Children of the Light

Children of the Light!

2^nd to the Last Sunday of the Church Year

By Rev. Steven D. Spencer, Pastor

1 Thessalonians 5:1-11

Now concerning the times and the seasons, brothers, you have no need to have anything written to you. For you yourselves are fully aware that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. While people are saying, "There is peace and security," then sudden destruction will come upon them as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and they will not escape. But you are not in darkness, brothers, for that day to surprise you like a thief. For you are all children of light, children of the day. We are not of the night or of the darkness. So then let us not sleep, as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober. For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk, are drunk at night. But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, having put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation. For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us so that whether we are awake or asleep we might live with him. Therefore encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing.

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ Jesus:

There’s a saying; “The difference is night and day.” "Why, this hand cream just smoothed out my alligator skin and made it soft and sinuous, I feel 10 years younger. The difference is night and day." "This detergent makes my clothes so much whiter and brighter than that other stuff. Why, the difference is night and day." You get the picture. It’s an old saying, meaning that the comparison is striking and obvious. The difference is noteworthy. Well, our text speaks about us and "them"; it describes us as children of the day and suggests that they’re of the children of the darkness and of the night. The difference between them and us, particularly as we deal with the end of the world, is the difference between night and day, quite literally.

That’s what these 2 weeks is about, in the Church Year. We look at the end of the world, as we come ever closer to the end of the Church Year. How we Christians and how the world approaches the end is as different as night and day. It is night and day as to our expectations, and it is night and day as to our approach to the future, which is to say our approach to the end of the world.

The Bible lessons from Last Sundays of the Church Year bring to mind the end of the world. It’s coming, and we know it. We might be tempted to think, well it’s some distant day off in the future, but the truth is that it is not. We can read the signs, and the end is near. Even if the end of the world were not so close, the end of our participation in it is. We just don’t know the day or the hour.

Paul writes “Now concerning the times and the seasons, brothers, you have no need to have anything written to you” (1 Thessalonians 5:1). What he means is that we can easily sense that the end is near, and that we must surely be living in the very last days. We don't know precisely how many "last days" there are, but each day that passes brings the end of time one day closer for sure. And we know, as Paul says, that “the day of the Lord will come just like a thief in the night” (1 Thessalonians 5:2). That is to say, it will come suddenly, unexpectedly and with no warning.

By the way the expression "day of the Lord" (Yom Yaweh) occurs in the Old Testament Books Amos 5:18; Joel 2:31; Malachi 4:5 and it means a day of judgment for nations. But in the New Testament it came to mean the last day of history on that day the Lord Jesus will judge all individuals.

The verb come is in the present tense. That day is always coming. The only thing unknown to mankind is the time. It’s that only unfulfilled item in the Apostles Creed. Remember, “He ascended into heaven and from thence He shall come. Come to what? Judge the Living and the Dead!” The day is coming "as a thief by night." But you already know this!

It is going to come when the world least expects it. When the world around the church and outside of the church finally convinces itself that nothing is going to happen, and that the end, long-promised in the Scriptures, is really not going to come, then –bam- it will happen. I think we can safely say that most people, even most Christians think that way today. Some think the end is coming someday, but certainly not today, or tomorrow. That day is going to catch them off-guard. They will be like the pregnant woman who set out shopping or goes to work in the morning, and is suddenly immobilized by the onset of her labor. There will be no warning, no time to prepare, no last-minute accommodations or getting ready. They will be caught flat-footed and red-handed in their sin and unbelief.

You, on the other hand, should never be caught off-guard. You know it’s coming. If you haven't wrapped your mind around that thought yet, start wrapping! The end is coming and it is coming soon. The difference is night and day - you are of the day and in the light of the Lord and His Word, and the world is in darkness. “For you are all children of light, children of the day. We are not of the night or of the darkness” (1 Thessalonians 5:5). The day of the Lord should not catch you unprepared, or surprise you in sin and unbelief. You know better.

You know the grace of God in Christ Jesus. You know that He died for you. You know what a terrible thing sin is, and how great a price was paid for your salvation! The price was paid on the cross. We look at it every week. We remember what Jesus did and hear each week how He has cleansed us and how He forgiven us. We eat of His body and drink of His blood and do so also in remembrance of Him (T). We walk in the light of God's grace and love day by day. Paul suggests, and God says clearly, that we cannot believe all that He has revealed to us and still be caught off-guard, unprepared, and self-deceived.

That is what Paul calls sleeping, in our text. Either we are wide awake, alert and prepared, expecting Jesus to return, or we are unconscious - or completely out of contact with the realities that God has impressed upon us with so many warnings and exhortations. We are the people of the day and of the light - not lost in the dark like the world around us. You see, the difference is night and day, literally. Paul is driven by the very Word of God. He sees the world through spiritual eyes. He looks at life through the very Word of God. I fear that many of us have inverted this. We view the Word of God through worldly eyes rather than the world through the Word of God.

The difference is day and night also in how we handle it, and ourselves. We are not to be counted as one those who sleep, as though we did not know the day. Sleep, here, means to act as though we were unaware of the great spiritual realities confronting us. We cannot behave as though we have all the time in the world and no urgency about what we do. We actually do have all the time in the world, but the time in the world is growing short, and there are so many who need to know Jesus, and we need to prepare ourselves as well. We need to be alert and sober minded. We face terrible dangers, and not just the kind that terrorists present. We face doubt. We face temptations to lusts and pleasures. We face temptations to fear. We face temptations to adopt the world's values and transform ourselves to the times, and so become unprepared when Jesus comes. And we face death.

