Sanctified
II Thessalonians 5:16-28
Imagine for a
moment you are the Apostle Paul. You had
close relationship with the believers in Thessalonica but were forced to leave
because of persecutions. Now some time
later you wanted to write a letter to them to encourage them to remain firm in
their faith and to be a strong influence for the Gospel in the whole region of Macedonia . As your letter was drawing to a close, you
would want to leave them with some solid words of advice. What do you suppose you would want to say to
them?
The words of our
text, the Epistle lesson for today, show us just what Paul had to say to his
dear friends. His words of advice pick
up in verse 16. “Rejoice always, pray
without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God
in Christ Jesus for you.” Think of that. This is the will of God in Christ Jesus for
you. When you understand the blessings
that you have from God in Christ Jesus, the blessings of the forgiveness of
sins, a blessing that you certainly don’t deserve, the blessing of
reconciliation with God by His grace and the sure and certain hope of heaven
through Jesus Christ, you can’t help but rejoice always. You can give thanks in all circumstances, not
just in the good times but in the difficult times as well. He says in all circumstances. Pray without ceasing. When you think of prayer as talking with God,
you can understand what Paul meant by praying without ceasing. You have the opportunity to be in constant
contact with God through prayer. Why
wouldn’t you want to take advantage of that golden opportunity?
He continues with
some good advice when it comes to hearing God’s Word. “Do not quench the Spirit.” Do not try to put out the fire of the Spirit
that purifies the heart and strengthens your faith. When you think about the importance of the
Holy Spirit in your faith and life, you can see how important it is to keep the
Spirit’s flame alive in you. “Do not
despise prophecies.” Prophecies come
from one who is speaking for God.
Because there are many false prophets out there, it is important that
you test what you hear. Those that are
consistent with what God has revealed to us will be good. Those that contradict the clear message of
God will be evil. One of the tricks of
the devil is to proclaim that something is from God when it actually is intended
to draw you away from the truth of God’s Word.
That is why it is important to test what you hear against what God’s has
already made known.
Those words of
advice come from a heart that cares deeply for the spiritual welfare of those
who are to receive this letter. The
point that is made over and over is that you need to let the Spirit do His work
in you. The work of the Holy Spirit is
called Sanctification. That’s a big word
that has as its root a word that means holy.
Sanctification means to make holy.
It is something that is done to you.
You are made holy, something that you can not accomplish on your
own. Because of the inherited sin that
is a part of every one of us, you could never make yourself holy. It is something that the Holy Spirit does in
you. That is why St. Paul can say, “Now may the God of peace Himself
sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept
blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
That word
“completely” indicates to us that the whole work of making us holy is the work
of the Holy Spirit. It begins by
bringing us to faith in the first place.
In most cases, that happens through the blessing of Baptism. It continues throughout life as the Holy
Spirit works through the other means of grace, namely the Word and the
Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, to keep us in the true faith. The Spirit also works in us through those
same means to strengthen your faith and empower you to live a God-pleasing life
as you wait for the time when Jesus will come again. That’s what it means that He will sanctify
you completely.
The reason that
Paul includes this in the last part of His letter is that it is so contrary to
what your human nature tries to tell you.
Your human nature tends to want to take all the credit for the things
that only the Holy Spirit can do. Human
nature, which tries to figure everything out logically, would rather have you
think that you come to faith through your own will. It tries to tell you that you become a
follower of Jesus when you let down your defenses and decide to give yourself to
the Lord. That makes your faith not a
matter of sanctification, but rather your own work. Sanctification, remember, is a description of
something that is done to you. If it is
thought of as something that you can do for yourself, then you would also have
to say that keeping your faith strong is also a matter of the things that you
do in order to remain firm in the faith.
You would then be convinced that you would have to work hard at keeping
your faith strong enough so that you don’t fall away. If you would fall away, it would be because
you didn’t work hard enough at it. The
logical extension of that is that you can live a God-pleasing life through your
own good works and as a result, God should be pleased with your good effort and
reward you for all your hard work. The
error of that kind of thinking, which is quite common in our world today, just
as it has always been, is that you are never sure if you have been good enough
or worked hard enough to earn God’s approval.
It rejects the Holy Spirit’s work of sanctification and, worst of all, it
ignores Christ’s work of redemption. Our human nature can be a dangerous thing,
especially when it interferes with God’s plan of salvation that is clearly
taught in the Scriptures. That’s why it
is so important for us to stay close to God’s Word. There we find the truth. There we find what we need to know and
believe about our relationship with God in Christ Jesus.
There is
something else that Paul mentions in his final words of this first letter to the
Thessalonians. He prays that your whole
spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus
Christ. Being kept blameless is also
part of the work of the Holy Spirit. You
are blameless because God declares you blameless because of what Jesus did for
you. He lived the perfect life that you
could not live because of your sinful human nature. He then died as the punishment for your sins. Because of God’s grace you are then declared
righteous or blameless. You are kept
blameless through the work of the Holy Spirit.
Paul then adds, “He who calls you is faithful; He will surely do
it.” He doesn’t say, “Come on now, work
hard and you can do it.” He says that He
who called you is faithful and He will do it.
What a difference!
You are kept blameless at the coming of our
Lord Jesus Christ. It is that reference
to the coming of Jesus that makes this an important Advent Scripture lesson. You are waiting for the second coming of
Jesus. You can’t forget that in all of
the hustle and bustle of the Christmas season.
We celebrate that God sent His only Son to the world to bring about our
salvation through His life, death and resurrection, but we can’t let that
overshadow the reality that one day, He will come again. He calls you to be prepared. He calls you to give thanks for the Father’s
love, for the Son’s work of redemption and the Spirit’s work of sanctification
as you wait for the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Rev. Gerald Matzke
Zion Lutheran Church
December 14, 2014
The Third Sunday in Advent
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