“God’s Will for Sexual Conduct”

1 Thessalonians 4.1-8

 Finally then, brethren, we request and exhort you in the Lord Jesus, that as you received from us instruction as to how you ought to walk and please God (just as you actually do walk), that you excel still more. ² For you know what commandments we gave you by the authority of the Lord Jesus. ³ For this is the will of God, your sanctification; that is, that you abstain from sexual immorality; ⁴ that each of you know how to possess his own vessel in sanctification and honor, ⁵ not in lustful passion, like the Gentiles who do not know God; ⁶ and that no man transgress and defraud his brother in the matter because the Lord is the avenger in all these things, just as we also told you before and solemnly warned you. ⁷ For God has not called us for the purpose of impurity, but in sanctification. ⁸ So, he who rejects this is not rejecting man but the God who gives His Holy Spirit to you.

            We have turned a corner in our study of 1 Thessalonians.  As we begin chapter four, we enter into a new section of the book.  After having received the report from Timothy about how well the Thessalonians were doing (3.6), Paul took pen in hand and wrote this letter to them.  In chapter one, he expressed his thanks to God for the Thessalonians’ genuine faith and resulting spiritual fruit in their lives.  In chapter two, as both a personal defense and exhortation, he described and rehearsed his ministry while he was first among the believers in that city.  Then in 2.17 to the end of chapter three he turned to describe his relationship to and interaction with the Thessalonian believers after having been forced to leave them.

            Now Paul turns to give them exhortation and practical instruction.  He has expressed his overwhelming desire to see them face-to-face so as to complete what is lacking in their faith (3.10), and has prayed toward that end (3.11-13).  But he has not yet been able to visit them, so in the place of such a personal visit, he now tells them in writing what he would have told them if he were present with them.  He says, “Finally then,” or literally, “What remains therefore.”  He says “therefore” in light of his desire to be with them and see that they are thoroughly established in the faith (3.10-13).  He says “finally” as a way of looking forward to “what remains” to be said to them. 

            When he says, “We request and exhort you in the Lord Jesus,” he uses a gentle, friendly request followed by an authoritative apostolic plea.  And notice that this strong exhortation comes by virtue of Paul’s union with Christ—“in the Lord Jesus.”  As those who are united together with Paul in their new union with Christ, the Thessalonians are bound to obey the exhortations Paul is about to give. 

            But before Paul gives those exhortations, he reminds them that they had already received instruction as to how they ought to walk and please God.  You could say, “walk so as to please God.”  They knew how they needed to live their lives in order to please God because Paul, Silvanus and Timothy had already instructed them in the matter. 

            The exhortation still on the tip of his tongue, Paul says parenthetically, “Just as you actually do walk.”  Paul is about to give the Thessalonians some sobering reminders of how they need to live their lives in holiness, but he doesn’t want them to take it wrong.  He doesn’t want them to think that he is just walking all over them, so he prefaces these exhortations with a very encouraging acknowledgment that they are doing a good job in following the instructions that they have already been given.  They are doing so well, in fact, that he need only say, “Excel still more.”

            The verse could be paraphrased like this: “You Thessalonians are doing so well (I’m proud of you), but I don’t want you to be content with where you’re at (thus becoming stagnant).  I want you to abound more and more in your walk and relationship with our dear Lord.  So put your hand to the plow and don’t look back.”   Paul then says, “For you know what commandments we gave you by the authority of the Lord Jesus.”  This is another reminder to the believers of the instructions they had already received from Paul, but here those instructions are actually called “commandments” and their binding nature is backed up by all “the authority of the Lord Jesus.”  What is to follow is not a series of suggestions, but a set of authoritative commands. 

            One such command has to do with the holiness of believers: “For this is the will of God, your sanctification,” says Paul.  It is God’s will for us to be holy, to be sanctified, set apart from sin and to God.  This could be described as the moral will of God or His desirous will.  When God gives a command, it is certainly His will for us to obey it, right?  But we don’t always do that do we?  We don’t always obey His commands, so there is a sense in which this will of God is not always carried out.  But there is another will of God described in Scripture.  In Ephesians 1.11 God is described as the One who “works all things after the counsel of His will.”  This could be called God’s will of decree.  What He wills in this sense will certainly come to pass without exception. 

