The Coming Day of the Lord

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Tonight we’re going to be back in 1 Thessalonians, 1 Thessalonians chapter 5. And chapter 5, where it starts in verse 1, is an extension of what we looked at last week in chapter 4, where Paul wrote to the church at Thessalonica and reminded them about the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ and told them that it was a certainty that they would notice it, they would see it when it came, because if you’ll remember back to last week, they had many of them had a fear because they’d been influenced by these teachers who told them, oh no, the second coming, that’s already happened. The rapture, that’s already happened.

The fear that you would have of thinking, oh no, the rapture’s happened and I missed it. And I told you the story about being a child and hearing my pastor preach on the rapture and the second coming and then shortly thereafter not being able to find anybody in my family at the house. I was probably Benjamin’s age, 8, 9, 10, I know you’re 8, but 8, 9, 10, somewhere in there, and thinking, oh my word, my whole family’s been raptured, and I missed it.

What did I get wrong? I was already a believer by then, and I thought, what did I get wrong? And it was just a terrifying few moments until I realized where they were.

Well, the church at Thessalonica was living with that fear constantly because some people had come in and convinced them, Oh, you’ve missed it. Others of them were convinced, oh, it’s coming, and it’s coming any day, so we can just sit around and do nothing, sort of like you’ll see on TV shows. Sometimes they’ll have cults.

I’ve seen a few different sitcoms where they’ve used it as a comedic plot device, that there’s some cult in the community that is convinced the end is coming, Jesus is returning, the spaceship’s coming back, whatever it is, And they’ll all just, they’ll sell everything and they’ll spend weeks in time just out on a hill somewhere waiting for it to happen. And some of the church at Thessalonica were in that same mindset. Okay, they didn’t think the second coming had already happened.

They didn’t think the rapture had already happened. They thought it was coming and it was so imminent that they should just sit around and do nothing. Now, Paul doesn’t correct them for thinking it was imminent.

He corrects them throughout this, though, for thinking that that’s a reason to do nothing. Now, we know that God’s timetable and our timetable are different. So when the assumption of the earliest Christians was that Jesus is coming again soon, and then it’s been 2,000 years, well, soon, according to God’s timetable, isn’t necessarily soon like we think it is.

And so in the end of chapter 4, he reassures them about Christ’s coming. He reassures them that there is going to come a day where Christ will raise the dead in Christ and those who are alive and remain will be caught up to be with him. And I made a mistake last week.

I made a mistake. I know y’all are shocked. But I was talking about where the word rapture is found in the Bible.

And I gave you some wrong information. And I’m going to correct that tonight. This is why I should double check always before I just start trying to throw out the original languages like I’m an expert.

I said that people will say there’s no such thing as the rapture because that word is never found in the Bible. Well, by that logic, the word Trinity is not found in the Bible either, but the concept is certainly there. The word Bible is never found in the Bible, but the concept certainly is there.

The word rapture is never found in the Bible, but the concept is there. I told you last week there was a Latin word, harpazo, that is taken from the passage we read in 1 Thessalonians chapter 4 when he talks about us being caught up to be with the Lord in the air. In 1 Thessalonians 4, 17, then we who are still alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.

Okay, so my mistake here was not in telling you that there’s a rapture and it’s found there, but my mistake was, first of all, the word is Greek, and it’s not harpazo. It’s not rapazo, like I said it was. It’s harpazo.

The Latin word is raptio, which is where we get rapture, which is a snatching away. So I wanted to come back and correct that, lest you happen to check, and the pastor doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Sometimes I don’t, but I get really close.

So the concept of the rapture, and I’d also hate for you to tell somebody that who’s skeptical about the rapture and then say, they don’t know what they’re talking about either. It is there. I just gave you some wrong information about it, and now we’ve corrected it.

But the rapture is there in verse 17 of chapter 4. And so he reassures them that there’s coming a day when those who’ve trusted in Christ as their Savior, both the living and the dead, are going to be snatched up, are going to be caught up, We’re going to be raptured up and collected to be with Jesus Christ forever. And he reassures them that there’s a rapture and there’s a second coming and that they haven’t missed anything.

