STRAIGHT TALK ABOUT MORAL PURITY
1 THESSALONIANS 4:1-8
NASB
1 Finally then, brethren, we request and exhort you in the Lord Jesus, that as you received from us instruction as to how you ought to [a]walk and please God (just as you actually do [a]walk), that you excel still more. 2 For you know what commandments we gave you [a]by the authority of the Lord Jesus. 3 For this is the will of God, your sanctification; that is, that you abstain from [a]sexual immorality; 4 that each of you know how to [a]possess his own [b]vessel in sanctification and honor, 5 not in [a]lustful passion, like the Gentiles who do not know God; 6 and that no man transgress and defraud his brother in the matter because the Lord is the avenger in all these things, just as we also told you before and solemnly warned you. 7 For God has not called us for the purpose of impurity, but [a]in sanctification. 8 So, he who rejects this is not rejecting man but the God who gives His Holy Spirit to you.
4:1 [a]Or conduct yourselves 4:2 [a]Lit through the Lord 4:3 [a]Or fornication 4:4 [a]Or acquire [b]I.e. body; or wife 4:5 [a]Lit passion of lust 4:7 [a]I.e. in the state or sphere of
NLT
1 Finally, dear brothers and sisters,[*] we urge you in the name of the Lord Jesus to live in a way that pleases God, as we have taught you. You live this way already, and we encourage you to do so even more. 2 For you remember what we taught you by the authority of the Lord Jesus.
3 God’s will is for you to be holy, so stay away from all sexual sin. 4 Then each of you will control his own body[*] and live in holiness and honor —5 not in lustful passion like the pagans who do not know God and his ways. 6 Never harm or cheat a fellow believer in this matter by violating his wife,[*] for the Lord avenges all such sins, as we have solemnly warned you before. 7 God has called us to live holy lives, not impure lives. 8 Therefore, anyone who refuses to live by these rules is not disobeying human teaching but is rejecting God, who gives his Holy Spirit to you.
[4:1] Greek brothers; also in 4:10, 13. [4:4] Or will know how to take a wife for himself; or will learn to live with his own wife; Greek reads will know how to possess his own vessel. [4:6] Greek Never harm or cheat a brother in this matter.
Homes in North Texas are built on silt clay. Now if you don’t know anything about silt clay, let me put it this way: It’s great for growing cotton, but terrible for building houses. The stuff is like a natural sponge. It expands when wet and shrinks when dry. And in North Texas it’s either all one or the other. If you aren’t baking, you’re flooding. This means unless you build a house with piers drilled all the way down to the bedrock, the foundation of your home is going to sink or swim. Yes, it’ll usually take a few years, but eventually you’ll begin seeing the sure signs of slippage: cracks in the walls, doors sticking, floors dipping, even pipes leaking. If you don’t do some foundation repair, your home will slowly continue to deteriorate.
Since its inception, the church was built to be a stronghold of personal holiness. Against the shifting sands of popular opinions, the household of God is called to remain committed to moral purity. But one of the most disturbing signs of a deteriorating church is its compromise of biblical moral foundations. When this foundation begins to sag with loosening standards, crack under cultural pressures, or wash away with the flow, the moral fortitude of Christians is weakened, purity polluted, and innocence lost.
How do we do moral foundation work when the cultural ground keeps shifting? We need to return consciously and constantly to the clear, unmistakable foundation of God’s Word. A great starting place for strengthening our standards of moral purity is in 4:1-8.
— 4:1-2 —
The apostle Paul yearned for the Thessalonian Christians to be established “without blame in holiness” (3:13). The principle that ends the first section then becomes the first practical application presented in the second. Paul applied the general principle to the Thessalonians’ specific context. And that context was the real potential for moral failure, especially among the young Christians still washing off the lingering residue of the dirty culture that had stained them prior to turning to Christ.
Paul had an even greater motivation to warn those Thessalonians about temptations to immorality. Remember, he was writing to them from the city of Corinth. If there was a “Sin City” in the first-century Roman Empire, Corinth was it. In fact, a glance out his window one morning could have prompted him to include the straight talk on moral purity in this chapter. He knew that the Thessalonians lived in a city with all the same kinds of temptations, if not to the same degree.
