Right, we will because we we will because we want

to out of gratitude, out of and.

Then if we can understand that God's laws are not

in Paul says in other passage, God's laws are not burdensome.

So if they are burdensome, if you're trying to earn

a way to heaven, it's not possible, right, But they're

not burdensome as far as they make your life better.

So you don't have to worry about struggling in sexual

intimacy with your partner if you know that you've been

pure and holy with each other only right. You don't

have to worry about bringing STDs into the family if

you've been holy. Right, So there's all these benefits to

just doing things God's way. And you know, I love

to tell the story about when I used to work

with gangs in Chicago, and I told you the story before.

I think where dudes walking this massive Rottwiler down the street.

But the menus dog I've ever known was these people.

They were Puerto Rican people. They had a Chihuahua and

this little chiny chihaha pound for pounds medus dog I've

ever known, and come flying off the porch and just

started smashing itself against the fence trying to get to

that giant rottweiler and that whitewader, I'm honestly one of

the largest ones I've ever seen. He is probably one

hundred and fifteen pounds, and he never even made eye

contact with that little dog. That little dog is losing

his mind, just pounding himself against this fence. He just,

you know, he just wanted to tear into that rattweiler.

That rottweiler was so big he could have just inhaled

him and not even you know, missed a step. So

where was that little chihuahua safest. That chihuahua thought he

was more than capable of handing himself with that ratweiler,

But this loving master had the fence in the right

places that little chiuhaha was completely free and safe inside

that fence. Outside that fence, he would have been a

scooby snack for that great big jam rat wider. Right,

it's kind of the same thing for us. We think

we know better, and we throw ourselves against the fence

all the time. We want to get out. We're digging

underneath the fence, trying to get out away from all

the safety and protection that our loving Master has for us.

And the Bible says Peter says, the devil walks around

like a roaring lion, looking for whom he made a vour.

And if we just understand God's the guidelines for holiness

are not oppressive. They give us a better life, a

cleaner life, a safer life, a gentler life, a more

peaceful life. So I don't think it's a mistake that

he ties sexual purity and holiness to so live a

peaceful life, live an industrious life, do something that matters

with your life, but choose to live at peace. He

ties both of those together almost one breath to the

next breath. And it's because what he's saying is this.

Is a good life.

It's not a bad life.

Yeah, you know, it's isn't it funny how today when

you talk with people in society, the one thing that

people do not want to hear is the old fashioned idea.

And I say that in quotes, the old fashioned idea

that God actually designed sex for marriage. And it's like,

I mean, it is just I thought it was. I

thought it was not a popular idea thirty years ago,

you know, in the eighties, I thought, wow, this is

not a popular idea. But holy Christmas, this thing has come.

Holy Christmas, bat man, it has come to the point

to where people just don't don't want you to talk

about it. It's like, it's like, please just change the subject,

talk about anything else. Because as a couple dating, we're

definitely going to have sex before we're gonna get married.

It seems to be the mentality.

Right. All talked more about sexual parity than he did

about heaven.

Yeah, he did, oh for sure. He talked.

He talked more about sexual parity and answer prayers. He

talked more. We can just going down the line all

the things and all the reasons why people go to church,

or all the reasons why people like to talk about

how important faith is to me. He talked more about

sexual purity than any of those topics. And so if

it's important to God to make sure that that's preserved

in scripture, it should be important to us too. We

should just understand that there's a couple of things that

really define where our heart is headed. Our money Jesus says,

where your treasure is that's to your heart is also

and then our sexual purity. Those two issues really define

are we running towards God or from God? And so

this is a it's kind of a it's almost a

spiritual litmus test. Paul's not saying I'm measuring you this way.

Just understand, if you're heading towards God, you're going to

flee these these these other issues you're gonna gonna And

it's not through just pure will power and personal character

that he's talking here. It's because of what Christ has

already done for us. Then we are free now to

live the life You made for us to live.

That's great. Yeah, yeah, I think that overall.

When Paul, you know, writes back, you know it is

it feels like to me it is in loving context,

it's within context of relationship. You can tell that he

has some history with these people because he says you

are already living this way anyway. That's another angle for

us to think about. Whenever we decide to encourage somebody

to live holy, you know, we do it most effectively

in the context of loving relationship. Yeah, so you know

what is more effective for the guy standing on the

street corner in New York with a sign that says

the end is near? You know, with people walking around,

how many converts you're going to have right out of

the millions of people who see you. How effective is

that really going to be? Versus sitting one person down

in a coffee shop who you are in relationship with

and leveraging your love, your relationship and your influence and

you say, can we talk about something that's important to

me and it should be important to you, and all

of a sudden you decide to give them the message.

And so you know, again, it's it's just very evident

that Paul has a loving, contextual, contextual relationship absolutely these people.

Absolutely, And that was you know, yesterday's conversation was all

about that he loved them like a father, he worried

about them like a mother, that's right, right, and all

these things. And so in this context he kind of

has the right to speak up on this. You know

it does it just a few verses, but he has

the right to speak up on this because this is

a major issue, especially in that culture. The note here

in the Life Application Bible, which I love you should

get one, it says sexual standards were very low in

the Roman Empire, and in many societies today they're not

any higher. The temptation to engage in sex outside of

marriage has always been powerful. Giving into that temptation can

have disastrous results. Sexual sins always hurt someone, individuals, families, businesses, churches,

and more. Sexual desires and activities must be placed under

Christ's control. So it's not my character and my will power,

it's I'm surrendering it to Christ.

Right.

God created sex for procreation and pleasure, and it is

an expression of love between a husband and wife. The

sexual experience, therefore, must be limited to marriage. Besides the

physical consequences and sexual sin, they're also spiritual consequences. We

go on and on. He's going to talk about more

about that in First Corinthians, as a matter of fact,

because while the Thessalonians we're having trouble with this, corinth

is rife with it. They worshiped with sex, right, so

it's a whole other issue. And he talks about that

in Romans or First Crinthians six and seven quite a bit.

So we'll talk about it more. But I love the

fact that he's speaking with authority and he's not ashamed,

but he's doing it like a loving father, like a

worried mother for these people that he genuinely loves. And

then he goes okay. So then in verse eleven, make

it your goal to live quiet lives. So he talks

about loving each other, respecting each other, caring for one another,

and then just live a good life. And you know,

one of the things that he warns about here is idleness,

really right, Christian should be industrious people. We should be producing,

We should be making a difference, you know, regardless of

you know, in America, our goal is to save up

enough money to finally we don't have to do any

work ever. And God didn't make us that way. Even

if you are well off enough to not have to

work the nine to five grind, you should still be

productive for the kingdom. And so this is what he's saying,

to make your goal to live a quiet life, minding

your own business, working with your hands, and he said,

you know, then people who are not believers will respect

the way that you live and will not and you

won't have to depend on other people. And so he's saying,

it's a testimony to other people that Christians would still

be producing and be productive in their life.

Well, it seems like there's a lot to learn from

just these few verses. Which is which is the purpose

of the Bible? That's right, because there's always an application

for God's truths.

Whatever, every one of these passages. We could talk for

hours on, yeah, right, for sure.

Yeah, Well that's all we have time for.

And so we'll see you next time on the Bible, guys,