1 Thessalonians - Lessons on Worship

Oh, how important it is that you and I have a satisfying, growing experience of worship with God, because God wants us then to step out into a needy world and share the Lord Jesus Christ with lost people.

Father, help us to examine our lives, to rearrange our priorities, help us to live for the things that really count. Remind us that life is short and we want to make the most of it. And so I pray that You will help us in our study of the Word of God today, for Jesus' sake and in His name, Amen.

How easy it is for us as Christians and for local churches to forget the priorities of the Christian life. It's so easy to get off on detours. And we're busy and we have a full schedule and the church bulletin looks like the timetable from O'Hare Field, and then we wonder why God isn't blessing. Here we are busy and going here and going there and yet nothing really seems to be happening. Why? Well, I think there are times that we just forget the things that really count. The highest privilege that we have as Christians is the privilege of worshipping God.

This is the activity of heaven today when you read Revelation 4-5, you are introduced to the throne room of heaven and there the angels and the spirits of just men made perfect are worshipping and praising the Lord. Some people are bored by worship. I don't know what they're going to do throughout all eternity when they get to glory because one of our chief occupations in heaven is going to be to worship and praise God. The highest privilege we have is that of worshipping and praising God.

Now, everything else in the Christian life flows out of worship. Oh, I know we've substituted everything else for worship and we're limping along. Our Christian walk flows out of worship. If we aren't rightly related to God in worship, we're going to have a hard time walking with Him and walking for Him. Our witnessing comes from worship. Isaiah the prophet was called when he was at a worship service; he saw the Lord high and lifted up. Our work, our warfare, all that's involved in the Christian life flows out of our worship of God. Now, this is not only private worship, but public worship. I'm a little bit disturbed by the way people are neglecting the public worship of God.

It's too bad that when there is a big football game on Sunday, the church has to reorganize its whole schedule to give the carnal Christians opportunity to have one foot in the world and one foot in the church. Dr. Tozer used to say it's so difficult to get the saints to go to any meeting where God is the only attraction. And somehow sports and other kinds of entertainment are so important on Sunday—reruns of old movies—that we don't have time to go to the house of God, and shame on us. Because God warns us: the day is approaching and we better be ready when the Lord Jesus comes.

Forsake not the assembling of yourselves together because the day is approaching. It means we assemble together, it means that we know each other, we greet each other, we encourage each other, we show love to each other, Christian love. Too often in our public worship there's no power, there's no joy; it's just a routine. On the other hand, some public worship is so disorderly that, well, you wonder if God really is at work, because God is not the author of confusion. When the Holy Spirit of God is at work in a local church, then worship is what it ought to be.

This is the problem they had in Thessalonica. When you read 1 Thessalonians 5:19-21, you get an insight into some of the problems they faced in their public worship services. Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise prophecies. Test all things. Hold fast what is good. Now, it doesn't take any imagination to figure out what was going on. There were people in the church who had gone to extremes. Some were so wrapped up in the second coming of the Lord, they were getting all kinds of prophecies concerning His coming. Some thought that they were already in the Day of Tribulation, the Day of the Lord. Some were worried about the Christian dead—what's going to happen to them? And so you have two extremes in the Thessalonian church. You have those who were very activist and perhaps emotional and they were expressing their ecstatic joy, and there were others who were more conservative and more cautious, and they were saying, "Now calm down, calm down." Quite frankly, I agree with Bishop Handley Moule, the great British Bible scholar who said that he would much rather tone down a fanatic than resurrect a corpse.

I would much rather that a worship service show some life and some joy and some spirit and some praise. You can always calm that down a little bit. But I tell you, I have preached in some services where I thought I was in a mausoleum. Here were all of these corpses propped up staring at me. Billy Sunday said that there's some services where you could skate down the center aisle on ice skates and take up the offering, that's how cold it was. We don't want either extreme, do we? We don't want the extreme of fanaticism, nor do we want the extreme of stoicism where nobody moves and nobody says anything—prim and proper and business as usual.

Well, we can improve our public worship of God if we'll just heed Paul's admonitions here. He's negative: do not quench the Spirit, do not despise prophecies. I want to make them positive and give to us some basic rules for public worship. Number one, be open to the Holy Spirit. Do not quench the Spirit. Number two, receive God's message to you. Do not pour contempt upon, do not make light of, do not despise prophecies. Number three, test what you hear. Test all things. And number four, hold on to the truth and obey it. Hold fast what is good. You can see here a gradation in experience. The worst experience of all is quenching the Holy Spirit. But here's somebody who doesn't want to quench the Spirit, but he despises the Word. And the two of course go together because the Holy Spirit uses the Word. Paul tells us now you hear the Word of God and you be open to the Holy Spirit, but you test all things and then you hold fast that which is good.

