Standing Firm

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Transcript:

We’re going to be in 2 Thessalonians tonight, 2 Thessalonians chapter 2, and we’re going to look at the very end of chapter 2 and the very beginning of chapter 3. This, according to my plans, is the next to last message from this series on 1 and 2 Thessalonians on finishing well, and we will not have an evening service next Sunday night, so the week after that we’ll be finished, we’ll be finishing up with this series and with this study. So as we’re coming to, as we’re coming close to the end of this second letter that Paul has written to the church at Thessalonica, he’s starting to wind down and get into some of his closing thoughts to the church.

And even though he deals with a number of topics and themes throughout both of these letters, really the overarching idea of these letters is that they are messages of encouragement and challenge to a church that is looking in earnest expectation of the second coming of Christ and trying to figure out how to make whatever time they have left count. That’s why I’ve given you this series emphasizing finishing well. That’s what they were looking to do.

That’s what their hope was. And so they were looking to find out what are the things we need to do, what are the pitfalls we need to avoid in this race. And I’ve told you many times throughout this series that the idea of finishing well for us should not be just the 2 Timothy idea of finishing well.

There’s nothing wrong with that. But Paul wrote in 2 Timothy about how he’s run his race, He’s completing things. That was the overall idea of 2 Timothy, that Paul’s ministry is coming to an end.

Timothy’s is continuing, and Paul writes about how he’s going to be faithful to the end. In 2 Timothy, we see somebody who knows that their time is very, very short, and so is going to make it count, although he’s made his time count well up until then. And sometimes we will do that.

we will wait to get serious about things until we will wait until the end of things until we can see the light at the end of the tunnel to start getting serious we’ll wait until the doctor says you have six months to live we’ll we’ll wait to really buckle down and get serious when we know we have a year left until retirement I’ll start really getting serious about losing weight in october knowing that my annual checkup is coming up in November. We’ll wait until the end. If we know that that end is coming at a definite time, we’ll wait until the end to make our time and make our effort count.

What we see, and there’s nothing wrong if you know that you’ve got a limited amount of time in life, in a position, in a career, whatever it may be, if you know you have a limited amount of time, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with making it count. But 1 and 2 Thessalonians deal with a church who said, we don’t know how much there is left. Could be 50 minutes, could be 50 years, but whatever it is, we want it to count.

So this is talking about what we need to do before things get down to the wire. Now, as he’s writing to this church, we get to the end of chapter 2, and he starts winding down and giving them some of the closing thoughts. We’ve dealt with the idea of starting well.

At some point, to finish well, you have to start well at some point. And we looked at that, and hopefully to understand that that doesn’t mean, wait a minute, I didn’t start out well in life. I didn’t start out faithful to God in life.

You know, it’s taken 40 or 50 years to get to a point where I’m serious about God. Not to get to that point where we think, okay, I didn’t start well, so there’s no hope. Now the Thessalonians were pagans when Paul, well they were Thessalonians, they were pagans when the gospel came to them.

And through the preaching of the gospel, they turned, their lives were turned around, their lives were changed, and they started well at some point to follow God. Now some of them were probably later on in life, but at some point they turned around and began to run well. So to end well we have to run well, but we also have to, I’m sorry.

Do you ever have that problem where your brain moves faster than your mouth and the sentences just kind of pile up on you? All right. To finish well, we have to start well.

Even if that means we didn’t start well at the starting line, we’re halfway through the race when we realize we’re not doing this well. We can start well from there and try to finish well. So to end well, we’ve got to start well, but we’ve also got to be in it for the long haul and decide we’re going to finish well.

And that’s where we pick up tonight in chapter 2, starting in verse 13 and going into the first few verses of chapter 3. We see that Paul writes to them about standing firm. He’s writing to them telling them not to be carried away from the things that they’ve been taught.

