1 Thessalonians 3:9-13 Pastor Nathan P. Kassulke
First Sunday in Advent Sunday, December 1, 2024 “Our Earnest Advent Prayer for You”
Three weeks and three days. I don’t know if you will think of this as good news or bad, but that is the amount of time we have before Christmas arrives—three weeks and three days. Good or bad depends a lot on perspective and context. Is that a long time because you still need to wait that long, even as Christmas music and decorations have been showing up for a while already? Or is that way too short because you have so much shopping and so many preparations to get done? Isn’t there a tension between wanting more time to get things done and wanting the holiday to arrive with its happy celebrations? In a way, that’s a lot like the season of the Church Year known as Advent. There’s a certain hope and a palpable joy. We’re getting ready to celebrate Christmas. But there’s a tension, because we need to wait, and we need to examine ourselves, and we need to consider some hard truths if we’re going to celebrate in the most meaningful and most important ways. So Advent takes us places. It has us consider biblical events that make us think about preparations that God and people made for Christ’s first coming as a baby. Advent calls on us to learn lessons and apply them. Advent helps prepare us for Christ’s second coming as an all-powerful judge. Advent takes us to places like Jerusalem and Nazareth and Bethlehem. Advent takes us to the wilderness near the Jordan River. And today Advent takes us to a place that sounds a little less “Advent-ty.” Today we’re making a stop in a city called Thessalonica. The Apostle Paul visited the city of Thessalonica on his Second Missionary Journey. The city was in a region called Macedonia. That region is notable because it marked Paul’s first visit into what we now call Europe. God even sent Paul a dream in which a man from Macedonia asked Paul to come his direction to share the Gospel. That’s exactly what Paul and his fellow travelers and missionaries did. Their first stop in Macedonia was Philippi. Paul and Silas got into some trouble there. They hadn’t committed any crimes, but they upset some people. They were beaten and imprisoned. The book of Acts tells us about how they witnessed to a jailer in the prison there who became a believer along with other people in the city. After they were released from prison in Philippi, Paul and Silas, along with Timothy and others, went on to Thessalonica. For three weeks they preached in the synagogue there, and God brought many people to faith. But then more trouble started. Jews who were jealous started a riot. They stirred up a mob of people against the missionaries. It got so bad that Paul had to leave. It got so bad that he couldn’t even stay in Berea, his next stop. People were listening to him there and learning well, but Thessalonian mobs came there, too. So Thessalonica was a place where Paul had preached and taught and met people and had seen them come to faith, and then he had to leave. This didn’t necessarily surprise Paul. He knew that the Gospel would face opposition. He knew that believers would face persecution. It didn’t surprise him, but it did concern him. How would the new, young Christians fare in Thessalonica while they faced persecution and such a heated environment? Well, Paul wanted to know. He sent Timothy to go see and return with a report. This was all while Paul’s missionary journey continued. Timothy came back with good news. The Thessalonian Christians were holding up. They were letting their lights shine. They were not giving up on Christianity or Jesus even in hard times. They were holding firmly to the faith. On hearing that good news, Paul, inspired by God’s Holy Spirit, wrote a letter. We call that letter 1 Thessalonians. The third chapter of that letter gives us some particular words to consider on our little visit to Thessalonica this morning. In this section, Paul talks about his earnest prayer for the Christians of that city. It is a deep and rich prayer. We’ll summarize it in three parts: He is thankful for their faith, hopeful for their love, and confident of their holiness. First, thankful. Paul gives thanks to God for the faith of the Thessalonians. Faith was God’s gift to them, and knowing about their faith was God’s gift to Paul. After being worried about the people he had to