Engaging Scripture

How to have radical love for your church leaders – 1 Thessalonians 5:12–13, Part 3

Editor’s Note: This week we welcome guest blogger, Emily Marks. Emily is an adult & community educator. She and her husband Sean live in Lancaster, PA, with their dog Corvus. Emily grew up as a pastor’s kid, and therefore she brings a wealth of experience and a unique perspective to this week’s passage.

As you think about how you relate to the leaders of your church, consider the famous Love chapter of the Bible:

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” (1 Corinthians 13:4–8)

Will our pastors and leaders make mistakes? Of course. They are humans. The story goes that one time at Faith Church, Pastor Joel showed a little too much of the film The Matrix during a sermon illustration. I wasn’t a part of Faith Church at the time, but I heard it was rough. The next Sunday, he apologized. And if we love our leaders, we keep no record of wrongs. Losing esteem for pastors over mistakes they apologize for and grow from would not be in line with this exhortation of Paul’s to esteem and love the leaders who are spiritually guiding us.

Love is not easily angered.

Our pastors and leaders call us out, warning us against poor behavior. They sometimes say important say important things that might hurt us a bit. But if we love our spiritual leaders, we believe that God has things to share with us through them, and we should not be easily angered but instead challenged by what we learn from them

Love is not self-seeking.

We should not come to worship services and expect that our pastors are here to tell us what WE want to hear. That is not their responsibility. And if we love them, we will remember that and hold them in proper esteem when they say things that are not what we want to hear.

I’m not going to go through the entire love chapter because I think you understand what I’m saying. Think of what other attitudes and actions flow from relationships that are rooted in a Christ-like love.

For example, when you love someone, you care for others in their family.

If you see one of the pastor’s kids turning into “one of those pastor’s kids,” maybe instead of criticizing or judging, you approach with the posture of “raising kids is HARD. How can we lovingly support you while you raise kids like the rest of us, but in this unique situation?”

When you love someone, you respect their personal autonomy.

Pastors have lives outside of the church. Their personal lives should reflect Christ and his values always, as all of ours should, but their lives don’t need to look the way you “think” a pastor’s life should look. The church should also take care to ensure that family time is respected as much as possible. Pastor’s responsibilities don’t stop when they go home, because situations in which we may need pastoral care don’t always happen during business hours. So we should respect family time that happens, and we should be gracious and respectful with vacation days.

When you love someone, you care about their security.

You don’t dangle the future of someone’s career in front of them or hold it over them as a threat to get things done in a church the way you think they should be done. We as congregation members should remember that while this is a calling, this is also a job that sustains a family, and we should treat is as such.

When you love someone, you defend them.

Pastors have special giftings from God. Again, pastors will make mistakes, but if pastors are unfairly targeted by persons in a church, the other congregation members should come to the pastor’s defense out of love and recognition of the pastor’s calling, and not hold the happiness or satisfaction of a congregation member as higher than that calling. There can be one less person in a pew if the pastor is following Christ. Leadership behind the pastor should firmly defend the pastor and not allow congregation members to bully anyone into agreeing with opinions or preferences.

Our actions and reactions towards our leaders and their families and life situations should be rooted in radical love. Examine your attitude and actions toward the leaders of your church. Do you treat them with “radical love”?

Photo by Emmanuel Phaeton on Unsplash

Have superabundant respect for church leaders – 1 Thessalonians 5:12–13, Part 2

I had a fantastic experience growing up as a pastor’s kid.

Part of that is my personality: I’m friendly, I’m outgoing, I was really cute when I was little and had sun hats that matched my church dresses, and my mom would curl my hair. I have that crippling oldest daughter syndrome where I try to people please and care-take adults’ feelings, all which lends itself to being an outstanding pastor’s kid.

Part of it was consistency. My dad had the privilege of serving the same church for 20 years, so I was able to grow up with the same group of people. Even when I did do something wrong or something that wasn’t wrong but maybe wasn’t popular, these people knew me and they had known me for years. We lived in community and relationship with these people, which made a difference in a really positive way.

