Well, hey, good morning, church. So good to see you this morning. I am glad you're in the room. And if you're new here or you're visiting with us today, and you were coming to check out Pastor Jamie. I ain't he.

Okay. I'm not the one. He is away on vacation. He'll be back next week with us. But I do get the privilege of serving here as your pastor of discipleship.

And in the preaching schedule for this month, I am signed the task that we are gonna study in the Bible in first Thessalonians. And if you wanna go ahead and take your Bible, turn there to 1 Thessalonians. And we're gonna kind of work our way through chapter three this morning. And as you're turning there, let me ask a question. How many of you are puzzle people?

You put puzzles together. How many of you in the room?

All right, so the rest of you listen and learn. Okay? Just. That's all I know right there. So when you get together and you put a puzzle together and there are some puzzles that, I mean, are like 500 to 1,000, that's kind of an average one.

Like, the most I've ever seen was somewhere up to 15,000 to 40,000 pieces in a puzzle. But you know how it works when you put a puzzle together, right? What you do is you open the box and you dump out all the pieces on the table and you start flipping pieces over and you look for the corners, you look for the outer edge pieces and stuff like that. And then looking for the colors that match. You're flipping it all over right?

Now. You puzzle building people, you tell everybody in the room. What happens after all the pieces are flipped over where all the colors are kind of stuck together. What do you start looking at? Yeah, the picture, the lid, Right?

Because the lid, I mean, listen. Most of y' all really need to listen close here because you're not learning, right? The lid is critical because you got all these pieces in there. But. But you don't know what these pieces are gonna look like without the lid.

Cause the lid has the picture. It's the guide. It tells you where these pieces are gonna go together. And it's the only way, you know, when you're finished that you accomplished the goal. What if you went and bought a puzzle that had all this in it and the front was like this.

You know what you would be doing? You'd be guessing, and then sooner or later, you'd just rake it all back in the box and you'd be done with it because you have no idea what this is supposed to look like. All those pieces don't make any sense at all because you have no picture, you have no God, you have no idea. Can I tell you from the get go, that kind of reminds me of what people have done with life. Whether it's marriage, whether it's parenting, whether it's family, whether it's.

Whether it is like hardships and difficulties, whether it's temptation, whatever it is. What they're trying to do is build their life on a picture. They have no clue what it's like. And they are guessing at what marriage should be like. They are guessing at what it means to raise their children the way God designed them to be raised.

They are guessing at what it's like whenever you begin to think about making decisions in life. They're just guessing because what they've done is they've looked to the culture around them and they have decided that maybe TikTok and Instagram and Facebook or whatever social media or influencers are in your world, they have tried to help you figure out the picture and they keep getting it wrong. So the only way for us to ever figure out what God wants us to understand and to think is to quit looking at the blank box and pick up this book. Because this book is where God helps us to understand clearly what he wants us to know about any and all of those areas that we just listed. And there's another thing that we need to realize that we need to stop looking at the box of the world and what it's trying to tell us it should be like is the church.

When we think of what is church supposed to be, what is it supposed to be like? If we are not careful, we will let the culture and the influencers or whatever is out there shape our idea and build the picture of what we think the church should be. And I have determined in my life there's basically two polar opposites people come to whenever they're trying to decide what should church be and what is church? One is the critic. The culture.

The world around them has caused them to think in a critical way about the church. Who are those people thinking they are better than us? They're just a bunch of hypocrites. There's nothing of any value in that. We're wasting our time.

That get together thing that churches did back in that day, that's where back in that day, today we're much more connected through all technology and things like that. We don't need to get together as a church. That's the critic. And then there's the other extreme, and that's called the consumer who goes looking at church and saying, what is it going to do for me? What will it give my family?

Now, listen, we want to love our church people. We want to serve our families. We want to equip them and help them to be all that God intends them to be. But if you're starting point is, what does it do for me? You've been looking at the wrong box.

