Thank you, Lord, for this occasion.
May it be richly redeemed.
May you have an opportunity to bare your
heart, gracious God, and speak to our own.
Let this be more than something informational.
Let it be a word that performs a
work in us who hear it.
Thank you, gracious God, for your precious watch
care and love, your seriousness toward us as
sons.
May we respond appropriately.
Thank you now, Lord, bless this and perform
all your will in it.
We'll thank you and praise you.
In Jesus' name, amen.
I've been on one theme, true apostolicity.
You say, why don't you just say true
apostle?
Because apostolicity is more than apostle.
Apostle is at the heart of it, but
it goes far beyond what the apostle is.
It's because his significance is so great.
Because what he is affects the church that
bears the name apostolic.
What a man is as an apostle is
what the church ought itself to be in
its character and activity.
Understand that?
So if the apostle is false, what of
the church that bears the same name?
If the apostle is spurious, what of the
church that is spurious?
So we have a tremendous responsibility to understand
and to maintain true apostolicity because it is
the last resort.
If we have toyed with things charismatic or
New Testament-ish and made of that a
kind of merchandise and games playing, that's sad
enough.
But if we do the same with this,
there's no further recourse.
This is it.
And this is my great dread, that that
possibility exists and is already in process of
fulfillment.
We know that the church in Revelation is
complemented because it discerns those who say that
they are apostles and are not.
So evidently this is going to be an
end-time factor.
So if there are those that say that
they are apostles and they are not, what
of churches who say they are apostolic and
are not?
So I have in my heart this morning
just to share a little episode or a
little segment out of the life of a
chief apostle, namely Paul in 1 Thessalonians, that
we can glean something from his life, from
his character, from his activity that gives us
an insight into that which truly apostolic is.
So reading from the very beginning of that
chapter, 1 Thessalonians, Paul, so vain is in
sympathy to the church of the Thessalonians, in
God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ,
grace to you and peace.
We give thanks to God always for all
of you, making mention of you in our
prayers, constantly bearing in mind your work of
faith and labor of love and steadfastness of
hope in our Lord Jesus Christ in the
presence of God our Father.
Knowing, brethren, beloved by God, his choice of
you, for our gospel did not come to
you in word only, but also in power
and in the Holy Spirit, and with full
conviction, just as you know what kind of
men we prove to be among you for
your sake.
You also became imitators of us and of
the Lord, having received the word in much
tribulation with the joy of the Holy Spirit,
so that you became an example to all
the believers in Macedonia and in Achaia.
For the word of the Lord had sounded
forth from you not only in Macedonia and
Achaia, but also in every place your faith
toward God has gone forth, so that we
have no need to say anything, for they
themselves report about us what kind of a
reception we had with you and how you
turned to God from idols to serve a
living and true God and to wait for
his Son from heaven, whom he raised from
the dead, that is Jesus, who delivers us
from the wrath to come.
Amen.
I don't know of any book that is
more susceptible to being misread than the Bible.
You just had a perfect example.
I don't know what a true reading would
be, but you didn't get it.
There's such a tendency to gloss over the
word of God as if we're reading Gone
With the Wind and miss the mighty portent
of all that is written there.
Just to give you an idea of what
I mean, I'll start from the end of
that chapter and work backward, looking at the
last two verses, for they themselves report about
us what kind of a reception we had
with you and how you turned to God
from idols to serve a living and true
God.
Imagine speaking that so blithely and not recognizing
what an enormous wrench that constituted.
What did it mean for a pagan people,
Greeks, in all that is intrinsic in the
Greek mentality, with all of their panoply of
gods and mythologies, to turn from that to
the living God?
The word wrench is hardly sufficient.
I wish I could give you a sound
effect.
The enormous power that it took to turn
men from idols to the living God, from
their whole assortment of gods and their mythologies
so dear to the Greek heart, from their
rationality, from their love of reason, from all
that is celebrated in being Greek to that
which is Hebrew.
If you don't understand that, you're going to
miss Paul and you're going to miss what
being apostolic means, what the power is that
turns men from things that are dead to
things that are alive, from things pagan to
things holy, from things humanistic to things Hebraic.
You turn to God from idols to serve,
not just merely acknowledge, but serve a living
God.
And Paul is very careful about his use
of words.
He's not one who is given to flattery.
He's incisive, he's sharp, his words mean what
they say.
These men did not just merely acknowledge a
new deity, they served him.
And as a matter of fact, if that
acknowledgment is not expressed in serving him, it's
not acknowledgment.
Remember what Elijah said to his own people.
How long will you hold between two opinions?
If God be God, serve him or follow
him, not merely acknowledge him.
So Elijah had an apostolic heart.
He understood what the issues of truth are
and would not be satisfied with anything less.
That's the marvel of this Thessalonian church.
They turned from idols to serve the living
God.
Why?
Because of the reception that we had with
you.
Everything rested on the acceptance of a single
man who came bearing an ideology wholly offensive
and opposed to all that can be understood
as Greek reckoning and mentality.
I don't know if you know how formidable
a thing it is to bear the message
of the gospel, how foolish a thing it
is, how loathsome a thing it is, how
contrary to reason and to all that men
celebrate as rational and good.
Why God could not have gone overboard more
to find something more calculated to offend human
sensibility and intellect than the gospel of Jesus
Christ.
That's why Paul speaks of the mystery of
the gospel.
And one of the reasons that we don't
have this kind of acceptance and our preaching
of it does not result in this kind
of consequence is that for us it is
not this kind of a mystery.
It's hash.
It's too over easy with bacon.
It's commonplace.
We've lived with it for so long.
We've grown up with it.
The mystery has not touched us.
We've not been offended by it.
I marvel that you haven't.
It was a struggle for me as a
Jew coming out of a Greek background when
I was first confronted by the gospel.
