SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 6/5/2014 9:45 AM
My Worship Focus: Introduction to “Abstaining from Sexual Sins
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: 1
Thessalonians 4:3-8
Message of the
verses: 3 God’s plan is to make you
holy, and that means a clean cut with sexual immorality. 4 Every one of you
should learn to control his body, keeping it pure and treating it with respect,
5 and never allowing it to fall victim to lust, as do pagans with no knowledge
of God. 6 You cannot break this rule without cheating and exploiting your
fellow-men. Indeed God will punish all who do offend in this matter, as we have
plainly told you and warned you. 7 The calling of God is not to impurity but to
the most thorough purity, 8 and anyone who makes light of the matter is not
making light of a man’s ruling but of God’s command. It is not for nothing that
the Spirit God gives us is called the Holy Spirit.” (Philips)
3 For this is the will of God,
your sanctification;
that is, that you abstain from sexual immorality; 4 that each of you
know how to possess his own vessel in sanctification and honor, 5 not in
lustful passion, like the Gentiles who do not know God; 6 and that no man
transgress and defraud his brother in the matter because the Lord is the
avenger in all these things, just as we also told you before and solemnly
warned you. 7 For God has not called us for the purpose of impurity, but
in sanctification. 8 So, he who rejects this is not rejecting man but
the God who gives His Holy Spirit to you.
I want to begin by saying that this introduction to this
subject is difficult for me to write about, but because it is in the Word of
God we have to deal with it. As I was
listening to John MacArthur’s sermon on this section, or at least part of this
section he mentioned that he was told that those young couples who came for pre-marital
counseling, that there were 75% of them who had already engaged in sexual
intercourse. This is an alarming
statistic indeed, and it shows the kind of society that we live in today.
When we looked at the beginning of chapter four we stated
that Paul was going to use much of the rest of his letter to show the
Thessalonians how they were to excel still more in their walk with the
Lord. He writes in verse three “For this
is the will of God, your sanctification.”
We have mentioned this word in past SD’s and said that there were three
parts to this process, first when a person receives Christ as their Savior and
Lord they are sanctified, and then as they walk with the Lord their walk is the
process of continuingly being sanctified and then the final sanctification
comes when the person enters heaven. John MacArthur writes “But
before mentioning specifics, Paul defined the will of God under the broad
governing principle of sanctification (hagiosmos),
which is the process of being separated from sin and set apart to God’s holiness. God wants believers to separate from all that
is evil, fleshly, and impure. The
sanctification process is the direct result of salvation, as Paul instructed
the Corinthians: ‘Such
[sexually immoral] were
some of you; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were
justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of God’”
We have to ask
ourselves a question at this point and that question is why did Paul begin his
“list” on how to excel still more with abstain from sexual sins. The answer to that question is that the city
of Thessalonica had all of the vices of sexual sins there and it was a part of
their culture. There was a temple there
to a god which had many prostitutes and the way that you worshiped that god was
to have sex with one of them in order to draw closer to that god. The culture
was actually worse off than what we live in today in some ways. They certainly did not have the technology
that we have today but they did have a society that was driven by sexual relationships
outside the commands of God. Can you
imagine how Paul felt when he had to leave this very young church and why he
was concerned for them and why he prayed for them so much? As we looked at chapter two we found out that
it was not possible for Paul to return to them to see them in person so the
best thing that he could do was to write to them and encourage them not to fall
prey to the culture that they lived in.
It broke the heart of Paul not to be able to return to them, but God has
His own purposes for Paul not to return to them, and I believe one of them is
that we could read the letter that Paul sent to them and learn from what he
wrote.
John MacArthur entitles his ninth chapter of his
commentary on 1 Thessalonians “Abstaining from Sexual Sin,” and it covers
verses 3-8 and we will begin to look at those verses in our next SD but I want
to quote what he writes at the end of introduction in order to share what we
will be looking at: “That this general,
preventive exhortation to sexual morality began his list of practical
instructions in the final two chapters of 1 Thessalonians highlights Paul’s
major concern for sexual fidelity in
Thessalonica. With this background in
mind, one can examine this passage by asking three questions: What kind of sexual conduct does God
require? How can a believer be sexually
moral? Why should a believer be sexual moral?”
These are three questions that all believers need to have answers too
and we will try to do that in our next three SD’s. For now we need to know that God does have a
plan for believers lives and we know that our God is completely Holy, and
desires us to be that way, and that He is completely good and wants His
children to be that way, and that He has given to His children His Holy Spirit and
His Word in order to help us to live a holy life before Him. We also know that we worship a God who
forgives and will lift us up when we fall and that is another thing we need to
remember.
Spiritual meaning
for my life today: Trust the Lord to
give me the answers to these three questions and to give me the power to live a
life that is pleasing to Him.
My Steps of Faith for Today: Remember that I can have a wonderful
relationship with my Lord, and that He will help me to do this as I study His
Word and pray that this will come about.
Memory verses for the
week: Philippians 2:5-8.
5 Have this attitude in
yourself which was also in Christ Jesus, 6 who, although he existed in the form
of God did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied
Himself, taking on the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness
of men. 8 Being found in appearance of
man, He humbled Himself by being obedient to the point of death, even death on
a cross.
Answer to yesterday’s Bible
question: “Always” (Philippians 4:4).
Today’s Bible
question: “Name the man out of whom
Jesus cast many demons?”
Answer in our next SD.
6/5/2014 10:52 AM
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