Life of the Church

Scripture Reading

Well, you open in your Bibles with me to 1 Thessalonians chapter 5. Meet me at 1 Thessalonians chapter 5. We only have two today and next Sunday in 1 Thessalonians. 1 Thessalonians chapter 5. Again, if you're flipping through your New Testament and you find all the T's before Hebrews, you're gonna find 1 Thessalonians. 1 Thessalonians chapter five, if you're using a Pew Bible, you'll find it on page 1050. 1 Thessalonians chapter five, and we'll read verses 23 through 28 this morning together.

Here now, God's perfect and holy word. Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who calls you is faithful, who also will do it. Brethren, pray for us. greet all the brethren with a holy kiss. I charge you by the Lord that this epistle be read to all the holy brethren. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you. Amen. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God abides forever.

Prayer for Illumination

Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your word. And we pray that as we read your word now, that we would sit as students at your feet, that we would have ears to hear and minds to understand. Teach us, oh Lord, that we might walk in your ways. In Jesus's name, amen.

Sermon

What does life in the church look like? Today, there are a multitude of books, and in the 90s and the early 2000s, there was a huge movement that swept across the church, the seeker-sensitive movement. What do people want from church? And depending on what people want from church, that's what we should make church look like.

That's not the way the scripture seems to indicate we should go, though, because what we found out with the seeker-sensitive churches, as they grew and they grew and they grew, and they were hugely popular, I was just reading a study a few months ago of one of the biggest ones just south of Chicago, something like 15,000 members.

And as the elders got together and they looked at How, what have we done? Right, there's been lots of people who have come through the door, there's lots of people who have attended, there's lots of people who have made professions of faith and been baptized, but where are they now? And from their own elders, what they said is, and this was just about two years ago, we failed. We failed to make disciples.

We failed because we based what the church is supposed to be off what the world wants the church to be. Here we find three things that mark the church. Prayer, friendships, and the Bible. So if you're one of the children, you might want to draw a little picture there of people praying, of people being friends, or a picture of people reading the Bible with one another. And so how do these look in the life of the church? What does this look like in the life of the church today?

First Point

First, There's a few commandments here. What does the evangelistic pastoral team say in verse 25? Brethren, pray for us. Brethren, pray for us. Life in the church looks like a life of prayer. Notice, where are Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy? They're not there. But the church is meant to pray for people who aren't even there. I know that in our worship service, it's a little bit odd.

Some people, when they first visit our church, like, man, you guys have this like really long prayer that takes up like a quarter of the worship service. Yeah, because God tells us to pray for one another. And not just to pray for people in our own congregation, but to pray for people across the globe, pray for people in other churches, pray for those who are in need. And so that's what we do. But notice a few things here that are interesting. Brothers, pray for us.

Notice how Paul and his companions speak to the people in the church. Hey, little heirlings down there, lower people who we taught, y'all need to pray for us because we're over you. No, what is it? How do they call them? Brothers. Brothers. wasn't some type of super saint.

Paul, Timothy, and Silas were people just like you, just like me, they needed prayer. They humbled themselves, and they would be open with things that they needed prayer about. Things that they were suffering, where they were, Paul told them how worried he was about them, and the persecution they had, and how rejoiced he was when Silas came back and gave him good news that even under persecution, that they were doing well. He prayed for them in chapter one, verse two. He says he always gives thanks for them when he remembers them in prayer. He prays for them. He wants them to pray for him or for them. And this is one of these interesting things in corporate prayer. Remember when Jesus taught his disciples how to pray? It wasn't my Father who is in heaven, forgive me of my sins. No, it was our Father who art in heaven. It's us, it's our, give us our daily bread. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. It's us, it's us praying for and with one another. He calls them brothers. He doesn't lord it over them, because there's a reality of prayer, a real love, a real friendship, a real affection that they have for the people on Thessalonica.

