If you need a copy of the Word, the Word of God that is, raise your hand and one of the ushers will get you a copy. There are also notes for the children if you're interested in those. As you receive these copies of the Word of God, turn to 1 Thessalonians chapter 4. It's found on page 987 if you have one of the church's Bibles. This, as most of you know, has been a difficult week for us as a congregation as we've already prayed for the Gregory's, the death of their two-year-old son, Jonathan. And so as we come to these words, these are words that we read there at the graveside. cemetery and we are privileged to read them again. The Lord just knows what he's doing. It's a wonderful text for us today. It's a wonderful text for me personally. It's one of those texts that invigorates the soul with the truth of God. when we're faced with these kinds of circumstances in life. And I want you to see the context again. In the first three chapters, Paul is writing to this church in the city of Thessalonica. He's expressing his love for them, his appreciation for their reception of the Word of God as what it really is, the Gospel of God. And in chapter 4, he turns and he says, now we want to answer some questions here essentially, deal with some things you're dealing with. And so in verses one and two, he writes, finally then brothers, we ask and urge you in the Lord Jesus that as you receive from us how you ought to live and please God, just as you are doing, that you do so more and more, for you know the instructions we gave you through the Lord Jesus. And what he gives them there then is instruction in moral purity, sexual sanctification specifically, and then secondly, how it is that they're to think about their work in the world and loving one another through that. And then today, we turn our attention to their questions with regard to the second coming of the Lord, and as we read, you'll see that it's evident they had a question about people who had already died. They had this sense that Jesus is supposed to come back very quickly, And they had a problem because people who had been converted to faith in Jesus Christ were dying. And so the big question is, well, what happens to them? And what happens to the rest of us? And we receive God's answer to those questions as we read beginning in verse 13, but let's pray before we read. Lord, we thank you that you have breathed your word out for us and that it is a word that gives life. We thank you, Lord, that you spoke in the darkness and you said, let there be light. And there was light. And we thank you that Jesus has come into the world as the light of life. And we thank you that the darkness cannot withstand it when you speak forth your word into the hearts of people. And that's our longing here today, Lord. Our longing is that you would fill our hearts with a greater knowledge of yourself. a greater awareness of our own sinful condition apart from you, an appreciation for all that you have offered us in the gospel of Jesus Christ, and the benefits that are ours, and the hope that we have. So Lord, would you speak now as we read, in Jesus' name, amen. This is God's word. But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. For this we declare to you by a word from the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will always be with the Lord. Therefore, encourage one another with these words. Thus ends this reading of his holy, inspired, and inerrant word. May he write its truths upon our hearts today and forever. When you deal with physicians and healthcare workers in the hospital, one of the things that becomes apparent is that for patients, generally speaking, the more information that they can have about their case or the case of the situation of their loved ones, the more confident they are and the better they are able to think. This is the way most people feel. And so physicians seek to give the appropriate amount of information to these who request it in order to be of greatest aid to them. And one of the things that becomes apparent if you've been alongside in these hospital rooms is that sometimes the patients aren't ready to receive all of the information that is available. And so it is the task of the one who bears the information to give just the right amount of information so that the people who are being treated and are under their care are able to take the next steps forward in life. And that's what the Lord gives us here in these verses. The difference is that sometimes the physicians, the healthcare workers, are not able to perfectly gauge what exactly is the right amount of information to give. Often because they don't know what the future holds. But we have a Lord. who has spoken to us, who are in the midst of this crisis of life where there are people dying all around us every day, even those who believe in the Lord Jesus. And the Lord has given us all of the information that we need at this particular point in history in order to take the next steps forward. And so with this scripture, as you look here at verse 13, you see Paul saying, but we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep. The Lord is telling us here that we need to have our minds filled so that we will be able to walk with confidence and be able to serve the Lord fully. Now, of course, this last week we had a great titan of the Christian faith, R.C. Sproul, die and go to be with the Lord, and many of us have profited immensely from his ministry. One of the things that he emphasized was our need to grow in our knowledge of God. He says at one point, and