Destiny

 

Text: 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11

Focus: resurrection

Function: to build our hope in God

5:¹Now concerning the times and the seasons, brothers and sisters, you do not need to have anything written to you. ²For you yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. ³When they say, “There is peace and security,” then sudden destruction will come upon them, as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and there will be no escape! ⁴But you, brothers and sisters, are not in darkness, for that day to surprise you like a thief; ⁵for you are all children of light and children of the day; we are not of the night or of darkness. ⁶So, then, let us not fall asleep as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober, ⁷for those who sleep sleep at night, and those who are drunk get drunk at night. ⁸But since we belong to the day, let us be sober and put on the breastplate of faith and love and for a helmet the hope of salvation. ⁹For God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, ¹⁰who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep we may live with him. ¹¹Therefore encourage one another and build up each other, as indeed you are doing.

We a e continuing our theme from last week about the great hope that we have as believers in the power of the resurrection.

And our focus is verse 9: “God has not destined us for wrath but for obtaining salvation...”

According to this passage, it is NOT our destiny from God to endure wrath, but to obtain the salvation that God has for us in Christ.

Think of what salvation means. When we think of salvation, I wonder if our minds go to the right place?

I see salvation as the healing restoration to God and to others through the transforming work of the Holy Spirit.

But because I was taught a God of retribution, or wrath,0 instead of a God of restoration, when I was growing up I was taught that salvation merely meant that we were not destined for hell anymore.

And, there is truth to that, the text tells us that we are not destined for wrath. When he is speaking of wrath, he is speaking of retribution. And he says that God is not a God who delights in getting even with people for their sins. God is the God who sends the Spirit of God to them, either through their own faith in God, or through the loving response of a believer that draws them to the family of God as well.

People wonder about the mystery of the Holy Spirit.

Jesus told Nicodemus that he must be “born from above.” Jesus was speaking of the transforming power of the Holy Spirit in the life of the individual.

God sends God’s Spirit to transform us.

If you read through the Old Testament you see that although the people knew the greatest commandment was to love their neighbor as much as they love themselves along with loving God, they simply had a hard time obeying that command. Their selfish nature got in the way.

So, God promises them through the prophet In Ezekiel 36:24-27 that they will be able to obey because God will send the Spirit to transform their hearts. And Jesus reiterates that prophecy by speaking mysteriously of being born from above. I grew up calling it born again and the meaning is pretty similar.

What happens is this: the Spirit of God moves us to love the other. That is why I believe that God is the God of restoration, not retribution.

Retribution implies wrath and revenge.

God loves us. Now, God does discipline us like a parent corrects their children. The discipline is not in anger or revenge, but in restoration toward the full potential of loving the other that God provides through the Spirit.

According to this passage, the Holy Scriptures of the Christian faith, it is not revenge that God practices. Jesus said: It is no longer an eye for an eye.

The retribution in the Old Testament did not work. People can be stubborn, selfish, even greedy and unforgiving. It is human nature. God sends the Spirit to help us overcome, I believe, our evolutionary tendency to love one group by hating the other.

Jesus showed us that living by hate and revenge is not the way of the Kingdom of God. By Jesus’ example, through his death and subsequent resurrection, we can forgive, forget revenge, and focus on restoration.

2 Corinthians 5:17-21 says: God wants to restore everyone to become loving and kind people.

However, that is not the way of the world we live in. That doesn’t excuse us, it calls us to depend more on Christ and the resurrection.

We live in a culture of independence. We live in a culture that encourages greed. I believe that it is immoral that 8 people have more wealth than the combined masses of 3.6 billion people on this planet. What is immoral is that we praise these people as examples for us.

The Bible says that it is the rich who oppress us and treat us unfairly. And yet we honor the rich as somehow better people than others even though many got that way by refusing to pay their workers a living wage.

It never has trickled down to the poor people and the Bible makes that clear.

But there is no eating sour grapes about not getting to be rich for the believer because our reward is laid up in heaven and it is eternal, not temporary.

And there is not eating sour grapes about the rich because the Bible the same passage in James that I quoted says that God has chosen the poor in this world to be honored and rich in spiritual things. Jesus said it as well in the beatitudes.

I sort of understand that concept.

I have spent some time working on mission in Tijuana, Mexico. I met a community of believers there who are living in desperate poverty and are more happy and have less stress than we do trying to protect all this wealth that we have.

So, we live in this Un-Christlike culture of independence which values individualism, personal gain and honors greed, over the Christian culture that values the welfare of everyone. Remember, the scriptures call us to live and love sacrificially for others.

Being Christian in our culture means that we accept a different set of values than the ones that allow for personal gain over the welfare of others. We are to treat others as well as we treat ourselves.

Now remember: our destiny is not for wrath, but for salvation. And remember, salvation is the healing that God gives us. The way of Christ is a path to an abundant life if we live by the principle of treating others as well as we treat ourselves.

Now the context of the passage is what is known as “The Day of the Lord.”

As we saw last week in the previous chapter, we are to fix our hope in the fact that Jesus is coming back and will reward us for living a life of love. It goes again with the Matthew 25 theme of being vigilant while waiting for the coming of the Christ.

He speaks in the passage about how at times we get distracted and fail. But here is the cool thing: he reminds us that even in failure, God has not destined us to be the recipients of wrath, but of restoration.

When we fail, the Spirit is there to lead us to confession and repentance.

I like to think of it as acknowledging our need for healing and correcting behavior that keeps us from experiencing that healing.

We teach the guys at Kairos that forgiveness, giving up the need for retribution and asking God to restore the individual who harmed us, is absolutely imperative for our own restoration.

And, during the forgiveness ceremony, through that act of giving revenge over to God, many are born from above and become Christ’s brothers in the spiritual realm.

My son Philip told me on the last weekend, three of the guys were not able to go through the forgiveness ceremony. And we do not push in Kairos, we let the Spirit convince, so we treated them the same and kept on loving them.

Forgiveness is hard. It is a sacrifice. It is a huge step in faith because it places its trust in the healing power of God instead of the human need for vengeance.

But remember, our destiny is not wrath, but restoration.

In John 12:47 we read that Jesus did not come to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through him.

Again, I can’t emphasize this enough. God is no longer, if God ever was, the God of wrath. God is love, healing and restoration.

Let us let God heal and restore us to continue to be loving people as well.