Send me your light and your faithful care, let them lead me; let them bring me to your holy mountain, to the place where you dwell – Ps 43:3

We have been reading together through 1 Thessalonians. In the first chapter we read that this letter was from Paul, Silas and Timothy, and that they began by giving thanks to God for the ways in which the Christians in Thessalonika grew in faith in face of persecution from their countrymen. In the second chapter they remembered how in their ministry they sought to please God and not please them and how God used that to make their witness fruitful. In Chapter two Paul and Silas note that they know that their faith is true and living because they in Thessalonika now suffer as the church in Judea suffered and so they are united in the Lord who suffered and rose again and is coming again.

At the end of chapter 2 Paul says he longs to go to them but Satan hinders them. We do not know specifically what this means. Paul knows the roads and boats he needs to get to them. But something supernatural is happening and getting in the way, something he identifies as the devil. In the Gospel of Luke, chapter 10 verse 18, Jesus tells the seventy two that he saw the devil cast down from heaven like lightning, and that the time has come for trampling of the serpent’s head. In St. John the Divine’s Revelation we see an image of the Archangel Michael’s army casting this dragon out of heaven and him falling to the earth with a mighty thud. When he has landed he is filled with rage and goes to war with the children of Eve. For this reason Peter in his letter to Asia Minor writes “Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.  Resist him, standing firm in the faith, because you know that the family of believers throughout the world is undergoing the same kind of suffering” (1 Peter 5:7-8).

Since Paul finds he cannot go to them  he sends their young assistant Timothy. Chapter 3 is the story of that decision and what it meant to them. Paul and Silas do not want this persecution to end the faith in Thessalonika and so they send these new believers someone to encourage them. He also is honest and says that he was afraid that their labour had been in vain and that their faith had been lost. This is a real fear, to witness the miracle of lives changed by the gospel lost due to the cost it demanded. Following Jesus has a cost. There is a cost to discipleship, it will cost you everything, and by it you will gain all things anew. When Jesus calls you, he bids you come and die, he bids you take his yoke upon you and follow him, he bids you turn from the pleasures linked to this world and be led rather through its pains that you may know an eternal joy that this world cannot take away.

Paul feared that the Thessalonians had given up for the inconvenience and agony of faith. But when Timothy returns to Paul and Silas they hear quite the opposite. Timothy brings Paul and Silas in Athens good news. The Thessalonians are growing in faith. The Thessalonian Christians are growing in their love for one another. They remember you both well and they long to see you as you long to see them. And so as Silas and Paul struggled with the devil the Thessalonians encouraged them.

For now they really live. They are united together with saints beside them. Paul and Silas can not help but give thanks to God for their faith. This is why it is important to be lifting up fellow believers in times of trial. Whether those trials are violent or merely coercive, whether those trials come from inward emotions, or the pressures of our unbelieving countrymen. Trials ought to bring us together united in Christ, not into leaning on pagan institutions or movements to try and turn the pressure up on fellow believers. We need to hear one another, we need to pray for one another, and we need to be working together in an earnest desire to be obedient to King Jesus. That is what this life is, its trial after trial, by which we are made more and more in the image of God or unmade into a hideous mockery.

Bretley and I have been reading George Macdonald’s fairy tales. In one of them two wicked girls encounter a wise woman who tries to correct their parents’ neglectful parenting. One of these girls is led through a series of trials to become a princess not just in station but in who she essentially is. She is shown in a mirror how her pride and selfishness has made her ugly and collapsed her into herself. Eventually as she proceeds through the trials the wise women says “need I say anything” and the princess Rosamund says “no, no I am horrid. May I please try again?” A few trials later she learns to ask “Will you help me?” This is the progression we must go through with trials, to view them not with disdain but as the very fire that God has sent to refine us. This is the progression we must go through not to trust in our own strength to get through but upon grace to make the way in us to where God has called us to be, to who he is fashioning us to be. God uses trials, persecution, and temptation so that through them by faith he may fashion us into saints.

Seeing what God is doing in the trials of the Thessalonians Paul is moved to pray a benediction. He is talking to them but he is praying to God at the same time. Satan has been preventing them from being together, by prayer they ask that the God and Father of their Lord Jesus Christ may clear the way for us to come to you. In the face of the trials besetting them the benediction asks God to make the way. “May the Lord make your love increase, overflow for each other and everyone else, just as ours does for you”. This benediction prays for love to be the fruit of faith produced in suffering. A wounded love in the image of Love incarnate who has holes in his hands and a wound in his side is asked for among them. “May he strengthen your hearts that you may be blameless and holy”. Jeremiah promises that a new covenant is coming in which we will receive new hearts. Hearts that can love what God would have us love. This is what we trust we receive in Christ, the melting away of our old wicked hearts, and the making of new hearts perfected in him. Paul prays that their hearts might be strengthened that they may be holy and blameless.

Now it was not until the 1200s that we started using chapters and verses to organize the bible. But that said I want you to pay attention to the ways chapters 1, 2 and 3 end. Chapter 1 ends: you wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead—Jesus, who rescues us from the coming wrath. Chapter 2 ends: For what is our hope, our joy, or the crown in which we will glory in the presence of our Lord Jesus when he comes? Is it not you? And Chapter 3 ends: That you will be blameless and holy in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus comes with all his holy ones. The Thessalonians are in a place of expectation. More on that next week.

Send me your light and your faithful care, let them lead me; let them bring me to your holy mountain, to the place where you dwell – Ps 43:3