Sometimes we might just get into these things where we just call each other brother or sister, but this is really an affection thing. In the early church, this was taken so far that one of the reasons why Christians were persecuted in the first century, one, Romans thought that they were cannibalistic because they talked about eating and drinking the blood and body of Jesus Christ. Two, they thought that they were incestuous because they called everyone brother or sister. That's not That neither of those are true, but it was the intimacy that they saw. When the pagans saw the Christians, they thought, how are they so close? How are these people who aren't related so loving one another? How can they call each other brother and sister? How are they able to show that type of affection for one another? It's because it's rooted in Jesus Christ. Hebrews chapter two, verse 12 says, Jesus is not ashamed to call us brethren. Jesus is the one who establishes the family of God. It is Jesus Christ who has drawn us together in this familial relationship. But let's get nitty gritty a little bit.

It's kind of hard to pray for people you don't know, isn't it? Have you ever done that before? Maybe each week, or each month, some of you have it in your bulletins right now. You get this little prayer calendar, and you start reading this prayer calendar, and for some of the older members, you're like, I don't even know who that person is. And for some of the newer members, you're like, I think I've met that person, but I don't know.

There's a reality that we need to get to know one another. We can have a common spirit in which we say to one another, brother and sister, but if we're not fellowshipping with one another, if we're not spending time with one another, if we're not investing in one another, it's a term without meaning. You can call your brother brother all you want, but if you never call your brother, is there really that much affection between the two of you?

I mean, this is real. I mean, think about it in your own life. I love my brother, and I love my brothers, and I love my sisters, but I notice when I talk to them more, well, not always, sometimes it's harder to love them when I talk to them more. Maybe you might feel that way too. But that's the point. When you find out about them, when you come into a close relationship with them, you realize how much they need your prayer, how much they need your help. This is why the elders desire to see you come closer and closer with one another. This is why we do Sunday school. This is why we do chalk and talk. This is a shameless plug for chalk and talk. The first thing we do during chalk and talk is pray for one another. This is why we have fellowship meals downstairs. If you're driving a long distance, we understand that you can't make it easily to midweek activities, so there's a meal for you. that we want to fellowship and we want to get to know one another.

How was your week? Tell us the good things. Tell us the bad things. I just found out something this week that happened to someone that I was like, whoa, I didn't know that at all. I wouldn't have known about it unless they were here. We need to pray for one another. This is why we have fellowship nights. This is why we have Bible studies. All these are extra things, but we do them not because we want to do stuff, but because we want to grow in our love for each other and our love for the Lord. We need to be praying for one another.

Have you ever looked at Jesus's ministry before and seen how often he just goes off and he prays? He just leaves his disciples. Mark says that while it was very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus departed to a desolate place and there he prayed. It doesn't tell us what he prayed about, but I can imagine how much he was pouring out his heart to the Lord to care for his disciples, to care for those who were coming to him, to impart faith to those who he was speaking with. Again and again, Jesus prays for his disciples.

Brothers, pray for us. I'm going to encourage you. Sometimes we'll get together, you know, and this is like, we just have these Christian-y things. We'll say, you know, somebody tells us something bad or something struggling in their life, and you're like, oh, yeah, I'll pray for you. And then you see them the next week, and you're like, yeah, I never actually prayed for them.

I'd encourage you, stop right there. Be a people of prayer. Stop. It's fine. If you're in that conversation, can I just pray for you real quick? And we don't need to be like the Pharisees, put on a big show, you know, hey, let's go in the corner and let's go do this so everybody knows that we're praying together, but just stop and pray for that person. It might just be a 10-second prayer. I can't tell you how encouraging that is to my heart when people will do that. Just say, can I just pray for you real quick? And just pray, just pray for one another, pray.

Paul needed it, Silas needed it, Timothy needed it, we need it. The house of God is meant to be a house of prayer. Pray for one another. Next part of the life of the church is close friendships. Close friendships. Look with me at verse 26. Greet all the brethren with a holy kiss.

Well, when I was standing out there this morning, I was giving you all about the biggest kiss I'm going to give you. But my wife came up, and she said, I'm going to give you an actual kiss. But I was kind of disappointed. She just kissed me on the cheeks.