That when Jesus comes, they’ll know it. When we are raptured, the believers will not miss it. And when Jesus comes at the second coming, nobody will miss it.

And he tells them in verse 18, encourage one another with those words. Well, he goes on in chapter 5, as we’re going to see tonight, to talk a little bit more about the end, about the last things, with a reminder at the end of the passage in verse 11, again, to encourage one another. And one of the things that has dissuaded me throughout my ministry from talking a whole lot about the end times, the last days, whatever you want to call it, is that for a lot of people it’s something that causes anxiety.

And for me, it’s not that the end causes anxiety, it’s talking about the end causes anxiety, because there’s so many different ideas, even among evangelical believers, about how all this is going to work. I don’t want to tell you anything wrong. And yet I can’t avoid talking about something that Scripture places such emphasis on.

and here’s why I tell you this because for some of us it causes discomfort to talk about it to try to teach on it for some of you it might cause discomfort to think about the end times it might be one of those things that makes you nervous that you kind of worry about we’re not supposed to the Lord wants us to do the opposite because both of these passages where he talks about the end he ends that passage by telling us to comfort one another with the knowledge of what’s coming. Now we may not know all the timing. We may not know all of the order that everything’s going to take place.

But it’s one of those areas where we need to trust God, even if we don’t get all our questions answered. I was listening this week to Greg Laurie preaching about the end times on the radio, and he was talking about how we will never, ever know, in our likelihood, we will never, ever know who the Antichrist is. But people want to know, and people want to speculate, and they worry about it.

Is it Prince Charles? Is it Barack Obama? Is it Osama bin Laden?

Is it somebody from the European Union? I’ve heard dozens of people named since I first started taking note of this back in the mid-90s. Dozens of people, I read a whole book that the thesis of it was that Prince Charles was the Antichrist. Okay?

I’m just not that sure that Prince Charles is relevant enough to be the Antichrist. But there’s all sorts of speculation, and we want to know, and we want to worry about it. And God’s saying, here’s what you need to know, and trust me to deal with the details. Be comforted by the fact, not that you know everything that’s going to happen, but be comforted by the fact that you know I’m in control of all of this.

So that’s quite a long introduction, isn’t it? Let’s look at verse 1 of 1 Thessalonians chapter 5. He says, About the times and seasons, brothers and sisters, you do not need anything to be written to you.

For you yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come, just like a thief in the night. When they say peace and security, then sudden destruction will come upon them like labor pains on a pregnant woman. and they will not escape.

But you, brothers and sisters, are not in the dark for this day to surprise you like a thief. For you are all children of light and children of the day. We do not belong to the night or the darkness.

So then let us not sleep like the rest, but let us stay awake and be self-controlled. For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk, get drunk at night. But since we belong to the day, let us be self-controlled and put on the armor of faith and love and a helmet of the hope of salvation.

For God did not appoint us to wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep, we may live together with him. Therefore, encourage one another and build each other up as you are already doing. I have notes about tonight.

I may stick with them. I may not. We’ll just see.

But there’s some things that I want to point out to you about this passage, because we’ve been looking at the things that he said to the church at Thessalonica throughout 1 Thessalonians and later as we go on into 2 Thessalonians, the things that he said to them that have a bearing on their ability to finish well. Because that’s a lot of what he dealt with with this church. They were concerned about the end.

They knew it was coming. They didn’t know when. Like I said, some of them thought they had already missed it.

Some of them thought it was going to be in like 10 minutes. They were really concerned with the end, and however much time it was, making it count, doing the best with it. And so all throughout these letters, he writes to them and explains some things that they can do to bring glory to God and advance the kingdom of Jesus Christ while they’re here.