            But what we have before us is an example of God’s moral will.  God wants us to be holy, and the particular aspect of that holiness Paul emphasizes here is this: “that you abstain from sexual immorality.”  Here he introduces a subject that he will discuss all the way to the end of verse eight—God’s will for sexual conduct. 

            The word that Paul uses here is porneia.  It is “unlawful sexual intercourse, prostitution, unchastity, fornication.”  This word is the most general designation for sexual sin.  There is a whole host of more specific types of sexual behavior that come under its umbrella.  It is “all sexual intercourse other than that which takes place within the marriage relationship.”[1]  It can be used to designate pre-marital or extra-marital sex as well as homosexuality, promiscuity, paedophilia, incest, bestiality and especially prostitution. [2] 

            Sexual sin is nothing new.  It is a problem that has plagued mankind since the Fall.  It is one of the fundamental sins into which various peoples and cultures have immersed themselves for thousands of years.  You find numerous examples as you read through the Old Testament of men and women who fell to this sin.  That is why there is an entire chapter in the book of Leviticus (ch. 18) devoted to the issue, and numerous other prohibitions against sexual sins of all kinds in the Law of Moses. 

            As you study the history of Israel and you see how often the Israelites turned away from the LORD to worship idols and to bow down to the gods of the pagan nations, you begin to wonder what in the world was the matter with them.  It is easy to start looking at them as simplistic fools who were dumb enough to bow down to a block of wood.  I mean, what is it that would cause a person to turn away from the living God in order to pledge his allegiance to a statue made by the hands of men?  That’s absurd!      

            Well, it isn’t that the Israelites were any more simplistic or foolish than we are, and it wasn’t that the prospect of bowing down before a block of wood was so compelling.  It was the ritual and ceremony associated with worshipping those pagan gods that was so tempting to the Israelites.  The Canaanite mythological pantheon of gods included El, Asherah, Yammu (“the sea”), Naharu (“the river”), and Motu (“death”), but by far the most prominent god was Baal, the “master” of the land.  And the worship of Baal, who was the god of rain (which of course was of the greatest importance for agriculture in Canaan) consisted of a ritual reenacting the mythological drama that went on between Baal and the other Canaanite gods.  Since rain was considered to be a picture of Baal’s impregnation of Asherah, the goddess of fertility, the cultic ritual involved all kinds of gross sexual reenactments of this myth.  It required the services of both male and female prostitutes as the principle actors in the drama.[3] 

            Israel’s sin, then, in turning away for the LORD to serve the gods of the nations was rightly described as “whoring after other gods” (Judges 2.17).  1 Chronicles 5.25 says, “But they acted treacherously against the God of their fathers and played the harlot after the gods of the peoples of the land, whom God had destroyed before them.”   In fact that phrase—“play(ed) the harlot”—is used no less than 47 times from Genesis to the prophecy of Hosea.  Israel’s sin of idolatry was consumed with a downward spiral into the depths of sexual immorality. 

            And that sin was seen even at the high points of Israelite history.  David, whose heart was devoted to God as much as any king succumbed to the accumulation of wives and concubines and even to adultery in the case of Bathsheba.  And Solomon, his son, was eventually led away by the hundreds of wives that he had accumulated, and thus began the downward slide of the nation of Israel.      

            Sexual sin was at the heart of Israel’s apostasy, and as Solomon once said, “There is nothing new under the sun” (Ecc 1.9).  The same kind of backdrop set the scene for Paul’s exhortation to the Thessalonians.  It was the Greek Demosthenes in the fourth century B.C. who wrote, “We keep mistresses for pleasure, concubines for our day-to-day bodily needs, but we have wives to produce legitimate children and serve as trustworthy guardians of our homes.”[4]  Some three centuries later, attitudes had changed little.  The Stoic philosopher, Cato (95-46 B.C.), “praised those men who satisfied their sexual desires with a prostitute rather than another man’s wife.”[5]  It is evident from funerary inscriptions that concubinage was also common.  Furthermore,

Prostitution was a business like any other, and profit from prostitutes working at brothels was an important source of revenue for many respectable citizens.  Innkeepers and owners of cookshops frequently kept slave girls for the sexual entertainment of their customers.  Adulterous activity was, in fact, so widespread that the emperor Augustus (63 B.C.-A.D. 14) established a new code of laws having to do with adultery and marriage—the “Julian Laws”—in a failed attempt to reform sexual practices.  Within such a context, it is not surprising that the Jewish Christian leaders of the Jerusalem church felt the need to include in their letter to Gentile Christians a warning “to abstain from sexual immorality” (see Acts 15.20, 29; 21.25).[6]