So in the opening verses, Paul and his co-workers “request and exhort” them to “walk and please God.” The word “request” is a soft, polite form of appeal, as a brother might ask something of a brother or even an inferior of a superior. By contrast, “exhort” implies some degree of authority or urgency involved in the request. Paul may have paired both the soft and hard push because he knew the disciples in Thessalonica were already walking the way they were supposed to —“just as you actually do walk” (4:1). But the exhortation involves a desire for the believers to “excel still more.”
vlas2002/Adobe Stock.
The theater in Thessalonica
In his zeal for helping them to maintain their walk “without blame in holiness” (3:13), Paul stoked the Thessalonians’ own spiritual fire with the fuel of exhortation. “You’re doing great!” Paul said. They had accepted and followed the commandments Paul had given “by the authority of the Lord Jesus” (4:2). No doubt, this involved specific instruction in accordance with Jesus’ great commission: “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations . . . teaching them to observe all that I commanded you” (Matt. 28:19-20). But Paul knew that the potential for petering out always lingered, so he encouraged them to push on, progress, and excel even more (1 Thes. 4:1).
In essence, he implored them, “In your walk, excel!”
— 4:3-6 —
All of us who have experienced the life of faith know that Christianity isn’t just a list of dos and don’ts. It’s not as if there’s a long roll of paper with all the things Christians are supposed to do on the right side and all the things they’re supposed to avoid on the left. If you just do the dos and avoid the don’ts, voilà —you’re a Christian! That’s far from the kind of deep, virtuous, free, Spirit-empowered living presented in Scripture. Those dos and don’ts fall miserably short of Paul’s own description of Spirit-filled living in Galatians 5:22-23, where he says that “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.”
When these virtues flow from a heart submitted to God, trusting in Christ, and transformed by the inner work of the Spirit, no law of dos and don’ts has any significance for us. But this doesn’t change the fact that the temptation to walk after the flesh —our tendency to follow our corrupt fallen nature —is always present. This means we need to be constantly urged on to faithfulness and fruitfulness and warned against faithlessness and fleshliness (1 Thes. 4:3-6). Paul places his readers at the trailheads of two contrasting paths: a life of “sanctification” or a life of “sexual immorality.”
The term “sanctification” comes from a Greek word, hagiasmos, which is related to the adjective, hagios [40], meaning “holy.” You may have heard of the Hagia Sophia Church in Istanbul, which means “Holy Wisdom” in English. This word also has a noun form, ho hagios, which means “the saint” or “the holy one.” In the ancient world it referred to people, places, or things that were consecrated for religious service. With regard to the Christian, however, it refers to being set apart for God.[20]
Sanctification has a past aspect in that all believers have been “set apart” at salvation in a one-time declaration of righteousness based on the “once for all” sacrifice of Christ (Heb. 10:10). Sanctification also has a future aspect, when believers both resurrected and living will be transformed from mortal to glorious immortal bodies that will be made “holy and blameless” (Eph. 5:27). But here (1 Thes. 4:3), Paul emphasizes present or ongoing sanctification —the process by which believers are made progressively more holy as they are set apart from evil and increasingly consecrated toward good (Heb. 12:14). Oftentimes, to avoid confusion, theologians call the past “setting apart” justification, the present process sanctification, and the final outcome glorification. In any case, Paul’s emphasis in this passage is on the present, progressive nature of spiritual growth.
There’s no doubt about God’s will for our lives in the area of sexual practice. We don’t have to pray about whether we should have sex before marriage. We don’t have to conduct in-depth word studies in Scripture to discover whether an affair is okay. We don’t need to ponder whether God might, in fact, rubber-stamp our indulgence in Internet pornography as “stress relief.” The answer is clear and concise: “This is the will of God, your sanctification; that is, that you abstain from sexual immorality” (1 Thes. 4:3). One biblical scholar unpacks Paul’s exhortation this way:
Christians are to avoid and abstain from any and every form of sexual practice that lies outside the circle of God’s revealed will, namely adultery, premarital and extramarital intercourse, homosexuality, and other perversions. The word porneia, translated “sexual immorality,” is a broad one and includes all these practices.[21]
From My Journal
The More Things Change . . .