Because when you open your Bible and you come to a book like First Thessalonians, what Paul is doing is he is saying, let me show you the picture on the lid. You want to see what the church looks like. You want to know what the church looks like. This is the book that helps us to understand it. And if you want to take your notes there, you'll see in review what Pastor Jamie has been leading us through in this study on being resolute.

The first word I put in my Bible whenever I started studying this book was I put the word saved over chapter one. When Paul writes and tells us about this church, he is telling us that this is a church that is a saved church. Now this is interesting here because he says that when you heard the Gospel in verse nine, you turned to God from idols to serve the living and the true God. Listen, that's true of every one of you. When we think about the church, let's just remember this.

Listen, when we say church, we're talking about us as people. We are not talking about a building. You know what this is? It's a building. It's a room where we, the church, gather.

And when we gather, it's called the household of God, the temple of God, the dwelling of God. God is in us as his people. And when we come together, we. We are his house. We are his building.

And that's important because we sometimes put too much emphasis on a place and not the person. It's God in us, Christ in us, the hope of glory. And so here's the reality, brothers and sisters. When we leave out of this building, there's no God in the building because God is in you. And God is in me.

And Christ is in us. It's not like fire that leaves a smell of smoke when the fire is over. The fire is in us. The life is in us. And so when we think about church, we're talking about when we are together.

And Paul says one of the things that the church is defined as and described is they are saved church. Those people, those Individuals know what it's like to say, I have turned from those idols, those things that I thought would give me life in the world, the things I was trusting in, the things that I thought would satisfy me. They are broken cisterns. They use the Old Testament language. It's like a web with the bottom busted out.

You're never going to be satisfied when you try to find it there. And we as Christians, we know that, and we have turned from that to the true and the living God. Number two. In chapter two, I put the word a serving church. It's a serving church.

And the way we know that is Paul says, when we came to you in chapter two, we didn't just come to present the Gospel to you, we came to present ourselves to you. That's what real church life is about. Church life is not about just imparting something informationally and theologically, though we do give information and we need to communicate clear theology. But it's really about saying, we are here to serve you. We're here to give ourselves to one another.

And that's what this church was. It was a serving church. And he didn't just say, we did that so that you could know what we did. He said, we did that so that you would become that. And he tells them, in chapters one and two, you followed our example and you modeled what we were doing in your church.

So it's a saved church, it's a serving church. And that's important because that means that's you and that's me. And here's what's crazy about this is like, as Jamie told us, this church is probably only three weeks old. He spent three weeks with it, and then he had to leave because he got ran out of town. But in those three weeks, this church is a model.

It's an example. It's the picture you want us to look like. A saved church and a serving church. It didn't have 177 years since 1849, with all kind of legacy and history and discipleship and missions. It didn't have all that.

But what he said was, what it has is what makes us tick. It's the picture you're after. A saved church and a serving church. Now, if you want to write the word over chapter three or in your notes, here's what the third chapter I have for this. This is a stable church.

A stable church. Now, I'm gonna go ahead and warn you. I was assigned this passage. I didn't pick the passage. And it's about life being hard.

It's about suffering, it's about persecution, it's about hardships in the Christian life. Jamie took off and went on vacation, right? And he gave me this passage. So I'm just telling you, whatever comes out of the passage, it's just what the passage says. So when you come to this, what Paul is saying is, hey, we got ran out of town.

And there was something just weighing on us. In fact, if you look at chapter three, verse one, that's how he tees it up and reminds us of where he's going to go with this therefore, when we could endure it no longer. The therefore takes you back up to verses 17 to 19 in chapter two, where he says, we've been absent from you, now, not from our hearts, our spirit. We want to be there, but we're physically not there. And when we could endure it no longer, here's what he's saying, listen.