And that’s sort of been a theme throughout the second letter as well, throughout 2 Thessalonians. When we looked last week at how they were concerned about what they had been told about the rapture and the Antichrist and the second coming and thinking that they’d missed all of this, he said, don’t get your mind all twisted and don’t get confused and don’t let it drive you off of this race course. Stick with what you’ve been told and keep running.

Stick with what you know to be true. Well, he writes to them later on in the chapter about standing firm, continuing on in this theme. of don’t let the cares and concerns of life push you aside to where you get with inside of the finish line and you give up.

I saw a video that somebody had posted on Facebook, I believe, this week. It was not a Christian video. It had nothing to do with this passage on the surface.

But the title at the bottom of the video said, Don’t Celebrate Too Early. And it was just clip after clip, several of these, of people who’d come, you know, they’d done a long race, they’d done a marathon, they’d done whatever you call a marathon for a bike. They’d done these long races, and they get within sight of the finish line, and they think they’re there, and they’re going to win, and so they just kind of give up, and they start celebrating, and then somebody passes them, and they lose the race, because they got within sight of it, and something distracted them.

I saw a video one time of somebody grabbing a football and running many, many yards for a touchdown. And he thinks he’s across the line into the end zone. Sorry, my football terminology is escaping me as I’m trying to.

. . I know these terms, but they’re not there tonight.

He thinks he’s in the end zone, and he’s really about a yard short of it. And he spikes the ball, and he’s just dancing and celebrating. Somebody comes and picks up the ball and takes it the other direction.

and he doesn’t get his point. See, he got within sight of the end zone and stopped. And unfortunately, unless we just decide, unless we’re just committed that, Lord, we’re with you, come what may, there’s a danger of getting within sight of the finish line or the end zone and just stopping.

And people do it. I was told when I started out young in ministry that, and I forget what the statistic is, I think it was made up anyway because I heard different numbers. 25%, 30%, 50%, I heard different numbers.

But whatever it was, this number of people that started out in ministry will not end their career in ministry. I mean, they’ll not be in ministry throughout their whole career because something comes along and they go do something else. And that’s always been in the back of my mind.

No, God, you called me to do this. I’m here until you. I don’t see an expiration date on that calling.

I’m not running anybody down who went to do something else. But God, if you’ve called me to do something, I can’t quit. I can’t quit.

And that should be our attitude as believers. God, you’ve called me into this Christian life, and I can’t quit. If I’m going to get to that finish line, that finish line not being salvation, not being that we have to earn our salvation, but that finish line being that we can get to the end of our lives, And we can say we used them well for God’s glory.

We used what time we had available well for God’s glory. If we want to get to that finish line, we can’t quit. We’ve got to realize he called us into this.

All right. So let’s look at verse 13 of chapter 2. It says, but we ought to thank God always for you, brothers and sisters, loved by the Lord, because from the beginning God has chosen you for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and through belief in the truth.

He said, you know, from the beginning, God’s had this plan that you were going to, as the Spirit moved you and as you heard the truth of God’s Word and you responded to that in the Spirit, that God was going to bring you to salvation. It’s been God’s plan. And we ought to be thankful for you, brothers and sisters, because you’re loved by the Lord, because He’s had this plan for you, and because He’s brought it to fruition.

He’s reminding the Thessalonians that even if they get to some point in the race where it feels bleak and it feels hopeless, not to give up because you have that reminder of what God has already done in your life, of what God has already brought you to and brought you through. He says in verse 14, he called you to this through our gospel. He called you to salvation through our gospel.

Not that it’s a gospel that Paul made up, but it’s the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. And when he says it’s our gospel, he means it’s the gospel we preach. It’s the only gospel. Okay, don’t take from this the idea that there are multiple gospels that are all equally okay, and that Paul just happened to have one and everybody else had their own.

Paul said in Galatians, there’s only one gospel. Paul makes it clear throughout his writings, there’s only one gospel. But in Galatians, he said, if somebody comes preaching, I think I talked about this last week, if somebody comes preaching any other gospel, let him be accursed.