1 THESSALONIANS 4:1-8
I first preached a message on moral purity from 1 Thessalonians 4:1-8 back in 1984. October 21, to be precise. I remember thinking, “Things can’t get much worse, can they?” I never imagined I would one day live at a time when I would look back at 1984 with deep longing. Compared to now, those were the “good ol’ days.” Since I first delivered that message on moral purity, Internet pornography has begun eating away at our country and our congregations. Men, women, adolescents, and senior citizens —people from all walks of life —have succumbed or are at risk, and more are becoming infected every single day. In the last decade of pastoral ministry I’ve dealt with heartbreaking cases of moral disaster that would have only been seen on prime-time tabloid television just twenty years ago. I’m not so much sickened as saddened.
Without our knowing it, this problem could be eating our churches alive. And the scariest thing is this: We may not even realize the extensive damage it’s causing. Studies suggest that the majority of people in our churches have looked at, are looking at, or are addicted to Internet pornography.[22] The struggle is going on among those who volunteer in our churches. Chances are good that some of our full-time staff members, even some who faithfully serve on our boards, could be losing this secret battle. And while I’m mentioning this grim reality, let’s not overlook our young adults —married and single —who provide instruction among our junior and senior high school youth.
These are the men and women responsible for being examples of holiness to our flock —for inspiring sexual purity among those they’ve been called to lead and teach. I shudder to imagine the ugly but very real possibility that some of our own elders or deacons leave our church meetings and go home to surf porn. Or youth leaders may be viewing it on their smart phones one minute . . . then using that same device to read Scripture to a small group of our kids the next minute.
Forget the red-light district or the adult bookstore of the 1980s! Pornography has forced its way into our homes via the Internet. And with the “always online” presence of smart phones, we’re carrying in our pockets a potential portal of porn 24/7. It’s ruining marriages, destroying relationships, and harming and hurting the minds of the youth and the body of Christ at large. You hardly need to be reminded that fallen pastors didn’t “suddenly” fall. More often than not, pornography played a role in their downward spiral.
The only answer to this moral plummet is holiness. In the twenty-first century, that word almost sounds archaic —like “thou” or “ye” or “doth.” Holiness conjures up so many pictures in our minds, and we tend to cloister it in the hushed chambers of monasteries and cathedrals, hooded monks and mystics residing in silence. God, however, wants to unlock the wooden doors and open the stained glass windows of our thinking so His holiness can walk freely through every room of our lives. He longs for us to be holy —that is, pure —as He is holy. Yes, God is calling ordinary, dull people like you and me to become beacons of purity so that hope will pierce through to those who are stumbling in the world’s moral fog —a fog that seems to get only thicker with the passing of time.
In today’s hazy moral twilight, some would say that such a black-and-white standard seems fanatical —or at least intolerant. Others might think it’s an unreasonable expectation or even impossible. After all, in certain situations, if people love each other, are discreet, and use precautions, and if nobody gets hurt —what’s the harm? But Scripture doesn’t say, “Okay, go ahead and do it . . . just be careful.” It says, “Abstain!”
Paul doesn’t simply leave us with a stark command to abstain. He follows it up with some counsel, explaining what sanctification looks like in our attitudes and actions. Abstaining begins with possessing our own vessels (4:4). Some commentators understand the image of “vessel” (skeuos [4632]) to refer to a man’s “wife”; others take it as a metaphor for a person’s “body.” This debate has gone back even to the early church fathers and continues among Bible scholars today.[23] It makes the most sense that “body” is in view here. Elsewhere Paul uses the term “vessel” to refer to the physical body (2 Cor. 4:7). Therefore, his exhortation is meant for all believers, not simply for married men.
