How You Can Please God in: Sex, Work, Death (4)
Next week it is four months since we left our home in Queensland to come to Sydney to be with Eileen’s dying father, Jim McDowell. Two days later he died.
The same day, Sydney locked down – and ever since Queensland has locked us (along with thousands of others) out of house and home.
When/if we are allowed to go home it will be surreal to think that when we left, Dad was still alive, but that when we return he will have been gone many months. The life we return to, without him, will be different from the one we left.
Death changes your life: it is never the same again.
Death has changed our lives many times over in the last couple of years; so many of our friends have been taken from us.
Some, like Jim, were in their 80s or 90s. But others were much younger, in their 50s or 60s, and we weren’t at all prepared to lose them. And there are others, dear friends, who are younger, who do not expect to have much longer with us on this earth.
The death of a loved one changes your life forever: your life is never the same again. How do you live with that?
Recently people were asked: “What is an adult problem you were not prepared for?”
Perhaps the most significant response was: “Losing people. Loved ones passing away is the hardest. Then there’s the nasty breakdown of personal relationships, family relationships and friendships. Then there’s the sad drifting apart that happens when life takes you on a different path to a person you were once really close to.” There are many ways we can lose a loved one.
Phil Arthur comments: “No one is exempt from the pain of separation. Partings are a continual feature of life in this world. They may be acrimonious: friends quarrel and do not always make it up. Sometimes they are barely perceptible. Months or even years pass before we realize that we have drifted apart from someone whose friendship once mattered very much indeed.”
How does a Christian respond to loss?
How can we respond in a good way, a way that pleases God?
Writing to the new Christians in the fledgling church he had left behind in Thessalonica, Paul “asked and urged” them “as you received from us how you ought to walk and to please God, just as you are doing, that you do so more and more.” (1 These 4:1)
He then goes on to elaborate how they can please God in three areas of their lives: sex (vv 3-8), work (vv 9-12) and death (vv 13-18).
In this he seems to have in mind the three lots of people he refers to in ch 5, v 14.
He wants those (all members) in the church to “uphold the weak” who are in danger of falling into sexual sin, “warn the disorderly” who are lazy and sponging on others, and “comfort the fainthearted” who are mourning the loss of loved ones.
Comfort the faint hearted
Twice Paul tells those in the church in Thessalonica to “comfort the fainthearted” who are mourning the loss of loved ones:
– “Therefore comfort each other and edify one another, just as you also are doing.” (5:11)
– And before that: “Therefore comfort one another with these words.” (4:18) Comfort is found in “these words”, i.e. “words” found in Scripture.
A few years ago I attended a sad funeral in a Uniting Church north of Brisbane.
The minister tried to comfort the mourners with his own words – words like: “He has died, he has gone. We don’t know where. No one knows where we go after death.” That’s about all you can say when you rely on your own words.
Inevitably a pathetic attempt is made to inject some happy feelings into such funerals (as also occurred on this occasion) by turning the event into a “celebration” of the man’s life. But the Bible says only a “fool” turns a funeral into a celebration like this (Eccl 7:2-4).
Admittedly comfort was hard to come by: the middle aged man was not a believer, was separated from his wife, lived a life of debauchery, and eventually in despair had taken his own life. But still, many that day foolishly tried to turn “the house of mourning” into “the house of mirth.”
Words fail.
How different is the mourning of believers when a loved one, a fellow believer, dies. The Bible says: “I do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning those who have fallen asleep, lest you sorrow as others who have no hope.” (1 Thes 4:13)
We do not pretend to laugh as though it were a “celebration” – as unbelievers invariably seek to do at funerals today. That is ignorance.
But equally ignorant is to be overcome with grief so that we lose all hope. Where we lived for some years in a “Christianised” region of rural Kenya we often witnessed a procession of women wailing in (what seemed, at least to us, to be) inconsolable despair as they passed our house ululating, on their way to bury a dead child.
It is right for the Christian to mourn the passing of a loved one. “It would be very unnatural, indeed inhuman, not to mourn when we lose somebody near and dear to us.” (John Stott) Even Jesus wept (Joh 11:35).
But we do not mourn “as others who have no hope.” We are to “comfort one another with these words.” Lack of comfort comes when we are “ignorant” of “these words”.
What words?
Most important of all: “We believe that Jesus died and rose again.” (1 Thes 4:14)
What wonderful words!
If we believe that, then we can, and must, believe that “even so God will bring with Him those who sleep in Jesus.”
Phil Arthur comments: “The object of our faith is a crucified and risen Saviour who will certainly return to the world that He left at the time of his resurrection.”
So, we do not to see the one we bury as “dead” but (as Paul puts it here, 3 times in vv. 13,14,15) merely lain down to “sleep”.
His soul is not asleep – the moment our loved one dies, he immediately lives in the conscious presence of Jesus (Luke 23:43).
