Living Life in Light of Jesus Return: A Pastor's Exhortations

1 Thessalonians 5:12-15

The Reverend Dr. J. Ligon Duncan III

If you have your Bibles, I'd invite you to turn with me to 1

Thessalonians chapter 5. Were going to be looking at four brief
verses today, from verse 12 to 15, of this passage. John Stott, in his
wonderful commentary on this passage in The Bible Speaks
Today series, calls this section, running from verse 12 down to verse
28, Christian Community or How to be a GospelChurch. Well
that's a great title for this section and he in fact outlines it in three
parts. He's looking, of course, a little bit further than the passage
we're going to study today, but in verses 12 and 13 he says, These
verses teach us how pastors and people should relate to and regard
one another. Then, secondly, in verses 14 and 15, he said, These
verses show how church members should relate to and care for one
another. And then in verses 16 to 28 he says, Paul turns out
attention to how the public worship of the church should be
conducted.

Well today, we're just going to be looking at verses 12 to 15. And if

you count them up, depending on how you count, you end up with
either eight or ten exhortations from Paul in the span of those four
short verses. Now relax, this is not going to be either an eight or ten
point sermon! Were going to look at this passage in four parts and I
want you to look and be ready as we hear the Word read, be ready
to listen for those four parts. The first will come in verses 12 and 13,
the first half of verse 13. And in that passage, Paul indeed talks to
the congregation of the Thessalonians about what elders do and
how they are to relate to those elders.

Then secondly, if you look at the second half of verse 13, Paul talks
there about what all of us should aspire for our experience as a
congregation. He says, Be at peace among yourselves. He's talking
about our aspiration for a fellowship that is at peace with itself.

Third, if you look at verse 14, there are four exhortations alone in
verse 14, but the overarching theme is this. How do you relate to
different kinds of church members appropriately? And Paul, in that
passage, has at least three kinds of church members that it talks to
us about how we ought to relate to them. And then he has a general
statement at the end of verse 14 about how we're to relate to
everybody in the church. So in that verse he's talking to us about
how to appropriately relate to the different kinds of church members.

And then finally, if you look at verse 15, there Paul is talking about
how we can have a church that is characterized by forgiveness and
kindness, how to be a community characterized by forgiveness and
kindness. So be on the lookout for those four things as we read the
Word of God. And before we do that, let's pray and ask for His help
and blessing.

Heavenly Father, this is Your Word given by inspiration meant for our
profit, for our wellbeing, that we might be equipped for every good
work. Your Word is truth. Sanctify us with Your Truth. Open our eyes
to behold wonderful things in Your Word. Teach us, Lord, what it
means to be a Gospel church. We ask all these things in Jesus'
name, amen.
This is the Word of God. Hear it, beginning in 1 Thessalonians 5:12:

We ask you, brothers, to respect those who labor among you and
are over you in the Lord and admonish you, and to esteem them very
highly in love because of their work. Be at peace among yourselves.
And we urge you, brothers, admonish the idle, encourage the
fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with them all. See that no one
repays anyone evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one
another and to everyone.

Amen, and thus ends this reading of God's holy, inspired, and
inerrant Word. May He write its eternal truth upon all our hearts.

We want to be a Gospel church. To be a Gospel church, of course in

the first place, means that we are a church that has been brought
together by the Gospel. We wouldn't be a part of this congregation if
it were not for the grace of God to us in the Gospel and if it were not
for our faith response to the claims of the Gospel. We realize that
God is our Maker, He made us, and we owe worship to Him. But we
also realize that sin is our failure. We have sinned and rebelled
against Him and we deserve His condemnation and we realize that
Christ is our Savior, the only Savior that there is who, in His person,
came to die in our place that we might be reconciled to God and we
recognize that faith is the answer to God's free offer in the Gospel,
that we must rest and trust on Jesus Christ alone for salvation as He
is offered in the Gospel and that new life then flows from that saving
faith. It's a pleasure for us to live in that new life where we've been
freed from the bondage of sin. That's what brings a church together.
It's so amazing, isn't it, to hear Paul, the Hebrew of Hebrews, the
citizen of Israel, one descended from the tribe of Benjamin, of a
Pharisee according to the law, speaking to these pagans, these
Gentiles, these Greeks in Thessalonica and calling them brothers.
Isn't that wonderful? It's a picture of how the Gospel had brought
them together. There's nothing in their heritage, in their ethnicity, in
their religious background that would have brought Paul and that
crew of Greeks together but the Gospel.