It was powerfully offensive to everything to which
I had given my mind and heart and
loyalty and had celebrated as value for 35
years.
Rightly has a German theologian said that true
faith begins where the atheist thinks it ought
to end.
Namely at the cross of Christ.
That that pitiful wreck that hung limply on
the cross whatever you think of chick comics.
The one thing I really appreciate about his
artfulness is his ability to depict the crucified
Christ.
You ever seen it?
It looks like a shredded man.
Tattered.
I mean just a pitiful spectacle of something
so bludgeoned and whipped and beaten out of
shape that he has no form nor comeliness
that we should desire him.
And when you think that that's God hanging
on the cross and that's the heart of
the theology of the faith you want to
run out and shriek.
Why didn't God give us something more intellectually
reasonable to present to men?
I remember on a train from Prague, Czechoslovakia
to my next destination in that land I
was in the wrong compartment and I was
irritated because there were people smoking in that
compartment and there was a Swedish woman with
a little spoiled brat who was making a
ruckus and a noise which I didn't like.
In fact I looked at him and we
broke into a little conversation.
She spoke English.
She probably was not married.
Part of the avant-garde, the advanced generation
that is so characteristic of Scandinavia that now
looks upon marriage as a kind of inconvenience
in a piece of paper.
Very emancipated.
I said, I suppose you think that he's
the hope of Sweden.
Why yes, she said.
I made it clear that I did not
agree with her.
And just as I was looking for the
exit to my right side, sitting on the
same seat with me I noticed a couple.
They had been quiet.
I think they had spoken a word or
two in English.
And I turned to them and I said,
You're Jewish, aren't you?
And they gulped and said, Yes, how did
you know?
There's only the faintest semblance of Jewry left
in Czechoslovakia.
Probably less than four or five thousand.
Well I just knew.
And we got into a conversation.
She was a professor of, I don't know
what Eastern languages at Uppsala University in Sweden.
And he was a professor of mathematics in
his own country and a celebrated scientist.
In a word, they were the finest that
the world can produce in terms of that
which is prestigious and estimable.
They were intellectual.
They had it all together.
They were progressive and modern and suave and
smooth and all the kinds of things that
men drool to be and are not.
Because if anybody can be it, it's a
Jew.
They invented it.
And so we got into a conversation.
And they naturally wanted to know what I
was about and where I was traveling and
what I was doing.
And I said something about Jewish mothers who
are now lamenting about their son the evangelist
who used to pride themselves in their son
the doctor, their son the lawyer.
Now having to contend with a new phenomenon,
their son the evangelist.
And that I was in full-time Christian
service.
And I began to share something of my
testimony, how I myself came out of a
left-wing radical Marxist background and passed through
various disillusionments as my idols crumbled and how
in the time of deepest crisis and anguish
of heart as a hitchhiker who took a
year's leave of absence from the teaching profession
when all of my world had fallen about
me, how I was apprehended by a God
whom I was not seeking.
It was a very impressive, powerful, supernatural testimony.
And when I finished, this guy just kind
of yawned and he had already told me
that he had been spared from death in
the Holocaust because he had been secreted away
in a Catholic order and had grown up
as a Catholic.
And therefore he said he had the broadest
exposure to Christianity and he knew the New
Testament well.
And then he turned to me when I
finished my testimony and said, well, he said,
that's all right for you, but I don't
believe in God.
When he said that, a chill came over
me.
I don't have a word to describe what
was expressed in that moment.
It was the spirit of the world speaking
in all of its wisdom and rationality and
superiority and smugness and self-assurance, but I
don't believe in God.
And when that wave passed over me with
the power and the assurance of that statement,
the unction and the anointing of it, if
you will, I never felt more pitiful.
I never felt more weak, more beggarly, more
inadequate, more foolish.
I felt like some, what should I say,
some bent, crumpled piece of thing next to
this resplendent figure who had all the marvels
and all I had was this pitiful, bare
gospel, the foolishness of the gospel, pitted against
the esteem and the prestige and all of
the force and invective of the world in
its celebrated rationality.
I never felt the gospel to be more
foolish than in that moment.
I think it's for that reason that God
has wisely said, to the Jew first.
Because that's the hardest test.
When you can, with power and authority and
full conviction of the Spirit, bring the gospel
to this impervious and hard and self-opinionated
and assured people and impress them and break
through and bring them to the place of
repentance and turning, you will have known what
Paul celebrated.
I'm not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus
Christ for it is the power of God
unto salvation.
Many of us have not learned that because
we've not had the occasion to see or
to test the power of the gospel.
We started with the soft touches, the bum
groveling in his own vomit in the gutter,
rather than the supremely successful man of the
world who has no need of our Christ.
I recognize as a teacher if I didn't
start with the toughest problem in the class
but I chose the second echelon of problems,
I would be harassed all the year long
by the guys with whom I was afraid
to tackle.
You know what I'm talking about?
I'm talking about those characters in the back
of the room who grimace and make faces
and wisecracks and that they are as big
as you and if not bigger and you're
afraid to take them on.
You're afraid to test your authority before the
entire class lest you fail and be made
a laughing stock.
So the easiest course is to sort of
just not see them and pick on the
second echelon that you can handle but you'll
never have order for the rest of the
year.
That's why God says to the Jew first.
I'm saying things I didn't even plan to
say and we have never come into the
authority which is intrinsic to true apostolicity because
we have not obeyed the order of God
to the Jew first.
And in that confrontation, if ever you felt
weak, if ever you recognized despairingly how shameful
a thing the gospel is, how absurd, how
ridiculous, how ludicrous that you're going to tell
men that that was very God on the
cross who had come down from heaven and
lay aside as a deity to be born
in the form of man and to live
for 30 years in obscurity and that somehow,
to believe that and the blood that was
shed is a purgative for our sins that
somehow is esteemed in the Father's sight and
that there's a faith by which you can
acknowledge and believe these things that constitute salvation
and much more.
