1 Thessalonians 4:9-12

Awesome. Thank you, Matt. As he mentioned, one of the most important things you can be doing for your church leadership is pray. Prayer for remaining biblically sound, biblically faithful, but also for God's leading for whoever it is for the next right man to fill this role on the elder board. Let me just share a few different terms phrases.

Six plus four plus three equals two. Pintar, morning, trek power, a suicide squeeze, seventh inning stretch, sliding. Okay, let me share maybe a second set of words. Lights, camera, action, audio mix, floor monitors, stage lights, mic check. What do all these things have in common?

Absolutely nothing but the first set of words. Distinctly baseball terms. I suppose you could throw a softball in there too. What do the second set of words have in common? Well, anything that has to do with musical performance or stage production.

They're part of what makes the thing the thing. Baseball has a distinctness to it, and so too does a musical or a theater performance. Maybe it's helpful to think of it in terms of family relationships. Every family has things that make that family distinctly them. Maybe not everything they do is unique, but there's markers that make that family that family.

So if you grew up in the Newton house in circa 1998 through 2016, there's a few things that we always did. We always had monkey bread on Christmas morning. I thought it was illegal for a long time to have it any other time. But then we also after we bought a new car at Holiday Automotive in Fond du Lac, we would always go to Gillies for frozen custard afterwards. And we did a number of different things like that.

Guessing. The thing that made us stand out the most is we can quote almost verbatim the entire cult classic, Napoleon Dynamite. All of these things made the Newton family. The Newton family. None of them necessarily unique, but they were.

They gave us a distinctiveness. They gave us an edge. They made us who we were. These are things that describe what it was like to grow up in our house.

This is true to, or at least it should be true of Christian love. The way that those who belong to King Jesus love one another should be markedly. Should be distinctly Christian. If we claim to be followers of Jesus, then the way we love one another should be marked by that. Should be marked by how we love Jesus and love one another.

Everything we do right should be marked by that, but especially our love. This is the concern of our text this morning. We'll give some distinct ways how to do it. Our big idea is love one another like Christians. Love one another like Christians.

The text gives us two ways to Apply that this morning. The first, love one another like Christians with brotherly love. And the second, love one other like Christians by taking care of yourself. Love one other like Christians with brotherly love. Love one another like Christians by taking care of yourself.

Our passage this morning is 1st Thessalonians 4, 9 12. We're on page 1047 of the Pew Bible. 1St Thessalonians four, 9 12. 9 12. Would you turn there with me?

Now, God's word here says about brotherly love. You don't need me to write you, because you yourselves are taught by God to love one another. In fact, you are doing this toward all the brothers and sisters in the entire region of Macedonia. But we encourage you, brothers and sisters, to do this even more, to seek to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business, and to work with your own hands as we commanded you, so that you may behave properly in the presence of outsiders and not be dependent on anyone. This is the word of the Lord.

Love one another like Christians with brotherly love. Well, the Greek New Testament has a few different words for love. Four primarily are used. There's a couple other ones, but four primary uses. We've got those on the screen here.

So eros is a sexual sort of love, a romantic sort of love. It's where we get the Greek word or our English word, erotic, storge or storg. However, I'm sure there's plenty of discussion about how to pronounce it amongst everybody here. But storge is familial love, like a love that a mother has for a son or love that's shared amongst siblings. Filial love is love that's between friends.

How do friends affection show affection towards each other? How do friends show this unbreakable bond for each other? And then agape love is unconditional love, often the word we use to describe the love that God has for us. And so there's these different kind of words or feelings that are captured by these different words. Versus in English, we just have one.

We have love. We use the same word to describe how we feel about tacos and our spouses, or a crisp morning in the deer stand, or an excellently orchestrated tap dance performance, or even a family member. We just have one word, love. I feel bad for English learners because it's got to be tough because you have to know and understand the context. Versus in the Greek New Testament, there's a lot.

There's different words that capture these things. And Paul uses a word here that's not necessarily a combination because Combo words don't tell us the full meaning of the word. For example, butterfly. Those two words are totally unrelated to what a butterfly actually is. But rather, he uses a prefix and a suffix sort of deal.