And so he writes to them these things. And the first thing that I take notice of is that he tells them, you already know about the times and seasons.

you don’t need me to write about that to you and explain to you all of the prophetic timetable you know that he’s coming again you know what Jesus said about the time before he comes there’s all of that discourse in the book of Matthew where he’s there on the Mount of Olives and he’s talking about what’s to come I believe it’s Matthew chapter 24 they knew what Jesus had said now Jesus himself said no man knows the date or the hour and that’s true I’m amazed continually by these people who dig so deeply in all the details and all the minutia of biblical prophecy to try to figure out the date and the hour when Jesus is coming again and they do all of that digging and still manage to miss where it says right there in red and white no man knows the date of the hour you’re not going to figure this out the right way I mean for all the digging they do it’s their clear as day no man knows the date of the hour So as soon as somebody tells you, oh, Jesus is coming back on October the 17th, 2034, you automatically know they don’t know what they’re talking about.

I’m not an expert on everything biblical, but I can pretty well see what that means. No man knows the date or the hour. So anytime somebody comes and tells you, oh, there’s a date, and people have gotten away too from date predicting, and they’ll say, well, it could be this date.

They’ll do date speculating. It could be this date. Well, yeah, it could be any date.

I mean, you just pick one at random, you could be right. But as soon as somebody starts predicting or speculating about dates, let me tell you, you don’t have to worry about it. Not because I told you you don’t have to worry about it.

Jesus said no man knows the date or the hour, so you can already bank on the fact they don’t know what they’re talking about. And I have a suspicion that just, it’s just God’s sense of humor, that God will pick a date. God will make sure to pick a date that nobody has ever thought of before.

just so nobody’s right by accident. Okay? So we know that nobody knows the date or the hour, but Paul said, you know the times or the seasons.

Nobody can know exactly when he’s going to show up. He said, you can read the times and seasons going on around us. You can feel the change in the air.

There are things that Jesus said would happen, and we can start to notice that those things are lining up. Now, do we know for sure when that’s going to happen? I also get tired, and if some of you have said this, I apologize.

I’m not trying to offend you. But I get tired of hearing preachers say, well, you know, we’re living in the last days. No, we don’t know that.

It’s been the last days since Pentecost. We’re just waiting for him to return again. When they say that, I think they assume that it will be this generation that sees his return. It could be.

Or it could be my great-grandkids. It could be 2,000 more years. We don’t know.

So I get tired of people saying like they know with certainty, the end is coming. But we can definitely tell the times and seasons, and we know things are starting to line up. And what that tells us is God is at work, and God is moving, and God is, it may not be our timetable, but God is bringing all these things to a conclusion like he said he would.

It’s just how long will he take is up to him. So Paul said, you don’t need me to write to you about the times and seasons. You can see change in the air.

You can see God at work. You’re his children. You can see him doing things.

That’s what he means when he says you don’t need anything written to you about the times and seasons. Because he says you know. You can see God at work.

You know what Jesus said about his coming. And so just look around you and see what God’s doing. He says because you know that the day of the Lord will come just like a thief in the night.

Folks, they knew that the day of the Lord was coming. They may have a leg up on us when it comes to this because sometimes I think we forget the day of the Lord is coming. For them, it was an everyday reality, this realization that the day of the Lord is coming.

I don’t think about the rapture and the second coming every single day. I probably should. Like I told you before, I think it changes the way we live.

There was a girl I dated in high school, And she had put above the door in her bedroom. I didn’t see this. Okay, I was never in there.

I want to make that clear. I was never in there. She just told me about it.

She had made a sign that she put up above her door. So every time she walked out of her bedroom, she saw it and said, maybe today, dot, dot, dot. And that was a reminder to her, Jesus could come back any day, any time, maybe today, so make it count.

And I’ve always remembered that. It’s something we need to think about. They knew, they knew the day of the Lord was coming.

There was no doubt in their minds, and they were preoccupied with it all the time. They knew it was coming like a thief in the night. It was going to be something that they had no control over.

It was going to happen when it was going to happen. You know, we don’t know when the thief is going to break in and steal things. Unfortunately, thieves usually don’t call ahead, right?