That has got to be patent and colossal
absurdity.
Imagine Paul coming in the weakness that he
was both physically and in every way just
as weak as I feel this morning.
I felt great until I came into this
room.
I felt so great, as a matter of
fact, this morning that for the first time
since my return from three months of overseas,
very arduous and demanding, I did my daily
dozen.
I did my 42 or usually 50 stitches
but the phone rang and my other kinds
of bends and jerks and things like that.
That's how good I felt that I could
afford this morning for the first time to
limber up a little bit.
But the moment I came into the room
came the sack.
My inspiration dissipated away completely.
I almost forgot what the text was from
which I was planning to speak and when
it was time for me to get up
I got up with that weariness of like
a man taking his final walk to the
guillotine.
I think somehow that that is also intrinsic
in that which is apostolic.
That somehow the truest and the deepest and
the richest ministry that brings life is always
born out of weakness.
And I must imagine that Paul in his
first coming to Thessalonica came in that condition
as I believe he came everywhere in weakness,
not knowing.
And to be confronted by men steeped in
their Greek civilization and culture to turn them
from idols to serve a living and a
true God must have been an accomplishment of
enormous consequence of great demonstration of power and
authority as he himself says for the gospel
did not come to you in word only
but also in power and in the Holy
Spirit and with full conviction.
Somehow I just love to play on that
last phrase and let it lay like wine
on the tongue.
Don't be too quick to suck that down
with full conviction.
I know that this saying was popular where
you are when you grew up as a
kid but in Brooklyn where we played stickball
it's a little game where you use a
broom handle and a spalding ball or a
tennis ball we had the phrase a miss
is as good as a mile.
You know that?
Powerful swing can result in just a little
bleep and a little pop up or a
little foul dribbling off somewhere if it misses
so much as by a little.
It's only bye bye baby if it's right
on crack.
It's that ultimate connection something true through and
through that is unspeakably joyous.
It's real.
It's the full thing.
Crack!
You don't have to watch.
You know it's going.
Just a sound.
It's a full connection and with full conviction.
I'll tell you it had to be full
conviction with these Greeks or it would have
been a dismal flop.
Not only the failure of time expended and
energy expended but it might have been the
end of Paul.
I don't know how amenable these pagans were
to some pitiful Hebrew coming along and speaking
his wretched gospel.
I don't know that they just would have
taken him by the scruff of the neck
and kicked him out of town or really
done a job on him for daring to
presume upon them with this foolishness.
I remember speaking at City College in New
York 85% Jewish and the first gospel
outreach in the history of that school connected
to the whole New York University system.
The Jews were there.
I mean they were the audience bristling with
such an indignation.
And I remember the one guy I think
it was the rabbi of the Hillel organization
at the school standing up with such a
trembling of rage saying How dare you come
with a Gentile Bible and seek to persuade
us of these medieval old wives myths.
If you want to shrivel that would be
an occasion.
If you've not had these experiences I commend
them.
Paul took the risk of having Greeks respond
to him very much in the same way.
And I don't know that they would treat
him with the politeness of even allowing him
to be escorted out of town.
They might just about have mobbed him and
fallen upon him with their teeth and gnashed
upon him and done him in.
That's the risk one always takes in confronting
pagans with something that is totally offensive and
contradicts in every point in particular that which
they esteem and value and count as wise.
Which if they were to receive it completely
contradicts and invalidates all to which they had
given their life till that moment.
That's why my mother has her fingers in
her ears and doesn't want to hear and
doesn't want to acknowledge and doesn't want to
have to consider at the age of 75
a gospel which if it is true means
that all that she has done and all
that she has been about and all that
she has celebrated all to which she has
given her energy in these years that she
has counted as good in Jewish culture and
Israel and all that is estimable was false
and delusion and a misspent life.
It's an enormous wrench to go from idols
to the living God and serve him.
And the key to that wrench was Paul
himself.
For they themselves report about us what kind
of a reception we had with you.
And how you turn to God from idols
to serve a living and true God and
to wait for his son from heaven whom
he raised from the dead that is Jesus
who delivers us from the wrath to come.
What a mouthful.
Do you realize that there is a whole
and total theology in that one verse?
Do you realize that these Greeks not just
accepted the issue of immediate salvation but they
took the totality of a whole Christian mindset
and perspective including the eschatology of end time
things of that which is to come as
one whole thing and received it lock, stock
and barrel.
Things which we have not yet totally received
to which we have only faintly condescended with
a nod.
They received with depth and truth.
You know why?
Because they received it from him who had
such entry.
Who delivers us from the wrath to come.
They understood the judgment of God which was
imminent.
We haven't yet understood it.
Because perhaps we have not had the advantage
of such an apostolic penetration that comes in
full conviction and not in word only.
Okay.
Ready for the punchline?
It's in the fifth verse.
For our gospel and what a gospel it
is total including the judgment which is to
come so absent from the consciousness not only
of our present church but even its leaders.
For our gospel did not come to you
in word only but also in power and
in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction
just as you know what kind of men
we prove to be among you for your
sake.
Whew!
I'll tell you at the sound of that
we need all to come out of our
seats and go right down crashing upon our
faces.
If there's a heart of the mystery of
apostolicity I think we are very close to
it here.
To be an apostle is not one as
I have hinted who has a briefcase full
of clever things.
Who has scoured the scriptures and has taken
to himself the concepts and the teachings and
the statements of the apostles of the early
generation and has internalized them and now knows
how to bring them out on what seems
to be the appropriate occasion.
What an apostle is in the last analysis
is a certain kind of man.
I don't want to in any way give
the impression that I'm disparaging what an apostle
teaches.
I greatly celebrate and esteem it.
But what I want to say is that
the teaching is the expression of what the
man himself is.
He's the message.
He both demonstrates as well as proclaims.
