What are you waiting for? Vacation? The start of school? (There are people who can't wait.) Cool weather? Heaven? Are you waiting to find the person you will marry? Are you counting the days till you can retire? Have the lab results been delayed?

Have you noticed that when you wait for something intensely, it colors your attitude toward everything else in your life? It is also a reliable measure of what a person really loves? So, what are you waiting for?

This experience of waiting goes by a more elegant name. We call it hope, and it belongs to the foundations of our humanity. I would like to consider this profound power in the context of 1 Thessalonians 4. Please turn there with me.

Our Spiritual Vocation
At the end of chapter three, the apostle spoke a benediction over the Thessalonian church. May he strengthen your hearts so that you will be blameless and holy in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus comes with all his holy ones.

Do you ever think of yourself as being holy and blameless? Or might I just as well ask: do you ever think about running a four minute mile or being commander of the space shuttle? But being holy and blameless is surprisingly within reach, as Paul shos in chapters four and five of this letter. If that is hard to believe, would you work with me for the next few minutes? Maybe the possibility will gain credibility with you.

Of course, you may be asking: but why would anyone want to be holy and blameless? What are they thinking? What would motivate them? The answer to these questions brings us back to the experience of hope. Consider this.

Do you remember the famous love chapter, 1 Corinthians 13? The last verse (13) in that chapter says, and now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

That has led Christian thinkers to say that hope is one of three profound powers  in the human soul. Everyone has hope. Christianity says it is good for everyone to have hope. Now, 1 Thessalonians makes it clear that hope is connected with God. It makes that connection in every chapter by reminding us of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. That event is what the Church is waiting for. That's our hope.

But in 1 Thessalonians 3:13 that apostle seems to connect this hope with the idea that we should be holy and blameless. May he strengthen your hearts so that you will be blameless and holy (there's the idea) in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus comes with all his holy ones (there's our hope). Let's see if we can understand that connection. We begin with three behaviors that Paul said are holy and blameless.

Hope and Holiness
In the first twelve verses of 1 Thessalonians 4, he identified three behaviors or habits that belong to holy living. The first is at the end of verse three. Avoid sexual immorality. That can be difficult, but it is definitely within reach. I suspect that more people than we imagine avoide sexual immorality, but they are often intimidated into silence by the oppressive sexual propaganda of our culture.

The second habit is a combination of the three words at the end of verse nine and the three words at the end of verse ten. Love each other more and more. This is the behavior and the atmosphere that is to characterize churches. Like avoiding sexual immorality, it is an acquired habit; but we have a great teacher, and when it takes over a congregation, it makes the church the most desirable place on the face of the earth.

Verses 11-12 express the third habit. We will be most comfortable with this habit, because our culture prizes it highly. Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody.

Chastity, love for each other, and responsible work habits are within our reach. They are behaviors that are consistent with what it means to be holy and blameless. But what does our hope in the Second Coming of Jesus Christ have to do with them? To find out we need to listen again to the apostle's language at the end of chapter three.

May he strengthen your hearts so that you will be blameless and holy in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus comes with all his holy ones. The Church anticipates a major, future milestone. Jesus Christ, whom we havenever seen, yet whom we worship and love, will come again into human history; and He will be looking for chastity, love for each other, and responsible work habits among those who follow Him. His search for these holy and blameless people will take place in the presence of our God and Father.

But this is a future event. That's our hope. It is what we confess together, when we say: "I believe that Jesus Christ will come again to judge the living and the dead." Do you believe this? I know you do, even though it is difficult to stay focused on it; so many distractions push it out of our thoughts.

Nevertheless, the belief that we will someday stand before Jesus Christ gives birth in our souls to a sense of accountability to God for how we conduct our lives. Answering to Christ is a powerful motive for chastity, love, responsible work habits, and anything else that makes us holy and blameless.

At this point, it is good to consider a second motive that is closely related to the first. Look at the opening sentence of chapter four. Finally, brothers, we instructed you how to live in order to please God, as in fact you are living.

The desire to please someone is a powerful motive for the way we live. That desire goes into action as soon as we enter into a significant relationship with other people. I want to please my spouse. I want to please my children and grandchildren. I want to please my boss or my board or my colleagues. I want to please those who depend on me. I want to please God.

However, knowing that we have pleased God belongs to the future. If I please my child, I receive from that child immediate assurance that I succeeded. I see the llook on his face, or she gives me a big hug. But we do not receive from God immediate assurance that He is pleased with us. For one thing, our life isn't over; any evaluation would be incomplete. We have to wait to hear Him say some day, "Good job. I'm pleased."

That's a future event. That's hope. Hoping to hear God say this gives birth within our souls to other habits that go along with hope, such as longing and patience and endurance; and those habits are just what we need right now for chastity, love, and responsible work habits, and anything else that makes us holy and blameless.

Paul gives a third motive for being holy and blameless. It is related to pleasing God, and it begins in verse three. It is God's will that you should be sanctified. Verse seven is closely related to this idea. For God did not call us to be impure, but to live a holy life. God has called us to live a holy life. In other words, the Church has the spiritual vocation to be holy - a theme we will consider in depth in the fall.

