The Manifestations of a Good Church: Part 3 - 1 Thess Lesson 7

Receiving the Word

1 Thessalonians 1:6 

 We have come to the time of our service to study the word of God. We are studying 1 Thessalonians. As we have been doing, I would invite you to stand with me as we read this chapter together to begin this study.

We are going to look again at verse 6 this morning. I will admit that our progress is slow. We are about to spend our third Sunday on 1 Thess. 1:6. Some of you may be thinking that it can’t possibly take that long to understand what one verse teaches. I guess it doesn’t have to take that long, but I believe we need to dig deeply and examine closely this verse because it contains a wealth of information revealing what made this church the special church it had become.

 I have noted in previous messages that this is a special church. It was truly a group of people in whom God had worked miraculously. God had transformed them from idol worshipers to a church for which Paul had no words of rebuke, or criticism. He commends them. He instructs them. He reflects on his time with them. He fondly recalls the intimate connection that formed between him and this group of believers. But he did not have to rebuke or admonish them for any doctrinal error or behavioral issues. He didn’t have to defend his apostleship. They accepted his words as the word of God.

 Paul repeatedly emphasizes in this letter the primary things this church got right. The things they got right were the things that made them into a good church. We have seen the marks of a good church, and the making of a good church. We are now digging into the verses that give us the manifestations of a good church. There are two things in verse 6 that are manifestations of a good church. First, they were imitators of their spiritual leaders and of the Lord. Second, they received the word of God.

 The first time we looked at this verse a couple weeks ago, I focused in that message on the fact that the Thessalonians had become imitators of the Lord, and had received the word in much tribulation and with the joy of the Holy Spirit. This was my focus because this is what the text tells us. We never go wrong by focusing on what the text tells us. It occurred to me following that verse that I had not discussed an important emphasis of the verse, and that was to define what it means to imitate Christ, or what it means to receive the word of God.

 So, last week we came back and we defined and described what it means to be an imitator of Jesus. To be an imitator of Jesus is to become a follower of Jesus. Imitating Jesus means that we follow His example. We walk in the steps He walked. As He lived, we live. He lived not for His own will, but to do the will of His Father. He did nothing on His own initiative, He did only what His Father told Him to do or say. To imitate Jesus is to imitate His life of obedience to the will of God. To imitate Jesus is to walk in humility as He walked. To imitate Jesus is to love as He loved. To imitate Jesus is to serve others as He served others. All those things are basic to the Christian life but if we are not good at the basics we are not good. A good church is made up of genuine Christians who are imitating Jesus.

 I come back to this verse again today because we need a good understanding of what it means to receive the word of God. This church proved itself to be a good church because they had received the word. The word they received is the word of God. They had received it in much tribulation, and in the joy of the Holy Spirit. So, obviously, for these followers of Christ, the word was important. The word was a treasure.

 Think about it. They received the word and as a result the entire city was thrown into an uproar. Paul came into town and showed up at the synagogue and began to reason with the Jews concerning Christ. Many of those Jews received the word. They deliberately, intentionally, readily accepted this message for what it was, not the word of man, but the word of God. They embraced it, approved it, and followed it immediately. They were radically transformed by it. The word they accepted, Paul tells us in 1 Thess. 2:13, “performs its work in you who believe.” The work performed by the word made them into imitators of Jesus Christ.

 Obviously, receiving the word is something other than sitting and listening to a message being preached from the word. Receiving the word is more than simply affirming the word to be true. Receiving the word is more than reading the word. Receiving the word is more than memorizing it and being able to quote it. The word, when received does an amazing work in the life of the one who receives it.

The word of God is not intended for informational purposes only. The word of God is intended for transformational purposes. When the word of God is received, it does the work of transformation. One obvious observation we can make is this. If the life of a person calls himself or herself a Christian is not producing the evidence of a life transformed by the word of God, that person is not a genuine Christian.

 A very important question we must answer honestly is this. Are we a people who receive the word of God? Am I truly receiving the word? Are you receiving the word of God? I know you are good to come here and listen to the word. I know many of you are faithful to read your Bible daily. I know many of you read books about the word of God. All of those are good ways to get information about the word of God. But I want to say again. Receiving the word of God is not about gaining information. Receiving the word of God is about transformation. It results in a transformation that makes us examples for others to follow. This is affirmed in our text in the connection between verses 6-7. The word received had made them to become examples for all believers in Macedonia and Achaia.