And in this verse Paul in his mindless
and unselfconscious way sets before us the heart
and the genius of that which is apostolic
which needs to be true not only of
apostolic men but apostolic churches.
With full conviction just as you know what
kind of men we prove to be among
you.
The full conviction is in exact proportion to
what kind of men we prove to be
among you.
No more and no less.
You guys with me?
Or you feel as weak as I do?
As sagging as I do.
This is rich stuff.
I hope it's not falling to the ground.
The power of conviction is in exact proportion
to the quality of the character of the
man who brings it.
That's the apostolic prescription if I had to
sum it up in a formula.
Just as you know in exact proportion as
we were the kind of men among you.
No more and no less.
It was as full in power in speaking
as we were full in apostolic character.
No more and no less.
I marvel when I look down upon the
audiences.
I don't mean look down in any derisive
way but when I survey the men before
whom I find myself speaking in the course
of something like a 3 month journey from
which I've just returned.
Men whose shoelaces I am not worthy to
untie.
I mean men of God who have lustrous
records of service to God.
30, 40, sometimes 50 years of ministry.
Men in East Germany who are fathers of
the faith.
Apostolic figures themselves.
Giants.
Men who have been imprisoned for their faith.
Who have suffered for their faith are sitting
listening to me.
What's my qualification?
Where's my diploma?
How dare I presume to be a mouthpiece
for God before such men as these.
I have need to hear from them.
And yet they listen not with just a
patience and a tolerance that you would expect
of men of stature but avidly.
Taking to heart all that is being spoken.
And we had the great pleasure in this
trip not just seeing men receive the word
in a way that we have we don't
see it in our American experience but transact
it.
That it becomes event and history.
I am not ashamed to say that a
lot of what God performed on this recent
trip in places like East Germany and France
was historic.
In fact my continual prayer before God as
I would come into a minister's conference where
such men are going to be assembled is
that the Lord would give them nothing less
than that which is appropriate and becoming to
all that has preceded it in the history
of the church in that country.
So that from East Germany what is going
to come forth out of us in those
days is going to be exactly in keeping
in the same quality and stature and kind
as that which was communicated by God through
Luther.
And the remarkable thing is that it becomes
that.
Some of those messages and things were so
devastating and one occasion the ministry ended on
Saturday.
It was like four days or so long.
On Sunday rather than this man himself preaching
he took both services as an occasion for
the entire congregation to examine the word that
they had received.
What has God been saying to us in
these four days?
We don't need to laud it over now
with yet another message of our own and
have a quick opportunity to regain our own
prestige among you to show you that we
have an ability in God equal to the
brother who is just with us.
But putting aside all such vain consideration, hearing
that God has so solemnly and deeply addressed
us and that we are in so critical
a place in this land and in this
time, what do we understand God to be
saying by what we have heard through our
brother?
And so the two services on Sunday were
for an assessment of the word.
All of the elders were called up to
give their impression of what they thought God
to be saying.
And then the whole balance of the week
was a further examination of that word and
its implications.
And the upshot was that God set in
order and performed something by which the pastor
there was removed from that church and brought
yet to another city in a more significant
place in my estimation where he did not
want to be which compelled the men who
had only been elders of a more nominal
kind to rise in a more apostolic responsibility.
And you can actually just feel and hear
the meshing of gears and the setting of
things in place as something historic was actually
worked as an event by the word which
came forth.
In a critical situation, one of the most
important men in the country coming to it
without any knowledge of what was to be
spoken and just watching the unfolding of God
day by day and message by message.
Critical.
Walking on eggshells, holding your breath lest any
word be misspent or off or even the
tone and the manner by which the word
was being communicated.
You can understand why Paul said who is
sufficient for these things.
Who is sufficient for this character that gives
a man such entry what kind of a
reception we had with you.
Just as you know what kind of men
we were with you.
He's appealing to them.
He's saying you know what kind of men
we were.
And yet you know what the amazing thing
is?
There's not the faintest smidgen of a man
blowing his own horn.
There's not an odor of egotism in anything
that was read here or anything that I
expressed to you about my own experience as
far as I know my own heart and
spirit.
And that is an apostolic distinctive.
There's a quality of selflessness.
I use the word mindlessness but it's likely
to be misconstrued as being what I mean
is that there's a complete absent of self
-consciousness about one's own self in God that
was characteristic of Jesus who is the high
priest and the apostle of our confession was
absent in Paul though he often begins his
epistles by describing himself as an apostle called
elect of God and it's absent here.
As you know what manner of man I
was with you.
Not a smidgen of egotism not any kind
of inflatedness or puffing up.
Just setting forth what is factual and true.
Reminding them and reminding us of what apostolic
character is.
What manner of man.
Lest we think that it's a matter of
just having the briefcase full of appropriate things.
The concepts.
I admire Paul for the man that he
is.
The full orb and glorious man that he
is.
Just as you know what kind of men
we prove to be among you for your
sake.
That's the motive for it all.
Not for our sake.
Not to impress you.
Not to show ourselves off.
Not that we should receive adulation from you.
Or that you should celebrate us.
The whole motive for our being and for
our speaking is for your sake.
That's an apostolic distinctive.
That's true selflessness.
And it occurs again and again and again
in the writings of Paul.
I plan to show it again tonight in
yet another text.
You also became imitators of us and the
Lord.
Can you choke on that one?
That he can put the two together in
one phrase.
You became imitators of us and the Lord.
Is to be imitators of but one thing
only.
Because to imitate us is to imitate the
Lord.
Because what we are is what the Lord
himself is.
In his resurrection life made manifest through us.
Imagine a whole church being able to say
that.
To say to the world, imitate us.
Because if you imitate us, you're imitating God.
You want to know what God is like?
See us.
You want to know what God's character is?
Sample Alice.
That's an apostolic church.