It’s one thing to own a piece of property on paper, but to actually take possession of it, to become familiar with it, to know its nooks and crannies, live in it, eat and sleep in it —that’s how we really take possession of it. It seems that one strong implication of “taking ownership” of one’s body, then, would mean to actually know it. We know what weakens our self-control and what strengthens it. Just as knowing what kind of students we are academically will help us determine how to best prepare to pass an exam, knowing how our urges and desires function will help us pass the tests of sexual temptations we face each day.
Negatively, possessing our bodies involves admitting the temptations we can’t handle and avoiding those enticing situations. It means that if certain conversations with co-workers may cause us to stumble, or if friendly touches may be too provocative, we avoid them. For some people, certain films, books, magazines, or websites may open the door to moral compromise. We’re to stand against lustful passions typical of the unsaved world (1 Thes. 4:5). We avoid defrauding others of what is rightfully theirs —either a body over which we have no legitimate claim by marriage or the spouse of another by committing adultery, possessing as our own what belongs to another (4:6).
Positively, possessing our bodies means becoming involved in wholesome pursuits, finding friends who keep us accountable, and cultivating faith in the Spirit’s inner power to transform us into the image of Christ. It means standing up for moral purity and standing against the currents of corruption that threaten to sweep us away. It means to saturate ourselves with things that are pure and honorable (4:4).
As Paul positions his readers on the fork in the road, he presents two paths —sexual immorality or sexual purity. But before they take their first step in either direction, he warns them, “The Lord is the avenger in all these things, just as we also told you before and solemnly warned you” (4:6). Although in Christ we’re protected from His eternal condemnation (Rom. 8:1), God may still allow the consequences of our sexual sin to discipline us. Immorality can lead to anxiety, conflict, guilt, broken marriages, broken homes, and even deadly diseases. This is the bitter harvest we reap from planting seeds of impurity in the soil of our lives.
In essence, Paul exhorted the Thessalonians —and us through his inspired letter —“In your morals, abstain!”
— 4:7-8 —
In the final two verses in this section, Paul sets forth two things the Thessalonians need to remember in their reasoning about whether to take the path of righteousness or wickedness.
First, we must remember that we have been called to growth. In 4:7, Paul uses the term “sanctification” for the third time in this passage. Remember that? It’s our progress in spiritual growth between our initial experience of salvation and our entry into heaven. In the present “in between” time, we have our ups and downs, steps forward and backward, seasons of spiritual victory and moments of defeat, periods of doubt and confirmations in faith. But progressive sanctification means we ought to gradually make progress in growth toward greater Christlikeness by the power of the Spirit.
Second, we must remember that to reject holiness is to reject God (4:8). Sometimes we can be like Peter, saying we would never deny our Lord; yet through our actions, we reject His holiness and His power. If we truly trust in a holy God, we’ll make holy living our goal.
APPLICATION: 1 THESSALONIANS 4:1-8
The Choice
Like the Thessalonians, today we stand at a fork in the road. On the left, the path of immorality. To the right, the path of sanctification.
To take the path of the world means you’d drift through society’s fog of moral uncertainty. You’d begin by just dabbling with immorality. From there your conscience would become gradually dulled, no longer sensitive to the sinful acts, which would become sinful habits. This would lead to obsession or addiction when what were once habits would become your identity. You’d cross the line from being a person who commits immoral acts to being an immoral person. You’d no longer blush at sin or feel shame. And without repentance, you’d suffer the consequences of sin. Pain and destruction would ensue.
That’s the first path.
The second path is that of sanctification —being set apart by God, following His Spirit, living in a way that honors Him with your whole being. You draw power from the Spirit and are drawn into a deeper, more intimate relationship with Christ. As a result, there are no regrets, no looking over your shoulder for past secrets to catch up to you. No deep shame, no lingering guilt, no hypocrisy. Your obedience will result in greater confidence and habits of holiness. And you’ll be a living testimony for those you encounter who may not know Christ or who may not be living lives that honor Him.
That’s the second path.
The choice is yours. In fact, it’s a choice you make every day as you decide whether to follow the course of this world and its lusts or pursue God’s will for your life: your sanctification. Which will you choose?