Because it would be so much easier to be prepared. If you got a notarized letter, registered mail to you, and the thief said, I’m coming on July 21st at 11. 30 p.

m. , I’ll be coming in through such and such door or such and such window at your house, you’d be ready, right? Or she might also think, oh, it’s a trick.

He’s coming in a different window earlier that day. But if the thief was just that open and honest about it, you’d be ready, and you’d try to do something about it. And Jesus said that he would come again as a thief in the night.

And Paul said, you know this day is coming like a thief in the night. Not that Jesus is coming to harm us, but that it’s something that we really have no control over. Again, look at the times and seasons.

Look and see what God is doing. It’s not something that we’re going to bring about. I get so irritated from time to time.

I get irritated about a lot of things. I have scaled back from all the news I listen to and all the political discussion I listen to for about three or four months now, and my blood pressure has been so much lower. It’s great.

But I hear people criticize evangelical Christians for a number of reasons. Sometimes we deserve it, and sometimes we don’t. But they criticize our political leanings that most of us have when it comes to Israel, And they say, oh, they support Israel because they think they’re going to bring about the second coming.

I don’t know who they think we think we are. That we can bring about the second coming. It’s God that does this.

Whenever he wants to do this, he’s going to come like a thief in the night. We have no control over it. We can’t make it happen.

We can’t stop it from happening. We just do the best we can with trying to be obedient to what he’s told us while we’re here and wait for him to sort the timetable out. And us supporting this or not supporting that, I don’t think it makes a difference as far as what God’s going to do.

It does make a difference in terms of our obedience to him, but it doesn’t make a difference in how he’s going to bring all this to an end. No, him coming like a thief in the night means it’s out of our hands. And he makes that clear in the next verse, in verse 3, when he says, when they say peace and security, then sudden destruction will come upon them.

Okay, all of this is going to happen. The day of the Lord is going to come when people least expect it. That’s why I said I think it just fits with what I believe to be God’s sense of humor that I think he’ll pick a day that nobody’s ever thought of.

And it’s going to come at a time when the world thinks, oh, everything’s all sorted out. We’re in control. We are the masters of our own destiny.

Although we as a human race are kind of there, we think, oh, we’re in charge of everything. And then about once a year, a natural disaster comes along that we realize we don’t have control over anything. But there’s going to come a time where they say, oh, peace and security.

Oh, everything’s peaceful now. Everything’s secure. Everything’s safe.

We’ve moved past religion. We’ve moved past a need for God. We’re in control, and everything’s great now.

And as soon as they think they’ve established peace and security, they’re going to see that vanish like the vapor of smoke that it was. Because the Bible’s clear, too, that he’s going to rapture us. And then I say the Bible’s clear.

I could be wrong on the timing. I admit that. I know some people that I love and respect, think highly of in their Bible teaching, who have a different viewpoint than I do.

But the Bible’s clear to me, I’ll say it that way, that after he raptures us, there’s going to come seven years of tribulation. And the second three and a half years are going to be worse than the first three and a half years. It comes right on the heels.

If I’m right about the timing, it comes right on the heels of where the world thought, oh, everything’s great, everything’s wonderful, it’s peace and safety, and they’ve seen nothing yet. Is that because God’s mean? No, God’s given man time after time, opportunity after opportunity to repent.

God’s given us plenty of space to repent. And when God finally says, now it’s over, you’re done, God will be completely just in doing that. And his wrath will be poured out on the sin of the world.

On top of which, the world’s just going to, even before we get into the disasters and the wrath of God being poured out, even before we get to that, the world is going to become a worse place because the Bible talks about the restraining influence against sin being removed out of the. . .

When all the believers are raptured up out of the world, the Holy Spirit that dwells within us goes with us. And I tell you what, you think the world is dark now? Imagine a world where the Holy Spirit isn’t working on anybody.

Imagine a world where all the restraints are thrown off. Imagine a world where the full power of sin is unleashed with nothing to hold it back. And it would be like the days of Noah, where the world became a pretty dark and pretty miserable place already, even before God’s wrath was unleashed.