It's not some groovy bunch of hot shots
who have found a yet more scintillating vocabulary
than that which is charismatic and have gone
to an advanced level of concepts.
It's a stature.
It's a quality of being.
It's a character of life.
Imitate us and the Lord.
I'll tell you this is either the most
heinous presumption or such a glorious statement of
what is true apostolicity that you want to
drown on your own drool.
It's a statement and a model that God
sets before us.
The question has come up already a couple
of times in these days.
Are you trying to say that Paul is
the only model?
Wouldn't be bad if you were.
There may be other expressions of what apostolicity
is or what an apostle is.
Peter was certainly different from Paul in the
manner and expression and John and so on.
They each had distinct manner of expressing themselves
but I think intrinsically and inherently and centrally
they all shared this kind of character.
God was so enwrapped in them.
And it's evident that this kind of masterpiece
as any kind of masterpiece is not to
be formed in a day.
It takes time guys.
That's just what I'm trying to say.
But it may take less time if we
consciously desire such a thing as this.
I think we get in the way with
our false ambitions with wanting somehow to appropriate
the vocabulary, to handle the concepts, to be
wheelers and dealers and think ourselves apostolic because
we can move with a certain degree of
facility in the phraseology.
Far better off if you shut your mouth
and made no presumption and submitted yourself to
the hand of God for the dealings of
God and the trials of God and the
workings of God that we might come to
this in fact and in truth.
I'll tell you when Paul came to the
Thessalonians they saw something.
There was a phenomenon that came to them.
An awesome thing.
Not only one who proclaimed one who demonstrated.
There was a quality to his life that
suggested what the high priest and the apostle
of our confession is.
They saw the gospel as well as heard
it.
And that continues on in the second chapter.
I don't want to take the time to
read all of the verses but from the
fourth verse, but just as we have been
approved by God to be entrusted with the
gospel so we speak, not as pleasing men
but God who examines our hearts.
For we never came with flattering speech as
you know nor with a pretext for greed
God is witness.
Nor did we seek glory from men, either
from you or from others, even though as
apostles of Christ we might have asserted our
authority.
But we proved to be gentle among you
as a nursing mother tenderly cares for her
own children.
Having thus a fond affection for you we
were well pleased to impart to you not
only the gospel, but also our own lives
because you have become very dear to us.
For you recall, brethren, our labor and hardship,
how working night and day so as not
to be a burden to any of you,
we proclaim to you the gospel of God.
You are a witness and so is God
how devoutly and uprightly and blamelessly we behave
toward you believers.
Just as you know how we were exhorting
and encouraging and imploring each one of you
as a father with his own children, so
that you may walk in a manner worthy
of the God who calls you into his
own kingdom and glory.
And for this reason we also constantly thank
God that when you received from us the
word of God's message, you accepted it not
as a word of men, but for what
it really is the word of God, which
also performs its work in you who believes.
Phew!
I'll tell you that that one segment of
scripture deserves an entire convocation's attention.
It's so beautiful because it's mindless, because it's
so unselfconscious, because it's so unpremeditated, because it's
not a man putting his best foot forward
and making a statement for himself.
He's just reviewing with them what they know
to be true in their experience with him
from the beginning.
And because he does that, we have a
textbook.
We have a statement of what is the
quintessence, the definitive elements of true apostolicity.
All the more because it's unselfconscious.
And it deserves our attention.
Just as we have been approved by God
to be entrusted with the gospel.
Do you have that sacred sense?
To be entrusted with the gospel?
Holy, holy, holy.
That this is not some cheapy thing given
to us that we might have something wherewith
to witness to the opposite sex.
I remember how something in me churned and
my hackles rose with that Jesus movement, or
the Jesus people phenomenon of guys saved who
still had their hair down their shoulders, bare
feet, affecting some kind of an impersonation of
Christ whose whole ministry, it seemed to me,
was to bring the gospel over which they
were so excited to the opposite sex, accompanied
with hugs and all the rest.
Cheapy.
Nothing of the apostolic reverence for the gospel
as the mystery of the gospel as Paul
himself saw it.
And if we don't have this kind of
respect and this kind of reverence, do you
think God is going to entrust us with
it?
The very phraseology of Paul entrusted with the
gospel, approved of God.
So we speak, and you don't dare speak
except you've come to that kind of reverence.
And maybe it takes being brought down into
the dust on the road to Damascus to
understand the power and the glory of it.
We have not been sufficiently and deeply converted
ourselves by the gospel.
My favorite statement, many saved, but few converted.
That it's sacred and a reverent thing to
us.
Paul knew its power.
He was saved by it himself.
So we speak, not as pleasing men but
God.
And this theme, not as pleasing men but
God, again and again reoccurs in his writings.
And I would say the deadliest cancer of
modern Christianity, and even its best charismatic and
New Testament forms, is this sickly thing that
pleases men.
The coward that we are.
And it's reflected in our voices, in our
intonation, in our manner, in our pastoral style,
in the various ways in which we become
dripping and soothing and ingratiating to men for
we're afraid to offend them.
We're afraid to lose their esteem.
Our own egotistical balance rests so much on
the way that they look upon us.
After we speak a message, our first concern
is, was it received for our sake?
Did they like it?
So rare to find a man who can
bring the word of God objectively and passionately
as God's own word and even though it
is not received and even though he's going
to be looked upon with painful looks for
bringing a word that offends, yet will he
not deter in expressing a single syllable because
he's not in any way requiring the approval
or the applause of men.
That is a quintessential apostolic requirement.
And what shall we say?
Being realistic.
We're yet so far removed from it.
And that's why God has to deal with
us as he does.
To pulverize and break up and to deal
with the subtleties in the inner man that
yet craves for the recognition and the applause
and the esteem of men.
Paul was free of it, praise God.
Men can throw dirt upon their heads and
say, away with him, he's not fit to
live.
And he would not so much as bat
an eyelash.
