Don't Quench the Spirit!

Scripture Reading

We meet in your Bibles to 1 Thessalonians chapter 5. 1 Thessalonians chapter 5. We'll be at verses 19 through 22 this morning. 1 Thessalonians chapter 5, verses 19 through 22. But for the sake of context, we're going to read verses 12 through 22. 1 Thessalonians chapter five, if you're using your Pew Bibles, you can find that on page 1050. 1 Thessalonians chapter five, and we'll read verses 12 through 22. Hear now God's perfect word.

And we urge you, brethren, to recognize those who labor among you and are over you in the Lord and admonish you and to esteem them very highly in love for their work's sake. Be at peace among yourselves. Now we exhort you, brethren, warn those who are unruly, comfort the faint-hearted, uphold the weak, be patient with all. See that no one renders evil for evil to anyone, but always pursue what is good, both for yourselves and for all. Rejoice always. Pray without ceasing. And everything gives thanks, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. Do not quench the spirit. Do not despise prophecies. Test all things. Hold fast to what is good. Abstain from every form of evil.

Prayer for Illumination

Let's pray. Father, we thank you so much for your word. We know it is your word. And Father, we pray that your Holy Spirit would indeed enlighten our minds now. We pray that we would receive the truth of your word today, that you would bury it in our hearts. Let us have ears to hear and minds to understand. In Jesus's name. Amen.

Sermon

Well, as we get into this, if you're one of the children and you happen to grab one of those sheets in the back and we talk about this, the main point today is don't quench the spirit, right? Don't quench the spirit. Maybe if you're a kid and you have a piece of paper and you're drawing a pencil, a piece of paper, maybe you could draw a Bible and someone pouring their water all over the Bible. Don't actually pour your water on your Bible, but maybe that's a good picture for you to draw.

Well, there's two friends you can imagine. One, well not two friends, a married couple. One, the wife, and her name is Ms. Spiritual. And her husband is Mr. Too Good. Right? Mrs. Spiritual and Mr. Too Good. And Mrs. Spiritual is open to all sorts of things. Right? She's just open to everything. Mrs. Spiritual doesn't want to think that anybody is wrong. She doesn't want to think bad about anybody. So she'll just accept everything because she is Mrs. Spiritual.

But she's married to someone very different and that's Mr. Too Good. And this is, Mr. Too Good is a stern man who is critical about everyone and everything, and is going to live by himself, even though he might share a house with Mrs. Spiritual. He can't really stand her, and he doesn't get along with anyone. Often these two ends of the spectrum describe not just society, but even people who are in the peripheries of Christendom in the church. And both of them quench the spirit. Brothers and sisters, we must not quench the spirit. The Spirit. God tells us that today. Look with me at the first point, point one. God just outright says it in verse 19. Do not quench the Spirit.

Have you ever been to a bonfire before? Have you ever watched Smokey the Bear commercials before? You know, put out the fire, right? You're supposed to pour at least a whole bucket of water on the fire, and then you're supposed to take some dirt and put it on there, stir it around, make sure there's no ashes left. Make sure you just put it out, right?

Quench it. The scriptures speak of God as a consuming fire. And so often, Christians, remember this is being written to Christians, people in the church, in Thessalonica, first century real people, and God himself is saying, don't put out the fire. Don't quench the spirit. There's a general principle here in ways that we can quench the spirit in our own lives.

We might think to ourselves, oh, I really, have you ever met people like this before? People who are like, I really just want to, I want to know God more, I want to be, I don't know why, I don't feel it anymore. You know, I used to have this tight relationship with the Lord, and now He just feels so distant from me. And then you just think, well, why are you living with your girlfriend? You know, you look at their lives and you realize God hasn't gone anywhere.

But this is what Ephesians 4 and Colossians 3 is talking about, right? The fruits of the flesh are lying, persistent anger, stealing. Tearing people down, clamoring, fornication, uncleanness, lust, evil desires, covetousness. In our lives, if we are not serious about mortifying sin, putting sin to death, John Owen is famous for his quote, be serious about putting sin to death or sin will be putting you to death.