he said this really in many different ways, it matters profoundly what it is that you believe. And he said it with conviction such that his hair would bounce on top of his head. If you've watched the videos, you know it. And as his hair bounced on top of his head, you could see he believed it. There was conviction there. What you believe matters profoundly. And we know this to be true with the most important things in life. You think about what Jesus said to his disciples. He who hears my word and believes him who sent me. does not commit to judgment, but is passed out of death and into life. The only way for us as sinful people to cross the threshold of heaven, as Sproul reminded us over and over again, is to be clothed with the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ that we sang about in Psalm 96, and it only comes through the instrument of faith. That is, we lay hold of it by believing The ordinary means of salvation is that we would lay hold of Christ by faith and repent of our sin. Apart from you believing that, dear friends, you are separated from God for all eternity. And so when Paul tells us here in verse 13 that he does not want us to be uninformed, as he calls us his brothers, he knows what he's talking about. and he has good news for us. And so today we want to have our thinking anchored in the revelation of God, who gives us everything that we need for life and godliness. And today we are called to believe from this text that Jesus has died and risen again so that his people would be raised up with him, even those who have fallen asleep. Look again as he unpacks this here in verse 13. He says, he doesn't want us to be uninformed about others who are asleep, so that you may not grieve as those who have no hope. If you believe that those who have passed from life into death here on this earth, before Jesus comes back, and that's all there is for them, it would be a very grievous thing. A hopeless sort of a thing. But he says, he uses very particular language here. He says he doesn't want us to be uninformed about those who are asleep. What does it mean to be asleep? Well, this is a euphemistic language. It's softer language for death. And he's speaking here of the death of the body. Some people have misinterpreted this to say, well, the soul, when a person dies, just sort of goes to sleep, is in a state of unconsciousness. And they're actually reducing, when they do that, when we believe what is incorrect, we reduce our confidence in the work of the Lord and in the assurance of our salvation that he wants us to have because the Lord Jesus told the thief on the cross what? Today, you will be with me in paradise. The souls of believers, as the catechism says, are at their death made perfect in holiness. And their bodies, being still united to Christ, do rest in their graves till the resurrection. We need to know this. When the apostle says that these have fallen asleep, he's not saying their soul is in a lesser place than in perfect communion with God. What he's saying is their body is actually in a better place than what you might imagine otherwise. You think they're dead and gone? They're just sleeping. Those bodies are still united to Jesus Christ that are in the grave. And the root word here for this word for sleep is koima. From it, we get the root of our word sema or cemetery. So when you drive past a cemetery, it is simply, literally, as we take it from the original words, a place of sleeping. It is one large dormitory of the bodies of God's people. And as such, we need to be clear that we as Christians don't really believe in graveyards as such. We believe in cemeteries. And we, generally speaking, ought to refer to them as such. The word grave has as its root the same word from which we get gravity or gravitas, being pulled down, a sort of sense of hopelessness. But Christians, since the resurrection of Jesus, have referred to these as places of sleeping, as cemeteries. Because we believe the Lord Jesus Christ, who has already gone to the grave on our behalf, and paid for our sin, and demonstrated His power, and proved that He is the Son of God by emptying that tomb there in Palestine that many years ago. And because of that, we don't really purchase space in the cemetery, we just rent it. Because we know that this is not our final place of rest. This is simply a temporary resting place, and that our souls upon death immediately pass into glory, and that our remains, in whatever state they are, remain united to Jesus Christ, and he will raise them up again. And he spells this out then, he shows the believers what's going to happen. He says in verse 14 that since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. So we don't need to worry about these. And then he goes on to describe for us what it is that is going to happen in that last great day. And it is an amazing picture for us. It is a beautiful thing that is too much for us to comprehend, quite frankly. but the Lord's given us just what we need to be able to move forward with confidence. So look again with me here at verse 15. For this we declare to you by a word from the Lord that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep. So in other words, there are some people who are going to get to see this with their own eyes. those who are still alive when Jesus returns. We know that the earth isn't going to be destroyed by a meteor entirely, as some people would have you to believe. The Lord has promised there are going to be people who are here. And those who are alive will not precede those who have fallen asleep. So it's not going to be that the Lord takes up those who are living already. but rather the living are going to see the dead rise, which is exactly why I hope that if I'm alive, when Jesus returns, I get to be standing in a cemetery. It's just unfathomable to think of the joy that that would be in that particular moment. It's a promise from the Lord. And verse 16 goes on to tell us about this great event. It says three things. