Sexual Purity — Part One

We want to proceed with our studies in 1 Thessalonians and come once again to these opening verses of the fourth chapter, which are introduced by Paul’s words: “Finally, brothers, we instructed you how to live in order to please God.”

Jesus declared—it’s recorded in John chapter 8—in regard to his Father, he said, “I always do what pleases him.”[1] Paul announces of himself and of his colleagues in 2 Corinthians 5 that whether they’re away or whether they’re at home, he says, “we [always] make it our [aim] to please him.”[2] When he exhorts the Ephesian believers in 5:10, he says to them, “[I want you to] find out what pleases the Lord.” And this whole issue of pleasing God is not some matter of personal preference; it is a divine imperative. It is a necessity.

As we discovered this morning, God does not exist for us, but we exist for him. He does not exist in order that he might fulfill our aspirations, but we exist in order that we might live to the praise of his glory. And therefore, we’re always going to have to pay particular attention to this whole issue of pleasing God.

It’s important to realize also that Paul is not penning some of his own peculiar prescriptions. When he speaks about the gospel that he has proclaimed, back in 2:13, he says, “We … thank God continually because, when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men, but as it actually is, the word of God.”[3] So they were in no doubt as to what was going on. When Paul spoke and when Paul wrote, he was giving to them the very word of God.

And in the same way, you will note, as he speaks about these instructions or commands, they are provided by Jesus himself: “Finally, brothers, we instructed you how to live in order to please God.” And as he goes on into verse 2, he says, “For you know what instructions we gave you by the authority of the Lord Jesus.”[4] So when people are tempted to say, “Well, I don’t really know that we have any right to be as bold and as forceful as perhaps we are,” then our answer is, “This is not the preoccupations of the apostle Paul. This is the word of God himself, both in the gospel he proclaimed and in the practical instructions he in turn provided.”

How, then, should we live? Well, we should live with our eye and focus with a determined approach to pleasing God, for pleasing God is the foundation of all our ethical, Christian behavior. It’s a radical principle, and it is a wonderful principle—namely, that our whole motivation for living within parameters is not as a result of seeking to commit ourselves to some pharisaical list of dos and don’ts, but all of our Christian behavior is as a result of seeking to please God. And in seeking to please the Lawgiver, we then determine that we shall keep the law which he has given.

Pleasing God is the foundation of all our ethical, Christian behavior.

Now, that could all seem somewhat abstract were it not for the fact that in this section, Paul makes clear what it really means to work out this principle in the routine of our lives. And he addresses it in relationship to three particular areas in this opening half of chapter 4: the matter of sex, the matter of work, and the matter of death. If you think about it, there are no more prominent notions in many of our minds than these three whole areas of life, whether we live singly or within the framework of marriage.

Now, to this first issue we come this evening—and to the first approach to this first issue, I should say, for we will not be able to get all the way through these verses in the time that is available to us. But we’re addressing this issue of sexual purity.

Does the Bible have a perspective on this matter? Yes, it does. Is it clear? Yes, it is. Is it not true that the conditions in which Paul was living are very different from our own? No, it is not. Paul was writing from Corinth to Thessalonica. The context from which he was writing was dominated by sexual vice and immorality. The Temple of Aphrodite was predominant in the skyline of that time in Corinth, and this temple was a standing testimony to all kinds of immoral excess. And those who had become the temple priestesses, as they were known, would ply their trade as so-called “sacred courtesans” under the darkness of the Corinthian evening. And so, Paul was aware of the fact that people were continually bombarded by this kind of sexual emphasis. Aphrodite, of course, was, in Roman terminology, Venus, and with the same preoccupation. So that’s where he’s writing from. He can’t lift up his eyes and look but he is confronted by this matter of sexual immorality.

And the context into which he is writing, Thessalonica, was actually no better at all. Thessalonica had the worship of a number of deities who were called the Cabeiri. And in the worship of these deities, their worship included rites of gross immorality. It was not simply that they propounded freedom in terms of sexual license, but it was that they included within the very framework of their worship those excesses. And so Paul writes to this morally confused day in a way that is very helpful, for we live in an equally immoral culture.