But you've been in European cultures, or seen it on TV and stuff before, where people will greet each other on either side of the cheek. And there were different types of kissing at that time. The only culture we know of that actually as friends kissed each other on the lip was Persian cultures. But most of the cultures during this time would kiss each other either on the cheeks if you were friends or on the forehead if you were kissing a child. Now, I'm not saying that that is necessary, you know, that that's the only way in which we have to greet one another.

Actually, churches really struggled with this, you know. By the 5th century, and this is not, they call it the Apostolic Constitution, but this is way longer. This is in the 6th century, the 500s. People are still practicing this holy kiss, but what's the problem, right?

Do you really want women kissing men and men kissing women? Can this get a little bit out of control? Well, apparently it did because they had the women sit on this side and the men sit on this side, so you could still do the holy kiss, but you weren't getting weird. And I'm sure if I had gone out there today and instead of just giving you a kiss in your hand, if I had said, here, I want to give you a kiss, some of you would be like, I'm going back in my car and we're going home. We're going to find a new church.

But the point is this intimate affection, this love for one another. Some of you are huggers, and when you see people, you're excited to see them, and you want to give them a hug and tell them you love them. I remember after I had the week my father-in-law died, struggling up here, crying up here, somebody in the back just gave me a hug. Not a person who's typically a hugger, but wanted to give me a hug and just let me know, I love you. I'm there for you. I'm caring for you.

I said this, I'm not, I don't think our consciences are bounded to necessarily be driven by this cultural thing of a kiss, but this is why it's called a holy kiss, right? Not a carnal kiss, right? But it's this holy affection we have for our brothers and sisters in Christ. But this could be broken down. All right, this can be broken down in a congregation. Notice the scope of this.

It's not greet all your friends in the church. It's not greet the people you like in the church. It's not greet the clique that you have in the church. But what does it say, verse 26? Greet all the brethren with a holy kiss. There's no partiality allowed in this.

And in some ways, I could see in some cultures, you know, in the South, maybe you need to institute a more close handshake or something. Because in the South, when churches started to become, when Jim Crow went away, and before that, slavery went away, and churches tried to integrate, you would still see black people sitting over here, and white people sitting over there, and even though they were trying to intermingle, they wouldn't greet one another. They wouldn't show that affection towards one another. And it wasn't until the pastors hugged one another that the congregation saw, oh, I have to greet all the brethren. I have to greet all the brethren, whether they were Jew or Greek, Macedonian, slave or free, male or female, loving one another.

And this can happen in our own church, right? You can get factions, you can get parties, you can get cliques within a congregation, even one as small as ours, right? Only greeting the people you like, but not greeting the people you don't like. Could you believe that in a church you would have to tell everybody to be nice even if you don't like the person?

Yeah, this is what they're saying here to the church. Greet all of them, greet everyone. This is what Jesus is talking about in Matthew chapter five. What do the Pharisees and even the tax collectors do? They greet their friends. But what are Christians meant to do? To love everyone. Don't just greet your friends, love, everyone. Newcomers, greet the old members of the congregation. Older saints, please spend time greeting the children in the church. Children, spend time with the older members of the church.

Don't just spend time in your own little friend group. But we are meant to have intergenerational friendships. We are meant to have different area friendships. Some of you might live in different places all throughout the country, or all throughout Southeast Iowa, some of you not even Southeast Iowa, you look like North Iowa, but do you have friendship with one another?

This is one of the dangers in the church is when we just come for worship, we hear the word, we do what we saw in Nehemiah chapter eight, opening up the book, but as soon as the book is closed and the final prayer is gone, out the door you go. This is where you all can be bystanders here. I'm going to talk to our members online. This is why we desperately want you to be here in church. Online church is not a substitute for the actual fellowship of the saints. We need to greet one another. We need to greet one another with a holy kiss. We need that affection towards one another. There are a myriad of ways in which this happens, maybe even unintentionally. You might just not organize your Sabbath well. This is really hard. We have a bunch of kids. We have a gaggle of kids.