I was a pastor’s kid through my most formative childhood years, through the death of my brother, through college, through getting tattoos (which spurred some discussion), through early adulthood (grad school, my first jobs). I mean, I really experienced the gamut of life as a pastor’s kid.

And I just must tell you one of my favorite stories of being a pastor’s kid as a young adult. I don’t really have reason to tell these kinds of stories anymore, but I also think it could provide some good insight into the situations that pastor’s kids can be put into. And it’s also hilarious:

Everyone in the story will remain anonymous except my father of course, but also the woman who this exchange happened with has since gone to heaven, so I think we’re all ethically covered here.

After worship, we, the pastoral family of the church, would stand in line at the door to the sanctuary shaking hands with all the people as they filed out. One Sunday when I was in my early 20s, a woman, as she shook my dad’s hand, told the story about her nephew who was struggling with drug addiction, asking my dad to pray for her. Then she turned to me, and because I was single at the time, she suggested that maybe I could start dating her nephew. My dad turned to face the wall, so neither the woman or I couldn’t see him cracking up with laughter.

While I am truly blessed in my experience as a pastor’s child, it wasn’t always great. Hearing negative things about my father. People have opinions about everything.

At the last church my father served for a few years before retiring, I had a run in with a church leader because of some racially insensitive things that were said about Native Americans in the presence of my sister – who is a Native American – and let’s just say that when I was told that I was being too sensitive, the conversation took a bit of a turn.

At the end of it all, the way my father’s pastoral career ended was not ideal. It was deeply hurtful to me and my family, and at the risk of sounding dramatic, it was traumatizing.

So why am I telling you all of this? I am uniquely qualified to be both the best and the worst person to be teaching on this passage of Scripture. Having lived in this world and having seen the way that leaders can be treated – both for the best and the worst – I have an intense bias here.

The fact of the matter is that pastoral ministry is a relational job. Yes, there’s a calling and gifting that is attached to pastoral ministry, but it is a job. This is how pastors feed, clothe, and house their families. It’s not a calling that they do out of charity or in their spare time.

I think sometimes we as church goers forget that. So when you start to play around with things like healthcare offerings, salary, or even if the pastor should continue to lead this church, you’re also talking about possibly upending a family. And then we try to slap “God’s will” onto it to either pacify ourselves or to try and convince the family we are harming that it’s okay. See how messy and personal this can all get?

So the thing about me, having had large parts of the first thirty years of my life dictated by the church because of my father’s profession, I will always fiercely defend my church’s pastor and leaders. I’m going to defend their use of time, I’ll always advocate that they should be paid more, I’ll relentlessly defend their family and the personal choices that they make. Unless something happens that is unethical or sinful, I will always defend the pastor, even if it’s something I don’t like or even disagree with. If it’s a personal preference, I’m on the pastor’s side. That’s it.

The reason it’s important for me to mention my bias is that when I saw the passage of Scripture that I was to teach on, I immediately knew what I was going to say. I was like, “Duh, Paul! I get it. I can handle this one without notes,” and the fact of the matter is I didn’t initially read the passage because I “know” the way we should treat our leaders. I didn’t critically sit and read and think.

If we as Christians aren’t careful, we can all fall into the same boat that I did. I have had to make a conscious effort to put my family’s joys and traumas on the backburner in order to appropriately and faithfully engage with this text. I’ll do my best to point out places where I had to practice this as we continue.

So let’s get back into that text!

After Paul makes it known in 1 Thessalonians 5:12 that he’s talking about the leaders of the church, he continues on by saying, “esteem them very highly in love for their work’s sake”

Notice Paul’s word choice here, and I think it’s intentional: for their work’s sake.

Titles generally come with a level of respect. Sometimes we “respect the office or title” even if we don’t necessarily respect the person in that office or with that title. But that’s not what Paul is saying here; Paul is not saying that this title earns them this intense love he’s calling for.

Paul specifically said to esteem them in love because of the work that they do.

Irish theologian Adam Clarke said, “Christian ministers, who preach the whole truth, and labour in the word and doctrine, are entitled to more than respect; the apostle commands them to be esteemed, abundantly, and superabundantly; and this is to be done in love.”