The men of Paul’s day were, it was assumed, in such a position that they either could not or would not limit themselves to their wives as their only sexual partner. And this, of course, is what we find in many cultures. As the missionaries go out, they find that written into the very fabric of the culture is the idea of fornication and infidelity as something which is just regarded as being particularly normal and okay. We have not quite stooped to that level here, but one might be tempted to say, of course, we’re very close.

So, Paul responds to this without any waffling at all. He provides these instructions, which, as you will see, are plain, they’re honest, practical, authoritative, and uninhibited. When it comes to this kind of issue, especially if you’re dealing with teenagers, they don’t want a bunch of waffle. They don’t want a little bit of this and a little bit of that. They want a clear, straight answer. They may not like it, but they want it. And the Bible gives it. Any waffling on the matter of sexual purity is as a result of our fear or our compromise with our culture, but it is never and can never be as a result of the clarity with which the Bible speaks to these sexual matters. Paul is unashamed, he’s uninhibited, and it is exactly what the believer needs—especially the young believer—who is exposed to pagan standards and pagan pressures.

Now, in studying these verses, I have been helped—and I wonder if this will help you; I’m going to suggest that it might, and I’ll lead you through it—I’ve been helped by viewing this paragraph here as one half of a conversation. Now, let me explain to you what I mean. What we have here are Paul’s answers to a dialogue that is taking place between them, at least potentially so.

For example, Paul says—and here we are in verse 3—“It is God’s will that you should be sanctified.”

To which the individual replies, “Like, what do you mean?”

To which he replies, “Avoid sexual immorality.”

To which the reply is, “How am I supposed to do that?”

To which the reply comes, “Learn to control your own body. Live within the God-ordained limits.”

To which the individual responds, “So it’s just a kind of personal, private matter, is it?” To which the apostle responds, “No, make sure that you don’t wrong your brother in

relationship to these things.”

To which the individual responds, “Well, I’m sure since the Lord is so loving, he won’t mind if I mess up.”

To which the apostle responds, “Listen: the Lord will punish this kind of sin.”

To which the individual responds, “Give it to me again, just in a sentence.”

To which the apostle replies, “God did not call us to be impure, but to live a holy life.”

To which the individual responds, “I think you’re a little excessive in relationship to this, Paul. I think you’re going a wee bit over the top.”

To which the apostle responds, “He who rejects this instruction does not reject man but God, who gives you his Holy Spirit.”

I don’t know if it’s helpful for you to think in those terms, but it certainly was helpful to me—that what Paul is doing here is actually addressing specific questions that have come to him. And if you imagine it in terms of a dialogue, then I think we can see how logically the progression of his thought follows.

Well, let us, then, turn to it and go through this process, noticing his statement with which he begins in verse 3: “It is God’s will that you should be sanctified.” Christian faith does not derive its standards from contemporary society but from the Scriptures themselves, and here we have it in a phrase: “It is God’s will that you should be sanctified.”

Now, Paul has already referred to this. If you look at 3:13, he says, “May he strengthen your hearts so that you will be blameless and holy in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus comes with all his holy ones.”[5] Sanctification is the process whereby the holiness to which he refers in 3:13 is the end product. God by his Spirit is at work in the life of the believer, conforming us to the image of his Son. And so, as he works within our lives to conform us to Christ, there will come a day when the process is complete and when we are gathered up to be with him.

God by his Spirit is at work in the life of the believer, conforming us to the image of his Son.

He’s going to come back to it again, as we will discover in chapter 5, where in verse 23 he says, “May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful and he will do it.” It’s a great word of encouragement there. Because one of the tremendous challenges in relationship to the matter of sexual purity is this: How in the world can I possibly live to this standard? How am I ever going to be able to do this? “I’m supposed to live in purity,” says the teenager, “from now until the day I get married? I don’t even have a girlfriend. If I met one, I don’t know if she’d like me. I don’t know whether I could ever marry her. Goodness gracious! This may be for the next eleven years I have to live in purity.” Yeah. But Elisabeth Elliot is very, very helpful on the subject when she reminds the teenager, “You only have to stay pure for sixty seconds a minute.” For the future comes in at the rate of sixty seconds a minute. And the call to moral purity is one which is enabled by the Spirit of God. He is faithful, and he will do it.

