God gives us the grace to endure. Maybe you feel emotionally spent, taking care of the kids all day. Maybe you feel overwhelmed by the mounting pressure at work (or school). Maybe you feel depressed about your finances, or that your body is filled with pain. So many people get discouraged by a lack of recognition and appreciation.
One of my dad’s favorite cartoons is of this bird trying to swallow a frog…but the frog has its hands around the bird’s neck, and the caption says, “Never Give Up!” How many times have you wanted to give up, but God gave you the grace to endure?
We posted Kelly Knolls testimony on Facebook. Can you imagine? Kelly’s mother got sick. . . her dad suffered congestive heart failure, developed dementia, and he got diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. And just as Kelly moves her parents into her home to take care of them, her husband gets a job transfer… she discovers she has breast cancer and undergoes a double mastectomy. Then as she’s recovering. . . her mother is diagnosed with colon cancer. . . moved to hospice. . . and learns her sister has cancer.
When life seems too much to handle, God gives us the grace to endure.
I love sitting down with people and listening to their stories. Recently I had breakfast with Dannie Ocasio, our student-ministry intern. He told me how he didn’t grow up with a Christian mindset. His parents weren’t active in church. Because of his disability, he grew up seeing doctors, feeling depressed, feeling isolated, because of all the therapy he had to endure. For a while he hated God. He would think to himself, “If there is a God, he gave me this disability, so why should I trust him?”
[PLAY DANNIE’S STORY]
When life seems too much to handle, God gives us the grace to endure. In 2 Thessalonians 1:3-4 Paul says it this way: “We ought always to thank God for you, and rightly so, because your faith is growing more and more, and the love you have for one another is increasing. Therefore, among God’s churches we boast about your perseverance and faith in all the persecutions and trials you are enduring.”
We’re not surprised when a person gives up. But it’s a sign of God’s grace when instead of a giving up a person grows in faith, their love increases, they persevere, they endure, they embrace adversity to become more like Jesus. Instead of getting angry, throwing a pity party, they find joy serving God in new or different ways.
God doesn’t just give us grace to endure… God uses adversity to make us larger than life. So not only does Paul boast about the Thessalonian’s endurance, he prays that God would “make them worthy of his calling”… that by his power he’d “bring to fruition their every desire for goodness, and every deed prompted by their faith” … that “the name of the Lord would be glorified” in their lives and circumstances… and that it would all happen “according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Think of a time in your life you faced adversity. You could have cursed God, but instead you answered the call of God. You could have descended into some dark depressive hole, but instead you we’re filled with love, and a desire to comfort people with the comfort you yourself received. You could have lost confidence in God, but instead your faith grew, and you trusted God to move mountains. You could have disgraced God’s holy name, doubting his love, his kindness and goodness, but instead you glorified his name. Oh, how God gives us the grace to endure.
In 2 Thessalonians 1-2 Paul alludes to different types of adversity we face.
Trials and Trouble as Adversity
One type of adversity includes “trials” or “trouble.” A trial is losing your job, facing financial uncertainty. A trial is struggling with infertility, struggling through loss, struggling with chronic pain, absorbing the loss of a loved one. A trial is not unlike what Kelly and Dannie endured.
Persecution as Adversity
Another type of adversity includes persecution. A number of you have shared the growing hostility you’ve experienced because you are a Christian. In the same way people hated Christ, Jesus warned people will hate you, insult you, and falsely speak all kinds of evil about you. The enemies of God have many tactics! They question your motives, mischaracterize your good deeds, belittle your faith, ridicule your Biblical morality for being antiquated and narrow, question your intelligence, disassociate from you, exclude you, deny you for promotions. . .
Suffering as Adversity
Another type of adversity includes suffering. I’m not sure though, how many of us have experienced “violence” or physical suffering for Christ. This was the reality for the early Church at Thessalonica. This is the reality for Christians around the world.
Last week I was talking to a pastor who attempted to evangelize Muslims living in Dearborn Michigan. At the time he was leading one of the largest churches in Indianca. Their plan was to setup an outreach event in downtown Dearborn. They would have church people run games, distribute Bibles, and gospel tracts. If you can imagine, the choir practiced all their songs in Arabic. They boarded a bus and off they went.
The first night, they experienced incredible resistance. The Clerics and men stood in front of the choir shouting, “Forbodden, Forbodden.” They instructed young men to ride large bikes through the crowd, and through the rows of chairs, so people couldn’t sit. They aggressively rebuked anyone they spoke to, or saw grabbing a Bible. The second night, they pressured law enforcement to issue citations to the church workers for disturbing the peace. Out of concern for their own safety, they abandoned their outreach efforts.
