In our society we value choices and the ability to make choices. However, we don't want anyone to hold us responsible for the choices we have made. This attitude has come with us to church.
In 2 Thessalonians we meet a church of people who made several choices. They chose to grow their faith and they chose to love one another with an increasing love.
Questions for Reflection:
- Name the three most interesting choices you made today? What made them interesting?
- Do you agree that we as a society demand more choices and refuse to be held accountable for our choices? Why or why not?
- What is faith?
- How does your definition of faith affect how you live your life? How do different definitions of faith work themselves out in our lives?
- Has your faith been growing in the past while? How do you measure that?
- Describe one instance where you chose to love someone who was difficult to love? What was that like?
- How can you make choices that will help your faith to grow and your love to increase?
Sermon: Making Choices
I want you to think for a moment how many choices you make in a given day. Everything from do you hit Snooze or just get up in the morning through to whether or not these pajamas are fresh enough to sleep in one more night and the probably dozens if not hundreds of choices we make in between. Our society values choices and being able to make choices. If we in any way limit choices we quickly find out that we are infringing on someone’s freedoms.
I went to the Super Store this week and I checked how many choices we have available to us on several items that are found in every one of our homes. How many choices of milk are there at the Super Store? I’m not counting cream, or the flavored coffee whiteners that are in the dairy case, or the Soy Beverage options. Anyone want to guess how many milk choices there are? I counted 41 different choices of milk - 250ml, 500ml, 1 liter, 2 liter, 4 liter - Skim milk, 1%, 2%, 3.25%, Homo - Vanilla, French Vanilla, Strawberry, Chocolate, Dark Chocolate. There’s organic 1% and 2% milk. I was amazed. When I was a kid growing up on the farm, we had less choice in milk. It was essentially warm or cold depending on whether Dad had milked the cow in the evening or in the morning.
I moved from the milk cooler to one of the most basic products in our houses. It’s a product we all have but we’re embarrassed to talk about; in fact we try to give it more delicate and sophisticated sounding names. I’m talking about toilet paper or as the store labels the section - bathroom tissue. That new more sanitized name doesn’t help me at all, because I just translate ‘bathroom tissue’ into whatever slang comes into my depraved little brain. Anybody want to guess how many choices you can make in the bathroom tissue aisle at Super Store? 24. Can someone please explain to me why we need the choice between the double and single roll? Why do we need that? “I find I don’t use much paper and I like my paper fresh so I just buy the single roll, that way I’m always getting fresh paper.” I don’t know why there has to be two sizes of rolls. There’s a pretty big difference in price from one end of the aisle to the other. I understand how that works. The most expensive paper will be pillowy and soft and have pictures on the wrapper of kittens or clouds. The cheapest paper will have enough wood pulp left in it that we won’t be sure if we bought toilet paper or tooth picks on a roll. Why do we need three different sizes of sheets in bathroom tissue when all the sizes are within a centimeter of each other? As a society, in my lifetime, we have gone from a people who looked forward to the arrival of the new Eaton’s catalogue, because that meant the old one made it’s way out to the outhouse. We’ve gone from a people who looked forward to Christmas, partly, because Christmas oranges were wrapped in tissue paper. We’ve gone from that to 24 different choices of toilet paper, I’m sorry, bathroom tissue.
Finally, I went to the soup aisle. Care to guess how many choices there are in soup? Different flavors, different manufacturers, different package sizes or arrangements. Dehydrated or canned. I excluded all the Mr. Noodles type choices because I wasn’t sure if it was soup or pasta. Truth be told I wasn’t sure if it was food or styrofoam insulation. How many choices do you think there are in the soup aisle? Two Hundred and Eleven. Despite there being 211 choices in the soup aisle they still don’t have this one particular brand and flavor that I like. With 211 choices you would think I would be satisfied. No! I want that 212th choice.
As a society, on the one hand, we have to have choices; we demand choices, the more choices the better. On the other hand as a society we are increasingly demanding that we not be held accountable for the choices we make.
