When I was in the third grade, my older brother and I had to walk a little less than a mile to and from school every day. To get there, we had to make our way either through a trailer park, which was the way we were supposed to go, or up a tiny path through a stretch of woods. On the other side of the woods was a farm. The kids in the neighborhood used to tell stories about that farmer – how, if he caught you trespassing on his land, he’d fill your backside up with buckshot. I couldn’t say what was more terrifying: the farmer’s shotgun, or the creepy woods we had to walk through. At the right time of year, when it was still dark while we were walking to school, I almost would have preferred the farmer to whatever might be hiding in the trees. I was eight, after all.

I checked out the area on Google Maps this week. The farm is now a neighborhood, and the school itself has been turned into a museum. It’s amazing how things change.

One thing that hasn’t changed is the definition of trespassing. Trespassing is entering a particular piece of land or property without permission from the owner. People do it all the time these days and aren’t even aware that it’s an issue. But the laws are still on the books. If the owner doesn’t want you on his property he can tell you to leave. And if you don’t leave, he can call the cops to make you leave.

Trespassing. Believe it or not, it’s still a thing.

More than that, it should be. A key assumption of the Eighth Commandment – “thou shalt not steal” – is that God believes in property, and frowns on the unauthorized taking or use of other people’s property. If I use your property against your wishes, I am stealing the use of your property. Think about that for a moment. This is one of the ancient roots of why trespassing is a criminal offense.

The reason that matters for us as we continue to make our way through 1 Thessalonians 4 is that God says in verse six that it’s possible to be a trespasser in the area of sexuality. And in that verse, he warns that trespassers will be prosecuted. Let me show you what I mean,

We are in First Thessalonians. It progresses like this:

(verses 1-8) the Lord Jesus Christ’s policy on purity

(verse 2) the Lord Jesus Christ’s precept on purity

(verse 3) the Lord Jesus Christ’s position on purity

(verses 4-6) the Lord Jesus Christ’s plan for purity

(verse 4) learn to control your body

(verse 5) learn to discipline your passions

(verse 6) learn to treasure your brother

(verse 7) the Lord Jesus Christ’s purpose for purity

(verse 8) the Lord Jesus Christ’s persistence on purity

In verse six, then, God says it’s possible to be a trespasser in the area of sexuality, and he warns that trespassers will be prosecuted. Let’s listen to the whole passage again, and then think carefully about verse six.

¹ Finally, then, brothers, we ask and urge you in the Lord Jesus, that as you received from us how you ought to walk and to please God, just as you are doing, that you do so more and more. ² For you know what instructions we gave you through the Lord Jesus. ³ For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality; ⁴ that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness and honor, ⁵ not in the passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God; ⁶ that no one transgress and wrong his brother in this matter, because the Lord is an avenger in all these things, as we told you beforehand and solemnly warned you. ⁷ For God has not called us for impurity, but in holiness. ⁸ Therefore whoever disregards this, disregards not man but God, who gives his Holy Spirit to you.

God is calling Christian brothers and sisters to a deep and deepening respect – even reverence – for the preciousness of each other’s purity. It’s not going too far to say that the love Christians are called to show for each other is a love that treasures your spiritual siblings, and so erects a solid wall between your Christian family love and any possibility of impure sexual passion or contact. Pure sex is the marital act between two covenanted Christians, a husband and a wife, sharing personal and sexual intimacy with each other, and only each other, For as long as they live.

Let’s try to make FOUR outstanding observations to help us learn to treasure our brothers and sisters by protecting their purity.

the first outstanding observation

Treasuring your brother is a property matter

⁶ that no one transgress and wrong his brother in this matter, 

There are two sins warned against here: trespassing and embezzlement, The word translated “transgress” is ὑπερβαίνω , connoting to go beyond, to cross over a boundary onto property that is not your own, to trespass. The word translated “wrong” is πλεονεκτέω. The King James translated the word as “defraud.” You could also translate it as “to take advantage of” or “to embezzle from.” In ancient Greek just as in modern English, the word “matter” can be used as the legal term for a specific legal case. Paul is deliberately using legal language to talk about property. It’s a little jarring for modern minds to think about ourselves or our bodies or our emotions as property, But Paul was not a modern man, Thessalonica was an ancient city, and God himself is the ancient of days. It would be anachronistic at best to expect Paul or the Thessalonians or God to conform to modern sensibilities on this issue. In fact, God expects us to conform to his sensibilities. That’s just the difference between Creator and created,

These two property metaphors beg for answers to two obvious questions:

1. what is the owned property that Paul is thinking of here?
2. who is the proper owner of that property?