When I could not bear the thought or the pressure, this consuming desire about how you were doing, when I could not endure it any longer, we thought it best if we left behind when we left behind at Athens alone. And we would send Timothy, verse two, our brother and God's fellow worker in the gospel. And what he's saying is that I just needed to know how you were doing. And I sent Timothy to do two things to you, the church in Thessalonica, to strengthen you and to encourage you. And when he says here that he sent him to strengthen them, what he's saying here is I sent him to support you, to establish you, to make you firmly fixed so nothing could shake you, that you would be stable, and I wanted him to encourage you.

You know that word if you studied your Bible, it's the same word for the Holy Spirit that's used in the Greek language. To come alongside, to come along to comfort you, to come along to strengthen you. He's saying, we wanted Timothy to come and give you strength and give you encouragement so that your faith would not wobble, but it would stay firm on that foundation. And he got good news from Timothy. So verse three, down to the end of the chapter in verse 13 is Paul's way of rehearsing the good news that he got from Timothy.

And the good news, listen, brothers and sisters, was not that everything stopped being hard for them. The good news was not that now troubles are over in your life. It's all going to be good. It'll be your best life now every day is going to be a Friday. That was not the good news.

The good news was you weren't Shaken. Nothing stopped you from still trusting him. Now, as he tells us in verses three, two verses three to verse 13, he gives us six pieces, what I'm going to call six pieces to the puzzle of a stable and resolute church. And these six things, I like that because I like puzzles that don't have 500 to a thousand pieces. I like puzzles that have two to 24.

That's the real simple ones, the kind that Adaline puts together, right? And I love those. That's my speed. So today, all we gotta do is look at six pieces for a picture we're gonna create of what does a stable church look like? What does it look like?

Well, here's what it looks like. First piece you want to write down. Stable believers rest in God's appointment. That's verse three, he says, so that no one would be disturbed by these afflictions, for you yourselves know you should circle that word. No, they know this.

He's like, I'm hearing how you're standing, and I'm just reminding you, you know this. You know that we have been destined for these things. And I would underline the word destined, because the word destined is critical to how we rest in God's appointment or God's design and God's purpose. Paul is saying, whatever you're going through church, and I'll say, whatever you're going through church is not an accident. It is not randomly happening in your life.

Whether that's that struggle in marriage, whether that struggle in family, whether it's struggles at work, whether it struggles with your health, you just make your list out of whatever it is that's difficult for you as a believer right now. That is no accident in your life. The interesting thing about that word that is destined, it is the same exact Greek word that is used when the shepherds came at the birth of Jesus and they found the baby lying in a manger. The word lying there or laying there, is the word destined. I mean, Jesus didn't show up in Bethlehem on that morning in that stable by accident.

God laid him in the stable. It was his purpose. It was his plan. It was an appointed moment. And what you and I have got to remember is when trials come, God has laid that in your life.

If you don't believe that, you don't rest in that, you will be unstable. But if you can somehow lay hold of that and remember that stability starts when we, the church, we individual, we as the people, realize that we are resting in God's appointment.

It doesn't mean that I understand Everything that's going on in that trial. But what it does mean is, I trust someone in that trial, and that is God himself. God has not lost control. If I believe God has lost control and my suffering is random. Here's what you'll do.

I will and you will. I will panic if I think it's meaningless. I will despair if I think. And I tell myself this is unfair. I should not be going through this.

I am going to become bitter. But I'll be content if I know my trial has passed through the hands of my father, my sovereign God, who loves me and cannot make a mistake. I can truly sing those words. He won't fail. I know he won't.

Because he is my God and he is my father. Doesn't mean you don't question things. It doesn't mean you don't have real tears. It just means I know God has not lost control. You may have never seen it coming, but he saw it because he appointed it.

He destined it for you. So a resolute church starts with that. Resolute people start with that as well. You know, one of my favorite Old Testament characters is Job in the story of Job. And the story of Job is a story of where God permitted him to go through some, let's just say, this severe.

And that's saying it mildly. To lose everything you have in all your kids in a day is beyond imaginable. And it's so hard and it's so difficult for Job that the text says that he arose. And he said, the Lord gives and the Lord takes. Blessed be the name of the Lord.