And he said it twice. He called you to this, he called you to this salvation through our gospel so that you might obtain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ, so that you could lay hold of Jesus Christ in all of his glory. He didn’t call you into salvation through the gospel just for fire insurance.

He didn’t call you into the gospel just so you could have your ticket punched for heaven and remain unchanged in this life. Now he said God called you into this so you could take hold of Jesus Christ. There’s a prize in this race called the Christian life. There’s a prize where what we are pursuing is Jesus Christ. Does any of that mean we earn our salvation?

No. None of that means that we earn our salvation by running hard or chasing Jesus down. But it’s saying the object, the goal of the Christian life is to be, is once God saves us through Jesus Christ, is for us to become more like Jesus Christ. So throughout this race, and it’s called a race in the book of Hebrews, throughout this race of the Christian life, our pursuit is to always be more like Jesus, to lay hold of Jesus.

So he says, he called you through this gospel, again, not so that you could just have your ticket punched for heaven and sit around and be the same as you’ve always been. He says, no, he called you so that you might obtain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ, so that you might run after him and lay hold on him. So then, brothers and sisters, verse 15, so then, brothers and sisters, stand firm.

That’s the whole point, really, of this passage. Stand firm and hold to the traditions you were taught, whether by what we said or what we wrote. A few things that we need to unpack in there.

He doesn’t really use the race metaphor so much in this passage as I do. So if you feel like it’s kind of awkward mixing metaphors about running with standing, that’s my fault, not his, stand firm. And we can apply that to the race metaphor by saying keep doing what you’re doing.

Stand firm. Don’t budge. Don’t be dissuaded.

Don’t don’t be thrown off course, but he says, stand firm and hold to the traditions you were taught. Now, this idea of tradition doesn’t mean that it doesn’t mean human traditions. This is not elevating human traditions to a place where that’s what we need to live by, and that’s how we seek God.

All right, Jesus said that human traditions oftentimes distract us from God. I’m paraphrasing one of his messages to the Pharisees. But he told the Pharisees they were so wrapped up in their traditions that they were nullifying the Word of God by their traditions.

Now they can’t overthrow the Word of God. They can’t make it less powerful. When Jesus said they were nullifying it, he meant they were acting as though the Word of God had no power in their lives because all the power belonged to the traditions.

So when he says the traditions, he is not talking about human traditions. He’s not talking about going back to the Pharisees and their traditions and customs surrounding the law. He’s not talking about church tradition.

And every church does have their traditions, right? We have our traditions. Heard somebody say, if you don’t believe your church has traditions, try to change the order of service in the bulletin.

Did you say it would get you hurt? You sound like a man who knows. every church has traditions and traditions are not necessarily evil all right but traditions should never be elevated to the level of scripture and we we have we have traditions about doing things a certain way you know we have the lord’s supper on the fifth sunday every time there’s a fifth sunday we I think we all recognize that’s a tradition as a matter of fact we’ve been able to switch that up some.

Anytime the Lord’s Supper falls between Christmas and New Year’s, which it has the last couple of years, we’ve moved it into January because we all tend to forget about it. And I don’t ever want the Lord’s Supper to be something we just go through to go through the motions. We need to prepare.

So that’s a tradition and we have some leeway to change it. It’s not set in stone. Where tradition becomes a problem is when we elevate it to the authority of Scripture.

Oh, you can’t rearrange the chairs in there because that’s how Miss So-and-so had it set up for her class back in 1948. And y’all laugh, but there are churches that way. We might even be that way about some things if we’re not careful.

And there are churches out there that teach tradition is either equal to or superior to in some cases, or even just under the Bible in authority. I say when you put church traditions and the Bible next to each other, there’s no contest as to which has the authority. Church tradition can help guide us, but it is always, always, always way secondary to the scriptures.