        The owned property

The readiest answer to the first question is that the owned property is the body of the person you are thinking about. That body is not your property, and you have no right to be there. Which is a great answer, so far as it goes.

Listen to what God thinks about the connection between sexuality and the ownership of the body.

1 Corinthians 6 ¹⁸ Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. ¹⁹ Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, ²⁰ for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.

So, back in our passage, you could say that the owned property is the body of the person you’re contemplating having sex with. Yet that property belongs neither to you nor to the person, strictly speaking. The owner of the body of a Christian is the Lord Jesus Christ, who went to the cross and poured out his own blood to buy us for himself. We belong to him, and our bodies belong to him. Beneath and before that, the owner of the body of any human being is the Creator who made us and our bodies.

But if we stop there, with the body, we’re just legalists, focusing on the externals without getting to the heart. It’s like we need to go back to the Sermon on the Mount and take a remedial course on Jesus’ way of seeing personal ethics.

A more comprehensive and more Christian answer is that the owned property behind Paul’s metaphor is the passion of that person’s soul and body. It’s the inside. It’s the heart.

Follow the reasoning again:

1. Jesus teaches us in the Sermon on the Mount that to be outwardly conformed to the law of God is not enough. God expects absolute obedience to the intent and the spirit of his law at the heart level.
2. A key purpose of sexuality is as an expression and reinforcement of intimacy between a man and his wife, a woman and her husband.
3. Intimacy comes thru passion – both physical and emotional. The Bible’s sexual restrictions are meant to preserve and protect the purity of a person’s sexual passion – not just his sexual parts.
4. Therefore the sexual passion of your date, boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever, is the thing that is most urgently not If you intentionally arouse or experience it, you’re trespassing. Your traipsing through places you have no right to be.

Someone will object, “but what if it’s just a little bit of passion, like in passionate kissing?” If a public official is caught embezzling two thousand dollars, is he any less a thief than if he had embezzled two million dollars? He’s not as good at thieving, but he’s no less a thief.

The owned property that you need to stay away from is passion: your partner’s and your own.

1. b) The proper owner

Here’s another possible objection: “Wait a minute preacher, my passion is mine; I’m free to do whatever I want with my own property.” I’m so glad you brought that up

Lots of mainstream thinkers in our society today would roundly applaud such an answer. Of course, they would modify it by saying that you only have a right to that body and that passion if that person has given consent. In the contemporary secular American way of seeing things, each one of us is the owner of his own body and soul. So we have freedom to give access to ourselves to anyone we choose, for any reason we choose, at any time we choose. Because, after all, Choice is the modern American secular god.

The real God has a starkly different perspective on things. We have already seen that God thinks that Jesus is the one who owns us and our bodies. Now listen to this:

1 Corinthians 7:1-4 ¹ Now concerning the matters about which you wrote: “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.” ² But because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. ³ The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. ⁴ For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does.

Each of us has to decide whether we will believe God or man.

The proper owner of your girlfriend’s passion is Jesus, who ]delegates exclusive rights to her and her body and her heart to her future husband… nobody else. If you think I’m being sexist, I’ll just point you back to what Paul said. The husband does not have authority over his body. Authority over his body has been given to his wife. The ancient world had no problem or question with the idea of a husband having authority over his wife’s body. They all believed that already. But when Paul said this about the wife having authority over the husband’s body, he introduced a kind of equality that was almost insurrectionist in his day and age.

Of course that’s not really our point. Our point is that all the passion of the body and the heart of the person you’re thinking about have been given by Jesus to that person’s spouse. If that person is not yet married, then Jesus retains absolute ownership and complete rights to that body. He will delegate rights to that body to that person’s spouse when there is one. Which means  the place where that transaction happens is at the wedding. That’s what a public wedding is for. All the passion of my heart and body I gave irrevocably to Monica Carmela Oliver before the eyes of everyone we loved. She took my name and she took my heart. More to the point, Jesus gave all the passion of my heart and my body irrevocably to Monica on that day, and at the same moment he gave all the passion of Monica’s heart and body irrevocably to me on that day. The gift of each other’s passion was given to each of us by Christ. He is the only one who rightfully can give it – any of it.

I can hear the objection coming from the Christian college students playing a little tonsil hockey back behind the Student Center: “but it was such a little bit of passion!”

A thief is a thief is a thief is a thief… period.

The proper owner of your present partner’s passion is the Lord Jesus Christ, who some day will grant it to his/her future spouse for a little while (fifty or sixty years, if all goes well). Don’t steal a little slice of it today. The proper owner of your passion is your Lord, who has planned it for your future spouse; you have no right to give it away today – not even a little bit.