What, then, is this sanctification business? “It is God’s will that you should be sanctified.” “Yes,” you say, “and I’m very glad to hear it. But what is it? What’s going to happen to me?” Well, sanctification, as I’ve said, denotes this process of being set apart for God, of having been taken from what we once were and become something very different.

I may have told you before of a visiting speaker that we had, an Englishman, who came and spoke for us for a weekend in our church in Hamilton. And on the Saturday morning when we had a breakfast and the conference began, I remember him addressing this issue of what it meant to be part of the body of Christ and how it changed everything. And he described his own experience of being called up for the Second World War and appearing on the drill ground and being introduced for the first time to his drill sergeant. And the drill sergeant, he said, looked them all over and said, “I know you’ve come from here and come from there. I know your name is this, and I know your family is that. But,” he said—and this is how he put it—he said, “but I want you to know that as of today, you’re mine. All mine.” The guy said it struck terror right up his spine as he realized that this was actually true, and he had now, with this uniform, enlisted and was under the veritable control of this character.

Well, the fearfulness apart, the picture is helpful. When we are brought into the body of Christ, Jesus comes to us, and he looks us in the eye, and he says, “Irrespective of your background, or your preferences, or your family name, or wherever you’ve been, or whatever you’ve done, or whatever you’ll hope to be, I want you to know that you’re mine. You’re all mine as of now.” And as a result of that, there is set in gear a process to conform us to the image of Jesus.

That’s what Paul says when he writes to Timothy as a young man—2 Timothy 1:9, I think it is, that he says of the experience of Christian living, he says of God, he “has saved us and called us to a holy life.” “To a holy life.” To a radically different kind of life. To a kind of life that we’ve never known before. To the kind of life that we may have abused before and we may have scorned before, because we only ever used, in our preconverted state, the adjective holy in a pejorative way, and we referred to people as “holy Willie,” or “holy Jane,” or whoever it was, and we poured scorn on their lifestyle. And then the Spirit of God came and opened our hearts to receive the truth, and we embraced Christ, and we discovered that he had saved us and he had called us to a holy life.

It may be helpful for you to think of Christian living in terms of a crisis followed by a process followed by a crisis. That really is the Christian life. The crisis is described for us in Romans 5:1, where, being “justified [by] faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ”—a description there of one of the aspects of what it means to become a Christian. And as a result of this great crisis event, our condition before God is radically and irrevocably altered. We heard the word of the gospel. We realized that we were sinners. We realized that we could do nothing to put ourselves in credit with God. We heard the good news that Jesus had paid it all. We trusted our lives unreservedly into the care of Jesus. And being justified by faith, we were declared righteous in God’s sight.

There then follows a process. And the process is that to which Paul is referring here. It is that to which Paul refers in Romans chapter 6, if your Bible is open, where in verse 20 he says, “When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness.” “When you didn’t care about cussing and living in an immoral way, in reading certain literature and paying attention to certain things,” he says, “when you were slaves to sin, righteousness had no control over you. You had a disregard for it. Oh, there may have been a twinge in your conscience every so often, but it never bothered you. People said, ‘Do you want to do this?’ and you said, ‘Fine.’ ‘Do you want to see this?’ and you said, ‘That’ll be okay.’”

Verse 21: “What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you[’re] now ashamed of?” What an amazing verse that is! Ask yourself, those of you who have come to faith later in life: What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you’re now ashamed of? The answer is “None!” It was all hell to you. It was all emptiness to you. It was all futility to you. And that, you see, is one of the great—if I may make an aside here—that is one of the great reasons we want to make such an investment in the lives of our children, that God in his mercy may redeem them in their infancy and save them from that stuff, lest he has to save them out of the stuff. Now, God is sovereign in all these things.