So the Gospel brings us together as a church but the Gospel also

shapes our life as a church and there are different ways that the New
Testament describes the effect of the Gospel in shaping our lives in
the local congregation. But one way it does is it describes the
church, the Gospel shaped church, as a family. And we aspire to be
a family. Now it's very hard to do that, very frankly, with three
thousand folks spread over a couple of services. It's hard to know
one another. Do you ever find, like me, you run into a college or
university student and you haven't talked to them in a number of
months and you ask them how it's going and they say, Well, I
graduated three years ago and I'm working for Morgan Keegan?
And youre embarrassed because you thought you were keeping up
and you thought they were a junior but they've been out of school
and theyre doctors and lawyers and financial planners and all sorts
of things and you didn't know that because it's hard to keep up. It's
hard to keep up with about more than two hundred people and really
be involved in their lives so we have to go a little extra mile in order
to really be a family in our congregation but it's something that we
aspire to and this is something that is clearly on Paul's mind here
because a Gospel church is a family.

A Gospel church is a family. It's a family loved and chosen by God;

we're brought together by God in the first place. We draw our life
from God, and we manifest God's life in us in the graces of the
Christian life, especially love. And if you wanted an overarching
theme for this whole section, from verses 12 to 13, it's How
Christian Love is Manifested in Our Relationships, whether it's in the
relationships between pastors and people, elders in the
congregation, whether it's our general aspiration for the life of the
church, whether it's the way we relate particularly to different kinds of
people in the congregation, or whether it's how we build a community
that's characterized by forgiveness and kindness. All of this is about
the application of Christian love.

Now as I said, if you count them there are either eight or nine or ten
exhortations for our life together in this passage and do you notice,
not one of these can be obeyed by yourselves. You know, if I were
giving you exhortations for the Christian life and I said, Read your
Bible every day you can do that by yourself. Of if I said, Pray more
often, you can do that by yourself, but none of the exhortations that
Paul gives in this passage can be done by yourself. They all require
you relating to other people. And that points out what is so often the
truth of the New Testament - that you can't grow in grace, you can't
become more mature in Christ without one another. We need one
another. We can't grow to Christian maturity apart from one another
because so much of our growth is in our relationships with one
another in the heartbreak of being let down and having to forgive
people who've let us down, in the difficulty of having to walk
alongside of friends in Christ who are under enormous burdens and
discouragement, in the give and take of normal life where we defer to
one another and seek to serve one another and forbear with one
another and all of those other dynamics of life, well, kind of like in
your own family. Families get on one another's nerves; families have
to learn to forgive. Families can be places of tension and contention
but we don't want it to be that way. We want a family that's shaped
by the Gospel. What does that look like? Paul tells us in four parts.