For many of us, if someone even looked
at us wrongly, we're crushed.
We so much need the esteem of men.
So we speak, not as pleasing men, but
God.
And when we shall so speak like that,
I think we're going to speak in the
full conviction that we'll save men from their
idols and bring them to serve the living
God.
But we never came with flattering speech.
Never.
As you know, with a pretext for greed,
God is a witness.
All of these cutesy guys with their ingratiating
manners and their little witticisms to warm up
the audience also reveal, in my opinion, the
defect of wanting not only the applause of
men, but their finances.
Paul is willing to suffer the consequences of
just speaking God's word.
Even if it means that men will not
approve him, and even if it means that
it will cut him off from what would
have been the benefit he would have received
from them in finance and support.
Had he come to that kind of perfect
impartiality toward men, knowing that God is your
stay.
That's apostolic.
Imagine an entire church like that.
Nor did we seek glory from men, either
from you or from others, even though as
apostles of Christ we might have asserted our
authority.
There's so little of that assertion to be
found in Paul, though he might have asserted
it.
Yet what characterizes Paul is pleading, not demanding.
He sought to persuade men, knowing the terror
of God.
He didn't make his case on the basis
of his authority, though he could have.
He made his case on the basis of
the persuasion of the gospel itself, and the
anointing and the power of God by the
Spirit that was in his word.
He never threw his weight around in a
word.
He never used his title as swagger in
order to move men toward some desired end.
If they were going to come to it,
they had to come to it voluntarily and
willingly on the basis of the persuasion that
came from the speaking of the word out
of his mouth and the power of the
Spirit in full conviction.
That's an apostle, the meekest of men, never
throwing his weight around, never using his title,
although he could have.
But we prove to be gentle among you.
Having a fond affection for you, we're well
pleased to impart to you not only the
gospel, but also our own lives.
I hardly understand what that means.
I haven't had frequent opportunity to observe the
phenomenon myself, let alone to express it.
But I know that God desires it.
The gospel is not some kind of a
virtuoso thing that we can perform or speak.
It's something that has got to be so
incorporated with our life that the giving out
of it is the giving out of our
life.
We're well pleased to impart to you not
only the gospel, but also our own lives.
No wonder it came in full conviction.
No wonder they were turned from idols.
No wonder he found a reception among them.
He spent himself before them.
Almost seems to contradict what our dear young
brother has been saying to us in these
days about taking it easy and not being
burned out.
You get almost an opposite impression from Paul.
A continual spending of himself.
A not withholding of anything.
A giving of his own life.
Persuading men.
For you recall brethren, our labor and hardship,
our working night and day, so as not
to be a burden to any of you,
we proclaim to you the gospel of God.
What a contrary thing to those who flip
from one holiday into another.
I remember coming down to the dining room
of one such holiday inn where I happened
also to have a room and I was
looked upon as loathsome by the men who
were the principal speakers of that full gospel
regional conference.
In fact, the chiefest of them I met
in the lobby and we happened to ascend
the elevator together.
And if ever I felt like a nothing
thing was in that elevator.
He didn't so much speak a word to
me, but the look, the disdain, the oh
man.
And what a contrast to those days.
Men in resplendent wardrobes, full of prosperity and
abounding.
And yet the Lord had me put on.
Can't you dress yourself?
Well, that's how much of an idiot I
am.
Especially in ministerial times.
I stand before with things I have.
I say, Lord, what would you have me
to wear?
You know what he had me to wear?
Black pants and a white shirt and I
think a gray cardigan.
I was a picture of somberness and sobriety
against these flashy pastel colored and shining shoe
three-piece.
I mean they were resplendent figures and we
were a total contrast both in attire and
manner and spirit.
Yeah.
That was the one.
Yeah.
And I think that there's something to this
that is more than just an outward thing
of dress.
Because Paul says, working night and day so
as not to be a burden to any
of you, we proclaim to you the gospel
of God.
I want to say that that working night
and day so as not to be a
burden was the proclaiming of the gospel as
well as the proclaiming.
Do you understand?
The very extending of the self, the very
suffering, the hardships, the willingness to bear it,
the pushing of himself to the extremity, the
not allowing himself to be formed upon or
to be treated in any very special way
or to be given a holiday in treatment
was itself the proclaiming of the gospel, was
in keeping with the character of it.
What he was, how he deported himself was
the proclaiming of the gospel.
You are witnesses and so is God how
devoutly and uprightly and blamelessly we behave to
you believers.
You guys missed the message that I gave
at the first camp which was the teen
camp on blamelessness and I am altogether persuaded
though we have not yet come to appropriating
this but we're determined that there's no alternative
for us who have apostolic intention than blamelessness.
Interesting, very close upon the heels of the
giving of that message to these teenage kids
to be blameless that we might present you
blameless before the throne that you might with
joy enter into eternity blameless.
We had our own little Ben Israel community
meeting.
You know what the substance of it was?
Those of us who were exceeding the 15
mile an hour speed limit on these camp
roads or fudging on the speed limit generally
or a little sign that was in our
food house that said please take from the
frozen string beans before you take the canned
stock off the shelf only to find that
people were taking the canned stock because it
was more convenient and accessible and just in
a small thing disobeying.
We were not guilty of any one single
blatant thing though we are accused of much.
The Ben Israel men go out and cavort
in saloons and I've got a personal harem
and in fact one woman who is in
this convocation now came to me tremblingly saying
I was warned not to come here.
This is a Jim Jones establishment that you
have a personal harem, that you're a communist
and that you were born in Russia.
That got me the maddest.
Because I was born in Brooklyn.
But you know I recognize as I have
never before recognized there's only one alternative for
us.
It is impeccable blamelessness.
Impeccable blamelessness.
We cannot offend in the faintest and slightest
particular and to the degree that we do
we render null and void any apostolic credential
or authority.
We must be blameless.