More than respect. Superabundant love. The word in the original Greek doesn’t comfortably translate into English. The word suggests a hyperbolic view of love and esteem. It is MORE THAN.

A theme we’ve heard repeated in Paul’s letter to the Thessalonian Christians is “you’re already doing this, but do it more,” and that theme seems to continue in this word choice: love and esteem your pastors and leaders even more than you think is possible because of the vital work that they do for you and the community and your collective faith and discipleship.

We’re not just talking about the respect you were raised to have for people like teachers and pastors. Paul is suggesting something even further. When is the last time you took time to think about how important the work of your pastors and church leaders has been in your life, and have you considered that you should love them for it more than you think is possible?

Notice that Paul is writing this not to the leaders inherently but the Christians in Thessalonica. So when a pastor isn’t doing anything wrong or un-Christlike, but we don’t feel this intense esteem or agape love, it is OUR responsibility to get to OUR knees and ask Christ to mold OUR hearts. It is not the leader’s responsibility to turn into someone you want them to be.

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Who are the leaders in your church family? (And more importantly, how do you treat them?) – 1 Thessalonians 5:12–13, Part 1

My father was a pastor and denominational leader for 30 years, from the time I was six months old until I was 30, so I grew up as a pastor’s kid, and it was such a formative part of my life and my identity that I still claim the title of “pastor’s kid.” I came home from the hospital to live in the seminary student housing. I don’t think it gets much more pastor’s kid than that.

Being a pastor’s kid is a very unique situation, and it’s not easy for some people. All the stereotypes about pastor’s kids and all the horror stories you’ve heard…they’re all true. But I want to be clear that having lived this life, I don’t judge anyone and their experience of being a pastor’s kid because it’s really complicated: you do live in a fishbowl. Everyone is watching you. And yes, everyone has opinions about you and your life. Even things that have nothing to do with the church.

Because of that experience, I’m excited to talk about what Paul has to say to the church about how the church treats its leaders.

In the New Testament the Apostle Paul wrote numerous letters, and they tend to follow a pattern:

Greeting/Thanksgiving
Praise
Doctrine/Rebuke
Exhortations & Closing Remarks

With that in mind, we have been studying 1st Thessalonians, and this week we are studying chapter 5, verses 12–13. We’re in the exhortations/closing remarks part of the letter. Paul writes in verse 12 “Now we ask you” which signals that he is speaking directly to the church in Thessaloniki.

Remember that we are overhearing this letter. This was not written to us. However, even though we are overhearing this letter and this exhortation is directly given to the Thessalonian readers of the letter, Paul goes on in this exhortation portion to list multiple characteristics and actions that are good practice, regardless of culture, lingual differences, or the years in between when the writer wrote them and when we read them.

In fact, in my opinion, this almost reads like a psalm, and some psalms are simply lists of good advice, some even taken from the secular culture, pieces of good advice that we should all heed. I believe this passage is similar in that way.

All that leads me to conclude that we can directly apply these practices and ideas to church families in 2025, even though we live in America and not Thessaloniki.

So let’s read the text, talk about its construction a bit, and then we’ll get into some practical lessons we can extract from these two verses.

1 Thessalonians 5:12-13a: “Now we ask you, brothers and sisters, to acknowledge those who work hard among you, who care for you in the Lord and who admonish you. Hold them in the highest regard in love because of their work.”

I’m an English teacher, so I would be doing a disservice if we didn’t have a bit of a grammar lesson here, but not English grammar: Greek grammar.

The Greek construction in this sentence is three participles all pointing to one article.

Basically, think of the three descriptors in this sentence as pointing back to one person or group of people: “those who work hard among you,” those “who care for you in the Lord,” and those “who admonish you” are not three distinct groups of people, but instead those three things all describe the one person or group of people Paul is referring to.

That might sound nitpicky, but it’s an important distinction.

I suspect that in your church, you know a thing or two about those who “work hard among us.” In my church we have so many folks who pull together to make sure that things happen around here and for the Kingdom. We have:

Stewards
Committees, that we call serve teams
The Prison worship team
People that bake and serve during Fellowship time

And so many more that I simply don’t have time to acknowledge.