And we're kind of trite with that. Like he just said, the Lord gives, the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. But the text says he arose, which means he probably got knocked on the ground. The information was so overwhelming that it just flattened him.

But he got up and he said the right thing. And he believed the right thing didn't mean the questions went away. Because there are 42 chapters in that book to show you questions are not immediately answered and satisfying to us. But what Job did do is Job. This is the key to that whole book.

He moved from the why questions to the what points. Why questions are, why is this happening to me? Why do I have to go this. Why is this taking so long in my life? That's why stuff.

You just sooner or later throw those away and forget that. And what you ask yourself is, what do I have? What do I have is a God who hangs stars in the universe. A God who creates snow, a God who creates hippopotamuses. And he asked Job all these questions, you ever done any of that?

And so Job would go, whoa, I think I really spoke out of turn. It's not that my problem is too big, Job said, the problem is my view of you is just too small and I need to get it bigger. So I wonder this morning, is your concept of our God anchored in the truth? That you can rest in the fact that this is not an accident, it's appointed by God. I don't have to know how and why it's going on.

I don't even have to really understand all the pieces of it. I just need to rest in God's appointment number two, Second piece of the puzzle. Stable believers, remember God's announcement, verse 4. For indeed, when we were with you, we kept telling you in advance that we were going to suffer affliction. And so it came to pass, as you know, Paul is saying, remember, you were told this a long, long time ago.

It's not like the gospel and the Christian life has this fine print somewhere hidden away that you couldn't see and you didn't know that. Said, you know what, with the Christian life comes trouble. The Bible reminds us that all who live godly in Christ Jesus will what, Everything will go well for them? Everything will be easy for them? No, they will suffer persecution.

Jesus said, in the world, when you walk out of this room and you go back out in that world, I don't care if it's at Walmart, I don't care if it's at the Job, I don't care if it's in a fan. Wherever you go out in that world, you will have, he said, trouble. That's the world we have. There is no fine print. There is no secretly just sleep it in.

What he says here real clearly is that we told you before, we didn't just tell you once. We kept telling you over and over again, over and over again. And listen, as a discipleship pastor, I love these commands of Jesus. I've been studying with these men for a long period of time. We'll have a year and a half together as men studying the commands of Jesus.

And one of the ones that is so obvious that Jesus didn't hide it from his disciples is when he said in Matthew 16:24, if anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself, take up his cross and do what? Follow me. The only way you're going to follow me is if you say no to you and take up the cross. And the cross is not taking up some difficulty or hardship. The difficulty he's talking about, the hardship he's talking about here is the ridicule and the shame that comes with following him.

It's what Peter is talking about, persecution for those who live godly in Christ Jesus. You see, those people understood when Jesus said, hey, you see over there, that guy walking down the street being laughed at, beaten, spit on, clothes torn off of him. How shameful and embarrassing that is. He's like the worst of the worst. He is a criminal.

And Jesus said, that picture right there, that's the picture of following me. So when we hear the Bible say, this is coming, we shouldn't be saying, how could this happen? Why am I going through this? I don't understand it. It's because we have forgotten that he's already told us, don't forget.

Remember this announcement. Life will be hard. It's kind of the difference between being caught in a storm and being warned, the storm is coming. If I'm called in a storm, it's like, oh, my goodness, what are we going to do? I never saw that coming.

But if we hear the announcements, hey, the storm is coming, the hurricane, the tornado, it is coming. What people do is they start preparing for it. And Paul knows that if you don't prepare for it and don't remember it's going to happen, it will potentially the stable. You'll become unstable in that moment. There's one of my favorite verses along this line found in First Peter, the one I quoted earlier, but in chapter four, verse nine, when he talks about, don't be surprised at these things that come.

Don't be shocked because we've told you they're coming. Keep your focus on future glory that is to be revealed. And then he says, entrusting your soul to the faithful Creator and doing what is right. A little word there, entrust is so important because when you're in that trial, when you're in that difficulty, one of the things Peter says to do is entrust it. And this is an interesting word.