Do you want your conscience to go dull? Just stop caring about sin. Do you want the Holy Spirit to stop invigorating you with a desire and a love for God's Word? Just don't care about your sin. Right? We can vex, we can grieve the Holy Spirit. We can quench the fire within us and make it grow cold. By just not caring about the fruits of the Spirit. I'm going to ask you, this is a hard point.

Have you felt yourself distant from the Lord? First question you need to ask yourself is, have you been confessing sin? This is one of the tenants of what Jesus tells his disciples when they ask him how to pray. What does he teach them? Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.

One of the ways that you can quench the spirit is by being unwilling to forgive other people. Let me say that again, you have to be serious about killing your own sin in your own life, but you also have to be serious about forgiving people in your own life.

Maybe you feel distant from God because you're holding on to bitterness. Mark Spence yesterday, he said a phrase that both Olivia and I found out, we both wrote down later. Bitterness is a silly thing. It's like eating poison and waiting for the other person to die. It's the same thing with unforgiveness. But I'm not gonna forgive them unless they change. That's not how this works, bucko.

No. All right, we can quench the spirit, but there's also reality here. In a more narrow sense, as we look at verses 19 through 22, specifically looking at how God reveals himself, and that's we can quench the spirit as we have a bad attitude towards his word. As we have a bad attitude towards This isn't something new for people in the church, right?

Israel always had a problem with this. Have you ever read through the Old Testament before? And as you're reading through the Old Testament and you came to the different prophets, they all just had glamorous lives, didn't they? All the prophets were loved, they all had plenty of food, they all wore nice clothes, everybody liked them, they were the talk of the town. Now, one of my favorite stories, our son Daniel's middle name is Micaiah. And you can remember what happened to Daniel, but that was under a Babylonian king. But Micaiah was under a Jewish king.

And the king of the south and the king of the north, they want to go to battle together, and the king of the north says, okay, get all the prophets, and they're there, and they're just a bunch of yes-men, right? A whole bunch of prophets are just, oh yeah, yeah, okay king, it's all going to go well, do whatever, you know? And the king of the south says, hold on, is there no prophet of the Lord? And the king of the north says, oh yeah, there is one, but I hate him.

He never says anything good about me. And so they go and get Micaiah, and Micaiah comes and he says, oh yeah, yeah, sure, you're gonna win, it's gonna be fine. And the king of the north says, how many times have I told you not to lie to me? Stop being sarcastic with me. What's really gonna happen? He says, you're gonna die. And we were telling the midwife who delivered Micaiah this story, and she said, And the king didn't believe him? I said, I know, isn't that amazing? God tells people things and they don't believe him. Brothers and sisters, we do that.

Every time we read God's word and we just, no, that's not for me. Go read the book of Jeremiah. Jeremiah tells the kings over and over and over again, it's not gonna go well, the kingdom's gonna be destroyed, you're walking the wrong way. So they throw him in prison or they set him at the bottom of a dry well.

We do that in our own hearts. Every time we wake up in the morning, and you know what, I know what this temptation is like, you know what this temptation is like. Facebook is there, ESPN is there, the news is there, Fox News is just ready, and you just, I know I should read my Bible, but it's just easier to, it's just easier to do something else. I'll do it this afternoon, have you ever done that before? I just gotta get this work done this morning. I'll get back to my devotions tonight before I go to bed. How often do you actually get back to them at night before you go to bed? Don't quench the spirit. Don't quench the spirit. Don't be too busy for reading God's word.

It's amazing what Psalm 119 said, that the desire, the desire that it's more precious than gold. Do you chase after God's Word like we chase after our financial security. Would you rather be entertained by the things of this world or have God's Word in your soul?