These roles are all vital to the life of our church and should be recognized, and Scripture has plenty to say about sacrificial use of our time and service.

But that is not what Paul is talking about in verse 12.

That’s why the grammar is so important: we should not think of these descriptors as separate groups of people in this exhortation.

To fully understand what Paul is exhorting the readers to do, we must ask ourselves: who is the person or group of people who do all three of those descriptors? Who is the person or group of people who work hard among us, care for us in the Lord, and who admonish us?

Our pastors. Our leaders.

In the next post, I’m going to share one of my favorite stories about being a pastor’s kid. I hope my story can help churches think about how to treat their pastors and leaders in a healthy way.

Photo by Samuel Costa Melo on Unsplash

Church leaders – 1 Thessalonians 5:12–13, Preview

Throughout the history of the Christian church, there has at times been a testy relationship between the church’s congregation and its leadership. In some eras of church history, there has been more of a general respect for leaders, and for some eras, there has been less general respect. Some of that difference is cultural, some is deserved, some not deserved. How should the non-leaders in the church relate to the leaders in the church? What should a church do when its leaders are not behaving in an honorable way?

This coming week, our Philippians series is about leadership in the church.

You may have noticed already that our 1 Thessalonians series has just about made it to the end of the letter. But Paul does something unique in his final verses. He rattles off a bunch of short phrases that are very practical.

We’ve already heard a couple of them. For example, a few weeks ago I blogged on 1 Thessalonians chapter four verses 11 and 12 and chapter 5 verse 14, which were all about work. Molly Stouffer blogged about brotherly love. This coming week, Emily Marks will be blogging about 1 Thessalonians 5, verses 12 and 13, which are all about how Christians should treat the leaders of their church families. And for that reason, I am thrilled that Emily is writing this week and not me. Why?

First, given my role as a church leader, this topic could easily come across as self-serving. Second, Emily has a long family history in church leadership. She has personal first-hand knowledge of the relationship between a church family and its leaders, how it feels, how it can go really well, and how it can be difficult.

Because every church has leaders, I encourage you to check back here on Monday and follow along with Emily’s posts throughout the week.

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All Christians are to be builders – 1 Thessalonians 5:5–11, Part 5

Legos are my favorite toy by far. I remember how much I loved getting new Lego sets as a child. Following the instructions. Completing a model. Displaying it. Playing with it. Then eventually tearing it apart and combining it with other sets to make new creations. Legos engage a person’s hands, mind, and heart.

Frankly, building with Legos was not just a childhood hobby. I loved building Lego sets with my kids, when they were young. I remember the twinge of disappointment I felt when my kids entered their teen years and stopped building with Legos on a daily basis. Now my grandkids are nearly old enough to build with Legos. My opinion, you’re never to old to build with Legos.

Likewise, if you are a Christian, you are always a builder.

Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 5:11, “Therefore encourage one another and build each other up, just as in fact you are doing.”

That first word, “therefore,” connects the preceding material with what he about to say. What was that preceding material? In the previous posts this week, we studied 1 Thessalonians 5:5-10. Let me summarize those verses: We Christians always live ready for Jesus’ return by overflowing with faith, hope, and love, because we have union with Christ.

Therefore, what do we do? We encourage and build one another up.”

What “one another” reminds is that we are not alone. Who are your friends in your church family. Think about your Sunday School class, your Bible study, your care group. How do you encourage and build them up?

Are you talking about your relationship with God with those friends? Is your union with Christ impacting your interaction with your friends?

When we Christians gather, whether it is on Sunday, or at small group, on outside of a church setting, or whether we are on social media conversing, we encourage and build one another up, showing faith, hope, and love to one another. In the good times, and in the difficult times.

When you are getting ready for a church gathering, may that be your prayer, “Lord, I want to encourage and build up whoever I talk with. You are with me, help me”

When you are coming to a church meeting at the end of a long day, may that be your prayer, “Lord, help me share faith, hope, and love to my church family.”

When you are seated around the dinner table or living room or in the car with your family, may that be your prayer, “Lord, I have union with you, help me share your love with my family.”