And if there's any day in which your children are going to drag their feet, it's going to be the Lord's Day. Right, where it's like, come on, normally your shower takes five minutes and somehow it's taking 13 minutes today. Come on, come on, come on, just get out of the shower and get your shoes on, wear your shoes, wear your clothes. Why do you not have underwear on?

Come on, you know, you're trying to wrangle these children in and for some reason you can't get to church on time. But guess what that means when you can't get to church on time? You also don't get to greet one another. You don't get to have those informal conversations. This is part of how we manage our time and set the Lord's Day aside as an entire day to worship God. It's meant for that. It's meant for enjoying one another.

I think Jesus shows the reality of the blessingness of this family greeting, this love in the parable of the prodigal son. When the prodigal son returns home, The dad sees him afar off, he's been waiting for him, he picks up the bottom of his robe, he runs out to go meet his son, he hugs his son, and he kisses him on the neck because his son has returned home. He loves his son, it's a sign of affection for him. Jesus Christ shows that is how God receives us. God greets us with a holy kiss. God loves us with that love, and we show that type of friendship.

We were talking to a lady, and I'll get on to the next point in a second for this. We were talking to a lady at family camp whose kids are missionaries in Uganda, and apparently in Uganda, when you shake someone's hand, if you've met them for the first time and you're not really friendly with them, you shake their hand one time. But if you're kind of good friends with them, and you want to be really nice, you shake their hand, and shake their hand, and shake their hand, and shake their hand, and shake their hand. But if you're really, really, really, really, really good friends, it just keeps going on, and keeps going on, and you just keep talking while you're shaking hands. And one of the ways in which their family learned to let the people know that they actually cared about them was they would shake their hands multiple times. just learning the culture and saying, okay, I love you, you're my brother and sister in Christ, even though they had never met them before, to show them they wanted that bond of affection between them. What does the church look like? It's marked by prayer. It's marked by this close friendships with one another, greeting one another, but it's also marked by the Bible. It's also marked by the reading of God's word. Look with me at verse 27.

I charge you by the Lord that this epistle be read to all the holy brethren." This is serious business. I think that the New King James Version is fine here when it says, I charge you, but this is a legal word. It's even stronger than that is. It is, I adjure you, I put you under oath by the living God, by the Lord himself, that you must read this book to all the holy brethren. You got no choice in this. Right? If you don't do this, God will judge you, is what Paul is saying here. It's really, really strong language. Because God's people are people of the book. It's been that way since the very beginning. That's what God commanded in Deuteronomy chapter 6, right?

As they were walking along the way with their kids, they were supposed to be talking about His Word. It was supposed to be written on their hands, as a front lip between their eyes, written on the doorposts of their house, and inscribed upon their hearts. This is how we show our love for the Lord, by being in His Word. And as we're going to talk about in a couple weeks, when Joshua brings his people into the Promised Land, what's one of the first things that the Lord tells Joshua?

This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, that you may be careful to observe according to all that is written in it. We meditate on God's Word. We open God's Word. We saw that in Nehemiah chapter 8, when there is a revival of the church after captivity. What do the people say to Ezra? Bring out the book. Open up the book. Teach us the book. Read us the book. We want to read God's Word.

And that's what Paul is saying here. And it's interesting, if you notice, verse 25, brethren, pray for us. Okay, verse 26, read all the brethren with a holy kiss. But here in chapter, in verse 27, I charge you, I adjure you, I put you under oath. This is Paul with all of his apostolic authority jumping in. A lot of commentators think it's at this point that Timothy or Savannah stopped writing, and Paul himself actually picked up the pencil and started writing himself.

