A Word in Season: Directing the Heart (2 Thessalonians 3:5)

Faithfulness of God in 2 Thessalonians 3

We should not rely upon unreliable human beings, but upon the altogether faithful and righteous God. That underpins so many of the things that the Bible tells us, and it underpins Paul's exhortations to the Thessalonians in 2 Thessalonians and chapter 3.

There the Apostle Paul is speaking to them about faithless men, those who are opposed to the gospel and those who preach it, who are unreasonable and wicked. But God is faithful. The Lord is utterly reliable, true to his word, and unfailing in his responses to his people when they call upon him.

It is God who will establish and guard his people from the evil one, and Paul is confident that God will do that, and he is confident that the Thessalonians will follow in the path that he is directing them into.

Prayer for Hearts Directed into the Love of God

And then in verse 5, he prays for them. Now, where are your hearts being directed? Where is my heart being directed? Where do we pray that it will go? What's the route that we pray that it will follow?

What do we need amidst some of the particular challenges and tribulations of our circumstances? We need to have our hearts directed into the love of God and into the patience of Christ. We need to understand these things in the depths of our being.

We need our hearts to be carried out toward them, to grasp them fully, to understand them, to be able to enter into them, to enjoy them, and then to respond rightly to them. We need to know the love of God.

We need to know the favor of God toward us, unbidden, sovereign, gracious, and majestic, in its freeness and in its fullness. We need to understand that so that not only can we enjoy it for ourselves, but we can also live in a way that properly reflects that love.

The Patience of Christ and the Call to Imitation

We need also to understand the patience of Christ, that again, from the depths of our being, we would appreciate the fact that Christ did not deviate from the righteous course, that he held fast to the end in the face of all the provocations and persecutions that came against him.

He did not waver, but loved us to the very end, accomplished all that had been put into his hands, and then received the reward for his faithful endeavor. And we need to understand these things. We need to pray that we would have our hearts directed into them, precisely because it is so hard for us to grasp them, and so hard for us to respond to them rightly.

We can't love others until we understand the love with which we've been loved. We cannot pursue righteousness with that unflinching determination that was seen in Christ, until our hearts have been directed into his patience.

And because in the face of the unfaithfulness of men, the unreasonableness and the wickedness of the societies in which we live, we need to have our hearts directed into these ways, into these things, to pray for them, to ponder over them, to consider them deeply.

We need to rest upon them for ourselves. We need to find our peace in the confidence of a loving God and a patient Christ, of a father who, having set his love upon us, does not remove it from us, of a Christ who, having taken up the responsibility of saving us, does not deviate from his course.

Experiential Grasp of Divine Love and Christlike Patience

We need to pray ourselves and for our brothers and sisters that God would lead us in such a way that our hearts might be directed into such an experimental, experiential grasp upon these things. We need to ponder deeply what it means to be beloved of God and to be the objects of Christ's fierce and faithful affection.

And then we need to pursue these things for ourselves, to ask that God, in his mercy, would not only show us these things in himself, but teach us and train us so that in the face of the pressures that we have to deal with, the persecutions that we may face, the provocations that we undergo, that we may not only know God's love, but show a God-like love ourselves, that we might know Christ's patience and show a Christ-like patience ourselves.

And so, walking in his ways, our hearts directed into the love of God and the patience of Christ, we might show ourselves children of God and people of the Saviour.