1 Thessalonians 5:19, "Do not quench the Spirit." Here's our first little rule for improving our public worship: be open to the Holy Spirit of God. Now the Holy Spirit here is compared to fire. Do not quench the Spirit. It's a picture here of somebody putting out the fire. In the Old Testament, Isaiah 4:4, the Holy Spirit is called the Spirit of Judgment and the Spirit of Burning. The Spirit of God is compared to fire. Of course, we remember Acts 2:3 when the tongues of fire were over the heads of the believers on the Day of Pentecost.

Now the Holy Spirit is compared to fire because fire speaks of purity and holiness. The Holy Spirit is the Holy Spirit—the Holy Spirit of God. Fire speaks of purity; it speaks of judgment. When the Holy Spirit of God is at work, there is a judging that is going on. There's also power and energy. When you take fire, that fire can generate power and energy. Fire has a way of testing things. Fire has a way of giving light and warmth. Oh, how we need that. Some churches have a lot of light from their Bible study, but not much warmth from the Holy Spirit of God, and the two really ought to go together. The temperature of our worship service is sometimes too low.

I think God looks at our churches today far too often and says to us what He said to the church at Laodicea: "I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. I could wish you were cold or hot. So then, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth." That's rather a vivid description of judgment.

Now here's a church described in Revelation 3:15-16. Here's a church that thought it was rich and wealthy and needed nothing, had buildings and staff and crowds and budgets and who knows what else. And God said to them, "You don't realize that you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked." Now the Holy Spirit of God wants to take a cold church and melt those cold hearts and get the streams of the water of blessing flowing. He wants to take that lukewarm church and get it going the way it ought to go. Lukewarmness is really worse than being cold or hot, because when you're lukewarm you're complacent, you're comfortable. If you're hot, you know God's power is upon you—I'm talking in spiritual terms, of course. If you're cold, you know you need something.

Now the Holy Spirit of God is compared to fire. There are only three basic temperatures in the Christian life: cold, hot, or lukewarm. Many of the saints are cold when it comes to the worship of God. Now here's the fire of the Holy Spirit. If fire is not kept under control, it can destroy. Sometimes the Holy Spirit begins a work in a church and people just let it become wildfire; they don't keep it under the control of the Lord Jesus Christ because the Holy Spirit is given to glorify Christ. Be open to the Holy Spirit. Don't resist His ministry and don't neglect your own spiritual walk.

It's interesting what Paul had to write to Timothy about the fire in his life. Turn to 1 Timothy 4:14. "Do not neglect the gift that is in you." You can put a fire out by neglect. Just leave it alone. In 2 Timothy, he continues talking about this matter of judgment and the Holy Spirit. 2 Timothy 1:6, "Therefore I remind you to stir up the gift of God which is in you." Now that word "stir up" is an interesting word because it carries with it the idea of stirring and renewing a fire. Now you and I have an altar in our hearts, so to speak, and sometimes the ashes get pretty heavy. Every morning early in the morning the high priest would get up and he'd go down to the altar, or one of the priests would go down to the altar and take off the ashes from yesterday's sacrifices. Get the fire going and put a fresh burnt offering on the altar. I need to do that every day and my guess is that you need to do that every day. Be open to the Holy Spirit of God.

I get the impression there had been some division in the Thessalonian church. Perhaps it had to do with their public worship services. Paul had to admonish them: do not quench the Spirit, now do not despise prophecies. In other words, there were some in the church who were very careful about the excesses. Well, we should be. We should be careful there are no excesses. We should be balanced in our worship. But we can be so careful and so rigid and so mechanical that we quench the Holy Spirit and we resist the work of the Lord.

When I go to the house of God, I go to worship the Lord and I want to hear God's voice. I want to hear God speak to me. I want God to say far more to me than the preacher says. In fact, when I preach I ask God to say far more to people than what I say to them. You see what we get in church is pretty well determined by what we bring with us. The Thessalonians had a marvelous relationship to the Word of God. They had received the Word of God in much affliction, in joy of the Holy Spirit. They appreciated God's Word. Paul said, "I thank the Lord that you don't receive the Word of God like the word of man." 1 Thessalonians 2:13, "You receive it as it really is in truth the Word of God." They were sharing the Word of God.