So I want to make the case here. I want to make it clear here that when he says traditions, he’s not talking about human traditions. He’s not talking about church traditions.

You’ll see what he says in the verse, what he’s talking about. He says, hold to the traditions you were taught, whether by what we said or what we wrote. When he says traditions here, he’s talking about the teachings of the apostles that he gave them.

The teachings of the apostles, which by the way, were not teachings that originated with the apostles. He’s talking about the teaching of the apostles that originated with Jesus Christ. He’s talking about the truth that was taught by Christ and that was explained by the apostles. And where do we find those today?

Now that we don’t have the apostles speaking directly to us, we have the second thing, just like he said to the church at Thessalonica, whether by what we said or what we wrote. We have what they wrote, those traditions, which are not human traditions. They’re the Word of God.

They were scriptures divinely inspired by the Holy Spirit who worked within holy men of God and superintended the process, telling them what to write, and yet allowing their personalities and their grammar choices and their writing styles to shine through in this incredible process, and God inspired every single word of it. Now at the time they’re writing this, it’s part of the New Testament, part of what became the New Testament, so they didn’t have the full New Testament in its final form like we have today, but he’s referring to those parts of it. What have we taught you?

Look to the scriptures. Look to the scriptures and see what Jesus taught and the apostles taught on the basis of what Jesus taught. Don’t be distracted from the truth of God’s word.

Don’t be distracted from what God’s word tells you to do and what God’s word tells you to believe. Don’t be distracted by other traditions and other writings and other philosophies. He said stand firm and hold to the traditions you’ve been taught, meaning the word of God, meaning the gospel revealed by Jesus Christ and explained by the apostles.

He told them stand firm. He only told them to stand firm because there was going to be a time for some of them, maybe for all of them, when there was going to be a temptation not to stand firm. You know, I only warn my kids about the things that I really think have a good possibility of happening, right?

I don’t warn my kids to check under their beds for monsters because I don’t believe there are any there. Now, when Benjamin was little, I had an old bottle of, an empty bottle of Febreze, and I put water in it and put a label on it that said monster spray, because he believed there were monsters under the bed. And I, no, Daddy sprayed for him already, so I’d spray for him every night.

But I’ve got pictures of this. Y’all think I’m kidding. I’ve got pictures of Dr.

Daddy’s monster spray. But I don’t warn them, I don’t warn them, go check for monsters under your bed, because I don’t think there are any. But I do warn them about things like make sure you turn the water off in the bathroom when you’re done.

Because history has told me there’s a good likelihood that somebody’s going to leave the water on for a while. And water is not cheap in Seminole. I had a $130 water bill last month because they weren’t reading the meter, that’s why.

We’ve watched them not read the meter. I’m digressing here. I warn them about washing their hands with soap and water, because I know there’s a good likelihood that they might just go in there and turn the water on and stand and look at it and then turn it off.

You know, I warn them about things that I think there’s at least a decent likelihood of these things happening. Paul wasn’t warning them to stand firm because he thinks, oh, you know, I’m sure they’re going to stand firm, but I just need to come up with something to write here. No, he warns them to stand firm because there’s a temptation for each of us to get to a point of difficulty or sometimes a point of discouragement, maybe even a point of depression, where we’re within sight of the finish line and something else captures our attention and we just stop.

So he said, you stand firm. You keep doing what it is you know you’re supposed to be doing. If we were going to say this today, we might say, don’t stop until you get to that finish line.

Don’t give up on what God has told you. Keep going. If it’s a race, keep running.

If you’re using the metaphor of being planted and not being moved, he says stand firm. But we understand the meaning behind that. Don’t get distracted from what it is God’s told you to do.

Verse 16, may our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who has loved us and given us eternal encouragement and good hope by grace, encourage your hearts and strengthen you in every good work and word. And when he says this, this is something he’s actually, this is a blessing that he’s placing on them. It’s a prayer that he’s asking God.