But we who no longer see him, or communicate with him, understand our loss like we would one who has fallen asleep, whom we have not lost forever and whom we will see and communicate with again once they wake up.
Indeed, the Greek word for “sleep” here, koimao, also gives us the Greek word for their resting place: koimeterion, i.e. our word “cemetery”: a place of sleep!
When we view the grave of a loved one in a cemetery, we are reminded that though they “sleep” (or so it appears to us, at least), we will see them again and be reunited – either when we, too, fall “asleep”, or at the Last Day if before then.
What a day that will be!
“For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first.
“Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.
“And thus we shall always be with the Lord.”
That is the true “Freedom Day” we all long for.
Because of this, though we mourn our loss, we do not mourn “as others who have no hope.”
“Therefore comfort one another with these words.”
Mourning Loss
As noted above there are other ways we suffer the loss of relationships apart from death. All loss brings mourning.
Is there help in the counsel Paul gives us for these other ways we suffer loss?
As I write this, news has reached me that the church plant I was part of half a century ago, and where I served as a pastor for the first nine years of ministry, has now folded.
As I watched my father-in-law slowly go downhill over the last year, at the same time I watched from afar the slow and painful decline of a once vibrant church.
This is heart breaking. Though I haven’t pastored there for many years, yet some of those who were there from the beginning, with whom I still have such close ties, are still there – though now much older.
My heart especially goes out to these “who have borne the burden and the heat of the day” but who now, through no fault of their own, and in their frailer years, are deprived of a stable church community they once cherished and that they expected would still be there in their latter years.
Thankfully I have not lost the precious relationships I have with many there.
But a local church is more than the sum of its people; an organism is always more than just the sum of its parts.
Just as marriage is more than just two individuals: it is the life of two individuals together as they grow and flourish in unity.
And the local church is an organism in which individual Christians grow and flourish by being a part of it. That is why, whenever a church disintegrates, it is painful. Though the individuals may continue, something very precious is lost, and we mourn.
Though Paul was not the pastor in Thessalonica at the time, yet he was instrumental in planting the church there, and they were never far from his heart. They were like family.
Earlier in his 1st Epistle he recounts how “we were gentle among you, just as a nursing mother cherishes her own children” (2:7); and how “we exhorted, and comforted, and charged every one of you, as a father does his own children” (2:11).
When cut off from them, and prevented from returning, he tells them: “having been taken away from you for a short time in presence, not in heart, I endeavoured more eagerly to see your face with great desire”; and how much “we wanted to come to you – but Satan hindered us” (2:17-18).
Though he himself was not allowed to return, yet “when we could no longer endure it” he relinquished his fellow worker (though it meant he would be “left alone”) and sent him “to establish you and encourage you concerning your faith”. He was fearful “lest by some means the tempter had tempted you, and our labour might be in vain” (3:1-5).
But then he heard that the church continued to prosper in “faith and love” and had as “great a desire” to see Paul as he them, and he exclaimed: “Now we really live.”
I understand how Paul would’ve felt.
It was not just that those in Thessalonica had kept the faith and were growing individually. Of course, it is great when individual Christians prosper in their faith.
But what was equally important was that they were growing and flourishing as a church.
We mourn when that is lost.
How to respond?
Can we derive comfort from Paul’s words in 1 Thes, ch 4?
We can, from the same “words”: “We believe that Jesus died and rose again.”
What comfort there is in these words, whatever our loss. This is the very foundation of all the Christian’s hope and comfort.
After all, if “God did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all” – “how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?” (Rom 8:32)
It is this same Christ “who died, and furthermore is also risen” – “who is even at the right hand of God, who also makes intercession for us.” (v 34)
It is this Christ who has promised: “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” (Matt 28:20)
What happened to the church in Thessalonica?
Local churches come and go. Denominations rise and fall.
Did the church in Thessalonica continue?
Or did they disintegrate over the same 40 year period that some other churches of the time (notably Ephesus and its satellites: Pergamos, Thyatira, Sardis, Laodicea) did? (Rev 2-3)
The church in Thessalonica began so promisingly, with the supernatural vision given to Paul (Acts 16:9) In Thessalonica “some of the Jews were persuaded, along with a great multitude of the devout Greeks, and not a few of the leading women” (Acts 17:4).
The church was famous from the beginning for their vibrant faith and evangelistic zeal (1 Thes 1:10); as well as their great generosity (2 Cor 8:1-5, Rom 15:26).
After that, we don’t know much about what happened to them, except that, ominously, some 15 years later Demas was headed their way (2 Tim 4:10).
Today, whatever “church” there is, is most likely shrouded in a fog of Greek Orthodox superstition.
Local churches come and go. Denominations rise and fall. Sad and painful that may be.
But this we know – we are not ignorant: Christ has promised: “I will build My church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” (Matt 16:18)
“Therefore we do not lose heart… while we do not look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal..” (2 Cor 4:16, 18)