How do you usually end your letters to others? By wishing them well? Maybe you remind them of your love for them? Maybe by saying something to the tune of “May God bless you…” This is exactly how Paul ends his letter to the Thessalonian church. However, before he does that we see him giving a list of exhortations to the church, and this is what we are going to look at today as we wrap up this study in 1 Thessalonians.

How did you wake up this morning? Did you wake up thinking about the “Day of the Lord”? Or did you wake up reading your phone notifications, thinking about work, planning your next vacation? Paul here states that the Christian is to think about the day of the Lord and it should be weighing on their minds.

This series in 1 and 2 Thessalonians has been titled “With the end in mind” and as we’ve been studying, virtually every other verse in this letter is about the eschaton (the end times). But before you balk at the mention of “end times”, let’s take a look at what exactly Paul says to the Thessalonian church and why he says these things.

What is the worst thing that can happen to you? For many of us, it could be death. What about death? Sometimes, it is not your own mortality that you have to consider. It is the mortality of others that we fear. Our parents could be growing older and we could be struggling with our parents’ health. Or maybe, it could be our own deaths. What will happen to those we leave behind — wife and kids for some, our parents for others, friends for all?

It is often true that Christians have a desire to know God’s will, although I suspect that much of our contemporary desire to know God’s will is bound up in some sort of divine weather forecasting: we want to know if our skies will be blue or grey, that we might be able to better plan and chart our days on this earth. Today’s passage and study takes us beyond that, and we will be processing it along the lines of two guiding questions - 1) Why do we desire to know God’s will? 2) What exactly is at the heart of God’s will for us? 

In today’s passage we can learn about prayer from Paul’s prayer for the Thessalonians. As we think about our own prayers, we should ask, “Who are the characters in my prayer life? What am I praying for? Why am I praying for these things? When do I pray for these things?”

When we read this epistle, we realise that Paul is in love with the Thessalonian church. But before we just dismiss it as just knowledge, we should also read these verses closely and pray that we’ll also be affected by it.

We continue in our series in 1 Thessalonians, and as we read this letter to the Thessalonian church, if we say we believe the same thing that Paul believes, why do our lives look so different?