Not Wasting Anyone's Time

"Not Wasting Anyone's Time"
1 Thessalonians 2:1-8

How would you like to spend 2 years making phone calls to people who aren't home? Sound absurd? According to one time management study, that's how much time the average person spends trying to return calls to people who never seem to be in. Not only that, we spend 6 months of our lives waiting for the traffic light to turn green, and another 8 months of our lives reading junk mail. These unusual statistics should cause us to do time-use evaluations.  Taking a look at the use of our time helps us understand how even little things we do can add up to large blocks of time.  And in evaluating those blocks of time, are we wasting a chunk of our lives on that which doesn't matter.  What else could we be doing that makes our lives count for something?

"My friends, you know that our time with you wasn't wasted."  That's how Paul shifts gears in this part of his letter.  He wasn’t going to look back on his time in Thessalonica and feel like he had wasted any time.  As I’ve said a few times before, Paul was an intense, type-A personality.  He was going to make sure that each moment counted in his ministry for Christ.

But for Paul, it wasn’t just the moments he was counting.  It was how he was using each moment God gave him to share the gospel--to tell people about his relationship with Christ.  There are good ways to maximize each of those moments of witness.  And he describes those ways in these couple of paragraphs of his letter to the believers at Thessalonica.

The first thing Paul says, if you want to maximize your time of witnessing for Christ is make sure you have no hidden motives.  We have to be sure we are clear, within ourselves, what our motives are.  In talking to people about Christ, we're trying to develop believers, not get church members.  Talking to people about Christ and talking to people about coming to church at Pratt Presbyterian Church are two different conversations.  Talking to people about Pratt Presbyterian Church is an invitational conversation about being a person enveloped in a caring fellowship of people.  Talking to people about developing a relationship with Jesus Christ is a conversation about repentance and life transformation.  If our motives aren’t clear, people will see right through our witness and we will be wasting our time and the person’s time we’re talking to.

Paul then writes that we are wasting our time if we are filling our witness with foolishness.  Paul made it clear that there should be no clever tricks or come-ons.

I read about a church that held a lottery during their offering time in the worship service.  This is how it worked.  The offering would be collected.  Then they would choose one offering envelope at random from the offering plates.  The “winner” would then receive double their offering back.

But there were rules to this game.  Only people who pledged were eligible.  If you pledged, you would get a set of offering envelopes, and you were to put your weekly pledge in those envelopes.  Only offering in envelopes was eligible--not random checks or pew envelopes.  You could only get the offering pledge envelopes if you were a member of the church--that way only members were eligible.

What they found happened was that membership increased, and so did giving.  In fact, some people were making three or four pledges so that it would increase their chances of winning the offering lottery.  One woman said, in the article I was reading, “The offering time has become the highlight of the worship service.”  Do you hear that!? Not the scripture reading, not the sermon, not the prayers.  The offering lottery was what people were coming to worship for.

That’s a clever trick and come on.  Paul says that using such gimmickry in our witness for Christ is a waste of time.

Paul then states that when we are witnessing about our relationship with Christ, there should be no people pleasing. Please God.  We talked a little bit about this in Men’s Bible Study this week.  If we’re into people pleasing we are only worried about if people like us, rather than hearing the good news of Christ and developing a relationship with him.  We’re only sharing about Christ so that others will like us, rather than like Christ.

People pleasing is telling people what they want to hear rather than what they need to hear.  Watering down the gospel.  This has been called, "Cheap grace."  The term “cheap grace” can be traced back to a book written by German theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, called The Cost of Discipleship, published in 1937. In that book, Bonhoeffer defined “cheap grace” as “the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline. Communion without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ.” Cheap Grace tries to emphasize the benefits of Christianity without the costs involved.  To offer people cheap grace in order to please them without pleasing God is to waste their time.