And we think we live in dark times now. We’ve not seen anything like the days of Noah, and we’ve not seen anything like the days that’ll come when the church is gone. They say peace and security, then sudden destruction will come upon them.

And it’s going to come in an unstoppable fashion. Verse 3 says, like the labor pains on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape. Now, all of my children have been born by C-section.

Some of them by scheduled C-section, and some of them by emergency C-section. So what I’m saying is I’ve not had to, and not like it’s all me to endure anyway, but I haven’t experienced being alongside, I’m choosing my words very carefully because of the number of women in the congregation. I haven’t been there to experience being alongside somebody who’s been in labor long term.

Is that okay to say it that way? Okay. But I have been there when my wife’s gone into labor.

She didn’t pick that moment to say, you know what, I think I’ll squeeze out a baby today. Sounds like something fun. I have nothing else to do on my list. We’ll just go now.

Wasn’t her choice. It came on suddenly. And you know what, there was no warning.

The night Benjamin came, the night Benjamin was born, I was painting our dining room. And I looked like I was painting our dining room. She said, I’m going into labor.

I said, I’ll get you to the hospital. We knew, though, they had told us if you go into labor, you have a little bit of time to get here. I insisted on taking a shower and changing my clothes. She wasn’t upset about it, but she said, why do you have to change your clothes?

I said, first impressions are important. That’s not a preacher story. That really happened.

But it was, we were not expecting that to happen that night. The one we were expecting to come when they came was Charlie, and we weren’t expecting what we got there. There’s nothing.

The more I’ve learned about the whole pregnancy ordeal and childbirth, and now between the ones that have made it and the ones that are already in heaven seven times seven pregnancies I’ve I won’t say been through I’ve walked alongside of and I’ve learned a lot of things and one of the things I’ve learned is that we have very even even with all the doctors and medical technology we have we have very little control over anything that happens I think it’s a spot on analogy that Paul uses here. He said the day of the Lord will come like labor pains in a pregnant woman and they will not escape. And when somebody’s in labor, you can’t always stop it.

I know they have some techniques they can try, but if that baby’s determined to come, that baby’s coming. And I’ve been told by doctors, you know, we really don’t try to stop the labor. If all else, we try to deliver the baby as safely as we can and support the baby and deal with it that way.

You can’t escape the labor pains. You can’t escape the labor process. It comes on when it comes on.

It’s uncontrollable. It’s unstoppable. And that’s the way the day of the Lord is coming.

Now, we say that and we understand that. That doesn’t necessarily feel comforting, does it? I’ve told you that Paul wanted them to comfort one another with their understanding.

And the idea that we are out of control, we have no control over this, doesn’t seem like it should be comforting. I don’t like being out of control. I can’t tell you the last time I was a passenger in a vehicle rather than a driver.

Because I like to feel like I’m in control and can do something if there’s a problem. So it shouldn’t be comforting to realize that we are not in control of this. Here’s why it’s comforting.

Because we realize we’re not in control, but we know who is. We know who’s in control of this whole process. And it’s not us.

We don’t have to do anything. We just have to be obedient and be expectant and be busy in the meantime. So they knew.

They knew that the day of the Lord was coming. And so as children of light, he tells them not to act like they’re in the dark about these things. That goes for us as well.

We need to remember the day of the Lord is coming. We need to live in expectation of those things. He tells them in verses 4 and 5, but you brothers and sisters are not in the dark for this day to surprise you like a thief.

So for us, it’s like the thief has gone ahead and given us the notarized letter of warning. Now, God hasn’t told us the exact date or the exact time, but we’ve been prepared as much as we need to be. That the things that we need to know, we know.

And the things we don’t need to know, he didn’t tell us and we shouldn’t worry about. But especially for them who they thought it had already happened. wait a minute we missed it and Paul says no you didn’t miss it go back to verse 4 it’s coming you’ll know because you’ll be gathered up you’re not going to miss it he’s not going to forget about you he tells them don’t be in the dark about this don’t let the day of the Lord be a surprise to you you know this is coming at some point we do not belong to the night for you’re all children of light and children of the day we do not belong to the night or the darkness now in a spiritual sense We don’t belong to the darkness.