Here he uses the word for brotherly love is Philadelphia. And maybe that's familiar to some of us. The city in Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, it's often called the city of brotherly love. And so the prefix here is that word that we just looked at, phila or philia, meaning this family sort of love. And the end word.

And so Greek uses case endings. So it takes different shapes for different. Like the plural, or if it's possessive or not. And the ending in that word is adelphia or adelphos. And that really means, like, family.

It means close relationship. It means brothers, sisters, that sort of thing. And so friendships are love with family. And so Paul here is talking about this love. He's using these words here to describe this concept of loving those who are your friends like they're your family.

In other. In essence, loving those who aren't necessarily even blood. Maybe they're not even been adopted into your family. Loving them as if they are your own family. That's as foreign of a concept to them as it maybe is to us, too.

Because Paul said, you already have been given instruction about this. But these people would have struggled with it a lot of the same ways we do. They naturally divided themselves up. The Greeks hung out with the Greeks, the Jews hung out with the Jews. You don't have to tell people to hang out with the people that look and smell and are kind of just like you.

So his command would have been seen as different, to say the least. And so what does it mean? What is this brotherly love? I'll say it a few more times throughout this morning. What's being described here is this idea of loving other Christians, right?

It's a part of the body of Christ. We've sang about that this morning. Loving other Christians as if they are your own family, like, as if they are physically related to you.

God desires for his people to be united and to share in genuine love for one another. This is a theme that Paul writes about elsewhere. And in Ephesians 2, 1921, we see him. So then you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of God's household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him, the whole building being put together grows into a holy temple in the Lord.

In him, you're also being built together for God's dwelling in the Spirit. It's also a concept that Jesus taught in John 13, 34 and 35. Jesus says, There, I give you a new command. Love one another. Just as I have loved you, you're also to love one another.

By this. Everyone will know that you are my disciples. If you love one another by this, they know it to be true. They know this to be true. This is a command that God's given.

It's a command that still applies to us today. It serves as a good reminder. Then he moves in the start of verse 10, he says, you're doing this. You know this concept, and you're living it out well. And he says, you're loving all the believers.

He says, brothers and sisters. But we can just kind of read that right as all the believers in all Macedonia. That's not a small two square mile area. Macedonia at this time was about 37,000 square miles. And so this church was loving everybody within that vicinity.

Probably not every single. It could have been every single believer. But by and large, it was just knowing that they loved all these churches, that they loved them in a way that looked like they were family, that they cared about them, that they. They were committed to them. And what were they doing?

The text doesn't tell us exactly what they were doing, but. But we can just kind of infer and just know based on some history who maybe would have been helping out with economic needs. Absolutely. Praying for, visiting, serving them in tangible ways.

Put simply, they were showing up for churches throughout the area in a way that looked like they were caring for their own flesh and blood. And that's incredibly. That's incredible considering 37,000 square miles. It's a lot of ways when you have to do it on foot or on the back of an animal.

We need to remember too what this is. Because brotherly love, Biblically speaking, is loving brothers and sisters in the faith in a way that we would typically think of as only for nuclear family.

So what would this look like today in the year of our Lord 2026 in Lodi? How can we show brothers and sisters brotherly love, family love in a way that is faithful to God's command? I think, first of all, we have to think about, what do families do? How do families love? There's a whole host of ways that families love, but there's just four things I've kind of come up with, I think are helpful for us.

What do families do? How do families love? Well, in a Christ situation, who is there? Our Family.

These are all supposing families functioning healthy, right? In a Christ situation, who shows up? Our family? Who are the people that never, we know, would never turn our back on us, right? In a healthy family, that's going to be them regardless if we've blown it or we've just messed up in a way that we never thought possible.

Our family's going to be there. There's going to, of course, be some consequences, but our family will be there. Who should be checking in on us? Like, who should know us to the point where they actually know. Like, they can see past the I'm good, I'm fine.

They know to ask the question, no, how are you actually doing? Of course our family should be able to do that.

Who should not be afraid to call us on the carpet when we've been foolish? Of course our family. Not in a way that's harmful or mean or destructive, but in a way that says, hey, I actually care about you. I don't want to see you make a mess of your life when crisis hits. Our church family should be some of the first people we call, and they should be some of the first people to help when we royally mess up.