For a man to say who has been
with a people two, three years however long
it was, that you know how blameless I
was with you.
You know what manner of man I was
with you.
And that people are struck silent.
They cannot find a single occasion of offense
when he was not blameless.
That's apostolic.
Just as you know how we were exhorting
and encouraging and imploring each one of you
as a father would his own children so
that you may walk in a manner worthy
of the God who calls you into his
own kingdom and glory.
This is very much a same piece as
the reverence for the gospel that was spoken
in the earlier verse.
As you have been approved by God to
be entrusted with the gospel that you may
walk in a manner worthy of God who
calls you into his own kingdom and glory.
You know what I want to suggest guys?
We don't have any greater reverence and respect
for the gospel than we have a sense
of the glory of the kingdom.
How can we encourage men to walk worthy
of the manner when we don't know what
that worthiness is?
When we have not a real abiding and
passionate sense of that kingdom and its glory.
I'm probing deeper and deeper to come to
the heart of the heart of apostolicity and
this must be it.
A sense of the kingdom and its glory.
It's not a phrase it's not some ephemeral
thing that is distant.
For Paul it was an abiding, powerful, true,
ever-present conviction.
The kingdom and its glory.
Because if you don't know that, how can
you encourage or exhort men to walk worthy
in the manner of it?
You say, how is such a sense obtained?
Up on the mount.
Come up and be there and I will
give you the law that thou mayest teach
it.
You're not going to get it out of
your concordance or the hearing of the tapes
of other men.
This is only something that can be communicated
directly by God himself to the one whom
he summons up.
And that's how you can distinguish the true
from the false apostle.
A false apostle may have all of the
convenient vocabulary, he may know all the phrases,
he may have a propensity for building, for
laying foundations, for doing expert things, for setting
in elders and all those kinds of things,
but he has no sense, no passionate conviction,
no ability to exude or to impress or
to convey the glory of the kingdom.
He may use the phrase, but not fetchingly,
not penetratingly, not powerfully, because he does not
know it in his own experience.
It has not been given him.
You say, how come?
Because it's given only to those whom God
has called to the mount, not to presumers
who think to ascend at their own initiative.
Even now I'm frustrated, because what I'm trying
to convey almost lies beyond words.
I love this so, because Paul didn't think
of what he was writing.
He didn't recognize what he was expressing.
It was so native to him, it was
so intrinsic, it was so part of his
life and thought and manner and being.
He breathed it, he exuded it.
The last thing that he did in the
apartment that he had in Rome before he
was beheaded, was that to everyone who came
to them, he spoke to them of the
things pertaining to the kingdom.
He was a kingdom man.
He had a view of the kingdom as
present possibility.
He was a kingdom builder.
He was freed from lesser kingdoms because he
had a glimpse of the sense of the
glory of the kingdom.
And if you have not that, to the
degree that you have it not, neither are
you apostolic.
Though you have your briefcase full of concepts,
you cannot have this as concept.
You can only have it as passionate and
powerful experience that God himself has given you
on the mount.
I'd much rather wait for the call to
come up than I should presume in myself
to be some kind of hotshot who can
also cull through the scriptures and take out
the appropriate apostolic teachings and go about and
think that I can minister in them.
It's worth waiting for the call.
It's a holy call.
And no man can communicate this sense of
glory or encourage a people to walk worthy
in the manner of it who has not
first received it directly from God in communion
on the seventh day in the day of
rest after six days wreathed in thick smoke
on the mount.
That you may walk in a manner worthy
of the God who calls you into his
own kingdom and glory.
What kind of a walking do we say?
Slipshod, haphazard, raunchy, casual, flirtatious, full of divorces
and remarryings, hanky-panky, footsie, patsy stuff, fornications,
in charismatic fellowships, in New Testament fellowships and
even among the leaders.
We are not walking worthy of the manner
because we have not glimpsed the glory of
the kingdom.
Because we're not truly apostolic.
And for this reason we also constantly thank
God that when you receive from us the
word of God's message you accepted it not
as the word of men but for what
it really is, the word of God.
How many of you guys who are sitting
here would dare to be that presumptuous and
to say to those who hear your message
that your message is not yours but is
God's own word.
Understand what I'm saying.
It's not that you're not employing God's word
for your message but that the message itself
is God's very own speaking.
Yes, it comes through your accent and through
your personality but God himself is the giver
of it.
You want to know why we're in the
flabby and lousy condition that we're in?
Because we ourselves don't believe that what we
are speaking is God's own word.
And those who come to hear us don't
believe it either.
They're only getting a sermon and what we
have is a Christendom of a people who
have been sermonized Sunday after Sunday by men
whose faith is not sufficient or character to
believe that what they are expressing is God's
own word because they are men pleasers.
And it very likely is not God's own
word but even on the occasions when it
might be, men yet tremble and are not
bold enough to say that it is God's
own word and for that reason it doesn't
come through with the force and conviction full
conviction as if it were God's own word.
Because faith has so much to do with
expectancy and because we have trained up a
people through the generations not to expect that
what they are hearing is God's word that
they do not come to expect it and
therefore they do not receive it.
They receive good things and good sermons and
three points and scriptural and sound doctrinal things
but they do not receive it as the
word of God which is entirely a different
thing and did you notice that when I
read that I left out the last phrase
for what it really is the word of
God which also performs its work in you
who believe.
You know what I prayed for this speaking
this morning?
That it would not just be edifying or
instructive but that it would perform a work.
You say what work?
I don't know.
It's not for me to know.
A desired work by Him that with the
word and with the meaning that it conveys
something will be performed in you who believe
that this is not just a speaking not
just a teaching or a sermonizing but God's
own word.
Do you believe that?
If you believe that you are a candidate
for having it become a work performed in
you.
And there is some total of such works
work by work is in the end to
fashion such a man and such a church
as the kind that we're speaking.