He says, “[These] things result in death!” Verse 22: “But now,” a new process has begun. “But now that you have been set free from sin” —crisis—“and have become slaves to God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life.” You understand this? That this process is set in motion by the Holy Spirit, whereby old ways and old habits are increasingly done away with, and new habits and new desires which fit in with the will of God take their place.

And from the process we’re going to go to another crisis. Romans 8:30. Speaking of the great work of redemption, the apostle says, “And those he predestined, he also called,” and “those he called, he also justified,” and “those he justified, he also glorified.” He speaks about that which is still future in the past tense, because once God has begun the work of grace within our lives, it’s guaranteed that he will bring it to completion. That’s Philippians 1:6. And so he says, “The crisis of regeneration, now being followed by the process of sanctification, will eventually result in the crisis of glorification.” First John chapter 3: “And when we see him, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.”[6] If we are still alive and remain when the trumpet sounds, as we saw last Sunday morning, we will be changed “in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.”[7] It will not be a process; it will be an instantaneous crisis.

Once God has begun the work of grace within our lives, it’s guaranteed that he will bring it to completion.

And that’s why I’ve tried to summarize it for you always that the three tenses of Christian living are as follows: that in being redeemed by the grace of God, we have been saved from sin’s penalty; we need no longer fear the sting of death, for Jesus has paid it all—saved from sin’s penalty in the past; one day, when I see him, I will be saved from sin’s presence; and in the moment, I am being saved from sin’s power.

Now, how does this process take place? We can’t unpack it all, but listen to how Jesus prays for his followers in John chapter 17. And it gives to us the key. We won’t turn it very far in the lock, but I want you just to notice it. John 17:13. Jesus says to his Father, “I[’m] coming to you now, but I say these things while I am still in the world, so that they may have the full measure of my joy within them. I[’ve] given them your word and the world has hated them, for they are not of the world any more than I am of the world.”

You see, this is how and why people will hate us. When the second part of the verse is true, the first part will be operative. “I gave them your word, and the world hated them.” Why? “Because they’re not like the world.” As much as we are compromised with the world and like the world is the degree to which we know nothing of the first part of the verse. If we take the dirty jokes of a Monday coffee break and just laugh with them, the world has no reason to hate us. But if we laugh not with them—not in a censorious way, but we just say, “You know what? That is crud. I used to do that stuff. It’s not even funny anymore. That’s disgusting”—you’d better be on your toes, ʼcause they’ll be on you like a ton of lead: “Who do you think you are? Where do you think you came from? Who made you better than us? Don’t tell him. He’s a jerk. I hate him.”

See, we’ll never know that unless we live in the world. You’ll never know that if you’re living in a wardrobe somewhere and you don’t know any non-Christians. See, that’s the other way not to get hated: just to live in a box. You live in the box with the people you live in a box with, they’ll eventually hate you. But the fact is, if we’re going to live in the world, then we’re going to experience this.

Verse 15: “My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it.”[8] And here it comes: “Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth.”[9] How does the sanctifying process take place? By the Holy Scriptures. As the Scriptures are opened to us, as we read them in our daily devotional life—“How can a young man keep his way pure?” says the psalmist. “By [paying heed] according to your word.”[10] And as a result of the process being worked out, we declare ourselves to be these different kind of people.

Now, you see, the saints in the New Testament are not people who graduated at the top of their religious class and were subsequently rewarded with a title on account of their unparalleled goodness. The saints in the New Testament are just ordinary people like you and me—ordinary people who have been separated from all that marked our previous existence and separated to. If you think about it in terms of marriage, you’ve got it. Before you were married, you had girlfriends, boyfriends, whatever it was—people’s names in your book. You could call ʼem up: “You want to go to the cinema? What would you like to do?” You might have three, you might have two, you might have one, you might have ten. I don’t know. But on the day that you got married, the list was history. You were separated from, and you were separated to. And every day you live your married life, we have the opportunity to ratify the crisis moment when that ring went on our finger and the indissoluble union before God and man was established. That’s what it means to become a Christian. That’s what it means to discover a sanctified life.