Paul then told the Thessalonian believers that when they preached the gospel, they didn’t come with a lot of flattery.  Flattery is a form of what I was just talking about with people pleasing.  It's telling someone something that you think is pleasing to them, complimentary.  But in reality, by flattering, you are lying.  There's a difference between flattery and paying someone a compliment.  The difference is sincerity.  Flattery has sincere insincerity behind it.  The intention is manipulation.  Many Greek orators would use flattery in their speeches to butter up a crowd, setting them up to be taken advantage of.

By flattering a congregation and telling them they are all OK is doing those people and the gospel a disservice.  Sometimes you have to say some hard things.  One of my professors in seminary said the job of the preacher is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.  Worrying about what people think about you and acting towards them so you will be sure to stay in their spotlight is basically coddling, and avoids doing the hard work of challenging and confronting.  Paul said they didn’t waste the Thessalonians time by setting them up with a lot of flattery.

Paul said there was no greed involved in their sharing of the gospel.  This kind of greed of which Paul writes has to do with power as well as things.  But the motivation behind this kind of greed isn't just having stuff.  The motivation is trying to outdo others, or being superior.  And the way one acquires is by taking advantage of others, violating people, asserting yourself in an aggressive way.  This kind of greed leads to violence and a total disregard for others.

Maybe you’ll remember the name of Leona Helmsley.  She owns a string of hotels.  She owns the Empire State Building.  She’s a billionaire.  In September 1989, Leona Helmsley was convicted of 33 counts of tax evasion.  The picture of her that emerged from her trial was one of a penny-pinching tyrant who tried to stiff just about everybody she knew or was acquainted with.  No amount of money was too small to fight over.  After the sudden death of her only son, at age 40 in 1982, she sued and won a majority of his estate, $149,000, leaving his four children with $432 each and his widow with $2,171.

Paul wanted to make sure the Thessalonian believers understood that his preaching didn’t involve coming at them, wasting their time by taking them for everything they were worth and then leaving town.  Instead of greed, Paul gave and gave, demanding nothing for what he gave--only that they might listen to the gospel and give their lives to Christ.

Paul said he also didn’t waste the Thessalonian’s time by putting himself constantly in the spotlight.  In other words, Paul wasn’t witnessing for Christ in order to get recognition and praise.  Paul’s witness for Christ wasn’t about him--it was about the Lord.

One time I was in Seattle, visiting my family.  I was up there over a Sunday, so I was feeling really religious.  On the same Sunday morning I visited my sister's church (Presbyterian--new church development) and a friend's church (Episcopalian).  At my sister’s church, everything in the worship service was about their young pastor.  He was involved in every aspect of the worship, and it was like he was making sure no matter what was happening in the worship service, he was the center of attention.

At my friend’s church--the Episcopalian church--everything in the worship service was liturgy centered.  We followed along in the service in the Book of Common Prayer.  It was like the Episcopal Priest was almost invisible to the worship service as we became immersed in the liturgy and the flow of the service.  The spotlight was on Christ, and how the liturgy was keeping we congregants focused on him--not what the priest was doing.  That’s what Paul said he was about--putting the spotlight on Christ rather than himself.

Lastly, Paul said his witness about Christ to the Thessalonians was like a mother nursing her child.   Mothers can take up to two or three years before totally weaning their child.  Thus Paul is describing a style of doing ministry that doesn’t involve coming into a town for a weekend, setting up a big tent for some kind of crusade, and then hauling the dog and pony show on to the next town.  Instead, Paul is describing a way of Christian outreach that is a long term relationship of closeness and intimacy and friendship.  Paul wasn’t going to waste the Thessalonians time by being a flim-flam man, staying only a short time, without taking the time to build relationships over a mult-year time span, in order to bring people into relationship with Jesus Christ.


As we think about our own styles of sharing our Christian faith with others, we want to make the most of our time.  We don’t want to end up wasting our time, and the people’s time with whom we are sharing the faith.  Paul has given us seven great guidelines for how he shared his faith, that we can easily make use of:  no hidden motives, no clever tricks, no people pleasing, no flattery, no greed, no spotlight on ourselves but on Christ alone, and making sure we are talking to people in the midst of a long-term relationship and friendship.