Our church families should be some of the first people that say that not only accept our repentance, but call us to it and love us through it.

We should also know each other well enough to look past when we're sitting in the lobby or in the multipurpose room. We should know and love each other well enough to know if somebody's saying, I'm doing good, I'm doing okay. We should know them and love them enough to know if they're actually doing good, if they're actually doing okay, or if we've been acting foolish. Our church family should love us enough to call us out, to offer correction where it needs to happen. But friends, behind all of this, we cannot actually function like a family.

None of these things can happen if we don't know each other, if we don't get together, if we're not involved in each other's lives. I am proud to be from Wisconsin my whole life. I love this state. It's going to take a real. Like, God's gonna have to be very clear if he ever wants me to do anything but live here.

But I will say Wisconsin. A lot of times we have our nuclear family and maybe our extended family, and then we don't have much room for any other friends. And that's a problem because that's not functioning. Is this family relationship good? Absolutely.

But the body of Christ is not just made up of those who are flesh and blood. We need to include and be a part of each other's lives in a way that says here that doesn't make sense to an onlooking world.

We have to spend time with one another. We have to spend time on Sunday mornings. Absolutely. We gather together to worship and praise our great God, to build one another up and then be sent out. But then we need to be involved in each other's lives throughout the week, too, because how do families grow?

It's not by checking in every so and so every so often and just saying, how you doing? Good, good. And then you go on your way. No, that's not how families grow together. If we want to love one another like Christians, we need to do this with brotherly love.

We have to know each other. We have to be in each other's home, friends. Let's think. When's the last time we had someone from church over for a meal? When's the last time we've done something that's just as friends with somebody from church?

Shouldn't be just a foreign sort of idea. This should be just who we are.

Maybe a lot of you are just making the connection. You're like, I know exactly where he's going. He's gonna talk about Lilo and Stitch. Exactly. Good job.

In a 2002 Disney movie, right? The classic Stitch lands on the. On the state. On the beaches in the state of Hawaii. And Stitch is an alien, little blue, lovable guy, but he's kind of destructive throughout a lot of the movie.

He really tries hard to make his family kick him out, and he has a hard time adjusting to this concept of, well, they love me, but they're not related to me, but they love me as if they were related to me. And so he gets adopted by Lilo, the young Hawaiian girl, and she loves him like he's her own. And then eventually, the cinematic climax of the movie, the cinematic climate, like the alien supervisors of Stitch come to get him back, and they're trying to basically just take him back by force. And Stitch finally says the word. If you've seen the movie, you know that the word is ohana.

Throughout the movie, they say ohana. Ohana means family, and family means no one gets left behind. And so at the peak of the movie, Stitch says this. He says, ohana. And the nani, the older sister, says, what did you say?

She can't believe with her ears. And he says, ohana. And ohana means Family. And family means no one gets left behind. It leaves the Viewer, whether you're 6 or 16 or 60.

You see, yes, he gets it. He's part of the family. He's one of them. And if we're doing the Christian life rightly, this should be true for us as well. If we're loving one other in distinctly Christian ways, we need to love each other in a way that looks like we are family, looks like we belong to one another.

Because if we're doing the Christian life right, then we should be a collection of people also that have absolutely no obvious reason why we're spending time together. If we're doing the Christian life right, we should be a collection or a group of people. It doesn't make sense. If you remove Jesus from the situation, what an incredible witness that'd be. But also an even greater testament to the transformative power of the love of God.

These people, who would not, by the world's standards, spend any time together, have any reason to have become like family. Loving each other down to the nitty gritty. Knowing each other not just in the abstract, but in the particulars.

Because Jesus, when he was. Because Jesus led the way for us. When we do this, we reflect his love for his church. Because even though we are so wonderfully different than him, he came to earth knowing that we would turn our back on him, knowing that we were so. So out there compared to who he is.

He came to show us the ultimate brotherly love so that we could become brothers and sisters and friends. Did you know that? That Jesus calls us brother and sister. We're not on the same spiritual plane. No, not even close.

But that's how near, how close he views us. Hebrews 2:11. God's word there says, for the one who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one Father.

That is why Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters. That's the love he has for us. That's how close he views us. And when we love one another with brotherly love, we are reflecting this love to each other.

