In 1948, C. S. Lewis wrote “that Man is on the bench” – that is, humanity has taken the judge’s seat – “and God in the Dock” – God is the one on trial. Lewis’s line inspired the title for this sermon: God on the Shelf. If in the mid-twentieth century humanity placed God on trial, in the second decade of the twenty-first century he has been put on the shelf.

Someone once wrote me after reading a column of mine and said simply, “People like you don’t matter anymore.” That’s how many people feel about God: He just doesn’t matter. We can run our own lives. Whether we believe in God or not is a moot point; he’s on the shelf.

Society at large has put God on the shelf. My concern is that we don’t do the same by setting God aside when his instructions are inconvenient or out of step with culture. We may not be able to do much about society at large, but we can and must do something about our own lives. Putting God on the shelf is blasphemous and even churchgoing people can be guilty of it.  

In verse 8, Paul writes, “Therefore whoever disregards this” (literally, sets this aside) “disregards not man but God, who gives his Holy Spirit to you.” If you set this aside, you set God aside. But what is this? This is the instruction that Paul has just given the Thessalonians, which he says comes from God himself.

Clearly, this instruction is important, so let’s see what it is about. We will read verses 1 and 2, which introduce this section, and then we’ll read verses 3-8, which contain the instruction. I will warn you that this instruction, which is about the Christian way to live as sexual beings, goes against the cultural grain and possibly against decisions some of us have already made. I am not condemning anyone; I just want us to know there is another way.

We will start with verses 1 and 2, and I will be reading out of the Revised Standard Version. “Finally, brethren, we beseech and exhort you in the Lord Jesus, that as you learned from us how you ought to live and to please God, just as you are doing, you do so more and more. For you know what instructions we gave you through the Lord Jesus.” 

The first thing to notice, often overlooked, is that Jesus’s people have a distinctive way of life. Paul reminds the Thessalonians that he, Titus, and Timothy had taught them how they ought to live and to please God. Living the Christian way was not natural. It needed to be learned. When Paul first came to Thessalonica, he didn’t expect that people there would know how to live the Jesus-way. They would need to be taught. The same is true of people today. The Jesus-way is not self-evident.

Paul isn’t acting like he is God, telling people what to do. He beseeches (literally, asks) and exhorts them in the Lord Jesus. Paul knew that Jesus, not Paul, is the boss, yet he speaks with authority as Jesus’s apostle. He says in verse 2, “For you know what instructions we gave you through the Lord Jesus.” The word “instructions” is routinely used for the orders a commanding officer issues to his soldiers. Paul is not sharing advice; he is relaying orders that come from Jesus himself.

Now, let’s read these orders that Paul considers so important. “For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from unchastity;that each one of you know how to take a wife for himself in holiness and honor, not in the passion of lust like heathen who do not know God; that no man transgress, and wrong his brother in this matter, because the Lord is an avenger in all these things, as we solemnly forewarned you. For God has not called us for uncleanness, but in holiness. Therefore whoever disregards this, disregards not man but God, who gives his Holy Spirit to you.”

Karen and I are finishing up our work at Lockwood after 35 years. We love Lockwood and her people. We pray earnestly and, I think, daily, for God to reveal his will to the church regarding our next pastor.

But it’s not just Lockwood’s future we are thinking about; it is also our own. We don’t know what God wants us to do next, or where we will live, or how things will go, so we are seeking to know his will about that too. For the first time in years, I am in the place of all those people who have come to me, asking, “Should I do this? Should I do that? What if I make a mistake? How can I know if this is God’s will?”

They desperate want to know God’s future will for them. I usually ask if they are doing God’s present will for them – the part they already know. I’ve had people admit to me that they are not, and I have told them that they shouldn’t expect God to reveal his will for their future until they are doing his will for their present.

But how can we know what God’s will is for the present? That’s easy; he tells us. This passage is one example. Paul writes, “For this is the will of God, your sanctification.” God’s will is your sanctification. What does that mean?