He’s writing it down, but it’s part of his prayer to God for them. When he says, may our Lord Jesus Christ, he’s saying, I pray, I hope that Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who has loved us, we pray that this loving God and Jesus Christ, his son, who’ve loved us and they’ve given us eternal encouragement, they’ve given us good hope by their grace, not because we deserved it, not because we’ve earned it, but these good gifts come directly out of their goodness. He said, we are praying and hoping that they encourage your hearts as well, and they strengthen you in every good work and word.

So he’s praying, he’s essentially praying here for the church at Thessalonica, that they would have the strength and the commitment and the tenacity to continue. And he says in verse 1 of chapter 3, in addition, brothers and sisters, pray for us that the word of the Lord may spread rapidly and be honored just as it was with you. Pray for our ministry.

It’s interesting that Paul doesn’t ask them to pray that he’d have an easy time. And we could hardly blame Paul if he asked them to pray that he’d have an easy time. Paul typically had a rough go of it in his ministry.

Paul was in some dire situations at times. But what Paul actually asks them to pray for is that he’ll be effective in ministry, not for his protection, but for his effectiveness. He says, in addition, brothers and sisters, pray for us that the word of the Lord may spread rapidly.

Pray that the gospel will go out to people. Pray that it will be received. It’ll be honored just as it was with you.

Pray that God will give us the ability to tell as many people about Jesus as possible. That’s what he says. And pray that they’ll receive the word just as you did.

We ought to pray for that more often. We ought to pray for that for ourselves. There’s nothing wrong with praying for some of the things we do at prayer meeting.

Folks, it would be amazing if we came together and we prayed for people that prayed for them by name that we knew needed Jesus Christ. And we prayed for one another for boldness to share the gospel and prayed for wisdom, for what words to speak. And we prayed for some of these people by name, that they would hear the gospel and they’d respond to it. I honestly can’t remember which preacher I listened to that was talking about this.

But one of them said we spend more time praying to keep the saints out of heaven than we do praying for the lost to join us in heaven. And he said that’s what he was praying for. Don’t pray that Paul’s suffering ends.

He said, pray that Paul is effective in telling people about Jesus Christ, spreading the word, and pray that we find people who are receptive to hear and respond to the gospel. He said, and that we may be delivered from wicked and evil people, for not all have faith. Now, that might sound like Paul’s wanting to be out of prison.

Paul’s wanting to have an easier time of it. But if that’s what he was asking, he would have said, Pray that I be delivered from prison. Paul at other times said, you know, I really don’t care anymore.

If I’m out of prison, he said if they take me to prison, I’m paraphrasing, but if they take me to prison, I have a captive audience to tell people about Jesus. If they let me out of prison, great. I get to go tell people about Jesus.

If they kill me, I get to be with Jesus. That’s the right attitude. So when he says deliver me from wicked people, wicked and evil people, I don’t believe he’s talking about his jailers.

I believe he’s talking about those who wanted to silence his message. Because in a lot of places that Paul went, there were people who plotted to silence the message, plotted to silence Paul so the gospel would not go forward. And there were a lot of people praying for Paul in all these circumstances, enabling him to escape, not for his own sake, but so that he could continue to carry the gospel on down the road.

He said, for not all have faith. There are some people who don’t want this gospel preached. He said, but we pray that we’d be delivered from them.

He says in verse 3, but the Lord is faithful. He will strengthen and guard you from the evil one. And here we get a little glimpse of what it was that might have caused them not to stand firm, not to keep going.

See, when they were faithful to what God had called them to do, when they were proclaiming the gospel, Satan was going to throw everything he could at them. Satan was going to try everything he could to stop them and stamp out the message of the gospel. and Paul said the Lord is faithful, he will strengthen and guard you from the evil one.