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command. There's the first thing. The Lord Jesus is going to descend from heaven. You remember that He ascended up into heaven as is recorded for us in the book of Acts. And He promised that He's going to come again. And when the Lord Jesus comes, it is going to be with a cry of command. And the emphasis here is that that cry of command is going to bring forth the dead from the cemeteries. From the tombs. You remember what happened when Jesus went and he said, Lazarus, come forth. Lazarus came forth. And when Jesus gives that cry, we don't know exactly what his words will be, but we know that all of the dead will rise. And of course, when the Lord Jesus comes with that sort of cry of command, There's going to be a sense in which it is a moment of terror, not a sense. It will be absolute terror for those who are apart from him. This is a weighty thing. It is a joyous thing for the believer, but the Lord Jesus is coming and we're told in John chapter five that all of the dead will be raised. There are many of you who in your growing up years would be called by your father or your mother to get out of bed. What did you sometimes do? You rolled back over, you pulled the covers over, the pillow over your head, and you acted like you didn't hear. When Jesus descends with the cry of command, friends, there is no such option. Now we know from the book of Revelation that there will be people, kings and mighty ones on the earth who call to the mountains and the rocks and say, fall on us and hide us from the face of Him who is seated on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb for the great day of their wrath has come. And who can stand? The obvious answer is no one. But everyone will respond. And everyone will stand before the judgment seat. There is not a single person in this room who will escape that. And it is my great prayer, dear friends, that not one of you would be apart from Jesus Christ on that day. It will be a matter of greater horror than you can possibly conceive of if you do not consciously put your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ even today. You will hear the cry of command from the Lord, maker of heaven and earth, who has become man to save his people from their sins. But that's not the only thing we'll hear. We will also hear the voice of an archangel. Now you think, as we celebrate Christmas here, this time of the year, of the myriads of angels that filled the sky to announce the first coming of Jesus, and to declare peace on earth. Those myriads and more will be present on the last great day, led by the archangel who will declare that the Son of God has come again. This time, not to save His people from their sins by His own blood, but to bring judgment on the earth and to save His people from their enemies, those who have opposed the Lord Jesus. And we see then a third thing that is told to us here. There will also be the sound of the trumpet of God. Now the sense here is probably not that we will hear three distinct things. It's possible we may, but the idea is that the Lord is sort of piling up for us the sense of awe that we will experience on that day. The sounds that will reverberate through all the earth as the Lord Jesus makes himself known in his second coming. But think about the role of the trumpet in Old Testament Israel. Before the temple was constructed, the only instrument that was tied to the worship of God in the tabernacle was the trumpet that was blast in the camp, and the purpose of that trumpet was what? It was to call people to worship. To call people out of the death of their sins. to call people to come and to bring their sacrifices. To come and to worship the Lord. And this trumpet sound which will blast in that last day will be a trumpet sound that calls God's people to do the very same thing. To worship the Lord. And we're told here that the dead in Christ will indeed rise up first. They too will rise up. to give praise and worship and glory to God. Even your loved ones who have already passed on before. Even you yourselves and all of us are wasting away in the outer man. All of us, if the Lord tarries, we'll find ourselves in a cemetery one day awaiting the resurrection. resurrection to life or resurrection to judgment and death. Some of you are old enough to remember the funeral of Winston Churchill in St. Paul's Cathedral there in London. He had led England, of course, through the Second World War, and he was a man who was well-read, and he was a man who carefully choreographed his own funeral. After the benediction, High atop the balcony on one side of that great dome, there was a bugler who played the English version of Taps, that indication that the day is over, that it's done, that there is no more, the last call of the troops back to their camp. and it's used by us in our culture to signify death, perhaps most famously with the death of John F. Kennedy in our own culture. But when that last sound of the trumpet came playing taps there in St. Paul's, immediately, shattering the silence, came the sound of another bugler, another distinct