9 Don’t you remember, dear brothers and sisters, how hard we worked among you? Night and day we toiled to earn a living so that we would not be a burden to any of you as we preached God’s Good News to you. 10 You yourselves are our witnesses—and so is God—that we were devout and honest and faultless toward all of you believers. 11 And you know that we treated each of you as a father treats his own children. 12 We pleaded with you, encouraged you, and urged you to live your lives in a way that God would consider worthy. For he called you to share in his Kingdom and glory.
13 Therefore, we never stop thanking God that when you received his message from us, you didn’t think of our words as mere human ideas. You accepted what we said as the very word of God—which, of course, it is. And this word continues to work in you who believe.
1 Thessalonians 2:9-13
Dear God, it seems Paul was leaning on his credibility to get the right to speak into the lives of the Thessalonians. It’s as if he was saying, “Hey, I didn’t just show up and tell you what to believe. I worked with you. I took nothing from you. I wasn’t a huckster for personal gain. I was there to give to you, not to receive from you.” And I think that does make a difference. It’s one thing for Paul to have been run out of town by the Jewish leadership if he was going town to town like a traveling evangelist looking for money from the people (which he wasn’t doing). It’s another thing when he shows up to invest in the community, give more than he takes, and then share the message he wants everyone to know.
There are a lot of ideas that float around within the church right now. Some of them are varying shades of progressive. Some of them are varying shades of conservative. In both cases, both politics on the left and politics on the right have seeped in. I could name liberal issues that I think are steering the people of the church away from you, and I could name conservative issues as well. And it is hard to know where, on the spectrum of ideas, you would fall.
I think the thing I keep coming back to is when we start asking ourselves if something is a sin or not I go back to the Sermon on the Mount when Jesus gave the series of “You have heard it said ____, but I say ____.” He raised the bar on hate and equated it with murder. Lust and equated it with adultery. So when we talk about some of the political issues and start to wonder how close we can get to the fire without getting burned, I wonder if we aren’t asking the wrong question. Not only how far from the fire can we get, but how do we lovingly show people who don’t want to let go of those things the why behind it?
And then what are the blind spots I have? Where am I still too close to the fire? Am I willing to let you reveal those parts of my life to me through your Holy Spirit?
Father, it’s funny because this all started with Paul working with the people to get credibility with them, and it ended with me asking you to reveal my own sin to me. Maybe that’s exactly how all of our prayers should be: being led by you into repentance. So help me to see. I hope you can be gentle with me as you reveal my sin to me. And help me to be your man with others so that you can touch their lives and draw them closer to yourself as well.
I pray this in Jesus and with your Holy Spirit,
Amen
Emails to God 