Now that doesn’t mean we’ll never have trouble. That doesn’t mean that Satan won’t ever be able to hurt us. But it means if our priority is preaching the gospel, proclaiming the gospel to others, until we go to be with Jesus, then God’s going to ensure that that happens.

Sometimes even in the midst of that suffering, God’s going to give us those opportunities. And Satan’s plans are going to come to nothing. I hear verses like that, and it always reminds me of Voltaire, who was the French philosopher and, well, general smarty pants.

Thought he was smarter than everybody. Lived a few hundred years ago. And Voltaire just believed he was so much smarter than these Christians, and Christianity was so foolish, and only idiots believe in Christianity.

And he said within a hundred years, you know, Christianity will be non-existent. It’ll be stamped out because nobody will believe this anymore. Voltaire was quick to proclaim the death of Jesus Christ and belief in Jesus Christ and the death of the Bible.

Well, a hundred years later, Voltaire was dead. The gospel was still going forth, and Voltaire’s old house was used as a printing shop to print Bibles and distribute them. I love that story.

Satan may think, and by the way, in the Soviet Union, it was this way. In China, it still is today this way. The harder they try to stamp out the gospel message, the gospel message may go underground, but the more dedicated people are to sharing the gospel message and the more people come to Christ. It sounds like, I hear different numbers from different places, but it sounds like there may be more evangelical Christians in China than there are in the United States.

The harder Satan tries to come at God’s people. We may deal with trouble, we may suffer, we may struggle, but he can’t hurt our efforts to proclaim the gospel. God will guard us from the evil one in that regard.

Verse 4, we have confidence in the Lord about you that you are doing well and we’ll continue to do what we command. Paul had heard all kinds of reports about the church at Thessalonica, how well they were doing, and he said, we have confidence that you’ll continue to do this. We have confidence, not just in you.

He didn’t say we have confidence in you. He said, we have confidence in the Lord about you, because Paul knew that God was using the people at Thessalonica. Trying to move through this quickly, so we’re coming to the end of our time.

So he says in verse 5, may the Lord direct your hearts to God’s love and Christ’s endurance. May the Lord direct your hearts to this place where you’re overwhelmed by God’s love and that he gives you endurance like Jesus Christ. Now I want to share three things with you very quickly. Here they are very quickly and I’m not just that’s not a preacher’s and in closing and then we go 20 more 20 more minutes.

Three things about this passage I want to share with you very quickly. He tells them to stand firm and says that they are able to stand firm for three reasons in this passage. Stand firm because, first of all, the work, because of the work that God has done in you.

The whole first part of this passage is about salvation. It’s about the work that God’s done in them and the work that God continues to do in them since the time of salvation. Not only leading them to Christ, but helping them to become more like Christ. We’re able to stand firm because of the work that God has done in us.

He tells him, second of all, stand firm because of the truth that God has revealed to you. Because he tells him in verse 15, you need to stick with the traditions, meaning God’s word, what’s written down in the New Testament by the apostles, because of God’s word, the traditions you were taught, whether in what we said or what we wrote. So we can stand firm because of the truth that God has revealed to us.

And third of all, stand firm because of the power of God that enables you. There’ll come a time for each of us when we’re too weak to stand on our own, because honestly, Satan is more powerful than us. Satan’s more powerful than any of us.

Sometimes he’s more powerful than all of us. You know what? He’s not more powerful than God.

People who have this idea that it’s an equal match between good and evil, and it’s just one looking for advantage over the other, and they’re pretty equally matched, and they just keep on fighting. They don’t understand. Satan is no match for God.

Today, if it suited God’s purposes, he could snap his fingers and the devil ceases to exist. But that doesn’t suit his purposes. One day he’ll throw him into the lake of fire forever and ever and ever. And a God who’s powerful enough to do that is a God who’s powerful enough to empower us to stand.

And that’s what he does. We don’t stand in our own power. We don’t fight in our own strength.

We do it through the power of God and the strength of the Lord Jesus Christ that lives within us.