What Paul has described for us are followers of Jesus who cultivate close relationships with God, so that the good life of God flows out abundantly to all around them.

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Do you have union with Christ? – 1 Thessalonians 5:5-11, Part 4

In society we refer to marriages as unions. Not like a trade union, but not totally unlike a trade union either. Union is a way to talk about intimate relationship in which two or more become one, in pursuit of a unified goal. Christians, therefore, have union with Christ.

Do you have union with Christ? I’m talking about an important Christian theological principle. What is Union with Christ?

In Galatians 2:20, Paul writes, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” If that sounds familiar, it is because we read that verse in unison together at the conclusion of our worship service a week ago.

In both 1^st Thessalonians 5:10 (this week, as the title of this post suggests, we are studying 1 Thessalonians 5:5–11) and Galatians 2:20, Paul is talking about how Christians can have union with Christ.

In verse 10, Paul says that Union with Christ is living together with Jesus. In Galatians 2:20, Paul describes it as “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.” These are two very early statements of this crucial spiritual principle. It must have been on Paul’s heart and mind at this early stage. Actually, he wouldn’t stop talking about it. Paul would only develop the teaching further.

Listen to how he describes Union with Christ in Ephesians 3:14-19, which is my favorite prayer in all of Scripture: “I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”

Listen to how Jesus himself talks about how he wants to have union with us in a few passages.

John 14:23, “Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.”

John 17:20-26, “My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one—I in them and you in me… Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me. I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.”

In union with Christ, there is a deep inward entanglement between ourselves and Jesus, all of which he initiates and makes possible for those who are his genuine followers. Notice some of the phrases:

“that we may live together with him.”

“that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”

But, you might ask, didn’t Jesus ascend to heaven where he now sits on the right hand of God? Yes. Jesus is not actually here on earth, right? Right. Even though we say things like “Ask Jesus into your heart,” we don’t mean that literally, right? Right. So how can we have union with Christ?

Jesus tells us in John 14:16–20 “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever—the Spirit of truth….you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you…Because I live, you also will live. On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.

In both 1st Corinthians chapter 3 and chapter 6 Paul writes that our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives with us. When we think of the concept of living together with God, that union with Christ happens the moment a person becomes a true follower of Jesus. At that moment, God makes his home in us, as his Spirit lives with us.

Think about that for a moment. Just dwell on that. Right now, God is living with you. In you. Together with you.

Yes, there is a true sense in which 1 Thessalonians 5:5–11 is about the future, when Jesus returns, and we will live with him forever. But this passage is rightly applied to the here and now. It is not as if Paul is saying that you need to die to start living together with God.

Paul has clearly said in his other letters what is true about this phrase in 1 Thessalonians 5:10, we live together with God now through the Holy Spirit living in us. This is why Paul wrote to the Christians in Ephesus that they would deeply experience God inwardly, “that you may be filled to the measure of the fullness of God.”

So at the end of it all, Paul says that this Union with Christ is the goal. This is what Jesus wants. He loves us and wants relationship with us. This is why he died and rose again.

So we should do about Union with Christ? I encourage you to use The Pause App. It has guided prayers that often reference Union with Christ.

Paul also has some ideas in verse 11 for what should happen in the lives of Christians who are “living together with God”, and we’ll learn about his ideas in the next post.

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Three actions that Christians should be known for – 1 Thessalonians 5:5-11, Part 3

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 1^st 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.

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What Paul means when he says Christians are not people of the night – 1 Thessalonians 5:6–8, Part 2

Nighttime is for drinking and sleeping. At least that is when those two activities frequently occur. Let me explain.

Nighttime is for sleeping. Unless you’re like me and sometimes can’t sleep at night. Insomnia is no joke. When my brain starts racing, thinking about all kinds of thoughts, especially if I’m anxious about something, I can have a hard time turning my brain off. But for the most part, nighttime is for sleeping, and when we are asleep, we are oblivious to the world.

Nighttime is also often when people go drinking.