Even if we think of vocation as nothing more than a job, it is obvious that we grow into it. At work we say things like: "My learning curve is steep." We say we have to do the job for many years before we master it. We say that we never really stop learning. If we have from God a spiritual vocation to live a holy life, wouldn't it be natural to say the same things about that vocation?

Thing for a minute about names the Bible calls Christians. We are children of God (1 John 3:1), saints (Philippians 1:1), the people of the light (Luke 16:8), and those who belong to the Way (Acts 9:2). We are barely honest. How dare the Bible call us names like that? If we are going to live up to our spiritual vocation, won't there be many times when the learning curve is steep? Won't we have to be at this many years before we can say in any meaningful way that w've mastered it? Will we ever really stop learning what it means to be children of God, saints, and people of the light?

Living up to this vocation is a project of a lifetime. That's why I can say that accepting this vocation as your own nourishes within your sould the virtue of hope and other habits that go along with hope, such as longing and patience and endurance; and those habits are just what we need for chastity, love, responsible work habits, and anything else that makes us holy and blameless.

So here are questions we need to answer with our lives. Do I sense that I have a spiritual vocation? Do I want to please God? Do I believe that Jesus Christ will come again into human history and hold me accountable for my life?

If you say even a faint yes to any of those questions, you have powerful forces at work in your, encouraging you to be holy and blameless. Chastity, love for each other, and responsible work habits are not only within your reach, but now, because you have hope, you have effective motivation to cultivate these and many other habits of holiness.

Hope in the Darkness
We are not finished with chapter four. Hope has to do not only with our spiritual vocation; it also has to do with our long journey into darkness that we call death. When the apostle wrote verses 13-18, he was addressing people he loved about an anxiety he had unintentionally helped to create in them. Let me show you what I mean.

More than a dozen years ago, I received a pamphlet from the Taberah World Mission of Los Angles, New York, Philadelphia, and San Diego. I don't remember how I received it. The headline on the pamphlet said it all: IN OCT. 1992, JESUS IS COMING AGAIN. They were wrong.

But they are not alone. That kind of overzealous fatuity has put in an appearance off and on for the past 2000 years. It is by no means an exclusively American phenomenon. Now, the Apostle Paul did not set a date for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, but at one point in his ministry he seems to have left the strong impression that he expected it to happen during his lifetime. At least, the newly-founded Thessalonian church thought so.

In 1 Thessalonians 1:9-10 Paul had said that those young Thessalonian believers turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead. They did not expect to wait long. They expected the Second Coming of Christ in their lifetime. We know that because of a practical problem their belief created for them. Paul addressed that practical problem in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18. The problem is simple to state.

Some in the Thessalonian congregation had died, and the rest wanted to know, "Christ is returning soon. What will happen to them when He returns?" Their question awakened the apostle's sympathy and led to the teaching we find in these verses.

Verse 13 speaks of the relation of grief to Christian hope. Brothers, we do not want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep, or to grieve. Some people act as though the verse stops right there: "Brothers, we do not want you to grieve." We Christians deny that by remembering that John 11:25 says that Jesus wept for his dead friend, Lazarus. We know he wept openly, becaue people commented on it. They said, "See how he loved him!" (John 11:36)

To all of you who still weep around the anniversary of the death of one you loved and lost, I say to you: You are in good company. The Son of God wpet for his friend. His own tears make our tears worthy.

The Apostle Paul agreed with that. When he wrote here, we do not want you ... to grieve, he did not forbid Christians to grieve. We're not stoics. Instead, he called for a different kind of grief. Listen to what he actually said. We do not want you ... to grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope. Christian hope permits our grief and eases our grief.

But on what foundation does that hope rest? We come to verse 14. We believe that Jesus died and rose again and so (as a result) we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. The relation between Christian hope and our grief is rooted in Jesus Christ. We believe that Jesus died and rose again. His experience serves as the pattern of our future experience. He has seen beyond and gone beyond the horizon of death. Where he has gone, we shall go. That gives us hope. That is the Church's hope from generation to generation, until the renewal of all things.

The Pastoral Center of Gravity
Look at how the chapter ends. Encourage each other with these words. The phenomenally best-selling series of novels called Left Behind focuses on an event called the rapture. That word and that doctrine come from verse 17 here: we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds. Rapture means being caught up with other Christians in the clouds to meet the Lord. It is of course a doctrine that deserves consideration, because it has helped the Church to sustain a vivid hope in the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

After this sermon, I hope you can see more clearly why this vivid hope matters so much to the Church. It offers Christians powerful motives to lead holy lives that are marked by sexual restraint, daily work discipline, and love within the Christian family. It also offers us powerful support, when the time comes to say our final goodbyes in this world.

I began this sermon with a question: what are we waiting for? That is a question about our hopes. I have tried to show you how the experience of hope is linked to God. We are waiting for the day that we can say with integrity, "We have fulfilled our spiritual vocation to be holy." We are waiting for the day when God will say of our lives, "Good job." We are waiting for the day that we see Jesus Christ, and death is defeated, and judgment is rendered, and eternal spring welcomes us home at last.