11 Now may our God and Father himself, and our Lord Jesus, direct our way to you, 12 and may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, as we do for you, 13 so that he may establish your hearts blameless in holiness before our God and Father, at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.” (1 Thessalonians 3:11–13 (ESV)
The following excerpt is taken from Pastor John Piper’s sermon entitled Advancing and Sustaining the Covenant Community. Dr. Piper preached this message at Bethlehem Baptist Church in February, 1993. The topic concerned church membership.
“Let me begin this morning by putting this series on the church covenant in a wider context of American culture. Up till now we have stressed that local churches like ours come into being and get their meaning from a covenant that believers make with each other, and that this covenant with each other is rooted in the new covenant that God made with his people through the death of Jesus. God says in this covenant: “I will be their God and they will be my people” (Hebrews 8:10).”
“What this means is that the divine covenant creates a human community. The commitment God makes to us in the new covenant creates and shapes the commitment we make to each other in the church covenant. In other words, up till now our focus has been on how the church covenant relates to God and takes its origin and its character from him and his covenant with us.”
“But for just a moment now I want to relate the church covenant to American culture. I don’t know if you feel this or if you are aware of it in any way, but what we are focusing on in these days in calling each other to serious, practical reaffirmation of life together in covenant is very counter-cultural. But we are not unique in recognizing this.”
“In 1985 Robert Bellah, Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley, published with several others a very popular book called Habits of the Heart. It was a study in American individualism and a warning that the loss of ideals like commitment, community, and covenant will be the undoing of America.”
“He took his start from a Frenchman named Alexis de Tocqueville who came and described America 160 years ago like this: ‘Such folk owe no man anything and hardly expect anything from anybody. They form the habit of thinking of themselves in isolation and imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands.’”
“Now my point in connecting our focus on the church covenant with the peril of American individualism is not to justify our focus as part of America’s salvation. Our church covenant is justified by God in Jesus Christ and will be valid whether America stands or falls. America is not God’s main commitment.”
“The glory of God is God’s main commitment. If America sinks into individualistic anarchy where everybody does what’s right in his own eyes, God will still be Lord of the nations; his purposes will be on track; and his people, who live for his glory and not for any finite, narrow nationalistic cause, will endure to all generations.”
“My point in making the connections with American individualism is to wake us up to the fact that the whole idea of covenant and mutual commitment is counter-cultural and, to the degree that we have all been influenced by our culture, it might feel strange or un-American, and for many, therefore, exhilarating and liberating and strengthening and stabilizing in a world turned upside down and falling apart.”
“Secondly, the aim is to show that this need for covenant relationships and stable community commitments is so deep in the human heart that even outside the church in America there is a rising tide of urgency and hope that we may as a people discover this before it is too late.”
Notice in 3:12 Paul prays (in the form of a benediction), “May the Lord cause you to increase and abound in love for one another and for all men.” Our life together originates in the covenant love of God and so one essential mark of our covenant relationships in church is love. And this love is the work of God. “May the Lord cause you to increase and abound in love.”
“This is exactly the way we expect Paul to pray for new covenant blessings because the new covenant (as we have seen in the last two weeks) says, “I will write my law on their hearts . . . and I will circumcise their hearts to love me . . . and I will put my Spirit within them and cause them to walk in my statutes” (Jeremiah 31:33; Deuteronomy 30:6; Ezekiel 36:27).”
“So here Paul says: you promised to do this in the new covenant; so, I pray that you will now do it: “Cause them to increase and abound in love.” So, the covenant requirement of love is first and foremost a gift in the new covenant.”
“Look at the connection between 3:12 and 3:13. If God causes them to abound in love, they will have the holiness they need to meet the Lord. I infer from this that love is the essence of holiness. And that means, then, that the covenant requirement of holiness is also a gift as well as a command, because the love that is the heart of holiness is a gift and a command.”
“Paul wants the church to be holy and so he prays: Lord cause them to abound in love so that they will be holy. You have promised in the new covenant to write your holy law on our hearts. You have promised in the new covenant to give us the Spirit and cause us to walk in your holy statutes. So, Lord, do it now, and do it by making love increase and abound.”
“Which leads to the final point from the text, namely, that the new covenant community in this fallen world is not a perfect community, not a completed community, but a community growing and advancing toward perfection. Look again at 3:12, “May the Lord cause you to increase and abound in love.” If our love were perfect or complete, there would be no room for increase. But Paul prays for increase.”
“This means that the new covenant community is a pilgrim community. We have been saved from condemnation and transferred from death to life and from darkness to light and from the dominion of darkness to the kingdom of God’s Son, but in this new relation to God we are not yet perfected or completed, but are on the way to becoming what we ought to be.”
May the Lord’s truth and grace be found here. Have a blessed day in the Lord.
Soli deo Gloria!
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