 So I really believe we needed to come back to this verse one more time, and, like we did last week in defining biblically what it means to be an imitator of Christ. I want to define biblically what it means to receive the word. A really good place to begin to understand what it means to receive the word of God is to go to a place where Jesus Himself taught on the subject. This is a very familiar parable taught by Jesus in Luke 8. It is commonly known as the parable of the sower. But in reality it is a parable about the soils. The soils represent the various conditions of the heart. The word of God cannot be received unless the condition of the heart is right. 

 Let’s read this passage together from Luke 8:4-15. Let’s establish this truth up front. The first Jesus said when He came to the explanation of the parable in verse 11 is, “the seed is the word of God.” Listen to these words of Peter from 1 Peter 1:23. “for you have been born again not of seed which is perishable but imperishable, that is, through the living and enduring word of God.” Hebrews 4:12 tells us, “For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two edged sword, and is piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”

 When we receive the word of God, we are not receiving just any word. We are receiving that which causes us to be born again. We are receiving the living and enduring word of God. We are receiving that which performs the work of God in the deepest recesses of our hearts and minds. We are receiving that which will not leave us unchanged. We are receiving what Psalm 19 tells us is able to restore the soul, make wise the simple, rejoice the heart, enlighten the eyes. The word of God is clean, enduring forever, and righteous altogether. This treasure of the word of God is more desirable than much fine gold and sweeter than the honey of the honeycomb.

 This is the seed Jesus tells us is being sown in our passage. The first thing we see about this passage is that Jesus is teaching in a parable. A parable is an earthly story with a heavenly meaning. It is an easily understood earthly story designed to communicate a significant spiritual truth. Jesus used a lot of parables because they were easily remembered. People could relate to them, understand them, remember them, and they were relevant to their lives. Obviously, Jesus taught so that the spiritual truth could be remembered.

 The spiritual truth could be remembered if it could be grasped at all. Many times, the spiritual meaning of the parable was hidden from the hearer. When the parable was shared, not even the closest followers of Jesus understood this parable. After it is explained by Jesus, anyone should be able to understand its meaning. But Jesus didn’t explain every parable as thoroughly as this parable. He explains why He shared truth in parabolic form. It was because the mysteries of the kingdom are not for everyone to know. There are some to whom the truth of Scripture is hidden. They cannot see it or hear it.

 Paul explained to the Corinthians in 1 Cor. 2 that the natural man does not receive the things of God. 1 Cor. 2:14 says, “But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God (i.e. the word of God), for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised.” One very important aspect of the work of the Spirit of God in salvation is the opening of the eyes to be able to receive the truth of the word of God. Listen, having the Holy Spirit abiding in us is a prerequisite to receiving the word of God. Paul said in 1 Cor. 2:12, “Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may know the things freely given to us by God.”

 Who are those who are prevented from seeing and hearing and understanding? Romans 1 tells us who they are. They are those who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. They deny the evidence of God that is within them. They deny the evidence of God as seen in creation. They deny the certainty of His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature even though they are clearly understood by what has been made. They are without excuse because their hardness is of their own making. Because they refuse to acknowledge the truth, God gives them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity. They choose to exchange the truth of God for a lie, and worship and serve the creature rather than the creator. So God gives them over to degrading passions. Because they do not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gives them over to a depraved mind.

 These are those with hard hearts on whom the word of God, if it falls, or when it falls on their hearts, it will not be received at all. Satan comes and takes away the word from their hearts so that they will not believe and be saved.

 Can there be hard hearted people within the church who will not receive the word of God? We can let Jesus answer that question. In Matthew 7 He described two men building two houses. One was building on sand and the other on rock. The wise builder was a wise builder because he heard the word of God and acted on it. The foolish builder’s mistake was hearing but not acting on the word of God. Jesus would have identified the foolish builder as a tare sown among the wheat. There are a lot of people in the church who enjoy coming to hear the word of God but who fail to become doers of the word. James would concur with Jesus, affirming the need to be doers of the word, not hearers only who delude themselves. Good churches are churches where genuine Christians are not hard hearted hearers but rather have hearts of good soil who are doers of the word.

 Verse 14 of Luke 8 describes the next heart condition. “Those on the rocky soil are those who, when they hear, receive the word with joy…” Stop there for a moment. This soil condition would have been common because it was shallow soil that looked good on the surface, but several inches beneath the surface there was bedrock. The soil lacked depth enough to hold sufficient moisture to facilitate the plant all the way through to production of fruit. Seed would fall on this place, and because the sun had warmed this soil more quickly, and before it gets dry it has sufficient moisture to make the plant sprout and grow, the plant starts out looking great. But the wise farmer, when he sees this area where plants are sprouting more quickly than other areas, knows what is going to happen. He knows these plants are not going to survive all the way to the harvest. As soon as it gets hot and dry, these plants will wither and die.