It means to bank. It's a banking word. To entrust is a word that means to deposit something for safekeeping.

He said, I want you to deposit your trust, your confidence, your reliance upon him, because he's the one that will keep you safe in the trial. It may hurt, but it's not going to destroy me. Peter is saying, I may grieve, but it's not going to be without hope. I may be confused, but I'm not going to be abandoned. I'm resolute in that everything is deposited in a safe place and safe keep.

So number three, third piece of the puzzle. Stable believers recognize Satan's attack. Look at verse 5. For this reason, when I could endure it no longer, I also sent to find out about your faith for fear that the tempter might be tempted, might tempted you and your labor, and our labor would be in vain. Don't you love reading this about the apostle Paul?

I was afraid, the apostle is saying. I was really afraid. Not like, oh, God's not in charge afraid. Oh, no, not in charge. Not like, fear like, you know, like, I'm not sure how's this going to turn out.

Not that kind of fear, but the kind of, like, deep concern. It weighed on him, heavy on him.

And when he says, like, I was afraid we have labored in vain, he's not saying, hey, what you do really is what makes me feel like I'm successful. That's not what he means. He's just saying, I didn't want this to go sideways because I knew. I knew that there's a tempter coming after you. Now, you want to hear something really interesting?

I think from the text? He didn't say that he would tempt you to rebel, or he didn't say that the adversary would come and turn you against God. The word tempt means to lure you away, to make you question, to make you doubt, to make you wonder. Is that true? He did the same thing in the garden.

First of all, nothing's new with Eve. He tried the same thing with Jesus in the wilderness when he tempted him. Same idea. And Paul is saying, I'm really concerned. It's weighing on me.

I'm away from you and I miss being with you. But I need to know that you're aware that there is a tempter. And you want to know something? He does it most often in your times of hardships, in the times of difficulty, when you're tired, when you're lonely, when you're struggling, when you feel like you're alone. All of that just tees it up.

And he looks for like he did with Jesus after he left him. Another opportune moment to come and hit you again. And he's going to do that. And what Paul is saying, I want you to recognize that. Listen, I don't want to get off in the weeds over here and in any way discount the sovereignty of God over the devil because he is sovereign over him.

Luther used to put it this way. The devil is God's Devil. He's on the chain of his sovereignty. And if you've ever read any great resources like Pilgrim's Progress, you'll see that Pilgrim was afraid. He was scared when he saw the two lines.

And then Bunyan says, but he forgot they were chained. They were chained. So they are chained by God's sovereignty. But we don't want to overly emphasize the fact that he goes and does everything he wants to do because he's under sovereign control. But we don't want to be naive about what he can do and what he can do.

Paul really understood that he could be doing that because, as Peter reminds us in first Peter 5:8, he's like a roaring lion, an adversary seeking to devour us. Us.

It's not in your nose, but somewhere on the side. Maybe you want to jot this down. Three very common ways. He tempts us when we're tired, when we're lonely, when we're in the struggle, when we feel like this is overwhelming to us. Three very, very common things.

Number one, we often are tempted to doubt the goodness of God, to doubt his goodness. Satan will whisper or put into your head these ideas. If God really loved you, and this would not be happening. If God really cared, he would have stopped this by now. If we are really good, we won't go through any more of this.

He did it in the beginning. He tried it with Christ, and he's going to do it with you. So watch out for him to lure you away from how good God is. Number two. He will tempt us often to retaliate with anger and resentment.

Retaliate with anger and resentment. Especially when the trial involves other people. We replay what they did. We nurse our hurt. We justify our bitterness.

We think about what we want to say or do or get even with them about, even though we're clear. And the Bible has told us in James 1:20 that the anger of man does not achieve the righteousness of God. In other words, you try to use your sinful anger to accomplish something, you'll never get what God was after. Romans 12:19 says, Never take your own vengeance, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God. Don't you go trying to avenge yourself.