RESPECT, ESTEEM, AND LOVE YOUR ELDERS WHO LABOR,

LEAD, AND HELP YOU LEARN

First, if you look at verses 12 and 13, Paul says this - respect,
esteem, and love your elders who labor, lead, and help you to learn.
Now did you notice how I got six things into that one sentence?
Respect, esteem, and love your elders I'm going to show you
where I got that in verses 12 and 13 in a minute who labor, lead,
and help you to learn. That's Paul's exhortation about how people
and pastors are to relate. A couple of Sundays ago a congregation
member saw this text coming and she stopped me after the first
service and she said, Is it going to be kind of awkward to you to
preach a sermon to the congregation about how we're supposed to
respect and love you more? And I said, Well, I haven't quite figured
out how I'm going to do that one yet! And I'm going to do a Paul
thing because Paul is actually not talking about the Thessalonians
respecting and esteeming and loving him more, he's actually talking
to them about respecting and esteeming and loving their leaders in
that local congregation more. You respect and love me more than I
deserve so let me focus the attention right now on your respect,
esteem, and love for your elders, for your leaders in this local
congregation and for the other pastors here.

Let me give you the context. Apparently, you remember chapters 3

and 4, there have been several errors in Christian practice that have
been going on in this congregation. There have been some people
who, because they believe Jesus is coming again very soon, have
stopped working and now they've become a burden on the
congregation because other people in the congregation are having to
feed them. Theyre not working because Jesus is coming again and
the rest of the congregation is having to take care of them. And there
are others who are very, very fearful about the nature, about what's
going to happen to their loved ones that have already died and Jesus
hasn't come yet. And there've been all of these tricky pastoral
problems going on that we've described in chapters 3 and 4, and the
elders, the leaders in this local church, have had to confront people
in the church and apparently hasn't gone so well. And the result has
been there are people in the congregation who are critical of their
leaders.

Now you say to me, This passage doesn't say anything about
elders. Well it's true, it doesn't say the word elder, but notice three
things that the people who are talked about do here. They, 12, labor
among you and are over you in the Lord and admonish you. Notice
that these people, who youre called to respect and esteem and love,
labor, they are over you, and admonish you. Now what are those
three jobs that elders have? Labors are called to labor among you.
Pastoral work is hard work, believe it or not. A mother in the
congregation stopped me a few days ago and said that she
overheard her son talking with her husband saying, I wish that you
could have a job like Dr. Duncan so that you could be with your
family more. You know, he only has to work on Sunday! Well I
understand that there are a lot of you that think of the pastoral
ministry like that, and lazy people can work in the pastorate, I
promise you, but it has always been my endeavor not to be one of
those. You can call me a lot of things but I've endeavored for you not
to be able to call me lazy. My mother's motto in life was, You might
be smarter than me but Ill outwork you. And I've tried to live that out
in the way that I've conducted myself here. So Paul's describing
people in the pastoral ministry as laborers. They work hard.

Secondly, he says that they are over you. They are there to guide
you, to shepherd you, to lead you, and theyre there to admonish.
Now the word admonish means to hold the Word of God up before
your eyes and say, The Word of God calls us to this way of life. It
calls us to do these things; it calls us to not do these things. It's a
word that's used in the context of moral exhortation. Now those three
things are things that elders do. So here we are in Thessalonians,
one of the earliest books, if not the earliest book of the New
Testament, and Paul is already talking about the duties of the
eldership. Now that shouldn't surprise us because Luke, in the book
of Acts, describes Paul, wherever he goes, making sure that elders
had been ordained in the churches because that followed a pattern
that stretched all the way back to the Old Testament, not just in the
days of the synagogue but all the way back to Moses! So Paul is
speaking to this congregation about respecting their elders because
apparently, as those elders have been involved in addressing some
touchy situations in the congregation, there's been some blow back
and people have been less than respectful towards their leaders and
Paul says, Respect them, esteem them, love them, because they
labor and lead and help you to learn. Paul is calling on the
congregation to show a due regard for the ministers, the elders, that
the Lord has put in the congregation.

And your culture doesn't help you do that. This is not a culture the
culture that we live in is not a culture that just loves authority. You
know, if we were to speak to our grandparents about the way our
generation speaks about people in authority today, I think our
grandparents would all be horrified. It's a very, very different world,
fifty years ago to now, from the way we speak about people in
authority. So the culture isn't going to help us here. Were going to
have to be shaped by the Gospel. Jesus lived as a man under
authority. What did He say to His disciples? It is My meat to do the
will of Him who sent Me. He loved to be under the authority of His
heavenly Father and doing the work of His heavenly Father. And so
Paul is calling on pastors and people to have appropriate
relationships here and especially for the people to esteem the work
of their elders, their leaders in the local congregation.