We insist the bad choices we have made are not our fault. We have medicalized character traits, and moral choices so that it’s not our fault if we choose badly or if we are of low character; it’s our medical condition. We blame our families for our choices, either we had absent parents, or inferior parents who were present. We blame anything to avoid taking responsibility for our choices.
That attitude has infected most of us as Christians and we bring that attitude with us to church. We demand comprehensive and excellent choices of church programing to satisfy our needs which may in fact only be wants. We convince ourselves they’re needs because some other church has it and we need to have that too. However, because of the other choices we’ve made we insist we don’t have time to serve in the ministry of the church, which would allow the church to expand those choices and would help us develop our gifts. We like it that we can choose between a dozen or more churches in our city and we reserve the right to choose whichever one suits our fancy this year. No one is allowed to tell us that we can’t flit about from one to the other because we just go where we’re going to get fed. Erwin McManus once asked people who said they weren’t being fed at their former church what they were intending to do with all the food they were accumulating. He also asked them if they knew what happened to fat sheep who never exercise.
We demand the right to choose but we refuse to take responsibility for the choices we’ve made all of which has lead to our own spiritual dwarfism. The church in North America is chock full of spiritual dwarves when given the resources at our disposal it should be full of spiritual giants. Instead of taking responsibility for our condition we blame the church that we’re not growing in our faith. We may only have been there twice in the last three months but it’s the church’s fault I’m growing in my Christian life. We demand choices but we refuse to take responsibility for the choices we make.
In the next couple of months it is my plan to look together with us at a New Testament book that highlights choices the first readers of this book had made. Some of the choices were good ones and we’ll talk about some of those good choices today. Some of the choices they made were poor choices. If you have your Bibles with you I would invite you turn with me to the little New Testament book of 2 Thessalonians. You will find 2 Thessalonians just to the right of 1 Thessalonians and just to the left of 1 Timothy. Let’s begin reading at 2 Thessalonians chapter 1 verse 1.
1Paul, Silas and Timothy,
To the church of the Thessalonians in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ:
2Grace and peace to you from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
This is a fairly typical greeting from Paul to the recipients of his letters. He identified himself and who else was writing the letter with him. Like 1 Thessalonians Paul identified for the church that they were in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. He wanted them to know they were secure in Christ. This will be important later in 2 Thessalonians because some of the church people had come to believe that the 2nd coming of Christ had already happened and they had been missed; God had forgotten them. Paul, right from the beginning assured them that they were in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Verse 3,
3We ought always to thank God for you, brothers, and rightly so, because your faith is growing more and more, and the love every one of you has for each other is increasing.
Paul confessed to the Thessalonians that every time he and Silas and Timothy prayed for them the first prayer that came to their minds when they thought of the Thessalonian church was a prayer of thanksgiving because of how good they were doing. Let’s just bring this home for a moment and ask this question, “What’s the first thing you think of when you go to pray for Grace Church?”
When I pray for Grace Church, I often give thanks for this church. However, those prayers of thanksgiving are usually not the first things I think to pray despite the fact we have a lot to be thankful for in Grace Church. I usually pray for unity, for truth and right relationships and for respect and kindness. Those things are the first things I think of when I pray for Grace Church.
Paul then described why it was that the most appropriate prayer that he and Silas and Timothy could pray for the Thessalonians was a prayer of thanksgiving. There were two things which rose to the top of the pile that made him and Silas and Timothy thankful whenever he prayed for the Thessalonians.
The first thing for which Paul was thankful was that their faith was growing more and more. In the Greek that phrase literally means their faith was growing exceedingly. Their faith was not inching along, three steps forward and two steps back. Their faith was leaping forward. They were bounding forward in their faith and Paul was thrilled to watch this happen. Because of the way their faith was growing the first prayer Paul thought to pray for the Thessalonians was a prayer of thanksgiving.
What does it mean if your faith is growing? What is faith? There have been times when I thought faith was the opposite of doubt. I used to think that if there was any doubt in my life about the things of God, my faith was weak. So I had to speak to others with complete confidence even when in my heart there was doubt. You see, if I doubted God wouldn’t answer my prayer. I don’t know why I didn’t realize that God knew every attitude of my heart and I wasn’t fooling Him for a moment and I was lying to my brothers and sisters in Christ. I don’t believe faith is the opposite of doubt anymore.