Growing up I was pretty sheltered when it came to alcohol consumption, so I did not observe a drunk person until I was about 20 years old. I think my first encounter with someone who was drunk was in Guyana, South America. I was in that country the summer between my junior and senior year of college on a missionary internship. Guyana is a major producer of sugar cane, and what you can make out of sugar cane in addition to sugar and molasses? Rum!

In the community I was staying in that summer, there was a problem with alcohol abuse because of the easy access to rum. One day I was looking out the window of the missionary’s home, and stumbling down the street comes a man, very disheveled, staggering, mumbling, carrying a bottle of rum. That was during the middle of the day. Sun shining. When you see a person stumbling drunk at high noon, you know there is something very concerning happening in that person’s life.

What Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 5:6–8, is what is much more typical. People sleep at night. People, if they get drunk, typically do so at night, “So then, let us not be like others, who are asleep, but let us be awake and sober. For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk, get drunk at night. But since we belong to the day, let us be sober.”

Whether you are sleeping or drunk, you have no idea of what is happening in the world. It is why we use the word “dead” to describe both of those situations. When a person is in a deep sleep, they are dead to the world. When a person is intoxicated, we say that are drop-dead drunk. The brain is not conscious of what is happening in the world around it.

Paul’s point is that when it comes to the return of Jesus, we Christians are people of the day, not of the night. We are awake, we are sober, we are watching, waiting, aware, conscious, focused, ready, prepared. We are on mission for Jesus. The mission of Jesus is our passion, what our lives are about, as we go about all we regularly do. We do not just turn Jesus or his mission off. We are always on the ready. God’s ways are what we filter all our decisions through.

We work and remain alert on mission. We raise our children and remain alert on mission. We go to coffee with friends and remain alert on mission. We interact with neighbors and we are on mission. We are relaxing in our homes on mission. We are always on mission. We are never not on mission. We live our lives leaning on God. We think about his heart and his ways, seeking to align our lives with his heart and his ways through every event of our lives.

Because we are sober and awake, Paul describes how we live, and we’ll find out what he says in the next post.

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My church building ripped my shirt (and what it taught me) – 1 Thessalonians 5:5-11, Part 1

I have attended half-day prayer retreats with Open Hands Ministries for the last six months or so. If you live in or near South-Central Pennsylvania, you might really appreciate an Open Hands prayer retreat.

Each of the retreats has a different topic, and a couple months ago, the topic was The Dark Night of the Soul.

The Dark Night of the Soul refers to those times in life when it feels God has disappeared. Maybe you’re going through a hard time, crying out to God and you don’t seem to get any response. Maybe you’re going through a normal time, and it just seems like God is hiding.

You know the feeling? Perhaps this passage of Scripture describes what you are feeling:

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, but I find no rest.”

Israel’s great king David wrote that. See Psalm 22. Last year I blogged through the life of King David. Remember some of his dark nights? When King Saul was chasing David, trying to murder him. When David’s son Absalom was overthrowing him.

If that psalm sounds familiar, it’s because Jesus quoted that one from the cross. Talk about a dark night of the soul. It’s real. It is a common experience for Christians to have a dark night of the soul. For months and years even.

When you’re going through a dark night of the soul, is it possible to get closer to God?

What Paul has to say in 1 Thessalonians 5:5-11 relates to us when we are waiting on God, and it seems like he is not responding.

Last week we studied 1 Thessalonians 4:13–5:4. In that previous passage, Paul was teaching about Jesus’ return, saying that Jesus’ return will be sudden, unexpected. Look at what he says, though, in verse 4. “You, brothers and sisters, are not in darkness so that this day should surprise you like a thief.”

We Christians do not need to be surprised at the return of Jesus. Why? Has God told when he is going to return? No. So, is Paul wrong? Won’t Jesus’ return be a surprise for us too? Yes. So what does Paul mean when he says in verse 4 that we are not in darkness, and thus won’t be surprised? It seems to me that we are in the dark as to when Jesus will return. We have no idea when he will return. Jesus himself said we can’t know when he will return. So how can Paul say we shouldn’t be surprised?

In verse 5, Paul begins to answer that question. Here’s what he writes, “You are all children of the light and children of the day. We do not belong to the night or to the darkness.”