PURSUE PEACE AND UNITY WITH THE BRETHEN

So there's the first aspect of a Gospel shaped church. The second

one is this, and it's an aspiration. You see it at the end of verse 13.
Be at peace among yourselves. Paul is telling us here to pursue
peace and unity with the brethren. Peace and unity do not just
happen. They take deliberate commitment. One of the things that
you vow - if you are a communing member of First Presbyterian
Church, you have answered this question: Do you promise to study
or strive for the purity and peace of the church? That's a beautiful
question and it comes right out of the apostle Paul and this verse
could be a proof text for it - 1 Thessalonians chapter 5 verse 13
second half. Striving or studying the purity and peace of the church
is a very important part of our membership vow because peace
doesn't just happen. Unity doesn't just happen. It has to be cultivated
and it can't be cultivated unless we aspire to it, unless we value the
peace, not just the lack of dissention but the real spiritual unity that
exists in the church.
One of the things that we're going to sing when we sing, Blest Be
the Tie That Binds in a moment, is that our hearts long for the same
thing. One of the stanzas has a beautiful representation that our
goals, our heart, our aspiration is unified, it's one. Well is that really
the case? You have to work to that end to really be unified around
one mission, one goal, one cause, one aspiration in a local
congregation. And Paul's calling us to that here. Pursue peace and
unity with the brethren.

REPSOND APPROPIATELY TO EACH DIFFERENT

KIND OF FAMILY MEMBER

Then, if you look at verse 14, youll see a third thing that Paul says.
We are to respond appropriately to each different kind of family
member. You know, family, it's amazing; you have two, three, four, or
more children and you begin to see very, very different aspects of
their characters and personalities and it's like that in a local church
too. There are different kinds of people. And Paul tells us that we
don't respond to everybody in the same way. There are different
ways to respond to different kinds of family members. Look at verse
14. We urge you, brothers, admonish the idle, encourage the
fainthearted, help the weak. Let's just stop right there and then well
look at the general exhortation. Admonish the idle. Idle here is a
military term referring to somebody who's out of step with the other
guys marching in the rank, maybe because he's lagging or loafing,
but whatever the case is, he's out of step with everybody else. And
Paul says, What you need to do is admonish him. Now it's the
same language that's used up in verse 12. What are the officers, the
elders, the leaders of the church supposed to do? Theyre supposed
to admonish us. Theyre supposed to hold the Word of God up
before our eyes and say, This is the standard of the Christian life.
This is what we're to do; this is what we're not to do. And so this
person is going to be exhorted with the Word of God. But Paul is
saying that the whole congregation is to be doing this to one another.
Don't just leave it to the pastors or the elders; we as a congregation
are to be exhorting one another in this way.

Then he says, Encourage the fainthearted. Notice, not, Admonish

the fainthearted, but encourage the fainthearted. Now the
fainthearted here may refer to some of the people, end of chapter 4
beginning of chapter 5, who were struggling because of their
concerns about dead loved ones missing out on the blessing of the
second coming so theyre very easily discouraged, theyre
fainthearted. Or it may refer to people who are constitutionally timid,
or both, and more. But notice Paul says for them the response is not
to get touch on them, to get on their case l encourage them,
strengthen them.

