Persecution wasn’t the only challenge that Paul was facing as he did his work. The Roman culture was sexually promiscuous, and proudly so. It was normal for a man to sleep with prostitutes. It was generally accepted practice to even worship the gods or the goddesses at the temple by having sex with a prostitute at the temple. This was the prevailing culture, the reality in which Paul was doing his work, calling people out of these practices to be sanctified and holy before God.
He told the Thessalonians:
It is God’s will that you should be sanctified: that you should avoid sexual immorality; that each of you should learn to control your own body in a way that is holy and honorable, not in passionate lust like the pagans, who do not know God; and that in this matter no one should wrong or take advantage of a brother or sister. The Lord will punish all those who commit such sins, as we told you and warned you before. For God did not call us to be impure, but to live a holy life. Therefore, anyone who rejects this instruction does not reject a human being but God, the very God who gives you his Holy Spirit.
1 Thessalonians 4:3-8
In many ways, this is very similar to our western world today. Every type sex, according to our culture, is permissible, and the attitudes and practices of the prevailing culture regularly find their way into the church.
But God calls us to be sanctified, to be made holy. He calls us to leave behind the practices of our local culture and instead heed his commands. He is our God and we are his people. He calls us to be holy, just as he is holy. He calls us to live as the people of God in every way, including our sexual lives. Not to deny our sexuality, but to live out our sexual lives fully and happily in the way that he has ordained, with our spouses, our wives and husbands.
But as I read this morning that someone said, the plan of the enemy is to completely subvert God’s plan: to get us to disobey God, tempting us have the most amount of sex outside of our marriage covenant and the least amount of sex inside of the marriage covenant as God has ordained.
So this is the call that Paul gave to the Thessalonian believers, that they should be sanctified and holy, leaving behind the culture that is all around them and instead adopting the new culture of the kingdom of God. No longer that of the kingdom of darkness, but that of the kingdom of God. And that same call echoes to us even today, even in our culture now in the twenty-first century. We are to be sanctified and holy, leaving behind the traps set for us by the culture all around us that tempts us into every type of sexual sin and running for the culture of sexuality that God has given us as his people.