“Well, okay, so I am supposed to be sanctified. What exactly do you mean by that? Could you give me a concrete example?” “Yes,” says Paul, “I’ll give you a concrete example. Here it is: avoid sexual immorality.” Phillips paraphrases it, “[Make] a clean cut with [all] sexual immorality.”[11] The word “avoid” is really not strong enough. You can avoid certain things, like you’re driving on the road, and there’s some poor creature that got mangled, and you avoid it. But you get the chance to see it. You get the chance to kind of look at it. It’s sort of around. You avoided it. You didn’t crease it, but you saw it. You were a little too close to it, probably.

And that, you see, in this word “avoid,” gives some of us a great measure of leeway: “Well, you know, I’m not really doing it. I’m avoiding it. I’m not really… You know, if you knew what it was, you know, and stuff…” No, no. Clean cut. Clean cut. In the way you have your tonsils taken out: clean cut. Once they were there; now they’re not there. No more gargling. They’re gone. That’s the picture.

Marshall puts it in this way: “Where things are evil the Christian attitude is necessarily one of abstention and not of moderation.”[12] Abstention, not moderation. You see, you hear people doing things with the Bible that’s really crazy stuff. They take phrases like “Well, all things in moderation,” and they fasten on to that, and they have a discussion like this, and then they say, “Oh yeah, well, the Bible says, you know, ‘All things in moderation.’” All things that are lawful in moderation. But where it comes to things that are evil, the issue is not moderation; the issue is abstention.

Well then, how does that work out? Well, that brings us to the beginning of verse 4. And it brings us to the most difficult phrase in the whole of 1 Thessalonians. Do you think right now would be a good time to start on that phrase? That’s right. I didn’t think so either. If you have a Revised Standard Version or a King James Version—I haven’t checked the NASB—but you will notice there that unlike the NIV, it says, “[so] each … of you [should learn] how to take a wife.”[13] In the NIV, it says, “that each of you should learn [how] to control his own body.” Why the discrepancy? Does it matter? What does it mean? How do we resolve it? We’ll come to that next Sunday evening, God willing.

But in the meantime, let it be clear: the people who are about to be baptized have experienced a crisis. They’re going for another crisis when they’re glorified. At the moment, they’re in process. These are not perfect people. These are not people who went through some deal and finally graduated, got the SAT scores on the religious level high enough, and so we decided they would get baptized. These are just ordinary people, stumbling and bumbling their way through life. God is not finished with them yet. They’re still under construction. They’re not what they’re going to be, but by God’s goodness, they’re not what they once were. They’re under new management. Tonight, they’re putting up the sign in a graphic way and giving to all of us the right to expect that since the shop of their life is now under a new manager, things will be different in the shop. And if in the shop of your professed Christian life things are not different, then you’re either living in rebellion, or you have never become a Christian. For when you experience a new life, there is an accompanying new lifestyle.

Let’s pause in prayer:

Father, we ask that the words of our mouths and the meditation of our hearts may be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our Redeemer.[14] For Jesus’ sake. Amen.

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[1] John 8:29 (NIV 1984).

[2] 2 Corinthians 5:9 (NIV 1984).

[3] 1 Thessalonians 2:13 (NIV 1984).

[4] 1 Thessalonians 4:2 (NIV 1984).

[5] 1 Thessalonians 3:13 (NIV 1984).

[6] 1 John 3:2 (paraphrased).

[7] 1 Corinthians 15:52 (KJV).

[8] John 17:15–16 (NIV 1984).

[9] John 17:17 (NIV 1984).

[10] Psalm 119:9 (NIV 1984).

[11] 1 Thessalonians 4:3 (Phillips).

[12] I. Howard Marshall, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, New Century Bible Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), 107, quoted in John R. W. Stott, The Message of 1 and 2 Thessalonians: Preparing for the Coming King, rev. ed., The Bible Speaks Today (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 1991), 61.

[13] 1 Thessalonians 4:4 (RSV).

[14] See Psalm 19:14.