I talked about that last Sunday morning, about being transferred out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of God’s Son. We don’t belong to the darkness. We’re not under the control of the darkness in a spiritual sense.

But also in a sense of our understanding, we’re not in the dark about these things. God hasn’t left us out in the dark with no warning about what’s to come. And so he tells us to stay alert and stay focused, Stay self-controlled because we know that Jesus is coming back.

He says in verses 6 and 7, So then let us not sleep like the rest, but let us stay awake and be self-controlled. Now he’s not saying here, don’t ever take a nap. He’s also, I took one this afternoon, and I’m in much better shape to come do this with you all tonight.

Sometimes you need a nap. My pastor when I was growing up used to say, sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is take a nap. And I think that’s right from time to time.

Even Jesus came apart to rest so he could be better equipped to do what the Father had sent him to do. When he says, let us not sleep, he’s not saying don’t ever rest. He’s also not using sleep in the way that he used it in chapter 4. Those who are asleep, it’s a euphemism for death.

He’s not talking about, don’t die on me. When he says, let us not sleep, he’s talking about not being prepared. We can think back to the story that Jesus told about the ten virgins who had their lamps and were supposed to have the lamps filled with the oil and have the wicks prepared and be ready when the bridegroom came.

And five of them overslept. Only five of them were ready. When he says, don’t sleep, he’s saying, don’t get lazy.

Don’t let your guard down. Don’t be unprepared. But let us stay awake and be self-controlled.

You know, if we remember constantly that he’s coming back, we remember the day of the Lord, and we know that it could be any day, and we keep that at the forefront of our minds, we will be prepared for it when it comes, because we’re going to live like it in the meantime. We’re going to be self-controlled. We’re going to realize that for every decision, there’s a consequence in eternity.

There’s a consequence in eternity. Heard somebody talking a while back about the rewards that God offers us. And how, it might have been Adrian Rogers, talking about the rewards that God offers, and how, you know, sometimes to sound spiritual, we’ll say, well, we shouldn’t do what God wants us to for the rewards, we should do it just because it’s right.

I’m pretty sure it was Adrian Rogers. He said, some of us try to act like we’re more spiritual than God himself. Because God set it up to reward us for our faithfulness because God understands human nature better than we do.

And if all we look at is we’ve got this life of just obedience and the sacrifices that we have to make to be obedient and that’s just all there is and there’s no light at the end of the tunnel, it’s going to be hard for us to press on. And so we have the promise from God that there are rewards coming. We have the promise from God that there’s a day of reckoning when all the things that we’ve done will be rewarded.

Now, we shouldn’t obey God just solely for the benefits. At the same time, God understands our human nature. And God reminds us throughout his word that this world, what we see right in front of us is not all there is.

There is coming a day when Jesus will return to gather up the dead in Christ and those who believe in him and are alive and remain. he’ll gather us to be with him. Then after seven years of sorting out the planet, he’ll return and establish his perfect rule for a thousand years.

And somewhere in that timeline, everybody will be judged. What about those of us? How are we going to be judged as Christians because our sins are already forgiven?

They’re under the blood. God says, your sins will I remember no more. God chooses not to remember our sins.

He puts them as far away from us as the east is from the west. How are we going to be judged? Not for punishment, but for degree of reward. How faithful have we been?

How obedient have we been? And God will judge us to reward us as we stand before the mercy seat of Jesus Christ. If we live with that reality in mind every day, that there’s coming a time, and maybe very soon, that we see Jesus, and we’re face to face with the one who died for us, and we stand before his mercy seat and give an account for what we did, wouldn’t it change the way we live? He says, remember that he’s coming like a thief in the night and don’t sleep, stay awake and be self-controlled.

Show the work of the Spirit in you. Self-control is not something we’re able to do on our own power, by the way. We’re only able to be self-controlled because the Holy Spirit works in us and gives us the ability.

Self-control is one of those fruits of the Spirit. Now, some translations translate the words differently, bu