You leave that to God, who will do it just and right and fair if it needs to be done. I remember one time I was talking to a person and we went over that verse. She said, oh, let me get that straight. Are you telling me God is going to be my divine hitman? He's going to get them really good for me What?

I said, no, that's not what it's saying. What it's saying is, you need to leave vengeance alone. It's not your business. That's his. So we are often tempted to doubt his goodness, to retaliate with anger and resentment.

And thirdly, we're often tempted to give in to despair and discouragement. Nothing's going to change. Nothing good will ever come from this. I can't keep going. It's not worth it.

That's why Paul is concerned, because he knew that could happen to the church. That is why stability requires alertness, being aware and recognizing we have an adversary, a tempter, against us. You know, in the psalms, God does not hide from us these struggles that we as God's people have. These psalms of lament. 70% of them are struggles about life that's going on in the believer's life and how to see God in it.

One of my favorite ones is Psalm 73, named by a guy named Asaph. And Asaph is looking out at the world. Those who are non believers, people who don't go to the temple, people who don't worship God, people who don't care about pleasing him. And he looks at them and he says, you know what? Everything's going really good for them.

I mean, they got money, they got food, they're fat. And that was a good thing in their day because that mean you were eating well and all that. He's just talking about how well things are for them. And then he looks at himself with all of his troubles and all of his struggles. And he said, I feel like I have washed my hands in vain.

That means, like God, I think I cleaned up my life. I started doing the things you wanted me to do. And I did it all for nothing. It was a waste of time. Everything's going wrong for me, and everything seems to be going well for them.

You ever been there? That's what Tempter will do. He will draw you into that place. But then the psalm turns, like all psalms do when they talk about their struggles. They turned and they find God in the struggle.

And he says this. I had almost lost hope until I came into the sanctuary of God. In their culture, in their context, that's the place where God said he would meet them. And then he remembered their end. He said, listen, life doesn't end here.

And now it's not about this time here. It's about what is to come. And can I tell you something, brothers and sisters? Listen. We, as the church, we are headed for home.

We are headed for heaven. Not as an escapist kind of mentality, just to get out of life, but that's where we're destined, that's where we're going. And whatever troubles you are going through and we may go through it, is the closest to hell we will ever get in this life because heaven is our home. That's where we're going. But till then, we got a tempter and we have to recognize he's there to attack.

Can I give you the fourth piece of the puzzle? Number four. Stable believers remain in faith and love. That's what verse six says. But now that Timothy has come to us from you and has brought good news of your faith and love and that you always think kindly of us, longing to see us, just as we also long to see you, it's his way of saying, what was bothering me, not only was the fact that I'm wondering if you're resting in God's appointment, that you know he's in charge.

If you're remembering like we told you this was going to happen and that you go, you have an adversary and you recognize that. But I really needed to hear from Timothy that your faith and your love stayed focused. Why is that important? Because faith and love do two things. Faith points us vertical, love points us horizontal.

Faith points us to God. Love points us to others. In the one sense, we could say it like this. When we think of faith, faith looks to God, trusts in his character, believes his word and says, God is using this in my life for my good. And love says, how can I move towards others?

How can I serve his people? How can I not withdraw? How can I see God is going to use this in my life and for others in my life. You see, faith has its focal point on God. Love has its focal point on others.

And the reason that is important is because in the trial, if there's one thing that happens, we become more self absorbed. Listen, we're just like that by nature, right? If you don't think you're that way, just think about this. The next time you look at a picture of you with somebody else in a group, who's the first person you notice in the picture? It's you, right?

I don't notice Pam in the picture. I don't notice everybody else. I notice me. I go, look at that belly on that guy. That boy needs to lose some weight.

We're naturally absorbed with being taken up with us. And when trials come, they intensify self focus. And so what Paul is saying, it just brings Me joy to be reminded that your faith is still stable. It's still godward, it's still trusting. It's still relying on him.