sound, reveille. calling people to life again. A new day has dawned. And Churchill wanted the world to know that he believed in the resurrection of the dead because of the truth of scripture. And that that trumpet would ultimately one day sound and call his body from the grave. And that's the kind of reason why we need to have these truths embedded in our minds as well. So that our hope and our faith might be in the Lord Jesus Christ. That we would remember what he has promised. So that we would not grieve as those who have no hope, but that we would remember that in that day as the dead are raised first and then verse 17 tells us that we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them and we will be in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And the book of 2 Peter gives us the imagery that as we're there in the air, the Lord will purify the earth with fire, and there will be a creation of a new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells, and God's people will inhabit that new heaven and new earth led by their Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. And the great promise here of verse 17 is this, so we will always be with God. We will be with Him in full, brothers and sisters. There is no doubt but that we will be with Him because He has already come as Emmanuel to be with us. And so what should all of this mean for us? Well, we should embrace these truths. We should inculcate them into our children, first of all, so that as we've already seen, we would not grieve as others do who have no hope, but that as we shed tears over our dead, we would do so knowing that those tears are used by the Lord to cleanse our souls and that the Lord catches every one of those tears in His bottle. and that he guarantees that he will raise his own, even bodily. The second thing that this should do is it should give us a perspective on all of life. One of the things that's really interesting about this passage as a whole is that a question that is raised is, well, what about burial? What about cremation? What about the body? What do we do with all these things? The scripture isn't utterly silent on these things, but it's not as clear as some people would like it to be. But the one thing that is clear from this passage is this, that if you believe in the resurrection of the dead, the thing that you will ultimately apply to the physical body is Paul's command back in chapter 4, verse 3. This is the will of God, your sanctification, that you abstain from sexual immorality. This is the most important thing to believe about the body as you think about the resurrection. Not so much exactly how the body is to decay and so forth, but rather how your living bodies are to be used. The resurrection not only gives us hope for the future, but it instructs us of the value that the Lord places on our human bodies. And you can go back and explore that part of the text to see why the resurrection is so important to our personal purity before the Lord. Secondly, it ought to motivate us in our work. We looked last week at these verses on our work and how it is that we're called to love one another. If we have it firmly fixed in mind that everything is taken care of for the future and it doesn't matter when you die or how you die other than that you die in Jesus Christ, That motivates us to serve the Lord with far greater confidence and boldness. We need not fear death. We need only fear that we would be unfaithful to our Lord in the calling that he has given to each one of us as we go forward into the week. We're not going to miss anything. When Jesus comes again, you're not going to miss it. That's the implication of what's going on here. Whether you're dead or whether you're alive, you will not miss it. And of course, the final implication is that we can have this great comfort that we will always be with the Lord. So what should we do with these words, brothers and sisters? We should keep this word. Look again at verse 18. Therefore, encourage one another with these words. We should be talking about them. We should talk about them with people of all ages. We should muse on these things. We should build each other up. We should explore how it is that these truths affect our purity. We should consider the work that is before us in light of eternity. And we should consider how it is that we ought to even weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice as a congregation because we have confidence. that we have a savior who is reigning over all the earth, who's coming again to judge the living and the dead, and we will always be with him. So let's encourage one another with these words. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you that you have encouraged us with these words. And we pray that you would fill our hearts with greater strength as we would consider the fact that our God reigns. Lord, you know that there are many tears shed here upon earth. There are people in our midst who are broken because of their own sin. People whose lives are not going the direction they might've hoped. We have people who face struggles in their workplace. They're grieving over the loss of their own bodies or the slow decay of the bodies of their loved ones. Lord, we thank you that even as we go through the travails of this life, that we have this anchor. We have a savior, the Lord Jesus, who's already conquered death. He has secured our future, and he's given us everything we need right now for life and for godliness. So Lord, encourage us with these words, we pray. In Jesus' name, amen.