            When Paul wrote 1 Thessalonians, he was in the city of Corinth where the Temple of Aphrodite “employed one thousand priestesses who were essentially religious prostitutes.”[7]  The Greek mystery religions, like their Canaanite predecessors, advocated ritual prostitution.  “They taught that if a follower engaged with a temple prostitute, he would be communing transcendentally with the deity the prostitute represented.”[8] 

This was the climate in which Paul gave the command to “abstain from sexual immorality.”  Sexual sin was so common and so integrated into that society that it was practically a non-issue.  In fact, to some degree you would have been considered religiously faithful and noble if you went to your local temple and engaged in these kinds of sexual conduct.  And there was a sort of Greek dualistic philosophy floating around that said that there was a major distinction between the physical realm and the spiritual realm.  The spiritual realm was the realm of the transcendent, the sphere of religion and eternal significance (Plato’s “forms”).  The physical realm was the realm of the body, the sphere of all that is physical and temporal (Plato’s “shadows”).  And what you did with your body didn’t matter.  Any kind of sexual contact was nothing more than a physical act that had no bearing on the spiritual realm (Paul attacked that kind of thinking in 1 Corinthians 6.12-20). 

            Does that sound familiar?  That is exactly what our post-sexual revolution culture would have you think today.  Your body is your body and you can do whatever you want with it; there is no greater spiritual consequence.  That, of course, is driven more by an evolutionary worldview than it is by Greek philosophy.  If you’re nothing more than the highest creature on the food chain, the current pinnacle of the evolutionary process, then “eat, drink and be marry,” and do whatever you want with your body, “for tomorrow we die,” and simply biodegrade into non-existence in “mother earth.” 

            In the few short years since the 1960’s our so-called Judeo-Christian society has progressed rapidly toward becoming just like the pagan culture the Thessalonians were part of.  Marriage is completely optional, adultery is hardly exceptional, and the internet has put sexual temptation right into the living rooms of the average family in America.  A 2003 Alliance Defense Fund report said that there were 260 million pornographic web pages on the internet, an 1,800% increase since 1998.  And homosexuality, what was once considered a sinful and shameful lifestyle, is now called “an alternative lifestyle.”  Just thirty years ago if you had mentioned “gay” and “marriage” in the same sentence, people would’ve assume that you were talking about a happy marriage.  Now, of course, the push is for legislation to legalize (and therefore legitimize) homosexual marriage, and the downward slide of our culture into the abyss of sexual relativism is fuelled incessantly by the most powerful producers of media in our society. 

            This is the world we live in, and Paul’s words to the Thessalonians could not be more relevant to our day.  And they will always be relevant because the Bible transcends time and culture in its fundamental dealings with the sinful nature of man.  Sexual sin has always been one of the basic failures of mankind, and the Word of God gives us the most comprehensive presentation of truth for dealing with it.  So this morning we aim to answer two questions about sexual conduct so that we might live by God’s standard.

I.  How Can a Believer be Sexually Pure?

The first question is, “How can a believer be sexually pure?”  In a world in which it seems that all the forces around us are bidding us to enter into the so-called promised land of “sexual freedom,” how can we remain pure?

A.     By Abstaining from Sexual Immorality

Well, there is an answer to this in the very command that Paul gives: “Abstain from sexual immorality.”  The word “abstain”—apecho in the Greek—means, “to avoid contact with or use of something, keep away, abstain, refrain from.”[9]  A helpful example of how this word is used comes in Matthew 15.8 on an occasion when Jesus was rebuking the Jewish leaders: “You hypocrites, rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you: ‘This people honors Me with their lips, but their heart is far away from Me.’”  That’s what the word means.  In the parable of the Prodigal Son Luke 15.20 records, “So he got up and came to his father.  But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion for him.” 

How are you going to remain sexually pure?  Well, you’ve got to stay far away from sexual sin; you’ve got to keep yourself a long ways away from it!  This is a very simple principle, but it is going to be one of the most effective in dealing with the issue.  The idea is that if you don’t want to fall, don’t walk on slippery ground.  Don’t get close to sexual temptation; do not flirt with sexual sin.  Don’t see how close you can get to the line without crossing it.  That’s a sure fire recipe for failure. 

