It is often true that Christians have a desire to know God’s will, although I suspect that much of our contemporary desire to know God’s will is bound up in some sort of divine weather forecasting: we want to know if our skies will be blue or grey, that we might be able to better plan and chart our days on this earth. Today’s passage and study takes us beyond that, and we will be processing it along the lines of two guiding questions - 1) Why do we desire to know God’s will? 2) What exactly is at the heart of God’s will for us?
(A) God’s will is that you grow in faithfulness to the gospel (1 Thess 4:1-2)
Before we jump into the substantive content of Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians, consider how Paul begins this segment. The language and tone of 1 Thess 4:1 is chock-full of emotion: Paul, as much as he has the apostolic authority to do otherwise, ask and urges them to stay faithful. If you have been reading the previous chapters of Thessalonians, this should not come as a surprise. The gentle, nursing mother-esque, and affectionately desirous Paul shows up again.
But Paul is not merely speaking for himself.
Paul frames his personal and impassioned appeal as an appeal that is made “in the Lord Jesus” (1 Thess 4:1). The calls us to rethink how we have been processing these words. First, it tells us that there is no room whatsoever for “red-letter theology”, where the directly recorded words of Jesus (which appear in red in some Bibles) are held to be of greater spiritual value than the rest of the Bible. Here, Paul reminds us that the apostolic letters can be read as letters from Christ Himself! How then, have we been reading these words? Second, we are reminded that the instructions and exhortations that follow carry the warmth and the weight of Jesus’ person. 2000 years after Calvary, many of us wish that we had more of Jesus’ life to know and hear from. 1 Thess 4:1-2 remind us that the tender hearted, truly righteous, and sagely instructive Jesus speaks to us through Scripture. Perhaps the weight of the truth that our Jesus asks and urges us in a certain direction has never sunk in for you. Pause to let the weight of its glory sink in now.
As for the content of the asking and urging, we see that Paul exhorts the Thessalonian church to “walk and please God” more and more - just as they are already doing, and following the same instructions that they had already been given. Remember that the Thessalonian church was a very young church (probably less than a year old!). This might not seem like much, but it should strike us as a challenge to many facets of contemporary church culture. Our day and age is marked by a youthful restlessness that is driven by modern metrics of success. What matters most for young christians and young churches are their 5-year plans, 10-years plans, and growth models. What matters less is a steadfast obedience in the same direction, where the fruit of ones life is not seen through measures of comfort, financial accruement, and social capital, but seen through the simple metric of a God-pleasing life.
And this is not just faithfulness to an arbitrary standard of what might please God. This is a faithfulness to the very same gospel that saved them! These are neither new instructions, nor innovations on old news. This is a faithfulness to the same good news of Jesus Christ that entailed specific instructions about a God-pleasing life. Are we clear about the Gospel, its entailments, and how we are falling in line with a long records of saints who have walked the same path that we are called to?
Before we get to the specifics of what a God-pleasing life might look like, it is worth considering whether we even ask ourselves what a God-pleasing life looks like. How often does this question, “God, how might I please you more?” surface in our decision-making process? Friends, Jesus personally desires that you are faithful, stay faithful, and grow in your faithfulness. Jesus desires that your desires are motivated by a fundamental desire to please God. Any endeavour to uncover God’s will that does not proceed from this desire will set you down a dangerous path. Take heed.
(B) God will is that you be sanctified practically and in community (1 Thess 4:3-12)
Paul joins together a desire to please God with a desire to keep God’s will, and “the will of God” for our lives is revealed to be our sanctification (1 Thess 4:3). For the Thessalonian church, the first instance of sanctification that Paul points to is their growth in sexual purity (1 Thess 4:3-4).
While the war against sexual sin seems to be timeless, it is worth noting facets of the Thessalonian context. We remember that Thessalonica was a bustling port-capital of the Macedonian region in the Roman Empire. This meant that Thessalonica was a thriving mix of cultures and a flourishing spot of wealth. Most importantly, it means that the Thessalonian view on sexual ethics would have been rather similar to the larger Roman view. Kyle Harper’s “From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity” lends to our understanding of Roman sexual ethics. Many of us might know that same-sex relations, prostitution, and pederasty were widely permitted. However, what many of us miss out is that this sexual ethic was not built on some libertarian notion of sexual rights, but on status and power dynamics. Sexual activity was largely permitted and promoted insofar as it reflected the male’s taking of a dominant position. This is why pedastry, sexual fulfilment with slaves, and the frequenting of prostitutes were seen as perfectly legitimate outlets for male sexual desire, even if the man had a wife. For these sexual relations always placed the man in a dominant position, thereby avoiding the shame of playing the passive sexual role.
So we understand Paul’s exhortations in light of this culture, where one’s sexual ethic revealed more than one’s strictly sexual inclinations, but also one’s status and power in society. This also helps us to understand why some translations phrase 1 Thess 4:4 as “that each one of you know how to take a wife for himself in holiness and honour.” Remember that the dominant narrative was that males were permitted for sexual relations beyond the confines of marriage, on the basis that they were of superior stock to females, slaves, and children. The twin condition of ‘holiness’ and ‘honour’ completely subverts both ideas. The outworking of one’s sexual desire was not to be done lustfully, with the other party seen as a mere passive receptacle. Neither was the outworking of one’s sexual desire to be done with a lower view of the other party. Rather, holiness and honour that accorded each person the fundamental dignity of being made in God’s image was to govern their sexual relations.
We are also reminded in 1 Thess 4:6 that sexual transgression was not merely a personal failing, but a relational sin. The use of the term ‘brother’ here to refer to both females and males brings to remembrance the fact that we are all equal partakers of God’s inheritance in Christ, which reinforces the call for sexual practice with an eye on honour.