And if we want to love one another like Christians, one way we do this is with brotherly love. Another way we do it is by taking care of yourself. Maybe if you're. If you're in the grammar thing, you're ourselves, whatever. I just use the phrase taking care of yourself.

If you want to love one other like Christians, one way to do this is by taking care of yourself. We shift our attention to the second part of verse 10 through verse 12 Paul wants them to love one another with ready love more and more. That's a great command, right, of a supervisor of someone, an authority figure. Love them, keep doing the thing you're doing and keep doing it even more. Keep doing it even more, you doing great.

And he gives some practical ways that that's going to look some practical ways to live this out, to keep doing this brotherly love thing. And so he lists a few here. They're told to live quietly, mind your own affairs, work with your own hands, and walk properly before outsiders while being dependent on no one. So let's work through each of these. What does it mean to live a quiet life?

It feels like kind of an odd phrase, like a quiet life. What does it mean? I mean, it's not just knowing what to say the right thing and what not to say the right thing, certainly part of it. I think a lot of us have probably gotten in trouble for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. So that's part of it.

But to live a quiet life just essentially means to live a well ordered life or a life that's not causing an active distraction to someone else in the way that they could follow Jesus. And so if we're living this quiet, if we're living this well ordered life for the Christian, it means that we have our loves in order, that we have Christ above all, our love for God above all things. And then if you're married, it includes a spouse, and if you have kids, that includes kids and then friends and church family fits in that sort of way. And some of this level is going to be controversial. I've had people tell me, well, you don't get to choose the order of your loves.

Well, biblically speaking, you absolutely do. We love God above all else in a way that Jesus says it looks like we hate other things by comparison. Not actually hate, but looks like it. We love God above all else, but if we want to live this ordered life, we love him. And if you're married and based on your context, someone who lives a quiet life has their affairs in order and they don't let the way they run their life be a hindrance to others, especially hindering others from following Jesus.

Minding our own affairs is fairly straightforward. Basically, stay in our own lane where it's appropriate. Don't engage in things like gossip or slander or meddling. The command, though that at least sounds strangest to me, maybe it sounds strange to you too, is this idea of work with your own hands, it feels kind of out of place in this sort of lineup. Dr. D. Michael Martin, writing for the New American Commentary, is helpful.

He writes here, this is not a command to the wealthy to take up a trade, but an encouragement to each individual to do his own work and so be a self supporting contributing member of the church and also of his city. This fits with other commands. So work for the good of others by taking care of what you can take care of. And then we move to this idea of walking properly before outsiders. It just means to live above reproach, be known around town at the very least as a nice guy or a nice gal, but also to be known as a distinctly Christian person.

Lastly, he says believers should be dependent on no one. This is an idea of self sufficiency that I think a lot of us naturally get, or at least we should want to get. But it stands in this kind of tension of the Christian life of okay, Hunter, you just got done sharing with us that God Word says we're supposed to depend on each other. Yes, we should. But also we should take care of ourselves.

Yes we should. And these things aren't mutually exclusive because there's many times where we need to lean on each other and there's going to be times where we need to be the ones that get leaned on. Because if no one can take care of themselves, then how is anybody going to take care of anybody? We should be working towards self sufficiency and not leaning on each other as a crutch and never being able to take care of ourselves, but in a way that frees others up of the burden, but also allows us to minister to and to love each other.

And the other others that are mentioned here in this case is outsiders, those who don't know Jesus yet because the way that they will know we belong to Jesus, of course with our mouth, but also our actions, like the way that we care for each other, the way that we look to take care of ourselves. But this taking care of ourselves, it's not total isolation. It's not spiritual homesteading. Maybe it's helpful to think of it this way. If you've been on an airplane, you know, the safety video or some of the airlines like the ones on the big yellow planes have, they maybe don't do the safety video.

And then the flight attendants have to do it manually, go through. They have to show you how to use a seat belt, which is always kind of funny to watch a grown up show another grown up how to do a seatbelt. But what's one of the things that they always talk about if the planes were to start losing altitude pretty quick, the air mask would fall down. And what do they always tell you to do with the air masks? Put yours on first.