These are not pretend terrors and dangers. They are real and very effective and extremely powerful. They are the tools of the enemy - the devil who “prowls about like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8). Far too often, we Christians are deceived by what we perceive to be a long time as if is God delaying His return. We have seen members seduced away. There is so much else to do. They slowly find themselves weaned of the habit of regular worship - weaned away to visiting, traveling, sporting events, and who knows what all. Some may find supporting this little congregation too much, too expensive, too pointless, in their narrow view. Now, occasionally the distractions of life - like family events and such - demand our attention. Our occasional absence for such things is minor, but when we allow ourselves to be persuaded that whether or not we are here on Sunday, or make it to Bible Study doesn't matter at all, that is when we find ourselves slipping away. We see such people once a month, then once every couple of months, and then it is too much trouble and takes too much time to stop and worship with us at all.

That is the sleep into which so many are lulled. That is the drink which intoxicates us and blinds our reason and dulls our senses until we cannot tell that we have stopped believing or think we know better than God’s Word. We cannot feel the big emptiness inside until it is too late. Like the drunk who thinks he knows it all, and believes that no one can see that he is unsteady, sometimes we become so sure that we know it all, and we don't need a sermon or a Bible Study or prayer. It’s then that we have anointed ourselves as prophet and priest, and then, the church be damned, we’ll just believe what we want to and make sure our religion doesn't get in our way or accuse us of sinning.

But the time for that sort of silliness and unconsciousness is at night, in the dark - that is, those are the thoughts and the errors of the world. We are of the day. We know our need, and we know our weakness, and we know where we find our strength and comfort. We understand the only thing we possess of any real value, we have in Christ Jesus. We have the gift of God through His Word, through the hearing of that Word, the Word made flesh Who dwelt among us. We need that comfort, even when we are not aware of our need. We need that strength, even when we do not feel our weakness. We need the Word – we need the Word spoken into our ears. It’s God's Word, poured out through the mouth and lips of His servants.

And we need the heavenly food which God sets before us in His Holy Supper! This isn't some ordinary bread and wine, this is the very body and blood of Jesus Christ, once given and shed on the cross for us, now offered to us by Christ Himself, from the hands of His called servant. It bears all that Christ won for us by giving that body to eat and giving the blood to drink, the very blood which was shed for us on the cross.

True, we cannot see the body or taste the blood, but we are not so sleepy or intoxicated that we cannot believe that God can do what He promises. Here is forgiveness, and because it is forgiveness, it is also life and salvation! This holy food does not merely nourish the tissues of our body, it feeds and strengthens us spiritually and comforts us in times of distress and temptation. And since we are of the day, and not of the night, we need this food to be alert and sober, and prepare ourselves for the coming day, and the dangers that await us on the way.

Paul says in verse 8, “because we belong to the day, let us be sober, having put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation” (1 Thessalonians 5:8). That is our armor - faith in God, love for one another, and the confident expectation that when this life is done, life isn't over, just death defeated. It’s the very thing that the world around us calls superstition, foolishness and wishful thinking. This is the armor against the pessimism of this age, the hopelessness that settles upon so many. No matter what is happening around us, even in our own lives, we know that we have God's love and that His will for us is always our salvation. We can trust God - faith does. Knowing God doesn’t decrease pain or limit frustrations. The truth is that they probably increase. The devil wants you to doubt, wants you to despair, and wants you to give up in hopelessness.

Faith gives us the answer. Trust in God is powerful stuff. God's strength is perfected in our weakness. His power shines through our troubles when we give up on ourselves and instead trust Him. Then His Word carries remarkable power! It doesn't magically make our troubles go away, like a spell in some Harry Potter book. Through His Word, God strengthens us to be equal to the obstacles, challenges, and dangers that confront us. Eventually they will go away, or God will take them away from us, but while we struggle, He is there to strengthen us, to protect us, and to bring us through. So our hope is always in Him.

As a bonus, God has given us each other. God has given us one another to encourage and comfort, to hold each other's hands in times of need and to help each other to bear the burdens appointed to us. We work for one another. We feed one another. We drive one another places. We sympathize, and weep with, and rejoice with, and confess the faith with one another. We do it out of love - not obligation. That is why the last verse of our text says, “Therefore encourage one another, and build up one another, just as you also are doing” (1 Thessalonians 5:11).

Then, while we stand protected by faith and encouraged by our love for each other, we have the helmet of the hope of salvation: “For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us so that whether we are awake or asleep we might live with him” (1 Thessalonians 5:9-10)

On this second to the last day of the church year, we face the end of the world. It is a serious and sobering topic. But it’s not cause for fear. It’s a cause for rejoicing and yearning and looking forward with great expectation. God is with us every step of the way, and even the end of the age. Of the world, yes, it is the end, but not so for us. God has destined us for salvation! So, for the Christian, the end of this life and the end of this world are, like the end of the church year, part of God’s plan. They are not a cause for fear or panic. They are a cause for remembering God's faithfulness and love, and encouraging one another to hold fast the faith and to never lose hope.

That’s the difference of night and day. For you are children of light and life, children of the living God. And you have been saved by God’s wondrous grace through His son Jesus Christ. Therefore you can know beyond a doubt that all your sins are forgiven for Jesus sake and in Jesus name. Come Lord Jesus, come. In Jesus name, Amen and Amen!