It's still resting in him. And your love for each other, man, that's still there. Nothing shook that away at all. That's not easy, and I don't want you to think it is easy. But like a compass in the storm, that's what faith and love is like.

You can't see past the storm. You don't know where the shore is. You don't know where you're headed, except you trust. This thing called a compass that says, keep me focused. Faith and love are like that spiritual compass to keep us focused.

All right, number five, fifth piece. Stable believers reinforce others by standing firm. You notice in verses 7 and 8, for this reason, brethren, in all our distress and affliction, we were comforted, man. We wanted to be content that things were well with you and we were about you through your faith. For now, we really live.

If you stand firm in the Lord, just clearly understand, Paul is not putting this burden on them. If you live well, I'll be happy. He's not saying they are the source of his happiness, not in the sense that you are the ones who make me happy. Christ is his source. God is his source of his joy and his happiness and that he's in control.

But he is saying, you're a real cause of what gives me joy, and the real cause of my joy is that you are standing firm. Have you ever stopped to think about this? When God lets you go through whatever you're going through, his end goal is not just helping you get through that and get on the other side of that. He has a bigger goal. And that goal is others who are going to come into your life and in your world.

When Paul wrote to the Corinthians, he said, blessed be the God of all comfort who comforts us in all of our troubles. And that's great. He comforted us, but he did it so that we ourselves may comfort others with the same comfort we have been comforted with. So don't think this is only about you. He's thinking about this man, this woman, this boy, this girl, this college student, this friend of yours, this individual who just comes into your world.

And God is saying, I'm going to direct them right to you because I'm using this not just for you, but for others as well. So it reinforces the truth here for stable believers to realize, hey, when we stand firm, it really impacts others. And here's the last piece here. Number six, Stable believers rely on prayer. That just seems like, how could that be something we needed to be reminded of?

Because it seems so obvious here. He says in verses 9 to 13, for what thanks can we render to God? So now he's celebrating. He is excited and thrilled that all those things, those five pieces are all in place. And he says verse 10.

And night and day we keep praying most earnestly that we may see your face and we may complete what is lacking in your faith. We are praying that God will let us be back together.

And he's reminding us in this that we as believers, if we're going to be stable, rely on the God we're trusting. And we pray. He doesn't just simply pray. Lord bless them. He teaches us some important things about what to pray for.

And here they are. Number one, in verse 11, he prays for God's direction. May God our Father himself and Jesus our Lord direct our way to you. That's a good thing, to pray for each other, right? Lord, direct them, help them to acknowledge you in all their way so that you may direct their path.

Praying the word like that. He's praying for God's direction. Number two, he's praying for increasing love. Verse 12 calls them to increase and abound in love for one another and for all people. Again, remember, trials tend to get you self focused.

So he's praying that they will increase, that they have it. But I don't want it to stop, he says. I want it to keep growing and overflowing and abounding in their life. And then number three, he prays for established hearts. That stuff on the inside, strength on the inside.

And we all know this again because whenever we are around people, we can look real good. We can put on a smile, we can be very polite and all that, but really caving on the inside. So he's praying really clear. Establish their hearts, establish them on the inside. Let them have that inner sense of all those things that we just talked about in that list.

Fourthly, he prays for their holiness. And holiness is not listening about what you wear, where you go, what you do necessarily. Holiness is what you are. And he's praying for their holiness before God. Like what does it look like to be holy before God?

Well, I'll tell you what it looks like. It looks like being like Jesus. That's what he wants. He wants them in that holiness before God to actually be more and more reflecting his son rather than the unstable person who prays. Lord, get me out of this the stable person says, lord, make me like your son through this.

So listen. Finally he says verse 13, so that he may establish your hearts without blame in holiness before our Lord, before our God and Father, at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints. What that brings us down to is this final bottom line statement here where we realize that when we talk about a church that is resolute, being resolute is meaning that in the purposes of God, it's resulting in a life establishing stability. We're stable people. Nothing shakes us, nothing moves us.