That's an honest question for you. Go look at your calendar and ask yourself as you look at your daily life, is my routine set up that the spirit might be inflamed inside me? Or is my day set up that it's just this thing over there, if at all? Brothers and sisters, don't quench the spirit. And there's different ways in which you can quench the Spirit, and we'll look at those in verses 20 through 22. This all kind of goes together, and there's two different senses of this. There's a general sense and a narrow sense in each of these, and we're going to be talking about those. The first is, don't despise prophecies. Don't despise prophecies. Look with me at verse 20. Do not despise prophecies.

This is the first century church. This is probably the second letter of the Bible, the second epistle of the Bible. The first is probably the book of James, because James is killed. He's martyred really soon after his brother Jesus' death. And then Paul is on his missionary journeys, and he's writing this most likely from Corinth, and he's trying to figure out, there's this baby church up in Thessalonica. He got kicked out of Thessalonica, so he went to Berea, and then they kicked him out of Berea, and he went to Athens. He had a pretty good time in Athens, and then he heads down to Corinth, and it's there, his heart, remember, we read this in the first couple chapters, his heart is, what's going on with my brothers and sisters in Thessalonica who are suffering? I know they're under persecution.

And so this is a brand new church, and there's prophecies going on. God hadn't spoken for 400 years. Have you ever thought about that? If you go to the book of Matthew chapter one, Matthew chapter one, you flip one page in the pew Bibles, and it's gonna say the gospels, and then the New Testament of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and then there's a blank page. That's 400 years worth of blank pages. Silence. And now all of a sudden the prophets are speaking again. Now all of a sudden the word of God is coming and people have to figure out what do we think about this? Is it just the Torah? Is it just the Tanakh? Is it the writings and the law and the prophet? Or is there new prophecies?

And in the first century church, there was real reason for people to be put off by this. The New King James version here says despise, it's like treat with disdain, like, have you ever tasted something before and you're just like, I don't want anything to do with it. And that's what it's saying, like, don't do that. He's telling the first century church, don't despise these prophecies that the Lord is bringing to you. Paul himself, the apostle of the Lord, is a prophet. 1 Thessalonians is a missionary letter. It's co-written by Paul, Silas, and Timothy. Paul even tells Timothy in one of his epistles, fan in the flames the gift of prophecy you were given.

So there they're even giving prophecies, but people... People in Thessalonica knew what prophecies looked like in the pagan world. Prophecies aren't something just in the Christian world, but pagans have all sorts of prophetic things that they wanna say and do. And a lot of them were immoral, ecstatic things that Paul's saying, hey, no, right? You go read 1 Corinthians and no, that's not how prophecies come. But don't disdain the prophecies. They know the prophets, the temple of Isis, but he's saying it's not like the cult of Isis. I know that junk goes on over there, but everything we say here ties into God's Word.

Second Point

And that's the second point, right? Test, or the third point, sorry, test all things. Look with me at verse 21. Test all things. He was telling the church, do not accept, carte blanche, everything that anyone in the congregation stands up and says, thus saith the Lord. Interesting today, if you know many Charismatics, they all like using the King James, and they always want to say, thus saith the Lord, when they prophesy. It's one of these funny things for me. I just wonder, does God know modern English sometimes?

Anyways, but how do they test the prophecies? How are they supposed to test the prophets? Well, there's a series of biblical tests for it. The first is one that Jesus says in Matthew chapter 7. Jesus tells them that there's going to be prophets who are coming and some of them are going to tell the truth and some of them are going to be liars. And Jesus' test in Matthew chapter 7 is look at their life. Look at their life. Do they have a godly character? 1 John chapter 4, 1 through 4, likewise, John is writing, the apostle John is writing to the people there, and he says, test all the spirits.

Not all the spirits have come of God, but only those that say that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. If any prophet is coming to you, and they're saying some bogus thing about who Jesus was, you know, the Gnostics came later, and they said, oh, Jesus wasn't actually born in the flesh, he was just kind of a spirit. No, false prophet, get him out of here, right? No, that's not cool.

