What a joy!

Hello everyone,

How are you doing on this day? I hope well and bubbling in the Lord.

Primary Text

“And now Timothy has just returned and brings the welcome news that your faith and love are as strong as ever and that you remember our visit with joy and want to see us just as much as we want to see you. So we are greatly comforted, dear brothers, in all of our own crushing troubles and suffering here, now that we know that you are standing true to the Lord. We can bear anything as long as we know that you remain strong in Him. How can we thank God enough for you and for the joy and delight you have given us in our praying for you? For night and day we pray on and on for you, asking God to let us see you again, to fill up any little cracks there may yet be in your faith.” 1 Thessalonians 3v6-10 (TLB)

I have heard it said that if you do not see someone in three years, you cannot really assume to know that person again, because the fact is that people change. Situations in life might make a person become more hardened or not to be who they once were. But what a joy it is to meet someone you have known before and find that not only are they still in the faith, but even stronger still; or someone who did not know the Lord before, now sharing the same faith as you and worshipping and praising the Almighty God. Circumstances in life come to shake our faith, but the prayer always is that the trying of our faith will bring us stronger and closer to Him. A song that we sang when we were younger was day by day my Lord for these three things I pray, to see Thee more clearly, love Thee more dearly, follow Thee more nearly day by day. May this indeed be true in all of our lives in Jesus name, amen. So you can imagine the joy of the ones who received news of the church in Thessalonica about how they were still strong in the faith and had warm memories of the time they had spent with them. And so I pray for you from Ephesians 3v14-19 (NIV):

Supplementary Text & Prayer

“For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of His glorious riches He may strengthen you with power through His Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge – that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” in Jesus name, amen.