There was a time when I thought that faith was a collection of facts we needed to believe; a right theology. We sometimes speak about ‘the faith’ as a bunch of facts and truths Christians need to believe to be able to properly call themselves Christian. This means that if my theology is off in one little thing I’m less Christian or immature in my faith. That would mean the key to growing in my faith would be to know more facts about God. I don’t think I believe that. I agree we need to believe the right things about God but just memorizing facts from a theology textbook won’t necessarily lead to growing faith. Religion departments at universities are full of people who know lots of facts about God but have no faith.
I used to think faith was something I couldn’t really control and it was this sense of closeness with God. This type of faith, this closeness with God just seemed to happen or it seemed to disappear and I couldn’t do much about it. God was fickle that way. I heard guilt inducing trite sayings like, “If you don’t feel close to God, who moved?” I could practice bible reading and prayer but that was no guarantee that faith or closeness with God wouldn’t disappear. I’ve had large deserts in terms of my closeness with God, despite the fact that I was working hard at all the traditional methods of being close to God. What is the faith that was growing more and more in the Thessalonians?
In the last couple of years I’ve come to believe that most often when the Bible speaks about faith it is speaking about obeying God’s call on our lives. Biblical faith is walking unwaveringly in the direction God in which God has called us to live. Some of us may not like that because it sounds like a works salvation and we don’t want anything to do with earning our salvation. That’s not what I mean at all. A faith that grows like the Thessalonians’ faith begins by recognizing that Jesus died for our sins and believing him for forgiveness and a relationship with God. A faith that grows like the Thessalonians knows that salvation is purely an act of God’s grace in our lives. Unswervingly following God’s call on my life doesn’t undo any of those things. Instead, it gives evidence that those things have actually happened in my life.
What’s God’s call on our lives? We often think of God’s call on our lives in terms of big life-altering stuff like being a martyr or a missionary or something like that. God’s call on our lives is really just a bunch of little stuff we do every day no matter what the vocational call of God is on our lives.
God’s call is all over the pages of Scripture and we are called to walk in the direction of that call. It’s God’s call to love. It’s God’s call to speak the truth. It’s God’s call to work faithfully. It’s God’s call to be honest in business. It’s God’s call to care about justice. There are hundreds more calls of God on our lives.
The beauty of this understanding of faith is that I can have doubts and still have faith. I can have great doubts that God’s call on my life to love my enemies is a good idea when everything within me screams out at me to deck my enemies not love them with a self-sacrificing love. I can doubt it’s a good idea but I can continue to walk the path God has called me to walk.
I can doubt it’s a good idea to speak the truth in love which is God’s call to us but do it anyway. I can lovingly tell that friend that they are poisoning relationships with their actions or that their lack of respect for others is killing the credibility of Christians in the world or that their gossiping on Facebook is way out of line. I can doubt it’s a good idea because I’m pretty sure they won’t take it well and I’m going to lose a friend but I can continue to follow God’s call in my life. That’s faith.
I can believe the wrong things about God but still have faith; walking what God has called me to walk. When God corrects my incorrect belief I can adjust my walk. I can walk God’s call in my life even when I don’t feel close to Him. I don’t have to feel close to keep walking that walk; I just keep picking them up and putting them down according to God’s call on my life. I’ve spent years of my life doing that. I still build that relationship with God through prayer and bible reading and other disciplines but faith is walking God’s call on my life.
I believe that’s the faith Paul and Silas and Timothy saw in the Thessalonians and it was exploding in them and because it was exploding in them the first prayers they prayed for them every time they prayed were prayers of thanksgiving.
Does that concept of faith make sense to you? What do you see that’s wrong with what I’ve just said?
Not only was the Thessalonians faith growing more and more. The next part of the verse says that the love every one of them had for one another was increasing. Paul, Silas and Timothy could see that the Thessalonians’ faith was growing because the love every one of them had for one another was increasing. Growing faith produced increasing love within the Body of Christ.