1 Thessalonians chapter 13 verse 3 tells us that the purpose of prophecy was for the sake of love. Right, if there is no love of Christ in this prophet and in his message, don't listen to him. In 1 Corinthians chapter 14, when God is talking about the point of prophecy, He's saying that it's specifically for edification, for building others up, for exhorting and for comforting. So if it's because they have some crazy doomsday theory about some weird thing over here, how this president is going to... No, that's not what the Lord is saying. You're not building anyone up there. You're not comforting people.

This is exactly what Paul commends the Bereans for in Acts chapter 17. They were even more honorable than the Thessalonians. Why? Because after they heard the prophecy from Paul and Timothy and Silas themselves, what did they go and do? You know what they did, don't you? They heard the prophecies from Paul. They heard the prophecies from Timothy. They heard the prophecies from Silvanus or Silas. And they went home and checked the scriptures themselves.

Is this true? If it doesn't accord with God's word, give it the boot. This is why when those people who say that, you know, you know those people. Got nice black ties and white shirts, and they got little name tags, and they're elder so and so. Yeah, I'm sorry, your little book of prophecies does not line up with God's word. Bye bye. No, it doesn't line up with the scriptures. Actually, a lot of it is just forgeries from the scriptures, messing up Hebrew names. This is real serious, right? It's not just a New Testament problem. It was an Old Testament problem too. There was a law in Deuteronomy chapter 18, that if you found out someone was a false prophet, you know what you were supposed to do to them?

Pick up a stone and start throwing them at the person. They're to be put to death. Man, I don't know about you, but if people took that seriously in the Christian church, maybe we wouldn't have so many people making the kingdom look bad. You know, we just talked about how many people will prophesy when the day of the Lord will come and they'll throw a date on the calendar and it doesn't come true. If they said that was prophecy by Old Testament law, we should take them out to the parking lot and pick up some gravel.

Does it accord with God's Word? Now, not all prophecy. There's a distinction I need to make here. Because there's two different forms of prophecy biblically, right? We all think about the main one, foretelling stuff. God is saying, in the future these things are going to happen. And yes, those happen in the scriptures. They're pretty rare, but they do happen. The other is foretelling. This is what God has done. This is what God has done, and how He moved in history, and telling the great stories of the past. When Stephen prophesies before his death, that's all Stephen is doing. He's forth telling, he's going back and he's saying, look at the patriarchs, look at our fathers, look at the prophecies, they all pointed to Jesus. And in that sense, even if someone was to say, and you'll hear this in some reformed circles, preaching is a form of forth telling, okay, we can quibble over that if you want.

If it doesn't have Christ in it, And if it's not lining up with the Scriptures, kick them out of the pulpit. Kick me out of the pulpit quick. Test all things. Test all the prophecies. But I'm going to encourage you about something. We started this off talking about Miss Spiritual and Mr. Too Good. And I want to warn you about Mr. Too Good.

See, he has this thing when he comes to church. He tests all things, but he doesn't test them by the word, he tests them by his preference. And by his extreme positions on things. He doesn't just test all things, he becomes a critic of everything. I don't like the way that guy reads from his notes. You know, I don't think any pastor should ever have any notes when they read. It should just come straight from the Spirit. Oh, I don't like the way that pastor reads the scriptures. I wish they were more animated. Or he's trained up his son, who differs from his dad. He says, I wish he was less animated. And he's raised his children to be too critical also.

We can become that way and reform circles, can't we? Where it's not just testing to see, is the thing that the pastor is saying is true, but we want to actually figure out, do we just like what he's saying? And there's all sorts of Christians who, if there's, man, this bugs me, in the Reformed world, there's no church pure enough. And so if you find yourself just in your house doing church by yourself, I'm sorry, you've become Mr. Too Good. That's not what the scripture is telling you to do, because if that's who that person is, and I'm warning you, this is common in the Reformed world, what you end up doing is ignoring the word of God himself, who tells you you must not forsake the assembling together. Right, sometimes Mr. Too Good becomes so critical and so picky that no church is good enough and will compromise all over the Bible because it's really just preferences.

