Reception of the Word

Bringing in the sheaves. How many of you have used the word sheaf or sheaves daily? Are you guys out there sheafing? I had to look it up. I know this song.

Was it, I don’t even know if it was in the old hymnal. It was. Oh, okay.

The, a sheaf is a bundle, like a bundle of grain. Like, you know the Wichita State Shockers? They have a bundle, oh, there you go. I didn’t know I’d elicit such a response.

They have a bundle of grain, they call it a shock. But it’s also a bundle of grain is called a sheave. And when you bring those sheaves in and you celebrate, that’s when the harvest is complete.

So the song is not about grain at all. Aren’t you glad I told you that? Let’s get on to the sermon. The song is about the harvest.

You know, Jesus told the disciples, the harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. The harvest of the gospel, that there is a celebration that occurs with the harvest of the gospel. So keep that song on your heart because it fits so well with what we’re gonna talk about today.

With what Paul went through and is celebrating with the church in Thessalonica. The Thessalonians, they really bless Paul’s heart. We talked about this last week a little bit, it’s almost like Paul, that Silas and Timothy came back and reported that the church was alive and well.

And the Thessalonian church was thriving. And Paul was so excited. Now, it wasn’t just that he was excited because he said, hey, there’s another church I started.

He had been through a lot. And although he loved the Thessalonians that he met with, it wasn’t the easiest time. Let’s look at 1 Thessalonians 2. We’re gonna start at verse nine and go through the first part of 14.

Will you stand as you’re able? For you remember, brothers, our labor and toil. We work night and day that we might not be a burden to any of you. And while we’ve reclaimed to you the gospel of God, you are witnesses, and God also, how holy and righteous and blameless was our conduct toward you believers.

For you know how, like a father with his children. We exhorted each of you and encouraged you and charged you to walk in a manner worthy of God who calls you into his kingdom and glory. And we also thank God constantly for this, that when you receive the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it, not as the word of men, but what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers.

For you, brothers, became imitators of the churches of God and Christ that are in Judea. The word of God, inspired by God, for the people of God, thanks be to God, amen. You may be seated.

Now, there’s a lot in this little section that Paul is trying to express to the Thessalonian people, to the Thessalonian believers who he had there. Now, so many times when I read about something in the Bible, I think, I wish I knew the rest of the details. I wish I knew what Paul said to them.

I wish I knew what it was like when he was there in the city with them. And then once in a while, you get this exciting blessing that all you gotta do is turn back to the book of Acts, and you can see. When they went to the church in Thessalonica, it says in Acts 17, it gives us what Paul is talking about.

It says, and Paul went in, as was his custom, when they were in Thessalonica, and there on three Sabbath days, he reasoned with them from the scriptures, explaining and proving that it was necessary for Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead, and saying this, Jesus, whom I proclaim to you, is the Christ. So we knew what Paul taught them. He said he reasoned with them from the scriptures.

Now, reasoning with them from the scriptures doesn’t mean he pulls out his own letters or epistles and said, see, this proves it. It means he had the Old Testament. In fact, as we talked about last week, one of the commentators I read from said, this could have been Paul’s very first letter.

And he said he was only in Thessalonica for three weeks. So how in the world would he know he was only there for three weeks? I mean, for two weeks. How would he know he’s only there for two weeks? Well, Luke says in Acts that he reasoned with them for three Sabbaths.

He goes into the synagogue, reasons with them from the scriptures that Jesus is the Christ, and he has been resurrected, and he is the Messiah. He goes back another Sabbath, reasons with them. He goes back a third Sabbath, and then like happened to John Wesley in many churches, he was not invited back again.

They didn’t like what he had to say. So he was there 15 days, two weeks, maybe 16 days, and they ran him out of town. In fact, they were gonna try him just like they did in so many towns.

The same thing would happen over and over. He would go to Ephesus, and he’d end up in jail, and he’d end up being tried. He would go to Thessalonica.

Now, we know he wrote it early because in the letter that we’re gonna talk about in the next couple of weeks, he says he wants to go back and see him face-to-face, and we know through Acts that he has another journey, and on that next journey, he gets to see them again in Thessalonica. So this was written probably not that long after he visited them. So it was probably very early.

So it was still fresh that they went there, and it says some of them listened and received the word, and a bunch of them got mad, and they pulled Jason. Jason was a guy. They pulled him out of his house, and some other people who had listened to the gospel, they drug him out, and they questioned him, and then it says they took a security deposit from him to make sure he wouldn’t do it again.