Treasuring your brother is a property issue

the second outstanding observation

Respecting your brother is a family matter

⁶ that no one transgress and wrong his brother in this matter,

We often overlook this because we hear it so often that we just stop bothering to think about it. Today, we need to stop and think about it!

When Jesus was talking to his disciples one day, he said this:

Matthew 23:8 But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brothers.

In my mind I can hear somebody protesting, “but that’s just a metaphor, only a figure of speech.”

I’m so glad you recognize that. It’s encouraging to know that you’re paying attention to the literature that you’re reading when you read the Bible. Now recognize this: Jesus uses the metaphor to retrain his apostles’ habitual ways of thinking and speaking about themselves and others. In fact, he uses metaphors and similes for that purpose all the time. If you love your Lord, learn from him. Let him lead. Follow.

He gives us the family metaphor to think and talk about each other because normal, healthy family affection is only a feeble hint of the purity, holiness, honor with which God wants us to treat each other in His family. How seriously and comprehensively should we apply this family metaphor, especially in the area of sexual purity?

1 Timothy 5:1-2  ¹ Do not rebuke an older man but encourage him as you would a father, younger men as brothers, ² older women as mothers, younger women as sisters, in all purity.

So let’s make this as practical as we possibly can. Only do with your date (boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever) what you would feel totally comfortable doing with your real, biological sister, or brother. Because, after all, that woman, if a followe of Jesus Christ, is your sister, or that man is your brother. If that person is not a believer,, what are you doing in that relationship anyway? You know better than that! Do not be unequally yoked together with an unbeliever. You know this.

The brother/sister metaphor addresses the whole matter of dating. The dating system as currently practiced is deliberately designed to excite romantic feelings and patterns of relating from the very earliest stages of a relationship. It certainly doesn’t tend to foster brotherly and sisterly emotion or devotion!

On the other hand, there are shockingly many young people who have decided to forego dating entirely because they’ve also decided to skip out on marriage and family entirely. Life online is so much less threatening. Real-life relating with real people, real, skin-on human beings, produces too much anxiety. An AI girlfriend will never criticize me or make fun of me and will always do whatever I want. Don’t laugh. For far too many people, this is reality. I’m concerned we’ve only begun to guess at how much damage is going to come from this.

May I suggest that it’s time to re-think what we’re doing? Could we find something more in line with the Bible’s vision of how Christian young men & women, sisters and brothers, should relate to each other?

Perhaps it is time to recapture an entire theology of what a faith family ought to look like, including a theology of courtship, marriage, childrearing, and life together?

You see, learning to treasure your brother is a family matter.

the 3rd outstanding observation

Treasuring your brother is a serious business

Listen to the last part of what Paul says to our Thessalonian brothers, and to us:

⁶ that no one transgress and wrong his brother in this matter, because the Lord is an avenger in all these things, as we told you beforehand and solemnly warned you. 

In other words, trespassers will be prosecuted… and Scripture makes this point repeatedly.

Galatians 5:19-21

¹⁹ Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, ²⁰ idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, ²¹ envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

Ephesians 5:5-6

⁵ For you may be sure of this, that everyone who is sexually immoral or impure, or who is covetous (that is, an idolater), has no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God. ⁶ Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience.

Now listen. I will freely agree with you that those are extreme and challenging words. Many people read them and conclude that the Bible is just rude and harsh. Then they turn away in disgust. Many other people read them and conclude that the Bible is right and that therefore there is no hope for them. They know how they have lived. They know the people that they have hurt, and the times they’ve been hurt by people. They read these words and then turn away in despair.

If you are of the first sort, and think you know better than Paul or the other writers of the New Testament what really is acceptable or unacceptable sexuality, I don’t have much to say that will help you. Perhaps the only thing I could ask you to do is look at the sexual climate around you in our society today and ask yourself if we really think we know better than God. Is there any evidence of this or are we surrounded by sexual brokenness? What has been the net effect of the sexual revolution on America and the world? How is it going for us? I beg you to rethink your position.

If you are in the second group, and think there is no way there could be any hope for you, my request is that you just push pause  for a few minutes, take a few deep breaths, and let me assure you that Jesus Christ is a great savior for great sinners

Then contemplate one more salient observation, and listen to two more passages by the same author (Paul) addressing the same issue (the outcomes of sexual immorality). But notice the difference in how the passages end. I’ll read those passages to you in just a few minutes.

the 4th outstanding observation

Treasuring your brother is a matter for Jesus himself

Listen to this language that Paul uses:

⁶ that no one transgress and wrong his brother in this matter, because the Lord is an avenger in all these things, as we told you beforehand and solemnly warned you. 

