Paul Thanks God because the Thessalonians are persevering under trial.
The first blog post in this series encouraged giving thanks to God for spiritual growth. The second post encouraged giving thanks to God for increasing love. In this last post of the series Paul thanks God because the Thessalonians are persevering under trial. Paul writes in 2 Thessalonians 1:3-4:
We ought always to thank God for you, brothers, and rightly so, because your faith is growing more and more, and the love every one of you has for each other is increasing. Therefore, among God’s churches we boast about your perseverance and faith in all the persecutions and trials you are enduring.
Thanksgiving Day may be over, but thanking God never is because God is at work. The steady perseverance of the Thessalonian’s was so noteworthy that Paul boasts about it ‘among God’s churches’ (v. 4). Since their faith and love had increased, they were spiritually strong enough to persevere under the persecutions and trials they were enduring.
Paul notes how powerfully the grace of God was operating in the lives of the Thessalonian believers in that they continue to follow Christ through the pressures of persecution and various trials. This is a result of the grace of God. They press on encouraged by their growing faith and love. So as a result, this testimony is an encouragement for other churches and brings more praise and thanksgiving to God.
The content of Paul’s thanksgiving shows his Biblical understanding of God’s pattern of truth he brings to his intercession—and we urgently need to develop the Biblical pattern.
Let us pray for the individual members of our church family and thank God for signs of grace in their lives.