1 Thessalonians 5:8

1 Thessalonians 5:8

The Work and Armour of the Children of the Day.

I. First, this central injunction, into which all the moral teaching drawn from the second coming of Christ is gathered "Let us be sober." Now, I do not suppose we are altogether to omit any reference to the literal meaning of this word. The context seems to show that by its reference to night as the season for drunken orgies. But, passing from that, let us turn to the higher subject with which the Apostle is here evidently mainly concerned. What is the meaning of the exhortation "Be sober"? Well, first let me tell you what I think is not the meaning of it. It does not mean an unemotional absence of fervour in your Christian character. Paul, the very man that is exhorting here to sobriety, was the very type of an enthusiast all his life. So Festus thought him mad, and even in the Church at Corinth there were some to whom, in his fervour, he seemed to be "beside himself." The exhortation means, as I take it, mainly this: the prime Christian duty of self-restraint in the use and the love of all earthly treasures and pleasures.

II. There is, secondly, a motive which backs up and buttresses this exhortation. "Let us, who are of the day" or, as the Revised Version has it a little more emphatically and correctly, "Let us, since we are of the day, be sober." "Ye are the children of the day." There is one direction especially in which the Apostle thinks that that consideration ought to tell, and that is the direction of its self-restraint. Noblesse oblige!The aristocracy are bound to do nothing low or dishonourable. The children of the light are not to stain their hands with anything foul. Chambering and wantonness, slumber and drunkenness, the indulgence in the appetites of the flesh, all that may be fitting for the night, it is clean incongruous with the day.

III. Last of all, my text points out for us a method by which this great precept may be fulfilled: "Putting on the breastplate of faith and love, and for an helmet the hope of salvation." And in like manner the cultivation of faith, charity, and hope is the best means for securing the exercise of sober self-control.

A. Maclaren, A Year's Ministry,1st series, p. 29.

The Duty of Seriousness.

To attain to a true Christian gladness, we must learn to be serious, to be sober.

I. The two great elements indispensable to the existence of a really grand character are elasticity and steadfastness: elasticity, without which a man gets crushed by every slight failure; and steadfastness, without which he will be turned aside from his purpose by unworthy motives, and be tempted to forget the end of his efforts in the contemplation of the means by which they could be attained. For keeping alive this elasticity, a man must know how to be wisely gay; for keeping up this steadfastness, he must know how to be sober.

II. And so Christian sobriety must be based upon a reasonable estimate of the importance of life and the seriousness of all things here below. The trifler, who has no higher ambition than to amuse himself, mistakes the meaning of all things on earth. But as a man lays hold on the fact that God loves him and all men, and that, with all his weakness and inconstancy, he is yet not left unsupported by the Spirit's grace, though he may be serious he will not be sad. Christian sobriety and Christian gaiety have their sources lying closely side by side in the devout and earnest soul; and, like the Danube and the Rhine, which start out from different sides of the same glacier, and then diverge as far as the east is from the west, so these two, however much they seem to be at variance when they take a separate course, yet have their true founts in a living faith in God, and are then most fresh, and real, and inexhaustible, when they spring from a source of trusting love, in a heart that rests upon the Rock of Ages, and which, while it has its hold upon the earth, is yet aspiring upwards.

A. Jessopp, Norwich School Sermons,p. 236.

Reference: 1 Thessalonians 5:8. H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxix., p. 148.