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.
As we wrap up this section of Exodus, we’re going to consider the Sabbath. To help us, we’re going to think about these 3 questions:
(1) Do we still need to keep the Sabbath today?
(2) What is it for?
(3) What does it mean practically to keep the Sabbath?
This section of Exodus has been talking about instructions for building the temple thus far. In this chapter, we suddenly focus on artists and art in the temple. The goal of this study is to see that God has designed everything for Him to dwell with His people. God’s goal and intention for art and artists is clear, and we want to see what God’s design for us is. It also follows that ff God has laid out so clearly what is our plan for our lives, how then should we respond?
Three themes repeatedly come up in Exodus: salvation, holiness and God’s people. Salvation is shown in how God consistently saves His people, the Israelites, who were led to God after He took them out of slavery in Egypt. This shows us that God’s people have a covenant with Him.
With the benefit of the hindsight we have today, we can see that while the laws were good for people to live in accordance to God, they also pointed to Jesus. This leads us to consider two questions: What is a Christian? What makes a Christian a Christian?
Why do we bathe? For us who live nearby the Equator, we know something of good reason. The people of Exodus lived in a similar climate, but for them, cleanness meant more than just washing with water. For washing is meant to be a picture of our spiritual readiness and purity before God. It is less about how clean we are, and more about what we about to do after we bathe. So what is it that God’s people are being told to be as they prepare to be clean? At one level, we know that the Israelites were being made clean to commune with God. But what does it mean to commune with the God we can neither see nor touch?
In this section of the Bible, we will be studying the altar of incense that God had instructed the Israelites to use within the Holy Place. In Exodus, God is laying out how he meets with his people in the Tabernacle, and how through this he expresses his desire to dwell with his people.
The first 10 verses of Exo 29 dealt with the consecration and preparation of God’s priests. God had revealed to Moses the garments that Aaron and his sons will wear.
There’s a lot more in the instructions, which can be read in last week’s study. But for this week, in the rest of the chapter, we learn more about what these priests had to do.
What do your clothes say about you? What do they say about your personality, or reveal about your identity? There is some truth in the saying “clothes make the man”, as clothes can provide insight into who you are as a person. But how often do we dress for service to God? The clothes that God’s servants wear reflect their God-given identity.