“Sanctification” describes the process by which our status as God’s holy people becomes our practice in daily life.  Sanctification is the process; holiness is the result. God’s will is that each of his people – you, me, all of us, be in the process of becoming holy. Christians who ignore this clear statement of God’s will cannot expect God to disclose the less clear parts of his will. Sanctification is God’s will and is central to his plan for us. Where Karen and I will live and what we will do is on the periphery of God’s will for us; sanctification is at its heart.

Sanctification takes in all of life, including our sexuality. So, Paul writes, “Abstain from unchastity,” or as we might translate, “Hold yourself apart from sexual immorality.” Now this gets complicated because each culture, each generation nowadays, defines sexual immorality in its own way. For many people today, sexual immorality means only one thing: taking sexual advantage of someone – usually a woman or a minor in a dependent position. As long as both parties consent, any sex is moral.

It’s strange that nearly 2,000 years have passed, and we are almost in the same place that Thessalonian culture was when Paul was writing. In those days, it was expected that men would go to prostitutes, have sex with slaves, and occasionally with other men. There was nothing in the Thessalonian’s religious instruction, unless they were Jews or Christians, that even spoke to the issue. You could sleep around, demand sex from subordinates (there was no ME TOO movement in those days), and then go to religious services without giving it a second thought.

In our day, it has become common to hear or read something like this: “The only sin the church ever talks about is sex! Like ecological injustice, child labor, economic inequality, and human trafficking are not far worse!” Perhaps a biblical case could be made in each of those areas, but that in no way lessens the sinfulness of sexual immorality, which usually causes children and women to suffer most. Part of sanctification involves learning to live within the framework of godly sexuality.

That, verse 5, will include acquiring (or living with) a spouse in holiness and honor. This verse is notoriously difficult to interpret. It might be about acquiring (or living with) a wife, as the RSV takes it, or possibly (as the NIV and some other versions take it) about controlling one’s own body. There has been debate about how to take this verse for the better part of 2,000 years. This week, I got lost in the weeds of detailed linguistic research into this, but either way we take it, the larger point is that Christians must follow Christ, not culture. Our standards of sexual morality are not defined by culture but by the Creator. That means that we will live differently from the people around us.

We can do that without judging, belittling, or looking down on others. We must do that without judging, belittling, or looking down on others. Paul was not telling the Thessalonian church to reform the culture around it but to stand out from that culture by following the way of Christ. Now, I say we can do this without judging, belittling, or looking down on others, but that does not mean we can do this without being judged, belittled, and looked down on. It was that way in the first century and it is that way today. There was a reason Jesus told people to count the cost before they set out to follow him.

Paul says that we should know how to take a wife / control our own bodies in holiness (better, sanctification) and honor. The first word implies that we take God’s concerns into account in how we live as sexual beings. We consider what he wants and what will glorify him. The second word implies that we take the other person’s concerns into account. How will I treat my wife (girlfriend or fiancé) with honor, acknowledge her value, and hold her in high esteem? We will come back to those two ideas – God’s glory and the other person’s honor – in a few minutes, because it is at the heart of this instruction.

But first, notice that the “heathen” – the word is simply “Gentiles,” meaning all the ordinary people around us – don’t live this way. They live in what Paul calls “the passion of lust.” Their desires, not God’s glory or the other person’s worth, is what drives them. The “passion” Paul speaks of is an overpowering feeling. “Lust” describes the thoughts that feeling sparks. The feeling controls us; the thoughts are our own.

Many people live under the control of the “passion of lust.” They are slaves – and some know it – and it is soul-numbing. Paul says here and elsewhere (e.g., Eph. 4:17-19) that this is what routinely happens in the lives of people who don’t know God.

Now, we need to think through this a little further. People who don’t know God are driven by the passion of lust. That means that freedom from the passion of lust (which can be a passion for money, or respect, or possessions – it is not always about sex) comes with knowing God. The better we know God, the more free we are from the slavery of compulsion.

Now we need to ask a question. Does the Bible suggest that all sexual feelings and thoughts are bad and harmful? Not at all. The Bible celebrates sexual desire as part of God’s good plan for human beings. If you find that hard to believe, read The Song of Solomon and you’ll be convinced. No, the problem, as John Piper points out, are those particular feelings and thoughts that disregard God and dishonor the person on whom they are focused.[1]

How might sexual desire, which our culture intentionally and even scientifically cultivates, dishonor a person? Here’s an example: A man says to a woman, “Let’s live together. We won’t be lonely, we can save money on rent, and satisfy our sexual desire.” What he doesn’t say is, “But I don’t value you enough as a person to enter a marriage covenant with you.” That is dishonoring. The woman (though in many cases the exploitation is mutual) is being used.

