What do the choices of your life say about what you believe? Observe your word choices. Observe your tone of voice, your body language, your spending habits, your food intake, your time alone, your media habits, your clothing. We make loads and loads of choices every day. Those choices are writing your biography. And not just the facts, the details. The choices reveal what you believe. So how you live is the best way to show others what you believe. How are you living?
Paul describes how Christians live, starting in the middle of 1 Thessalonians 5, verse 8, “putting on faith and love as a breastplate, and the hope of salvation as a helmet.”
If that sounds familiar, it’s because Paul also wrote about pieces of armor in Ephesians 6. I blogged about them starting here. In 1st Thessalonians 5, though, Paul’s focus is faith, hope and love. Those three concepts are marks of Christians who are sober and awake, and we learned in the previous post.
When people encounter us, whether it is the super brief interaction with an employee at the big box store, or whether it is with a life-long friend or neighbor who we see often, they should be able to see from our actions, our body language, our tone of voice, our choices that we are people of faith, hope, and love. Not aggressively so. Not legalistically. No condemningly. Not arrogantly.
These three words are action-oriented. They are not meant to simply be ideas. Faith is not simply propositions that we believe in our minds. Faith is the pattern of life that we live. Our actions really do speak louder than our words. Our actions, our choices, our decisions, reveal the quality and content of our faith.
Next our hope is active. We are hopeful people by living according to the mission of the kingdom. We display our hope by sharing the hope we have with others. We want as many people as possible to have hope too. We demonstrate and share our hope by leaning on God in the middle of difficult times.
And finally, we live out our hopeful faith in love. Our actions are actions of love because our God is love, and he calls us to follow his example of love.
That is how we live as daytime people, people who are sober and awake. In other words, that is how we live as people who are always ready for Jesus’ return, not to be surprised. We live on mission, with faith, hope, and love overflowing from our lives.
As Paul continues in verses 9–10, he wants us to experience that hope, “For God did not appoint us to suffer wrath but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ. He died for us so that, whether we are awake or asleep, we may live together with him.”
Suffer wrath? What does that mean? See that in verse 9? Sounds grim. It is grim. Paul is talking about the situation of people who are not with Jesus. Whether they are alive or dead, it is not a good place to be in if one is not with Jesus. God doesn’t want that either, Paul says.
Just as we are to demonstrate faith, hope, and love, Paul points out the incredible lengths of love that God went to so that we might live together with him. He died for us, and rose again, opening a way for us to experience new life, so that we might live together with him.
That’s what God wants, to be together with us. Together now, so that we can experience flourishing abundant life as his disciples, flowing with faith, hope, and love, and together with him in eternal life.
Please don’t hear me saying that God expects us to always be happy. You can overflow faith, hope, and love even in the middle of the hard times in life. That’s part of what being focused on Jesus and his ways makes possible.
Because we live in the now, however, it seems that Paul’s focus is on living together with God now. That is precisely how we remain awake and sober, but living together with him. Living together with God is another way of saying that we have union with Christ. Union with Christ? We’ll talk about that in the next post.
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash
Engaging Scripture 