I'm telling you, by the apostolic authority, this is what you must read to the church, to all of them. And this is a New Testament practice of the church. If we read the Church Fathers, we find out that in the early church, this is indeed what marked every single worship service. If you read the Apostolic Fathers, the Church Fathers writing from about 80 A.D. to about 150 A.D., again and again when they talk about the worship of God, they talk about the reading of the word, the sacraments, and prayer. reading of the word, sacraments, and prayer, reading the gospels, reading the epistles, reading the prophets, reading the law, reading and singing the Psalms. Again and again and again, this is what marks God's word, marks God's worship as a word-saturated fellowship.

The word is expected to be read, not just to a secret group, but to all the brethren. I charge you by the Lord that this epistle be read to all the holy brethren." What does that necessarily mean? It means that it's being read in a language people can't actually understand. Now, I encourage every single one of you to pick up the study of Greek and Hebrew and outdo me in Greek and Hebrew. Catch me when I'm wrong. Please do it. I love it. But guess what? You have a blessing that you have God's Word in a language you can understand.

That's not the case throughout church history. The Roman Catholic Church hid the gospel, hid the very words of God under the Latin that very few people spoke. Even the priests, as they would get up and say things in Latin, many of them had just memorized the words but didn't actually know what they meant. And the church said, no, God's people are not holy enough, they cannot understand God's word, so we're gonna keep it in Latin, so that way only the priests and the bishops and the archbishops and the cardinals and the pope can understand and read God's word.

Brothers and sisters, this verse right here directly says, No, read it to all the holy brethren. It was written in Greek, it's given to people in Macedonia, given to people at Thessalonica who know Greek, can read Greek, can understand it, even if they can't read it, can hear it and know what it says. Timothy was charged by Paul in 1 Timothy 4, verse 13, that he was to read God's word to the people. The fan and the flames, the gift that was given to him at the laying of hands by prophecy.

And one of the things that we know from other books, like the book of Galatians and the book of Ephesians, sorry, I want to say the place names, Ephesus and Galatia, these were cyclical letters. First Thessalonians didn't stay in Thessalonica. But they copied the book of First Thessalonians and they gave it to the people in Philippi, and they gave it to the people in Berea, and it made its way down to the people in Athens, and it was circulated throughout the churches. That's how the New Testament churches got their many, many manuscripts. We have such a wealth of manuscripts from all these places that show that these letters were copied and copied and copied and copied and sent to all the holy brethren, not just in Thessalonica, but all throughout the area.

But why? Why should God's people be marked by the reading of his word? Because as Simon Peter said to Jesus, where will we go? You have the words of everlasting life. We come to God's Word because we find the truth of Christ. We come to God's Word because we find the grace of Christ.

We come to God's Word because we find the law of Christ. We come to God's Word because we're admonished by Christ. We come to God's Word because we're taught by Christ. We come to God's Word because we learn of salvation by Christ alone through faith in Christ alone. We come to God's Word because it's the tool in which He has ordainly, sovereignly set in place to lead us, to rule over us, in both faith and life. We come to God's word because it shows us the living word.

It shows us Christ himself. We come to God's worship because we're spurred on in our love for Christ through his word, because we're comforted by the gospel of Christ when times are hard. We come to God's word during worship because it shows us what the body of Christ is to look like today. Brothers and sisters, what is our church marked by? I want you to ask yourself in your own heart today, write it down on your paper. Am I devoted to prayer? Have I been greeting the saints? Am I paying careful attention to God's word? That's what we come together for. That's what we long for when we come to worship. That's what the church is founded upon and the apostles and the prophets.

I pray that you find it here. If for some reason this book ever gets closed and philosophy or some other junk creeps in here, factions and divisions, I pray that you call us out for it, that you come to the elders and you tell us we're sinning. And I pray that this congregation might be marked by prayer, by close friendships, and by a love for his word.

Closing Prayer

Let's pray together now. Father, we thank you so much for this day. Lord, we thank you for your word. God, we pray that your Holy Spirit might impress these things upon our hearts. Lord, and if there are sinful or wrong things that I have said today in this fallible sermon, Lord, I pray that they would be purged away and that only the gold would remain. Lord, I pray that you would give us a hunger and a thirst for these things that mark your church. Apply it to us. Let us live it.