Read Reflect There’s no question about it – the details in today’s reading are difficult to understand. Paul is referring back to what he had taught the people in Thessalonica when he was there, and to something that had happened since he had left. Paul himself is not sure exactly what it was that the […]

Read Reflect Does it come as a surprise that the great apostle Paul should ask the believers in Thessalonica to pray for him? I think we sometimes forget how down-to-earth Paul was in his friendships and everyday life, and how he modelled the kind of inter-dependence that there should be among all Christians everywhere. We […]

Read Reflect This section would be easier to understand if we knew more of what was going on. Paul refers back to what he told the Thessalonians when he was with them, and then to what he had heard since then. But what exactly was it that they were doing? (The word translated “loafing” in […]

Read Reflect Sensitivity to the Spirit of God (vv 19-21) In Ephesus, Paul went first to the synagogue, faithful to his strategy of evangelizing the Jews first. The Jews, in not wanting him to leave them, showed that they were sensitive to God’s Spirit, and were conscious that what they were hearing was indeed the […]

Read Reflect “Have you received the Holy Spirit?” Paul is not convinced that the people before him are fully Christian. The sign that gives evidence that one belongs to Christ is, of course, the residing presence of the Holy Spirit. John’s baptism was only a commitment to leave the ways of sin. Salvation in Jesus […]

Read Reflect Today’s psalm offers the flip side of the perfect world we read about last week in Psalm 128. The two form a pair. Like Psalm 124, the repetition at the beginning indicates that it was intended for communal use, with the worship leader beginning with verse 1 and the congregation picking up the […]

This proverb is a prayer to the Lord that reveals certain aspects of our human nature. The author has two prayers that are intertwined. First of all, he prays for the moral fortitude to be a man of integrity, then he requests to be preserved from the circumstances that could jeopardize that moral integrity.