Sometimes I walk around my church family’s building, and I don’t turn the lights on, even at night. After 22 years, I think that I know the building well enough that I don’t need lights. The other day, I got a reality check.

I was walking down a dark hallway, and I chose not to put my hands out to sense how close I was to the walls. What you need to know is that the hallway walls are not empty, flat. We have tack strips on our walls.

The strips are one-inch cork board that we use to post notices or kids’ artwork to brighten up our hallways. The cork board is encased in a metal frame.

As I walked what I believed to be a straight line down the middle of the hallway, suddenly something caught my shirt’s shoulder and ripped it open. The ends of the metal frame of the tack strips are sharp. Frankly, I was fortunate they didn’t cut upon my shoulder.

But I must admit, it’s my fault. I was walking in darkness, and I was oblivious to how close I was to the wall. I could have taken precaution. I could have turned on the light.

In 1 Thessalonians 5:5, Paul is saying that we Christians have the light. Of course Paul is speaking figuratively here. He’s saying that the light we have is the awareness of what is true about Jesus’ return. Though we don’t know when, we know that he is coming again. We don’t need to know when. We just need the light of the knowledge that he is coming again, so that we can prepare for it.

How do we prepare? We learn what Paul advises us about how to prepare in the next post.

The bread that almost got me fired – 1 Thessalonians 5:5–11, Preview

In the nine months before October 2002, the date I began ministry at Faith Church, I worked at my denomination’s then seminary, Evangelical School of Theology, as the Director of the Annual Fund.* I had heard of the denomination, the Evangelical Congregational Church, and I had heard of the seminary, but this was the first time I was in close relationship with anyone deeply involved in the life of the denomination or seminary.

I had a shocking experience one day at the seminary, one that opened my eyes to a facet of the denomination’s history that I came to learn was a very big deal. At the time, my wife Michelle was selling Tastefully Simple products. Tastefully Simple creates a variety of delicious sauces, spices, dips, and mixes for easy food prep. A favorite of ours is their beer bread. All you need to do is mix up the batter with a can of beer or lemon-line soda, and bake it. Easy, and so amazing!

A month or so after my start at the seminary, Michelle made some beer bread, and I brought samples to the seminary, had a tasting over lunch, and invited seminary faculty and staff to purchase beer bread mix and dips from Michelle. It was a hit!

Except for an administrator who emailed me later in the day. He had partaken of the beer bread samples and loved it. But when he found out that Michelle used beer to make the bread, he said he never would have allowed it on campus. He even accused me underhandedly circumventing the seminary’s No Alcohol On Campus policy. He was very unhappy.

When you, the rather new employee, get an email like that from an administrator, it ruins your day. In no way were Michelle and I trying to do anything sneaky. Our understanding was that alcohol cooks off in the process of baking, so that the remaining bread is alcohol-free. I mentioned that in my response to him, and that data did not matter to him in the least. Thankfully, he seemed to believe me that I had no ill intent, but he did say something to the effect that this could never happen again.

What I learned that day was that the denomination has a long history of passionate disdain for anything related to alcohol. Years later when I did research in the denomination’s archives, I learned that every issue of our (now defunct) denominational magazine, The United Evangelical, which was published throughout the 1900s, included a full page of articles dedicating to eradicating alcohol in the USA. No surprise, our denomination was founded during American Prohibition in the 1920s.

While that strident anti-alcohol approach was removed from our denomination’s book of order in 2016, our book of order still includes a strong caution about casual consumption of alcohol, and a condemnation, in line with Scripture, of drunkenness. I find the current statement both biblical and reasonable.

When a person is inebriated, proper brain functioning is hampered. Sometimes a person is so drunk they are nearly unconscious. And that brings me to what we are studying this coming week. In the next passage of 1 Thessalonians, Paul uses drunkenness figuratively for how we are not to approach the return of Jesus.

How does Paul use drunkenness to help us understand the return of Jesus? See for yourself in 1 Thessalonians 5:5–11. What Paul has to say is important for all Christians to hear, and his point has nothing to do with alcohol consumption.

*Evangelical Seminary is now a part of Kairos University.

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