To abstain means to stay far away from it.  For men that means we have no business watching a movie that’s rated “R” because of sexual content.  It means that you avoid subjecting yourself to unnecessary temptation.  It means that you’re not on the internet behind closed doors with no accountability.  It means that you understand that you have feet of clay and that you are not beyond stumbling and falling in this area.  You remember the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, right?  She kept attempting to seduce him and finally when she was alone with him in her house Genesis 39.12 says, “She caught him by his garment, saying, ‘Lie with me!’  And he left his garment in her hand and fled, and went outside.”  He didn’t stick around to talk with her or reason with her.  He didn’t think, “Well here’s a good opportunity to share the gospel with this poor lady.”  He just took off and ran away at that very moment! 

Now the text doesn’t tell us exactly what he was thinking, but I know that if I were in his shoes I would be thinking, “I can’t handle this!  I can not stick around and flirt with this!  I have got to get out of here!”  “Flee immorality,” 1 Corinthians 6.18 says; “Abstain [get away!] from fleshly lusts which wage war against the soul,” says 1 Peter 2.11.  This is the first thing that we need to do if we want to remain sexually pure.  If you don’t want to fall, don’t walk on slippery ground! 

B.     By learning to control your sexual passions

The second thing we need to do is to learn how to control our sexual passions.  Notice what Paul says in verse four: “That each of you know how to possess his own vessel in sanctification and honor.”  Controlling your sexual passions requires knowledge.  You need to know how to do this, Paul says.  It’s a matter of knowledge; it’s a matter of learning the consistent habit of purity.  “Purity is not a momentary impulse, but a lesson, a habit.”[10]

What specifically do we need to learn?  Paul says that each person needs to learn “how to possess his own vessel.”  This small statement has been the matter of significant discussion among Bible interpreters.  If you have a good translation, you will see that the word “vessel” has a footnote explaining that it might mean “body” or “wife.”  The word itself is more general.  It’s just a “material object used to meet some need in an occupation or other responsibility, generally thing, object;”[11] or “a container of any kind, vessel, jar, dish.”[12]  In 2 Corinthians 4.7 Paul said, “We have this treasure in earthen vessels.”  He was referring to himself as a clay pot.  He was saying, “I’m just a common thing, a tool, an implement, a pot into which God has put the great treasure of the gospel.” 

Those who argue for “wife” as the correct idea of the word emphasize the fact that the verb “possess” fits better with that idea.  The verb typically means to get, acquire, so the meaning would be, “that each of you learn how to take a wife for himself.”  The idea would be that if you acquire a wife, if you get married, that’s going to deliver you from sexual sin.  That makes sense, but I think it is better to take “vessel” as referring to the body.  You could picture your body and all the inordinate passions that are expressed through it running away from you.  And the idea is that you’ve got to take possession of it; you’ve got to get mastery over your body.  You have got to learn how to take control of all the sinful sexual passions that are expressed through your body. 

The word “vessel,” by the way, was used in the Greek translation of the Old Testament.  The priest of Nob offered consecrated bread to David and his men under the condition that they had “kept themselves from women” (1 Sam. 21.4).  David responded, “The vessels of the young men are holy” (same word).  Now this could be understood generally as “bodies,” but a more particular reference to the male sex organ would certainly be appropriate.  Furthermore, a statue of Dionysus was also discovered in the temple of Serapis in Thessalonica.  “The sexual symbols and erotic activity associated with Dionysiac worship offer a possible background for the exhortations in 4.3-8 in general and for the meaning of skeuos in 4.6 in particular.”[13]  It is possible that skeuos “refers more specifically to the male sex organ.  The noun in secular Greek had such a euphemistic use.  The strongly phallic character of the Cabirus and Dionysian cults, which were popular at Thessalonica, also supports this meaning.”[14] 

The translation here should thus be, “that each of you learn to gain control over his own vessel.”  The idea is that each individual is to learn how to gain possession of that part of his body through which inordinate sexual tendencies are expressed. The acquisition of such possession is manifested in sexual self-control.

