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With the End in Mind
Paul ends his second letter to the Thessalonians with a very short benediction. He opens it by calling God “the Lord of peace”. Today, we get peace from many things, such as going overseas and being away from work and responsibilities. Yes, there is peace in that, but this passage speaks of peace in a different way and brings into question: What is true peace?
Beginning with Matt 2:1-12, we see that the arrival of Christ demands a response. We will read of different responses in this passage. There are those who actively searched for Christ (i.e. wise men) and a passive one (i.e. Herod). When we talk about the arrival of Jesus, both then and now, it demands a response. This is the mindset that we should have as we read 2 Thess 3.
1 and 2 Thessalonians is a book for our times, for it shakes us up from the drudgery of work and from the stupor of social media, and wakes us to our cosmic reality. After the previous chapters that contained thanksgiving, exhortations, and warning that we enter today’s text. Paul is finally ready to get incredibly practical. After labouring to help the Thessalonian church understand the urgency of living in the end times, Paul dives straight into the most practical course of action in the face of our eschatological reality.
In this Christmas season, we wait on God’s good promises that Jesus is coming again, just as the people in the OT longed for a Messiah, we are to stand firm on God’s word today as we wait for Jesus’ second coming.
In light of the lawlessness and false teaching that is already at work (2 Th 2:7), how can we live our Christian lives faithfully? What hope is there for us not to be deceived or deluded by the false signs and wonders of Satan? How can we stand firm in our faith as we wait for Jesus’ second coming.
These 12 verses are heavily disputed but tonight, we are going to observe the passage in the most commonly agreed sense. We are going to let the text point us to mainstream interpretation. Our goal tonight is to see the pastoral and applicatory value of the text.
In Christian circles, we are often more interested in the juicy, contentious bits, and overlook the common aspects of truth that most Christians agree on. Why is this important for us to know? We are incredibly susceptible to false teachings if we don’t know the basic fundamentals.
How can Christians make sense of persecution and what hope we have, in the midst of it? We must understand that suffering is a part of the Christian life, lest we be surprised or blindsided by times of trial and tribulation that may come. And this passage prepares us for that, while pointing us to the hope that we have, amidst such suffering.
When was the last time we got into a fierce debate about the centre of the Christian life? A discussion about doctrine? When was the last time you got into a serious debate about how Christians live? How many of you said that you were offended by was the lack of thankfulness in the lives of Christians? Issues of thanksgiving and gratefulness are not high on our priority list. This is the problem in our lives that Paul is trying to address. Thanksgiving is supposed to be a healthy normative priority.
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 saw last week how Paul appealed to the shared faith of the believers in Thessalonika as he wrote to them and exhorted them to please God, not man. The substance of his appeal was this: that a life ‘well lived’ is one that proclaims the good news of the gospel and that makes Jesus known to others.
This week, we look at how Paul approached ministry. How exactly did he “proclaim the good news of the gospel” to the Thessalonian church?
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?
We live in a world where things that are not churches, masquerade as churches. Many of us have loose understandings of what the church of Jesus Christ actually is. Many of us attended about 90 mins of religious gatherings. At this gathering, we were in the same space with different people, sat to listen to a talk, sang some songs, and left.
What would the apostle Paul say about our gathering? Would he say that it is the church? What would you say to him?
Paul has so much praise for this church, and it would do us well to pay attention to see what this church is like!
Who is a Christian? Who is a true believer? These are 2 questions that we will consider as we look at the opening verses of this letter to the church. Why is this important? Nothing is more important than a proper understanding of our spiritual condition, and it is of greater importance to those of us who understand what our spiritual condition should be.
Paul wrote two letters, also known as epistles, to the church that he established in Thessalonica, now modern-day Thessaloniki. In what is now 1 and 2 Thessalonians, he writes about his feelings to them, things in his own life, and teachings on Christian doctrine to encourage them.