By the way, we are commanded in Scripture to read the Word of God publicly. 1 Timothy 4:13, "Till I come, give attention to reading, to exhortation, to doctrine." Now that word "reading" means not just the private reading of books and the Word of God, but the public reading of the Word of God. Then having read the Word of God, use it for exhortation and for doctrine. In the previous verses, Paul said, "Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, in everything give thanks." You come to church with that attitude, you're going to have a wonderful time. Do not quench the Spirit, do not despise prophecies. In other words, the Spirit of God uses the Word of God. 1 Thessalonians 1:5, "For our gospel did not come to you in word only, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit." The Spirit uses the Word. 1 Thessalonians 1:6, "You became followers of us and of the Lord having received the word in much affliction with joy of the Holy Spirit." The Spirit uses the Word. 1 Thessalonians 4:8, "Therefore he who rejects this does not reject man but God who has given us His Holy Spirit." Rejects what? The Word that He's given to them about being pure and abstaining from sexual immorality. So the Spirit of God uses the Word of God. Now in the New Testament church, they did not have a complete Bible such as we do. But there were those who had the gift of prophecy. And when the assembly came together, the Spirit of God would speak to these prophets and they would get up and give the message. However, that message had to be tested.

We had to heed the admonition that Paul gave to prove all things. 1 Corinthians 14 describes one of these worship services, 1 Corinthians 14:26, "Whenever you come together, each of you has a psalm, has a teaching, has a tongue, has a revelation, has an interpretation." They all participated; they didn't just sit and look. "Let all things be done for edification." He goes on to talk about how to handle tongues and how to handle the prophets, 1 Corinthians 14:29, "Let two or three prophets speak and let the others judge."

In other words, there has to be a discernment. Somebody gets up in church and says, "God has told me this." How do you know? Might have been a demon. Might have been the fact that he had too much pizza the night before. How do we know? We have to discern through the Word of God. "To the law and to the testimony if they speak not according to this word it is because there is no light in them," Isaiah 8:20. And so we must receive God's message, but exercise discernment. The Spirit of God gives us the wisdom that we need. Now there is a gift of discernment in the church—a discerning of spirits—but the Holy Spirit of God can give to each of us the discernment we need in testing the message of the Word of God. People say, "Well, the Holy Spirit told me to do this." Well, what did the Word of God have to say?

Thirdly, test what you hear. We've talked about that now. Be open to the Spirit, receive God's message, and then test what you hear. The devil is a counterfeiter. In 2 Thessalonians 2, Paul warns them about the counterfeiting work of the devil. "Now brethren, concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering together to Him, we ask you not to be soon shaken in mind or troubled, either by spirit or by word or by letter as if from us as though the Day of the Lord had come."

Now the Thessalonian church was being troubled because somebody got up in a meeting and said the Holy Spirit told me we're in the Tribulation. Or somebody else got a word, or somebody else said here's a letter that Paul wrote—it was a counterfeit letter. Now God wants us to test what we hear. That's why He warns us in 1 John 4, "Beloved, do not believe every spirit." Every preacher you hear on the radio or television, but test the spirits whether they are of God because many false prophets have gone out into the world. And of course, test number one is the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ. Test number two, does what the person say square with the Word of God?

So we must be very careful to test what we hear. We should be like those Bereans in Acts 17:11, who received the Word with all readiness and searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so. Now do you do that? You should test what is taught and we should do it daily to find out what God is saying.

Finally, rule number four: hold on to the truth and obey it. This is the Word of the Lord to us: test all things, hold fast what is good. You're going to hear some things that are not good. You're going to hear some things that are not true. Just reject them. But hold fast that which is good. This word "hold fast" is the same word used in Luke 8:15 when He talks about the heart in the parable of the sower—the heart that produces the good fruit. This is the person who has an honest and a good heart and he holds on to the Word of God. This means accept the message, treasure the message, value it, obey it, guard it. Just get a hold of the Word of God and don't let it slip from you. Let every man be swift to hear and slow to speak and slow to get angry.

Now I think if you and I would spend all week rejoicing, praying, and giving thanks as Paul says in verses 16, 17, and 18, and then come to God's house and be open to the Holy Spirit, receive the Word of God, test what we hear, and hold fast and obey what we hear, it could revolutionize our lives and transform our worship services. Oh, how important it is that you and I have a satisfying, growing experience of worship with God, because God wants us then to step out into a needy world and share the Lord Jesus Christ with lost people.

Father, thank You for this letter that Paul wrote. Thank You for the Holy Spirit who inspired this letter. And now I pray as we have studied it and reviewed it, help us to practice it. Help us to live in the future tense, to spend our money and our time and our energy and to live our lives in the light of the coming of Jesus Christ. For I pray this in His name and for His sake, Amen.