Put yours on first. Because if you're busy putting your air masks on everyone else, maybe you're running to your kid that's three aisles over, or maybe you're putting on for your neighbor, that's a great thing to do. But if, if your air mask isn't on, it's not going to do you a lot of good because there's going to air is going to run out. You're not going to take care of anybody because there won't be any air for you. It's helpful to think about this in terms of our Christian walk too.

Yes, we need to invest in and care about the lives of other people, but we also have to take care of our walks with Christ. We have to take care that we can sustain ourselves, that we can follow after Him. There's always going to be exceptions or special circumstances, but by and large this is the standard. We take care of ourselves in our walks so we might be able to help others. Then do the same so that we can love each other and love outsiders in distinctly Christian ways.

We've seen this morning what it looks like, what it means to love one another like Christians. We do this by loving one another with brotherly love. We do this by loving one another. Sorry, by taking care of ourselves. To love one another with brotherly love means to love those within the body of Christ, as we talked about, in a way that looks like related, even if we're not in a way that's going to be just frankly look weird to the onlooking world means we need to be involved though.

We need to know each other. Because when a Christ situation hits there for each other, when we royally mess up, we receive one another. We know what's going on in the hearts and minds and lives of each other. We call each other out when we're acting, when we're sinning or we're acting foolish. But we need to spend time together.

If we want to love each other, we have to with brotherly love. If we want to act and love each other like family, we have to spend time together. The other way the text gives us is to take care of ourselves. If we want to love each other like Christians, we have to take care of ourselves so we can take care of others. Yes, we can still and should rely on each other, but at the same time we need to be working towards self Sufficiency.

Because if no one's taking care of themselves, then nobody can take care of anybody.

But whenever we approach God's Word, we should always be wondering what's the purpose? Or what's the so what? Why is this in the Bible? Like, why does this matter to me? The Bible was written primarily.

It was written for other people first, but it's still written for us. It wasn't written to us, but it's written for us. And friends, this morning, I think what Paul's trying to get at to the believers and in us today is that when we love each other like Christians in distinctly Christian ways, we are pointing each other and the onlooking world to what the love of Christ is like. When we love each other in distinctly Christian ways, with brotherly love and we take care of ourselves, we point one another towards the love that Christ had for us. Because when he left heaven, when he took on flesh, he didn't stop being God.

But before that, all he had ever known was the love within the Godhead. When he took on flesh, he gained human flesh. And he understood what it was like to be human, to walk, to eat, to sleep, to be let down, to have concerns for friends in a human way. But he did this all. He walked into the places the society would have said, you never should walk.

You never. Because those people are beyond redemption. They would have said the love that he had when he went to a cross that he didn't deserve died and rose again so we might have new life in him. So that one day, friends, Jesus did this for us so he could call us brothers and sisters. Because we've been made right with the Father through the work of the Son, by the power of the Spirit that we receive because of our faith in Christ.

Why should we love one another like Christians, friends? Because when we do, we model to both one another into the unlurking world, the love of Christ, the love that can only be found in Jesus, the perfect lover of our souls. As we get ready for the final song this morning, let us ask ourselves, how will I love someone in a distinctly Christian way? How will I. How do I need to point others to love of Jesus by the way that I love them?

So in this last song is we're getting ready to sing praise to God, right? So we're doing. We're singing praise to God, but also singing what we know to be true to one another. If that's something you'd like to talk more about, there'll be prayer team members in the back or you can find me after the service. Or even if you just came in with a weight that's too heavy for you to bear and you would like to talk to somebody about this Jesus, how this Christian love can free you up.

Would love to make space for that. But just consider how might you. You need to respond to God's word. This morning I'm going to pray and we'll give you the space to do that. God, it is good to know you and it's good to be loved by you.

You care about us. You love us. You know us, you see us. We thank you for the space to enjoy you, to hear your word sung, to hear your word proclaimed. We pray that we would love one another in distinctly Christian ways that that don't make sense to an onlooking world, but also that reflect the love that Christ has for us.

Let that be what encourages us, what spurs us one another on all the more until we see the day of return of Christ Jesus. God. We pray that this word would encourage us where we need to be encouraged and convict us where we need to be convicted. It's in Jesus name we pray. Amen.

Please stand with us.