Stand Firm
II Thessalonians 2: 1-8, 13-17
This is really an interesting and exciting time of the year. When you hear a statement like that you probably are thinking about all of the things that are going to be happening in the next couple of months. In a few weeks it will be Thanksgiving and as soon as that is over we are immersed in the Christmas season. The Boar’s Head Christmas Festival is coming soon and some groups have already begun practicing. It is an exciting time of the year. But that’s not what I meant when I started out with that statement. This is an interesting and exciting time of the church year. We are coming to the end of the church year. This is a time for us to be reminded that Jesus is coming again and that we need to prepare our hearts to be ready for His coming. The Bible tells us that when He comes, it will be a time of judgment. The dead will be raised and those who believe in Him as Lord and Savior will be taken to His heavenly kingdom and those who have rejected Him will be thrown into the eternal fires of hell. It is important that we have a time in our church year to have that important Biblical teaching brought forward so that we don’t forget about it.
Our Epistle lesson for today starts off with a very serious warning about what will come as the end draws near. To briefly summarize what Paul says, there will be worldly philosophies that will try and deceive God’s people into questioning and even losing their faith. These philosophies with try and deceive the faithful with clever words that will try to shake the foundations of your faith. Those who promote this kind of deception will even try to use the disguise of the church in order to accomplish the devil’s purposes. You don’t have to look into the history of the Christian church long before you can see how this has happened time after time as one false teacher after another has appeared and brought some new teaching that was contrary to the teachings of the Bible. Hungry for power, these false teachers led many of God’s people astray. We can be thankful for teachers like Martin Luther who brought the true Church back to the teachings that came from Scripture alone.
Yet even in our own time there are those who teach a message of self-reliance, a message of prosperity, a message of salvation by good works that hardly ever mention the name of Jesus. The danger in this is that the faithful are drawn away from the truth that we are all sinners who need to repent and trust in Jesus Christ alone for the forgiveness that was won for us by His perfect obedience and His all-sufficient sacrifice on the cross. Your human nature likes to hear a message that places the responsibility for your salvation on yourself. That way you maintain control. You can take credit for your accomplishment. Your ego thrives on that but it drives you away from Christ.
Paul urges the Thessalonian Christians and Christians of all time to stand firm in what you have been taught from the Scriptures. To reinforce his admonition to stand firm, Paul reminds us of God’s grace in our Lord Jesus Christ that brings us eternal comfort and good hope. As a result of Christ’s work in us and for us we have comfort and direction for our lives of response to God’s great love, lives established in every good work and word.
There are several reasons why you need to stand firm in your faith as you wait for Christ’s return. It begins with your faith as I have mentioned before. Since your faith is grounded in Christ Jesus and His work for you, you know that anything that tries to lead you away from that has its source in the father of lies, the devil. As a result, the first reason to stand firm is for the sake of your faith in Jesus. The other reasons to stand firm have to do with our life in the Church. While our faith is a personal faith, in other words, you can not expect to be saved by someone else’s faith and at the same time, your faith will not save someone else, you do not live in a vacuum. You are a part of the body of Christ. Each part of the body works together with the other parts for the good of the body. The three-part description of the life of the church that our Synod has set forward under President Matthew Harrison, has a real application to the admonition to stand firm in our faith.
The first part of that is that we stand firm for the sake of our witness to the world. In the face of all of the other philosophies and false teachings in the world today, we stand firm together for the sake of our witness to the truth. The world needs to hear that truth but they won’t hear it if no one tells them about it. A strong witness to the truth gives opportunity for the Holy Spirit to touch the hearts of people who have been deceived by the lies of the devil. Jesus gave his disciples that message before He ascended into heaven. “You shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem , Judea, Samaria
The second consideration for standing firm is for the sake of our service to one another and to those around us in need. The mercy ministry that God’s people are called to carry out is an important part of the life of the church. As we stand firm in our reliance on the Scriptures, we are reminded again of Jesus’ words, “Whatever you have done for the least of these, you have done it unto me.” Mercy ministry can be more effective and far-reaching when we work together and we work together when we stand firm together in what God’s Word tells us.
The third part of the description of the church is our life together. We therefore stand firm in our faith for the sake of the way that we care for one another, build one another up, rejoice with one another and weep with one another. The devil would like nothing better than to see our life together disrupted by arguments over doctrine and practice that could lead to division in the church. When we stand firm in the teachings of the Scriptures and in our faith, we understand that the preservation of our life together in the church needs to be an important priority. Once again, the word picture of the Body of Christ describes the importance of our life together. It has an effect on the other two parts of that description. If we do not care about maintaining our life together, that will have a negative effect on our witness and it actually works against the way that we show mercy to others.
When we stand firm in our faith, we will be more effective in preparing ourselves and the world around us for the time when Jesus comes again. That is what the Church is called to do. We are strengthened for that task by the power of the Holy Spirit who works through the Means of Grace, the Word and the Sacraments. Any consideration of preparing for the return of Christ would be useless without the power of the Holy Spirit to strengthen us. When we make use of those means, we will be able to follow Paul’s admonition and stand firm. Amen.
Rev. Gerald Matzke
Zion Lutheran Church
Painesville, Ohio
November 10, 2013
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