Like, why don’t we just hold onto your money for you to make sure you don’t invite Paul back into town? How about that? And so these are the circumstances in which Paul and those who traveled with him left town. They snuck out by night, like they did so many places they visited, and here comes Silas, or Silvanus, and Timothy back, and they say, we have been meeting with the believers. The church is still there, and it is still an amazing thing.

Now, if you just read in the Book of Acts, and you read on, that after they are at Thessalonica, it says the brothers immediately sent Paul and Silas away by night to Berea, and where they arrived, they went to the Jewish synagogue. Now, the Jews were more noble than those in Thessalonica. They received the word with all eagerness, examining the scriptures daily to see if these things were so.

I mean, it’s kind of a cool thing that it says he went from Thessalonica, where it seemed like he was DOA, like the gospel of DOA, like the words arrived, they shared, and those few people who believed were gonna be snuffed out, and then he goes on to the Bereans, and the Bereans received the word. They didn’t receive it in a sense of saying, okay, whatever you say. They checked it out.

Well, you think Jesus is the Christ. Let’s go see if that matches up with our scriptures, which is the Old Testament. That’s what Paul was teaching them out of was our Old Testament, and in there, the prophecies of the Messiah and everything else that pointed to Jesus all the way through is undeniable when you read it in light of who God sent to us in Jesus Christ and those Bereans.

Man, that would have been a great place to receive the gospel. We can learn a lot from them because it says they took what he said, and they examined it against the scripture. That was fertile ground for the gospel.

So Paul, after getting done with this first journey or after moving on to different places, was thinking the Thessalonian travels were a dud, and here they were. They still survived in the midst of all this. How could they do it? Paul asked the Thessalonians to remember how they worked night and day for the gospel.

He continued to give thanks for their reception of the word. That was kind of a new thought for me when I was reading through and preparing this series that God just laid this on my heart so clearly that he gave thanks for their reception of the word. Now, how could they do it in such a hostile environment? I mean, that makes it more exciting for Paul, and it’s something we might be able to relate to in some way, shape, or form.

Have any of you in any circumstance, whether it’s a loved one in your life or an experience you’ve had, ever struggled with something called grief? Everybody, yeah, I didn’t ask for hands, but they went up. I think we’ve all had some grief and some pain and some loss and some things that were tough to deal with. When you’re dealing with grief, your emotions can sometimes spin out of control, and it’s just a difficult, challenging time, but it’s like a process we have to work through.

Now, different experts say there are five stages of grief. Seven stages of grief, and I just kind of broke them, took some of the best points. Now, if we just narrow this down a little bit, how many of us have, look at these.

I’ll just read through them. Shock, denial, bargaining, guilt, anger, depression, reflection, loneliness, acceptance. How many of you have ever experienced that in the church, with the church? I mean, that feeling of being, this is my home, and then it’s like the rug being pulled out from under you for whatever the reason, for theological reasons, for trying to snuff out the word, and how? And if you have experienced that, then where I’m going is I wanna thank God today for your reception of the word, that even in an environment that may have seemed hostile at times, did the environments ever seem hostile? Like they wanted to snuff out the word? Like even in the church, it could be like the parable of the seed and the sowers, that Dana read the middle part of that parable.

It’s an amazing thing how much that parable can state what we might have gone through, and we have, we talked about this recently, that we had, we’ve done a lot of work, whether it’s at Hope Builders or other places on working with the pain or the anger or the loss that we accepted. We’ve anointed and let the power of God work in us, and we really hope to be a place where everybody who comes in can experience that recovery and that help, and brothers and sisters who know that they’ve gone through turmoil and grief, and they’ll walk through you with the grief process too. Does that make sense? This is something to be thankful for.

Paul asked the Thessalonians to remember how they worked night and day for the gospel. He continued to give thanks for the reception of the word. They did that, and he was so grateful.

Now, in Mark 4, the parable of the seed and the sower in here, Jesus tells a large crowd about the parable of the sower and the seeds, and he says, the sower came along and he had these seeds, and he threw these seeds down, and some of the seeds landed on the path, some of the seeds landed on the rocky ground, some of the seeds landed in the thorny parts, and other parts landed on good soil. Now, sometimes it’s easy for us to plant and grow like grass in our yards, and sometimes it’s a channel, it’s a challenge. We had a part on the west side of our backyard that was bare because when they came and helped with the redo the patio, they threw a bunch of dirt out there and it killed the grass, so we put a fence out around it, a temporary fence to keep the dog out of it and other animals, and we prepped the ground, we put the seed on, we watered it, and I have a son who likes to do yard stuff, so he not only worked on that, but he went and worked on another part where they destroyed, but we had not prepared the ground.