And all of this is to be “in sanctification and honor.”  It is in holiness; it is in honor; it is in the realm of respectability that one is so to control his sexual passions.  We as believers have got to learn how to do this.  Paul said, “I discipline my body and make it my slave, so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified” (1 Corinthians 9.27).  It’s a matter of discipline; it’s a matter of learning; it’s a matter of knowledge.  We have got to know God’s mind on the matter, and what is that?—One man and one woman coming together in the context of the covenant relationship of marriage: “Marriage is to be held in honor among all, and the marriage bed is to be undefiled; for fornicators and adulterers God will judge” (Heb 13.4).  That is God’s standard.  It’s very clear!

If it is true that we are to conduct ourselves “in sanctification and honor,” then it is also true that we are not to conduct ourselves “in lustful passion, like the Gentiles who do not know God” (1 Thess 4.5).  This is literally, “passion of lust.”  It is a doubly strong way of indicating that our internal drives can become doubly dominating.  Such was the case with the Gentiles.  “Gentiles” here should be rendered pagans as it is not the race Paul has in mind, but an ignorance of God that manifests itself in slavery to lustful passions.

It is this ruling and craving desire from within that culminates in sexual immorality. Jesus said, “Fornications…come…from within, out of the heart of men” (Mk 7.21).  For a believer to follow his own lustful passions, then, is to conduct himself as if God does not exist.  It is to feign ignorance of God.  And the world revels in such ignorance.  Freedom, it is said, is following your passions wherever they might take you; it’s doing what you want to do when you want to do it; it’s engaging in any and every sexual activity you might find appealing.  Yet note well what is said of the false teachers in 2 Pet. 2.19 “…promising them freedom while they themselves are slaves of corruption; for by what a man is overcome, by this he is enslaved.”  And how enslaving is this sin!  Proverbs 5.22 says thus of the man who chooses the way of the adulteress: “His own iniquities will capture the wicked, and he will be held with the cords of his sin.”  And how far-reaching are the consequences of sexual sin.  It was Solomon who wrote, no doubt after observing the terrible results of David’s adultery with Bathsheba, “The one who commits adultery with a woman is lacking sense; He who would destroy himself does it.  Wound and disgrace he will find, And his reproach will not be blotted out” (Pr. 6.32-33).  It is paramount that we as believer learn how to control our sexual passions!

C.  By not taking advantage of others

The third way that we are to remain sexually pure is by not taking advantage of others.  Notice that verses six says, “And that no man transgress and defraud his brother in the matter.”  When Paul says, “the matter,” he is referring back to what he has been talking about, the matter of sexual conduct.  In that realm no man is to transgress and defraud his brother.  The first verb means “to transgress by going beyond proper limits in behavior, trespass, sin,”[15] and the second, “to take advantage of, exploit, outwit, defraud, cheat.”[16] 

For one man to transgress by going beyond proper limits and take advantage of/defraud/cheat his Christian brother in this matter is to carry on a sexual affair with another man’s wife.  More broadly, it is for any man or woman to engage in an extra or pre-marital affair with a person who is or will be the spouse of a fellow Christian.  This is going way beyond the boundaries God has established for sexual relations—an exploitation of a fellow Christian and a blatant disregard for the brotherly love Paul will soon address. 

To do something as heinous as this is unspeakable!  It is to violate a fellow believer and to bring him/her into that sin.  Jesus said, “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depth of the sea” (Matt 18.6).  When He said “little ones,” He was talking about believers.  In the mind of Christ, causing another believer to stumble is worthy of a greater punishment than death.  It is a serious thing to sin against another believer or to bring him/her into sin. 

If we want to remain sexually pure, we have got to stay far away from sexual temptation and sin, we’ve got to learn how to control our sexual passions, and we need to refrain from taking advantage of others in that area.  This is how to be sexually pure.  Next week we want to answer the question, “Why should a believer be sexually pure?”  And this is such a vital question!  Odds are that at some point in your life you have had that question burn a hole in your mind.  “Why do I have to keep myself so pure?  Why can’t I just live like the rest of the world?  Everybody is doing this stuff!  What is the big deal anyways?”  Well let me tell you, the Word of God has comprehensive answers to these questions and no line of thinking in our world can offer a formidable challenge to what Scripture has to say on the matter.  And again, this is such an important question to answer because if we are going to live in a certain way we have got to be absolutely convinced in our minds that it is the best way to live.  So you need to be here next week to see what Scripture has to say about this vital question.      

 “Pornei /porneuo,” in Colin Brown, ed., New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1986), 3:497.