But Paul does not stop at mere exhortation. He provides the Thessalonian church with 3 specific reasons for their abstinence from sexual immorality. Consider the table below to understand what they are, and how they relate to us today.
To stress the applicative point of the second reason: if you have ever wondered what your life’s purpose is, wonder no more. Your life’s purpose is holiness. If you are in a relationship, consider what your relationship with your significant other would look like if holiness - rather than self-fulfilment, pleasurable gratification, and fantastical musings - were your operating paradigm. If you are not in a relationship, the same is true. Consider what your life would look like if you desired holiness more than you desired desirability, gratification, or even the status that comes with being in a relationship.
On an even more practical note, remember that God has called us as a people for holiness, and not just as individuals. Your war against sin is to be waged in community. If you are struggling with sin, especially sexual sin, today, then speak to a mature believers. There is grace to be found in confession.
Consider also, the logic at work in the third reason: The logic is that God has not only revealed His will for our lives, but He has also graciously provided for the means to meet His will. We do not grow in sanctification through self-help, self-medicating, and self-striving methods. We grow in sanctification through leaning on the Holy Spirit, and desiring to see more and more of His power worked out in our lives.
Many theologians have noted that the greatest gift of the gospel is that God gives us Himself. Friends, we see the same truth played out practically and personally here - God gives underserving sinners His Holy Spirit on account of what Jesus has done for them. This is a God who is good. I stress this again, that our God is a God who is good. The fight for holiness can often feel as though a brutal taskmaster were holding up an impossible standard that you hate having to meet. In giving us Himself, God reminds us that ‘His yoke is easy and His burden is light’ - He is a good God who has given us His Holy Spirit.
One clear way that the Holy Spirit aids us in this war has already been alluded to in 1 Thess 4:5. In contrasting the Thessalonian church with "the Gentiles who do not know God," Paul implicitly reminds them that they do know God!
Friends, we know God through the power of the Holy Spirit, and this is no light matter - it makes all the difference. Sin is not defeated simply by renouncing it and its affections. Something has to fill that gap. And the most practical way for you to kill sin is by growing in your knowledge and love of God. Nothing less will suffice. And this work of knowing God and growing in our love for Him is a work of the Holy Spirit! Have you ever considered what a privilege it is to be able to say that you know God? This is the God who sits enthroned over all creation, whose very Word spoke the cosmos into being. This is the God who is light - and in Him is no darkness, no perversion, no defect, no immorality at all. This is the God of inscrutable holiness and righteousness, who is entirely deserving of all glory and praise. Left to our own devices, we would be absolutely crushed beneath the weight of His glory, and damned in our sins.
But we have the unique privilege of being able to say that we know God - not just in our heads, but personally. For Christ has achieved our redemption, and God sends His Holy Spirit to make our hearts anew and give us the assurance that we can not only know Him and know His delight, but also actually be able to delight in Him rightly.
There is yet another practical and communal aspect of sanctification. Using the table below, try to understand what it entails:
(C) God’s will helps us to keep God’s will (Rom 8:28-32)
Before we jump away into another one of Paul’s letters, let us recap how 1 Thess 4:1-12 has answered our two guiding questions, 1) Why do we desire to know God’s will? 2) What exactly is at the heart of God’s will for us?
Regarding 1), we learn that our desire to know God’s will must be driven by a more fundamental desire to please Him. But we only get to the stage of wanting to please Him by having our eyes opened more and more to His glory, goodness, and grace. Will you make that your prayer today? That God, through the power of the Holy Spirit, would grow in your heart a deeper desire to please Him?
Concerning 2), we learn that God’s fundamental will for our lives is first and foremost our sanctification - not a cushy upper-middle management job, not a scholarship, and not a hot spouse. Our sanctification is God’s priority, and it should be ours as well. To make matters better, God also graciously gives us His Holy Spirit, through whom the work of sanctification is being accomplished as we desire and strive for godly lives more and more.
With that said, we turn to the realities of life in a fallen world. Life in a fallen world means that life oftentimes does not feel like sanctification. It most certainly does not feel like victorious Christian living. How then does God’s will factor in a fallen world?
Theologians have often distinguished between God’s decretive and preceptive will. God’s decretive will is that which God ordains to come to pass, like the Exodus, or the rise and fall of Saul, or the Cross of Calvary. God’s preceptive will is that which communicates God’s moral demands for holy living - as in the case of our sanctification. But there is at least one passage in the Bible where both the decretive and the preceptive meet gloriously.
Theologians also often refer to Romans 8:30 as the “Golden Chain of Salvation.” It tells us that those whom God predestined, He also called. Those whom he called he also justified. And those whom He justified He also glorified. This is God’s decretive will! It cannot be broken. It assures us that all whom are known by God will know glorification at Christ’s return. This factors into our sanctification when we read the preceding verse, which tells us that God has predestined Christians to be conformed to the image of His Son. That’s how we have confidence that all things work together for the good of those who love God!
Maybe your Christian life feels like a long series of defeats. Maybe sin seems to have an intractable hold on your life. But if you find in your heart a desire to know God and please Him rightly, rejoice and seize hold of that desire! It is a God-given desire. And God promises us that our Christian life is less about how many small victories we can accrue (as much as we should strive for them), and more about the final Victory that has already been won.
There is a famous Christian hymn that goes, “My knowledge of that life is small, the eye of faith is dim; But tis’ enough - that Christ knows all, and I will be with Him.”
Paul takes us even further, and promises us that we will not only be with Him, but like Him. And this is the decretive will of God for every Christian. It will come to pass. Let that be the grace from which you draw from as you desire to keep His precepts today!