But if you do not believe that it
is God's own word if you're just nodding
approval to that which is correct if you're
just enjoying it or appreciating it or rejecting
it as a sermon or as a message
given of man it shall not perform in
you anything.
This is a means by which we go
from glory to glory.
Paul said I praise God constantly that when
you receive from us the word of God's
message you accepted it not as the word
of men but for what it really is.
Paul is not making any bones about it.
He's not saying oh come on guys not
me I'm just you know Joe Doe you
know this is just something I've seen in
the scriptures I wanted to share with you
because I think it's of value.
He himself believed it was God's own word.
For what it really is Do you have
the apostolic conviction when you go back to
your fellowships and speak before them that it's
God's own word for what it really is?
Do you dare assert to them that they
need to hear it exactly in that way
so that it might perform a work in
them?
I'll tell you if we don't believe it
ourselves and don't demand that kind of attention
that is appropriate our people are not going
to have a work performed in them.
They'll hear good things but they'll not experience
the word as a work.
That's apostolic.
That's the difference between charismatic and apostolic.
That's the difference between enjoying something and walking
out and going to the ice cream parlor
or having something performed in you who believe
that.
And if we don't believe that who bring
the word of God how shall we expect
it of our people who hear the word
of God?
Such believing, such apostolic conviction has got to
begin with us who speak the word of
God and believe that it is God's own
word.
I believe that this morning.
You guys can take me out and shoot
me later but I believe that this morning.
I'll tell you how foolish I am.
I believe it every time I open my
mouth.
And if I didn't believe it I wouldn't
open my mouth.
Because I'm not a speaker just to fill
the gaps in convocations or to entertain God's
people or any such thing.
I always believe it's God's own word.
It's not rubbing the genie lamp and hoping
against hope.
And there's a whole mountain of things that
I can't take the time to describe that
goes into the working of a messenger by
which he could come to such a conviction
that it's God's own word.
The dealings of God, the crushings, the breakings,
the modifications, the embarrassments, the confrontations, the cost
of bringing the word for which you have
passed through many years until you can come
to a place of confidence that when you're
speaking, you're speaking God's own word.
The most solemn occasions in bringing God's own
word that have been most significant and historic
and momentous in importance have always been attended
by the same thing.
Some guy coming up to me to tell
me that I've missed the mind of Christ,
that I've done grievous damage to God's people,
that I've destroyed the unity of the body,
that I need to make an instant apology.
It's like a knife that goes into your
heart because he might be right.
There's always the risk that he might be
right, that you've missed the mind of the
Lord, that you've done damage, that you have
the best well-meaning intentions.
And if you're not willing to live with
that risk, to live with that tension, to
live with that terrible fear, and yet have
confidence you're speaking God's own word, you're not
going to be ministering at the apostolic level.
You want to play it safer?
And do things that are kosher and neat
and nice and appropriate, and solid teaching that
is edifying and instructive?
Okay, you can operate at that level.
But I think that what our people need
is not so much instruction as event.
The word of God that comes to them
as event as well as instruction.
That changes them, that fits them, and enables
them to walk worthy in the manner of
the glory of the kingdom.
But it needs men who speak apostolically, who
have the assurance that what they are speaking
is God's own word, that performs its work
in you who believe that.
May we believe it, both as speakers and
as hearers.
And we'll come to the thing that God
has designed.
Well, looks like I'm ending right on time.
Just a little digging out in these mindless
verses, Paul addressing himself in a particular moment
of time to a band of Greek believers
in Thessalonica, and yet what he's speaking is
timeless, eternal, and classic.
Although he didn't understand what he was doing,
what he's giving us is the prescription, the
anatomy of apostolicity.
He's giving us the quintessential elements that pertain
to the man as well as to the
message.
May it excite in us such a respect
for what is truly apostolic, such a reverence
not to touch the mouth, to regard the
bounds that God has set about it lest
we perish, to wait to be summoned up
in God's own time when we have sufficiently
learned from our wilderness experience.
I'll tell you guys, if we allow this
to go down the tube, if this becomes
a cheapie, if men are finding for themselves
Junior G-Men badges and are the first
in their neighborhoods to be an apostle and
they've got the kit and the know-how
and are going out and doing it, we're
finished.
There'll be no glorious kingdom, let alone a
people walking worthy of the manna.
So I just want to end with a
prayer that God will raise up such men
in our generation because the church shall not
exceed the men, for the church is to
be like the men.
It's the foundation.
Lord, thank you.
Precious God, Jesus.
Lord, let something be born in us from
this morning on.
Let the word that was spoken this morning
be an event.
Let it perform something.
If nothing less, let it be this, that
hereafter, when we hear or speak the word
apostolic, it shall be with such a hush,
such a reverence, such a respect that we
shall no longer speak of it blithely or
glibly or cheaply or some kind of easy
thing as if we have found a patchy
new kind of title and a scintillating kind
of thing that exceeds what we knew charismatically.
My God give us a reverence and an
awe for this is the very character of
God, the very quality of his life.
Ripped large in men and formed into a
church which is the eternal expression of his
glory.
Bless these young men.
There might be some here, my God, this
morning whom you're calling and will one day
summon the mount at the time of your
beckoning.
Let them not be premature in it.
Let them not initiate anything of themselves.
Let them wait.
Let them learn fully the lessons of character
and life in the place where they presently
are.
Let them not rush ahead my God.
Lord bring this reverence and respect into our
churches.
Save us from hanky-panky stuff.
My God raise us up as standard Lord.
Help us to attain it we pray.
That we might say what manner of men
what kind of men we have been with
you blameless.
May we see my God that there's only
one standard it's impeccable faultless so much beyond
what we're able.
With men it's impossible but with God thank
you Lord put something into our souls that
will affect our walk, our attitude, our demeanor
our voice our character and our life I
will thank you and praise you in Jesus
name Amen