You can close your Bible. You can close it up, because I want to just wrap it up with a couple stories here.

Sometimes you meet a person in life where you go, wow, make me like that, Lord. And this person I had the privilege of spending three days with one time was Joni Eareckson Tada. And Joni Eareckson Tada, if you know her story, jumped into a shallow place of water, broke her neck, became a quadriplegic when she was 17 years old, and today she is 76 years old. For 59 years, from her neck down, nothing has worked. People feed her, people clothe her, people bathe her, people wipe her up.

People do all the things you could think of, need to be done, and life is really, really hard. And when I got to spend the time with her, it was obvious. This is an incredible woman with joy like you wouldn't believe. She's not faking it till she makes it. She's really happy.

And she has this statement, she said to us when we were together, she said, kevin, sometimes God permits what he hates to accomplish what he loves. You say, I don't know about that. Well, let's just go to the gospel real quick. God permitted sinners, religious leaders, to take his son, to beat him, to spit on him, to make fun of him, to call him names. Did God get a kick out of that?

No, he did not get a kick out of that. Did he take pleasure in the sense that, oh, I like what's happening to my son? No. But he sometimes permits, allows, sovereignly brings into our lives things that we would look at and go, I don't like that. And he would say, that's not really good enough itself, but I love where it's going to get you.

What it brought was salvation to a world. And what God will do in your life, in my life, if we respond to that is we will find that we are being more and more conformed to being like Christ. And isn't that our great hope? Isn't that what's going to happen in that day when we see him face to face, we will be made like him. And that passage ends like in chapter one, with the coming of Christ, Chapter two, the coming of Christ, and chapter three, the coming of Christ.

Because listen to this. The coming of Jesus is the fuel to our life. It's what the saved are looking for, the final day of redemption. It's what keeps us serving. Because he came not to serve, but to serve and to give his life a ransom.

And it's that hope of his coming and the kingdom coming and this world becoming a new heavens and a new earth where we dwell in righteousness, that stabilizes us. So I wonder what you're going through. I wonder what it is today that God is asking you to respond. In that list. If you just prayed, lord, make me stable, which one of those six things would be make me stable in that if that's true of you, then I'm going to give you an opportunity as we sing in a moment, just to come and make that your time with the Lord.

Lord, make me stable. If you're in the room and it's really possible you're in the room and you don't know Christ, you're not a believer. Your prayer isn't make me stable. Your prayer is, save me, Lord. Because I know in this world there is nothing I've tried.

I keep looking at the box to try to figure out how to do life, and it keeps falling apart because I'm looking to something other than the One who designed me and created me and shows me where life is found. Like the children of Israel, they were putting their mouth to a broken cistern, a broken whale, sucking as hard as they could to get a drink of water out of. And he said, and the bottom is broken out. It never satisfies you. So your moment today is not, lord, make me stable, yours is, lord, save me.

And he will save you. Because as I said earlier, if you're a believer, the closest you'll ever get to hell will be troubles in this life, because heaven is your home. But if you're not a believer, it's just the start of your hardships. Because out of this life comes a life of eternal separation from a God who gave His Son to pay the wrath, to pay the punishment in your place. And you said no to that.

Life becomes eternally hard separated from God. So you know, you know what your response is. Lord, make me stable or lord, save me, let's stand together as we pray, and then we're going to sing.

Lord, thank you today for not hiding in fine print the challenges we would have as believers. Thank you so much for that. Thank you for the truths that made Paul delighted and so thrilled to hear. Not that the trials went away, not that everything just got put neatly in place, but they kept doing those things that we talked about today. Would you help us all to make that our prayer?

Lord, make me stable and make me stable in that area. And, Lord, draw someone if they don't know you, open their eyes. Help them to turn from those idols, those things they trust in, to you, the living God, through Christ. And it's in his name we pray. Amen.