Fourth Point

Fourthly, hold to what's good. Point four, hold to what is good. Hold fast to what is good, verse 21. Again, in the narrow sense of this, it's talking about the prophecies. If you hear from the prophet and he has said things that are true and they're biblical, hold fast to that. Hold fast to that.

The first century Christians in Thessalonians, they needed to hear that. When you hear this word, hold firm to it. Ephesians chapter 2 says, By the apostles and the prophets, the foundation of the church was laid. We needed the prophets, we needed the apostles because they laid the foundation of the church. So stand on that foundation. With Jesus Christ as the cornerstone.

And so now when we come into the more broad sense and somebody is teaching God's word or looking at God's word, we need to ask ourselves, does this make me love Christ more? Or does it make me rely on myself more? Does this make me look more like Jesus Christ? Or does it make me look like the world more?

Have you ever noticed it's really hard to hold on to good things? Have you ever noticed that? Or maybe I'll put it the opposite way. Have you ever noticed how hard it is to keep a good habit? Maybe you've tried to lose weight before, and you've downloaded an app to count your calories, and you're really excited about that for a couple of days. And then after a few days, you're like, oh, forget this. I'm just done. Even though you know it's good for you.

Or how many people will start an exercise resume, and they'll know, yeah, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. I'm going to January 1, they start. And by February 31, they're like, just give me another donut, all right? I just want to be happy.

It's really hard to hold on to a good habit. It's really easy. Or it's really easy to hold on to a bad habit. It's really hard to hold on to a good one. For some of you, you might have grabbed a Bible reading plan at the back at the beginning of the year. And you had great intentions on reading one, two, three, four, five chapters a day. And now you're lucky if you read one or two verses. Don't give up. Fan the fire. Hold on to what's good. Don't give up. When the persecution comes, hold on to what is good. When the dark hours come, hold on to what is good. When there's trials in your life, hold on to what is good. Go to God's word.

Lastly, abstain from every kind of evil. Verse 22, abstain from every form of evil. Again, in its narrow sense here, in its context of not quenching the spirit and prophecies in the first century church, abstain from every kind of evil, right? If there's an evil prophecy, just stay away from it.

Just don't go near it. I was talking to someone recently, and we were talking about the Mormon Church and evangelizing Mormons and things like that, and that's great, but some people will take that so far that then they'll say, well, I'll go and visit the Mormon Church, so they know that I want to be their friend.

No. Stay away from it. Stay away from the false prophets. Stay away from them. Stay away from their teachings. Stay away from those who would tell you that Jesus Christ didn't come in the flesh, or didn't die upon the cross, or didn't raise again from the dead, or didn't ascend up into heaven. And stay away from those prophets who might say that Jesus Christ is coming, and they know the date, or will say Jesus Christ is never coming back again. Stay away from those prophets. Stay away from them.

But in a general sense, this also stands true, verse 22, as a principle. Abstain from every form of evil. The opposite of the fruits of the flesh are the fruits of the spirit. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control. Against such things there is no law. I abstain from all those things we talked about in Colossians 3 and Ephesians 4. Stay away from them. Fight your flesh.

Cling to what is good. Instead, we talked about this earlier, God's will in your life is sanctification. The Lord wants to make you more like Jesus Christ. The Lord has poured out his spirit upon you that you might love Christ more and look like Christ more. Don't quench that spirit. Go to his word. Drink deeply of his word. And when you find the gold of his word, bury it deep within your heart and cling to it with all your might.

Closing Prayer

For the days of trial and tribulation are coming in your life. They will happen. Suffering will come. Cling to what's good. Fan the flame that's in you. Let's pray. Father, we thank you so much for your spirit. Father, we pray that your spirit might bury these words in our hearts, that we might love you with all of our heart, mind, soul, and strength, and we would never not love you. Fan into flame our love for you, Lord.