When we go to Old Country Buffet, we don’t demand that Paul and Richard eat everything offered. They can select what they want to eat. They choose some of this or that and that is OK. But when we eat at home we put a certain amount of food on their plates. We tell them that they must eat all three (or four) things that are on their plates. We don’t tell them that they have the option to eat what they wish to eat. We don’t allow them to say, “I’ll have the apple sauce but not the green beans.” If we didn’t want them to eat it we wouldn’t put it on their plates.
Unfortunately some Christians have the mistaken notion that God’s Word is like Old Country Buffet. If they like a particular command they’ll choose it. If they don’t care for something they’ll pass on it. The truth is, however, that God has placed in His Word His commands for our lives that He wants us to obey. If He didn’t want us to obey them then He would not have placed them there.
Here Paul expands on three commands about which they had previously spoken to the Thessalonians that he is now reiterating. And the key idea in this passage is Paul gives us three ways to walk in a manner pleasing to God.
1. Introduction
Verses 1 & 2 are introductory to the material through verse 12. There are three truths that Paul conveys to us through these verses that introduce what it means to walk and please God.
A. There is a way in which to walk and please God
The first truth we see in this introduction is that there is a way in which to walk and please God. Paul says in verse one that the Thessalonians received instruction from them as to how to walk and please God. There is a way to live that is outlined by God so as to please Him. We do not live simply in any way we choose. God has set a path in which we should walk. And if we decide to deviate from that path we are not pleasing Him. In 1 Corinthians 6:19 Paul says, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you have been bought with a price, therefore glorify God in your body.”
There is a way in which to walk and please God. To claim that God’s grace has made us pleasing in God’s sight and then to live against God’s Word is to make a mockery of God’s grace. Romans 6:1 says, “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase? May it never be! How shall we who died to sin still live in it?”
And what we have to recognize is that if we fail to call our sin, sin then we are not walking in a way that pleases God. Too many people today excuse their behavior as if it were a matter of preference or family lineage or genetic programming. I can’t help what I am doing because it runs in my family. Why does it run in your family? Your family has refused to deal with it as sin. And it becomes what seems like a family trait. All the men in our household are addicted to some form of drug. All of the women in our family have been afflicted with great depression. The Scripture says that this is because the sins of the fathers will be passed unto the children to the third and fourth generation as a curse unless you deal with it as sin.
There is a way in which to walk and to please God. And we can follow it. God is able to break us from the chains of our slavery so that we can live a life pleasing to God. God has being doing this for millennia. He is still doing it today in our lives and the lives of all that would trust Him to overcome their sin through Jesus Christ.
B. We are to grow in that way
Secondly, Paul says that we are to grow in this way. There is a way to walk and please God and we are to grow in it. Look at the end of verse 1. “As you have received from us instruction as to how you ought to walk and please God (just as you actually do walk), that you excel still more.” As these Thessalonians were walking and pleasing God, Paul says keep doing it even more. Continue to excel in it. As you have seen God strengthening you to put off the sin in your life keep doing it. This is what Paul means by excel still more. And how are we to do this? Paul says in Colossians 2:6&7, “As you have received Christ Jesus the Lord so walk in Him, having been firmly rooted and now being built up in Him and established in your faith, just as you were instructed, and overflowing with gratitude.” So how did you receive Christ Jesus the Lord? By faith, that is, by trust in His Word. And so how are you to walk and grow in that way? By faith. By continuing to trust what God’s Word says over our feelings or our own faulty wisdom.
Why are we to grow in this way that pleases God. If we don’t grow we will find ourselves stumbling and reaping the consequences of our failure to grow. Peter defines those consequences for us in his second letter. There in 1:5 Peter says, to add to your faith; moral excellence, knowledge, self-control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly kindness and to all these add love. In verse 8 he says that if we continue to grow we will find ourselves neither useless nor unfruitful in the true knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. But if we fail to do so Peter says that whoever lacks these qualities becomes blind or short-sighted, having forgotten his purification from his former sins. The one who fails to grow in the faith loses sight of the fact that they have been forgiven of their sin. It doesn’t say that they aren’t forgiven but that they forget they have been forgiven. These people lose the joy of their salvation. They are caught up in their own path in failing to grow in God’s grace and become miserable. And they lack strength to do what is right because the joy of the Lord was their strength.
C. God has made known to us this way
Thirdly, God has made known to us this way. Paul says in verse 2, “For you know what commandments we gave you by the authority of the Lord Jesus.” God has clearly made known to us again and again through His Word how we are to live. If there is any doubt in your mind as to how you should be living it is because you are not searching God’s Word. Or it is because you are not being honest with God’s Word. You may see something in the Word as being difficult to do. But instead of trusting in the Lord to carry it out you reinterpret for your own convenience. “Well the Bible doesn’t mean my kind of worry. Its only when someone really worries that it becomes sin.” God has made the way He wants us to walk clear. He h