How does that work? How can we increase love? How can we manufacture love? The word that is translated as love in this verse is the Greek word agape - which is a word that describes God’s love. Agape is a word that describes a love that sacrifices for the benefit of the person whom we love. The Thessalonians were increasingly sacrificing for one another. This kind love has nothing to do with the way in which the object of our love behaves toward us. This is the love Jesus said we’re to have for our enemies. The Bible says that God loved the world so much that no matter what we did He sacrificed His son for us so that we can have a relationship with Him. This is not a love that you feel your way into. This is a love that we choose to do or choose not to do. Every one of the Thessalonians was choosing to love and to sacrifice for everyone else in the church. Their love was increasing. This love was part of their faith, it was God’s call on their lives and they were choosing to walk God’s call on their lives and their faith was growing more and more.
Absolutely amazing. No wonder Paul said the first thing that came to mind to pray for the Thessalonians was Thanksgiving. I have never heard of a church anywhere where every one of the people loves everyone else in the church with an ever increasing love. It’s not happening here, but it was happening there.
We live in a society that has 24 choices in Toilet Paper, 41 choices in Milk and 211 choices in soup. For the life of us we can’t quite believe that we only get two choices in our faith; to believe and obey God’s call on our lives or to reject His call on our lives and that if we choose to obey God’s call on our lives our faith will grow and if we choose to reject His call on our lives our faith will wither. We think and our society has encouraged us to believe there must be a spectrum of choices between those two polar opposites. The Bible says no. That doesn’t stop most of us from trying to choose something in the middle, to mix and mash some sort of tailor made faith together that will be easy and still give us what we want out of life together with heaven after we die. Because we mash together a faith like that the North American church is full of spiritual dwarves where it should be full of spiritual giants. Because we as Christians try to mash together some sort of faith of our own making and because we don’t live God’s call on our lives every day, people in our society might still like Jesus - although that number is trending steadily downward - but our society really doesn’t like those who call themselves Christians - our approval rating is at an all-time low. People don’t like the church because Christians don’t obey God’s call on their lives.
We have an excuse for that. We say, “It’s so much harder to live in the 21st century than it was in the first century.” Let’s look at verse 4,
4Therefore, among God’s churches we boast about your perseverance and faith in all the persecutions and trials you are enduring.
In 1 Thessalonians we read that the church was experiencing a measure of persecution. Between 1 & 2 Thessalonians that persecution has increased and intensified. Despite the increase in persecution the faith of the Thessalonians had exploded in growth and their love for one another was increasing. External circumstances only control if our faith will grow or shrivel if we allow them to do so. We have choices to make about whether or not our faith will grow or not and about whether our love for one another will increase. We make those choices dozens of times every day.
We make choices to grow or shrivel our faith when we decide what we text or Tweet or Facebook or say about someone in the coffee shop. We make choices to grow or shrivel our faith when we decide to pay our bills or not. We make choices to grow or shrivel our faith when we decide what kind of customer we are going to be. We make choices to grow or shrivel our faith when we decide if we will tell the truth or not.
In the last year or so I have become appalled at how much untruth there is in the church. We are so addicted to niceness and so we don’t love each other enough to lovingly tell each other the truth. So we have issues that fester and remain because we won’t deal with them because we won’t name them and we won’t tell the truth about them. We choose to believe Satan’s lie that untruth is more profitable and better in the long run than truth because it’s easier and more comfortable. We reject God’s call on our lives to speak the truth in love and we wonder why the church struggles with issues.
A year ago I heard a crusty businessman named Jack Welch who really didn’t make a profession of faith in Christ at all say that the number one priority of his leadership while he was CEO of General Electric was to have a culture of telling the truth; candor he called it. I was ashamed that a man who really didn’t make a profession of faith had a stronger commitment to telling the truth than the church of Jesus Christ. We make choices about whether or not our faith will grow when we decide to tell the truth or not.
It’s about making choices. We will choose to grow our faith or not by the choices we make. We will choose to increase our love for one another by the choices we make. External circumstances only control whether or not our faith grows if we let them. We make those choices in every little decision we make every day to follow God’s call on our lives.
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