More importantly, God is being disregarded. “Whatever God says, everyone else says it’s okay. So, I’ll just set God aside … for a while. I won’t leave him on the shelf … but right now, he’s kind of in the way.”

When God has been set aside, which is happening on a societal scale, people find his instructions unworkable. That’s because his instruction don’t work without him. If we hold ourselves apart from God, we will embrace sexual immorality in one or other of its many forms. But if we embrace God, we can hold ourselves apart from it. Did you get that? Embrace sexual immorality and you will hold yourself apart from God. Embrace God and you will hold yourself apart from sexual immorality.

Many people go about this the wrong way. They try to hold themselves apart from sexual immorality so that they can embrace God, but it doesn’t work. Of course, it doesn’t work! We live in a highly sexualized culture, our children attend sexualized schools, and come home to sexualized websites and TV shows. Even elementary children are exposed to sexualized storytelling, sexualized advertisements, and sexualized educational programs.

As parents, we may think the first order of business is to put a stop to all this. We would be mistaken. That may be the second order of business, I don’t know. The first order of business is to draw close to God, embrace him in adoration, and serve him in love. The way forward is not to God or for God, but with God.

Parents and grandparents: do you want to protect your children from the confusion and misery of distorted sexuality? Show them how to trust God, how to seek him with all their heart, and glorify him with their life. There is no other protection. The opposite of the passionate lust of verse 5, which dominates the lives of so many people, is knowing God. Passionate lust is a bully; when we don’t know God, we will always be at its mercy.

The Nobel prize winning novelist Francois Mauriac had heard all the arguments against lust – you will feel guilty, your marriage will have trouble, God will punish you – but none of the arguments changed his behavior. In his book What I Believe, he wrote: “… none of the scary, negative arguments against lust had succeeded in keeping me from it . . . But here [in the promise of Jesus that the pure in heart will see God] was a description of what I was missing by continuing to harbor lust: I was limiting my own intimacy with God. The love he offers is so transcendent and possessing that it requires our faculties to be purified and cleansed before we can possibly contain it. Could he, in fact, substitute another thirst and another hunger for the one I had never filled? Would Living Water somehow quench lust?”[2]

Mauriac discovered that it does. It is the only thing that can. The passion of lust will either quench your desire to know God or your desire for God will quench the passion of lust.

Now, let’s think through what we’ve seen and apply it to ourselves. First, we have seen that Christians can be captured by their culture and this can happen without them even knowing it. Some years ago, I met with a couple who wanted to be married. They both came from churched families. The bride-to-be told me that her church-attending mom had urged her to move in with her fiancé before getting married to see if they were compatible. That mom had been captured by the culture.

She didn’t know that 80% of people who live together do not stay together throughout life. A high percentage never get married. Yet culture says this is wise, even though it goes against the way of Jesus.

In some parts of the church, arguments are being made against the biblical prohibitions on same-sex sexual relationships. They are popular enough that a story about them popped up on my internet browser a couple of days ago. These arguments are not so much about biblical scholarship as they are about cultural accommodation by people who already have been captured.

Don’t make it your goal to stand against culture. Make it your goal to stand with Christ and his apostles. It may be hard to stand with Christ on issues of sexuality, but there is no other solid ground to stand on.

Then there is this, especially for those of us who are seeking God’s will and guidance. Our sanctification is his will. Our guidance, at least a great deal of it, is in the Bible. That is the place to start. If you are doing what God has already revealed, you can be confident that he will guide you in everything else. If you’re not, then that is the place to start.

[1] See, Battling the Unbelief of Lust, (Battling the Unbelief of Lust | Desiring God).

[2] Francois Mauriac, What I Believe, Quoted by DJ Pace on Our arguments against sin are too negative. : r/NoFapChristians (reddit.com).