 Jesus said that people with this heart condition receive the word with joy. This word “received” is the same word as used by Paul in 1 Thess. 1:6. It was accepted as the word of God, believed, approved, and embraced. But look closely at the text of verse 13. They have no root. They believe for a while. There is no real transformation. There was the reception of the information but it lacked the work of the Holy Spirit as we see happening in 1 Thessalonians and there was no real, lasting, life transforming difference that was produced in the life of the hearer.

 The times of trial came, probably as a result of believing the word, and the shallow soil hearer falls away. Because we know the Bible teaches that the work of genuine salvation cannot be forfeited or lost, there was no salvation that happened if there was a falling away.

 This heart type was common among those who sought out Jesus. This heart type is characterized by those who are full of self-interest. The crowds who were present when Jesus multiplied fish and loaves and feed five thousand men, they got excited. They received that with joy. They chased Him all the way across the lake because they wanted more. They were ready to take Him by force and make Him king, not because they were genuine converts, but because they were witnesses to His miracles and they liked what they saw. But how many of them were still with Him on the night of His arrest? How many of them turned against Him and were among the crowds crying out “Crucify Him!” We don’t know how many. But we do know that as soon as they didn’t get what they wanted, they fell away. As soon as it began to look like it might be a little dangerous to be associated with Jesus, they were no where to be found. 

They received the word with joy because they were excited to see all the neat stuff Jesus was going to do for them. They were ready for a life of plenty, pleasure, and the pursuit of fulfillment and purpose. Many people today receive some of God’s word with joy. They like what they hear and it serves their self-interest so they get excited and joyful and believe. The problem is that they are believing for the wrong reasons. They will fall away. The emotional excitement they experienced from initially hearing the word fades. The word was received temporarily in the mind but never resulted in a transformation of the heart. They may have been stirred up by the truth but not truly born again by the living and enduring word of God. Otherwise, they would have bore fruit.

The third heart condition is described in verse 14. Their hearts are full of other things which choke out the word. They are consumed with the worries of riches and the pleasures of this life. Was this not what was wrong with Judas Iscariot? As soon as Judas realized that his chance for becoming wealthy and powerful by following Jesus was lost, he betrayed Jesus. He was only interested in the riches and pleasures of this life. He brought no fruit to maturity. There is no compelling evidence of a genuine conversion. Those with this condition of the heart are pursuing everything but the fruit which the word will produce if it is sown in a good heart. 

If you want to be one who receives the word of God, and to manifest the fruit of a genuine Christians, then you must be one whose heart is described in verse 15. You must hear the word with an honest and good heart. “Honest” and “good” are synonymous terms here that describe a heart that is good as to quality and character. It is going to be a heart of flesh which has been put in us by the Holy Spirit who takes out our heart of stone and puts in us a heart of flesh. It is going to be a heart that truly wants to hear the truth so that the truth can be obeyed. It is the heart of one who wants nothing more than to do the will of God. It is the heart of one who is sensitive to the truth and who responds to the truth with appropriate changes of attitudes or actions.

This heart condition is revealed because the seed is sown in the heart and the hearer holds fast to the word. This is what verse 15 says. Those who hear the word in an honest and good heart, and “hold it fast.” They cling to it. They embrace it. They revere it. They love it. They will not let it go no matter how the world responds to it or what trouble may come as a result of holding it fast.

They bear fruit with perseverance. The idea of perseverance is steadfastness. This is the idea of bearing fruit through any and every circumstance. It is the idea of bearing fruit for a long time. No matter how much difficulty comes into the life of the good heart hearer, the fruit just keeps on coming. No matter how long the good heart hearer lives, his or her life just keeps on producing fruit. 

 If you think about it, there are only two options when it comes to the word of God. The word of God will be received, or it will be rejected. No one gets to straddle the fence on the issue of the word of God. It has been that simple from the beginning. Adam and Eve had the choice to receive the word of God and believe and obey it, or to reject the word of God and disobey. They rejected the word of God and the entire human race was catapulted into sin. The nation of Israel had two choices. Receive the word of God and walk in the ways of God, or reject the word of God and walk in the ways of the nations that God had told them to destroy. They rejected the word of God.

