Sermon Tone Analysis

Golf Courses and other better places

Have you ever noticed that when human beings are faced with the reality and prospect of death there is almost always an afterlife invoked in order to remove the sting of death.

He’s now in the great golf course in the sky with a perfect handicap.

She’s sleeping with the angels.

It’s rare, that in the face of death, especially a sudden death, that the self-professed athiest will hang on to their cold hearted belief that for them death means its all over and everything has ultimately amounted to nothing.

Christians who have died

Death is real.

Death is hard to deal with.

You and I know that.

And the question of death was one that troubled the Thessalonian Christians too.

It is natural, when faced with death and our own grief and bereavement to ask questions.

What has happened to our loved ones?

Are they all right?

Shall we see them again?

The Thessalonians are asking all these sorts of questions about death.

But it also seems that for the Thessalonians they have got the return of Jesus a little bit wrong.

You’ll remember in the first half of Ch 4 that we looked at last week that Paul says,

and in the second half of ch 5 that we’ll read next week he says:

“warn the idle” 1 Thes 5:14.

It would seem that for some of the Christian’s they’ve taken so seriously the second coming of Jesus that they’ve stopped work and so certain Jesus would come any day now, they are so shocked that their loved ones would die before Jesus returned.

And so they don’t understand what this means for their loved ones.

John Stott:

Relatives or friends of theirs had now died before Christ’s advent.

They had not anticipated this; it took them by surprise and greatly disturbed them.

How would the Christian dead fare when Jesus came for his own?

Would they stand at a disadvantage?

Would they miss the blessing of the Parousia?

Were they even lost?

It seems clear that the Thessalonians had addressed such questions as these to Paul, either directly or through Timothy.

Paul writes to answer these concerns and in doing so he reminds all of us that, for the Christian, there is something different about death.

Anyone who ‘has fallen asleep’, that is died, will rise again and be with Jesus.

And for those of us who don’t die before Jesus returns?

We will be caught up in the second coming of Christ and will also be with Jesus, and we will join those who have died .

This is an encouraging truth!

And we should be encouraged by these words.

What we should not do is load these words up with crazy speculations of what it all means trying to sort out the precise details of exactly what Paul is describing here.

Likewise we should not seek to strip his statements of any real meaning as though they don’t describe real events.

What we see here is that:

we are eagerly expecting a cosmic event which will include the personal, visible appearing of Jesus Christ and the gathering to him of all his people, whether dead or alive at the time) with agnosticism about the full reality behind the imagery.

Jesus’ Return

So if Jesus will return one day, and if this is the source of our Christian hope in the face of death, then the natural question is when will all this happen and how should I live in the meantime?

As we mentioned earlier it seems some of the Thessalonians might have gotten a little bit sort of like over excited doomsday preppers.

Giving up working and expecting to be caught up in Jesus’ second coming any day now.

The Thessalonians it seems have thought seeing that Jesus is going to come back one day they should try and figure out when that is.

But Paul gives them, and us some helpful words of instruction for living while we wait for Jesus to come back.

We don’t know, but it will happen suddenly, so be prepared.

1.

We don’t know when it will happen.

Echoing the teacing of Jesus

2. It will happen suddenly.

Like when you watch one of those end of the world movies and people are just casully going about their business and then boom a meteor blows them up.

If they’d known a meteor might come perhaps they’d have taken more precautions.

3.

So be prepared/stay awake.

But as Christians we know it will come so we can be ready.

Paul contrasts light and darkness, wakefulness and sleep, for those who are ready for the second coming and those who are not through verse 4-10.

Paul wants the Thessalonians to not be sleepy, drunk night dwellers who live in their sin.

Rather he wants them to be, awake, alert, sober light livers who seek to live out their faith, hope and love.

To live in light of Jesus’ second coming is to be active in living out our faith.

I think this picture of putting on faith, love and hope as armour is a similar encouragement to the one we got back at the opening of Chapter 4.

Live in order to please God more and more.

Why do we do this?

Not to earn our salvation but because of what God has done for us:

Jesus died for you and me in order that when he returns, whether we’re still alive, or we’ve “gone to sleep”, that is died, we might join him in eternity.

When we put our faith in Jesus we move from the darkness of sin to the light of Christ.

Paul’s encouragement is to continue in the light and to be ready to recieve the full rewards of the light.

In other words, if we belong to the day (the new day which dawned with Christ), our behaviour must be daytime behaviour.

Let’s not sleep or even yawn our way through life, or live in our pyjamas.

Let’s stay awake and alert.

For then we shall be ready when Christ comes and we will not be taken by surprise.

Encourage each other

Paul rounds out this section with the encouragement to encourage each other.

Just as he did in 1 Thes 4:18

In the face of death.

In the struggle to keep living lives ready for the return of Christ we need each other.

We need to keep loving each other.

Encouraging each other.

Helping each other live lives ready for Jesus’ return.

We do that by meeting together.

By sharing our lives.

By being students of God’s word together.

By praying for each other.

Let’s do those things as we await Jesus’ return.