And then he says, Help the weak. Now again, the weak could refer
to people who are spiritually immature, theyre less mature in Christ
than they ought to be, or it could even refer to people who are
stumbling and struggling with sexual immorality. You have to go back
and look at the three previous chapters that we've just been studying
and see some of the sin that Paul's addressing in this congregation
and try and draw some parallels. But notice, kick them out? No,
help the weak. Three very different responses for three very
different kinds of church members, people in different settings. The
weak are to be aided, the fainthearted are to be strengthened, those
that are out of step, theyre to be confronted, and we're to be doing
that with one another. In other words, we're looking out for one
another; we're concerned about one another's spiritual wellbeing. It's
not that we're being busybodies. It's not that we're all collectively big
brothers spying in on one another's lives, but we care enough about
one another to engage with one another about important things in
the Christian life.

And then what's the overall rubric? What's the last thing that Paul
says in verse 14? Be patient with them all. Ouch. That hurt,
because I so often excuse myself, rather proudly, Lig, youre just
impatient. But do you know what I'm actually saying when I say to
myself, Lig, youre just impatient, feeling a little bit prideful about
that? I'm actually saying that I'm unloving because Paul says in 1
Corinthians 13 that love is patient so when I am impatient I'm
actually showing a deficit of love because patience is an expression
of love. Notice again how all of these exhortations boils down to the
expression of love in a Christian congregation. So how do we deal
with one another? When we see someone out of line do we expect
them (snap, snap, snap), Get back in line? Nope, we're patient
because the Lord was patient with us. And so patience is
overarching in our dealing with one another. And so Paul is teaching
us here how we respond appropriately to every different kind of
church family member in verse 14.

CULTIVATE A COMMUNITY OF FORBEARANCE,

FORGIVENESS AND KINDNESS

And then finally if you look at verse 15, Paul here tells us how to
cultivate a community of forbearance and forgiveness and kindness.
Look at his words. See that no one repays anyone evil for evil, but
always seek to do good to one another and to everyone. Look at the
three parts of that sentence. See that no one repays evil for evil. So
we're not going to deal with one another via the way of reprisal. Our
standard operating procedure is not going to be getting even, it's
going to be forbearance and even forgiveness. Obeying this
exhortation means that our community is going to be characterized
by forgiveness and that means real forgiveness, and real forgiveness
hurts; it's costly because we can really, really mess up with one
another. And Paul says, When that happens, the way I want you to
deal with one another is not by getting even but by forbearing.

And then he says look at the second thing Always seek to do

good to one another. There, he's talking about our cultivating
kindness towards one another or actually thinking, How can I do
good to my fellow congregation members? This is just like Jesus,
who, Himself refused to revile when He was reviled and who came
not to be served but to serve. In other words, this church is going to
be so Gospel shaped that we're going to look like, we're going to act
like Jesus acted in His earthly ministry to us. Were going to seek to
do good to one another.

But notice the last three words, and to everyone. It's not just doing
good to one another, our standard posture, our standard operating
procedure towards the world is going to be to bless, to do good to
the world. This is very important for us to bear in mind because as
evangelical Christians become a smaller and more hated minority in
Western culture, it will be our tendency to get mad about that at the
majority secular culture and all they will see is our sort of red-faced
anger at them, that they've messed up this wonderful country that
we've built. And Paul says, No, no. Our attitude towards that culture
is we want to do good to you. We want to be good to you. It doesn't
matter whether you like us, it doesn't matter whether you hate us, we
want to do good to you because Jesus did good to us when we didn't
deserve it and when we were rebelling against Him and He died for
us and He spared us by the shedding of His own blood and we want
to reflect that same kind of goodness and kindness and love to the
culture around us.

This is a Gospel shaping of a local church. That's what Paul's talking

about and that's what we aspire to. So many of these things, you
know I really can say this congregation, by God's grace, has done a
pretty good job of, but we've got a long way to grow. May God grant
us the aspiration to grow and then by His Holy Spirit work that growth
in us. Let's pray.

Heavenly Father, thank You for Your Word. We ask that You would
enable us to respond by seeing our own sin and repenting of it and
by aspiring to this beautiful vision of what a church shaped by the
Gospel should look like. We ask this in Jesus' name, amen.