 Israel rejected the word of God because they had hearts of stone. They had hearts of shallow soil with stone just under the surface. They had contaminated hearts that loved the ways of the pagan nations around them. But listen to what Jeremiah says will happen to the people of God. “ ‘…this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days’, declares the Lord, ‘I will put My law within them and on their heart I will write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people.’” God will make them to be a people with good hearts, people who don’t just hear the word of God, but receive the word of God and in whom the word will bear fruit.

 In the parable of the soils, the word of God is rejected by the person who has hardened his heart. The person whose heart is shallow, rocky soil initially believes but when trials come as a result of the word, the word is rejected in favor of an easier path. The heart contaminated with worries and riches and pleasures of life rejects the word because that heart loves riches and pleasures more than the word.

 When the word is received and not rejected, when it falls on a heart that is honest and good, a heart that holds it fast, the word will sprout and produce abundant fruit. The fruitful life is a prominent theme in the teaching of Jesus. The fruitful life is the result of abiding in Jesus. To abide in Jesus is to abide in His word and to have His word abide in you. If His word abides in you, you have received His word and His word will bear much fruit. This is how God is glorified in us, because we bear much fruit for the glory of God. The word of God received makes us fruitful for the glory of God. 

Go back to 1 Thessalonians 1 for a moment. Let me show you from this passage one indication of the results of the word being received. When the word is received, it becomes ours to the point that we will turn around and send it out of our mouths and share it with others. We find this in this passage. Look at verse 5. The indication is that the gospel, or the word of God, came to them. Verse 6 says “you received the word.” Verse 8 says, “For the word of the Lord has sounded forth from you…”

 Not only did the word sound forth from them, but look at the next part of verse 8, “but also in every place your faith toward God has gone forth.” Here is a clear indication that the word was received. It has been heard. It had its impact on their lives. Verse 9 tells us they turned to God from idols to serve a living and true God. They were sounding forth the word received. And, they were living the faith they had in God.

 And as we noted last week, the Thessalonians received the word in much tribulation and with the joy of the Holy Spirit. Think about this with me. Does simply hearing the word cause anything to happen to us that would make the ungodly culture around us react with animosity and persecution? The hard soil heart guy heard the word. The shallow soil heart guy heard the word. The contaminated heart guy heard the word. None of them received the word. The only one who received the word was the good soil heart guy. We know he received the word because it sprang up and bore fruit.

 Hearing the word is not receiving the word. Memorizing the word is not receiving the word. Preaching the word is not receiving the word. Reading the word is not receiving the word. All of these means of encountering the word can lead to receiving the word, but they are not the same as receiving the word. Receiving the word involves the word being sown in our hearts where it falls on deeply plowed, moist, clean soil. Where it falls on a heart like this, it springs up and bears fruit.

 We prepare our hearts to receive the word of God by making sure our hearts are not hard. What causes hardness of heart? Continued resistance to the conviction of God’s Spirit will cause us to become hard, calloused, and insensitive to the Holy Spirit. This renders our hearts hard and unreceptive to the word of God. We prepare our hearts to receive the word by coming in honest, careful examination of our hearts. We ask God to reveal to us the true condition of our hearts. We come before Him broken, humble, and sincere in our desire to obey all He reveals to us. If we are not willing to obey what His word says, we are hardening our hearts. Hard hearts do not receive the word. It is far too easy for us to allow our hearts to grow hard.

 We prepare our hearts to receive the word of God by making sure our motivation for receiving the word is pure. Why do you want to receive the word? You must want to receive the word because it will make you more like Jesus. We receive the word because of the work it performs in us who believe. The word transforms us. It addresses our attitudes. It confronts our behaviors. It informs our walk. We want the word in order that we may be filled with the knowledge of His will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so that we may walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, to please Him in all respects, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God. (Col. 1:9-10.

 The word of God comes with a warning label. It doesn’t cause cancer, like the warning label on a pack of cigarettes tells us. But it does cause trouble. If you really do receive the word of God, your thinking, your convictions, your beliefs and your behaviors will be shaped by that word. If you stand on that word you will be hated. I stood for the truth of God’s word in a difficult issue and was assaulted verbally and accused of unspeakable evil. These accusations came from people who say they believe the Bible. If our motivation is not to become like Jesus, when the trouble comes because we stand for the word of God, we will not fall away.

 Receiving the word of God means you own it. It becomes your guide and you follow it. It becomes your compass showing you true north and you trust it, even when the chaotic world makes no sense. Receiving the word means you make it your authoritative source of truth, even when everyone else rejects it, or compromises it. The word is your anchor. The word is your source of wisdom. The word is where you find the truth that sets you free. The word truly is more desirable than gold, even much fine gold.

 Let’s pray.