And in my mind, I’m going, that was a waste of seed. Do I say that out loud? I don’t know. And then on the east side, where he put that down, some of it’s coming out, and it’s that dry ground where it’s cracked, and it’s coming out of the cracks because it can go in a different place, but when seed is put down on different places, different things happen.

Jesus said, when the seed goes on the path, it’s right there, so the birds come along and they devour it, and they pick it up, and they just take it away. When the seed goes on the rocky ground, it immediately springs up, and there are buds, and it looks really good, but as soon as the sun comes out, it kills it. And then there is the seed that’s in the thorns, and it tries to come up, but it’s just choked out by those thorns.

And then there is the seed that is on the, rich soil, and it comes up, and there is wheat, or whatever the grain was, and it produces crops, and it’s an amazing thing. Now here is, I usually think of, Jesus said, the sower is who? The sower is the one who is delivering the word, the seed is the word, and the different soils are how that seed is received. Now, in a sense, it’s us, that Jesus likes to give us warm fuzzies in parables, so he said, I’m going to compare you to dirt.

But we know in Genesis 2 that God created man from dirt, so we gotta live with who we are. And in that dirt, there are different opportunities for how we receive the word. Now, Jesus said that when it falls on the path and the birds devour it, that is like the word falling on the path, and Satan comes along and snatches the word away from those who are there, so they can’t receive it.

And then, when it is on the rocky ground, it is like when it comes up, like they receive the word, someone, have you ever known this to happen? You receive the word with excitement and joy, and it’s an amazing thing, and it is life-changing until you wake up the next day. And it doesn’t last. The new sun on a new day sets it all away, because Jesus said there’s no depth to that.

And then, with the thorny ground, he says it’s like when you put the seed on the thorny ground, you put the word, and you receive it into thorny ground, and the cares of the world block it out, don’t allow it to grow, choke the word out. And then, he said, but when the seed is received on rich soil, it grows, and it deepens, and we bear fruit for the kingdom of God. Now, I say all that to say Thessalonica sounds more like the path, or the thorny places, or the rocky road, but somehow, in the midst of that, God’s word survived, that they didn’t share the name of Jesus in vain, that it survived.

Now, it survived because in the midst of all that bad stuff, they found some people with rich soil, they had rich soil, and they were able to receive it, despite all the thorns, and the rocks, and the hard places around them, they received it in rich soil, and let the word of God grow. And it was like a remnant that received it. Now, Paul says that they, in his letter, he said, he closed this section by saying, for you, brothers, came imitators of the church of God and Christ that are in Judea.

He said, you imitated them because you suffered amongst your own people, just like they suffered in the churches of Judea. Now, even pointing just to the churches of Judea tells you how early this was in the ministry of Paul in setting up churches and taking the gospel out, that the churches in Judea were suffering from their own people, the Thessalonican believers were suffering from their own people. And if we have suffered from others, but we still receive the gospel on rich soil, we’re thankful for that.

Instead of just focusing on why there were so many thorns or rocks or things that stopped the word of God, so many false teachers and different things we may have experienced, that I’m just thankful that you received the word of God on rich soil, and that you continued despite all the things that would have taken that away from you. And I also am thankful for those who will receive the word from us, that because we received it on rich soil, we’ll bear fruit, and we celebrate, we give thanks. Instead of complaining and being down and being upset, I mean, we still gotta work through grief, but we come to that point of acceptance, and we just thank God for the reception of the word, and we thank God for those who will receive the word through our faith, and I thank God that he has done that much for you.

We give thanks to God for paving the way for the reception of the word for the people in our lives, that you may scatter seeds and think nothing is growing, but just keep praying, keep sharing, keep bearing fruit, keep spreading those seeds, and thank God for those who receive, thank God for those who believe that it’s the word of God and not the word of men, those who say, I’m gonna live for Jesus. Let’s pray. Almighty God, thank you so much.

I pray that we can celebrate just like Paul celebrated. Celebrate those who have received your word. Celebrate those who know that the scriptures are true in what they say about you.

We can celebrate those who will receive the word if we remain steadfast and faithful in all that we do. We thank you for the healing that you have given all of us as there were a lot of hands that went up when we talked about grief, and we pray that you would give us healing and strength and fill that with peace and joy and love so that we can spread your word. In Jesus’ name, amen.