He says that the Lord Jesus Christ is an avenger in all these things. All what things? Sexual sin of every sort.

That raises a question for some of us. Where did Paul get this insistent, persistent sense of alarm over the wrath of God against every form of sexual immorality?

Matthew 5:27-30 ²⁷ “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ ²⁸ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. ²⁹ If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. ³⁰ And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell.

Jesus is the OG extremist when it comes to warnings about the consequences of sexual immorality. Paul learned to use such radical language from his Lord Jesus Christ.

Pay attention to this. Paul says that it is the Lord who is the avenger. “The Lord” is the term the New Testament writers including Paul use consistently to refer to the Lord Jesus Christ. Paul just used the phrase that way in verse two of our passage, and he’ll do it again repeatedly throughout this letter. He’s telling us the Lord Jesus Christ is the avenger.

For a time, my brother and I and our little sister, who is about five years younger than I, rode a bus to the First Baptist Church of Coral Springs, FL every Sunday morning. One Sunday, another kid on the bus groped my little sister. And she was only a little child. My brother stood up and punched the kid in the mouth and knocked out his two front teeth. I’m not saying that was the best way to handle the situation, but I am saying that my big brother was violently committed to protecting our little sister. And that was entirely good.

Now do you want to hear why God takes this issue so seriously? What if Mark, instead of protecting our sister, had been the one molesting her? You say, “That would be wicked! That would be monstrous! That would cry out for vengeance!”

Exactly. [[[ ]]] It cries out for vengeance. [[ ]] And Jesus is the avenger.

Alright. Let’s take a breath. Things I have said in the last few minutes may have triggered you in 43 different ways. That was not my intention at all. If some of the things that I have said have hurt you or alarmed you, I am truly sorry about that. I am not apologizing or asking forgiveness, though. I believe that Paul used deliberately alarming, what we might call triggering, language to describe Jesus, so I believe the only way to be faithful to God’s intent for this passage is to be similarly alarming. But I do feel bad. I feel sorry. I don’t like it when people bring up things that are painful for me, and I don’t enjoy bringing up painful things for others. I just believe that the Holy Spirit of God is the one who brought up this painful stuff when he inspired Paul to write this. In fact, before this passage is done, Paul will make it clear that what he’s saying is from the Holy Spirit.

A lot of us grew up singing

Jesus loves me this I know

for the Bible tells me so

little ones to him belong

they are weak but he is strong

yes Jesus loves me

yes Jesus loves me

yes Jesus loves me

the Bible tells me so

So which is it? Does Jesus love us or is he an avenger in all these things?

Both. Both things are true.

His love for us is what moves him both to protect us from sexual sin and to discipline us for sexual sin.

Treasuring your brother – or your sister – is a matter for Jesus himself.

Treasuring your brother is a property matter

Treasuring your brother is a family matter

Treasuring your brother is a serious matter

Treasuring your brother is a matter for Jesus himself

I told you a moment ago that I would want you to listen to two more passages in which Paul talks about the outcomes of sexual immorality. Remember, we need especially to notice how the passages end.

Colossians 3:5-7

⁵ Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. ⁶ On account of these the wrath of God is coming. ⁷ In these you too once walked, when you were living in them.

1 Corinthians 6:9-11

⁹ Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, ¹⁰ nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. ¹¹ And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.

There is not a soul in this building right now who has not been touched by sexual sin, either our own or someone else’s. Just as it was ubiquitous in Thessalonica, it’s on every street and in every corner of Dundalk. Do you hear how Paul spoke to the Christians so long ago? He warned them that sexual immorality – fornication, as our great-grandparents put it – was a damnable sin, because it was. It still is. But he rejoiced over them because, although that was who they were before they came to know Jesus Christ, that was no longer who they were since they had come to know Jesus Christ. And that’s the way it is today. Sinners become saints. The filthy are washed clean by the blood of the lamb slain on Calvary’s tree so long ago. The risen Lord Jesus changes everything.

If you don’t yet know this jesus As your savior and king, I really want to talk to you. I’ll be standing…

Our Lord spreads before us a vision of a church where the words “brother” & “sister” are so much more than mere titles, a church where we treasure each other as our Father treasures us. Together we shelter in the strong assurance that our Elder Brother Jesus is defending us, protecting us. And so we rejoice to defend each other and protect each other in his name. That’s what a church is for.

What does it mean to be in the family of God? What does it take to have Jesus as your elder brother? Turn from your sin and yourself to God and his glory… you know how it goes.