Serve and Wait

I Thessalonians 1:1-10

Good morning!  We are starting a new series of messages today that will carry us until the beginning of November.  We are going to study through two letters that the apostle Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, conveniently named 1^st and 2^nd Thessalonians.  These two letters are chock-full of powerful truths and practical teaching both for the here and now and for looking toward things yet to come.  Today, we’ll take a look at the background briefly and then go through the first chapter of the first letter.

Before we do that, let’s take a moment and ask God to speak to us from His Word:

Honor, Shame, and the Gospel

Welcome! Today is our final message in our Shame/Honor series. To whet your appetite on today’s topic, the Gospel, I want to give you a quote and a scripture. The quote is by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in Ethics:

“Shame can be overcome only when the original unity is restored, when man is once again clothed by God.”—Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Honoring the Shamed

Welcome! Today we continue our series on Honor and Shame. Last week’s message was entitled Shaming the Honored, and we looked at, among other things, the honor-shame cultural practice, especially common in the Middle East, of challenge and riposte, in which people of relatively similar honor status challenge one another in a game of words and rhetoric to jockey for “position” and status. Honor was often seen as a limited quantity, so that increasing one’s personal honor was seen to necessitate the reducing publicly the honor status of a rival. The Pharisees, scribes, and teachers of the law repeatedly entered this “honor shame game” with Jesus, seeking to discredit Him, but invariably He would emerge from the confrontations as even wiser, more good, and more honorable in the eyes of the crowds that watched. This of course meant that the honor status of the leaders continually became lower and lower. Because the “game” could only be played among those of similar honor status, eventually the leaders sought to kill Jesus, because He was beginning to threaten their very way of life, and they knew they could not beat Him any other way.

Shaming the Honored

Welcome! Today is our fifth of seven messages on shame and honor, both as they exist in many cultures around the world and in the cultures of the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments. The previous messages in this series have discussed such topics as the concept of face, community, family and kinship, and patronage.

Before we really get into today’s topic, I want to address a question I frequently see when others talk about the shame-honor perspective of the Bible. The question is, “Who is right – the innocence-guilt people or the shame-honor people?” The answer is that both are in the Bible, so both are right. I would argue, however, that the shame-honor perspective is much more prevalent in the Bible than the innocence-guilt perspective. For example, let’s take the Book of Romans – after all, if any book is going to go solidly innocence-guilt it is this one, right? Well, let’s look at Romans 1:23, 2:23, and 3:23, along with surrounding verses.