Whether we’re facing trials, persecution, or violence God gives us the grace to endure. He makes us worthy to answer his call. He increases our faith and love. He glorifies his name. He gives us eternal encouragement and hope.
Listen to what Paul says about God in 2 Thessalonians 3:3, “But the Lord is faithful, and he will strengthen you and protect you from the evil one. We have confidence in the Lord that you are doing and will continue doing the things we command. May the Lord direct your hearts into God’s loves and Christ’s perseverance.”
In 2 Thessalonians 3:16, 18 he prays, “May the Lord of peace himself give you peace at all times and in every way. The Lord be with all of you… the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all…”
In 1 Thessalonians 3:12 Paul prays, “May the Lord make your love increase and overflow for each other and for everyone else, just as ours does for you. May he strengthen your hearts so that you will be blameless and holy in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus comes with all his holy ones.”
And I love 1 Thessalonians 5:23-24, “May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do it!”
Endurance isn’t you. Endurance isn’t me. It’s Christ in you. It’s Christ in me. It’s God grace. It’s the grace of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. God’s grace is perfected in our weakness, and its equal to anything we might need to endure whether triable, our trouble, or tribulation or persecution or suffering.
Lawlessness as Adversity
I want to mention another type of adversity. We’ll call it what the Apostle Paul calls it… Lawlessness. He talks about it at length in 2 Thessalonians. At the very root of sin is what the Bible calls lawlessness. Lawlessness is when a person is governed by no greater principle than their own self, or their own flesh. Apostle Paul warns church that a “Man of Lawlessness” was about to emerge on the stage… A man who would oppose and exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshipped. A man who would set himself up in God’s holy temple, and proclaim himself to be God.
A lot of people speculate over who the Man of Lawlessness was, or is, or will be. But what Paul points out is that the secret power of lawlessness is already at work. The days are already growing evil. Not only are people wicked, but they delight in their own brand of wickedness. Their consciences are seared. People are being deluded. They are perishing because they refuse to the love the truth and so be saved.
Folks are rightfully alarmed, and not just Christian people. A Spirit of Lawlessness has infected every layer of society—where men become a law unto themselves. They are not subject to God. Nor are they subject to man’s laws. The Scandals. The Housing collapse. Wall Street. The Banks. The Sciences. The Courts. The FBI/ CIA/ NSA. The highest offices in land. We see lawlessness. And more than this, we have mass delusion. We have people too fleshly, too greedy and corrupt, too selfish, too political and partisan, to speak for truth against Lawlessness. This election comes down to which brand of lawlessness has the least potential liability for our land.
I know many of you are distraught over the future of our nation. We shouldn’t imagine that we are facing something wholly different than the early Christians faced. Here is how Paul encouraged the Thessalonians….
Assurance: God Gives Grace.
God will give you the grace to endure whatever adversity you face—whether it’s a trial, temptation, trouble, persecution, suffering, sheer Lawlessness. God will increase your faith, your love, and enable you to bear up under suffering. (1:11-12)
Assurance: God Is Just.
God will pay back trouble to those who trouble you. He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey. God will reveal himself with blazing fire and with his powerful angels. He will punish those who are evil with everlasting destruction and shut them out from the presence of the Lord and his glorious might. He will overthrow the Lawless One with the breath of his mouth and the splendor of his coming.
Often we want to take matters into our own hands. We want to met our justice, and make people pay. Think of it this way… with God there will be perfect retribution against evil… and it will occur in God’s time, in God’s way, and not in our time or in our way. (1:5-9)
Assurance: God is Good.
Not only will God provide relief—we will never be overcome by evil. God will also provide vindication for his people. When he comes he will take us to be with him. He will glorify us in his presence, we will be marveled at among the nations, because we have believed.
Assurance: God Is In Control
I need two volunteers. I need two people to unravel this string across the room. This span of string represents all time, eternity. These little dots represent George Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton. Friends God’s being sitting on his throne before this election. He’ll be sitting on his throne throughout this election. And he’ll be sitting on his throne long after this election. And no matter how LAWLESS any one man become… and no matter how DELUDED THE LAWLESS MASSES become… God is sovereign of all things.
And what Paul is inviting us to do is to stand firm, and to endure, because our life is just a dot. But if we will believe the truth of Jesus we will reign with God in his everlasting kingdom. No politician is going to bring the Kingdom of God. There is only one man, our Lord Jesus Christ, who can save. And the key to endurance is to shift our confidence away from self, and lawless men, to the eternal Christ.
“May God make us worthy of his calling…”