2 Thessalonians 3:1-5 - What Your Pastor Wants You To Pray For And Do

We are in 2 Thessalonians chapter 3 today.

We've been walking through this book where Paul says to Timothy, they're riding to a battered but still believing church, that they're undergoing heavy persecution for the sake of Jesus.

The apostle and his companions, they write to them, they let them know, hey, don't give up. You are not experiencing like God's rejection or God's wrath or condemnation.

This is what it looks like to follow the suffering servant Jesus in the Jesus way. And so realize that God is going to repay all of the injustice that has been done to you.

He is going to rescue you and honor you and glorify you for everything that you've been going through. I know that there are some people here. I'm speaking as though I'm Paul.

I know there are some people who have told you that we said the day of the Lord has already come and that all of this suffering that you're going through, it's just proof that now the tribulation time has come, and so you are being punished by having

to go through this horrible time. That's not the case. Here's what Jesus and what Daniel said about the end times, and none of that stuff has happened. So you can know that these people are lying to you.

So don't be unmoored by their falsehoods. Realize what God's Word says. Realize what the Old Testament and what Jesus have said.

And stand firm. And don't let anyone shake you from your faith because God loves you. God is the one that chose you.

He's not going to reject you or get rid of you now. And God is going to give you encouragement and good hope by grace. He's going to encourage your hearts and strengthen you in every good work and word.

And so then that brings us to where we are today in chapter 3 and verse number 1. So I'm going to read through and hopefully we'll learn some things. We're going to look today, I believe, at verses 1 through 5 of chapter 3 and then tomorrow.

We'll take from about verse 6 to the end of the book. And then we'll jump into Hebrews and that'll kind of conclude this particular season of Tabernacle Talk.

And that way they'll be pretty good about I think 12 or so, about 12 or so different books of scripture that you can go through about 250 episodes or so. And hope that it would be a good resource for you as you're studying God's Word.

Once we reach the end of Hebrews, I'm going to have some specific further resources that all kind of like guide you guys towards.

That way you can still have the same type of like joy, Bible study, same types of things that I'm doing, but in perhaps some even better ways that you can go through.

And then as my time and schedule allows me to in 2025, I think I'll probably intentionally go through about four or five different books of scripture. And I'll just keep on adding.

One of kind of my hopes is over the next five to seven years, I'll be able to between preaching and the podcast, have resources for almost all of scripture for people. And I know it'll be a blessing to me.

I've been encouraged through so much of this, and I hope that it would be an encouragement to as well. Okay, second to this loading is three.

Now Paul is turning from, hey, here's all the things I want you to know to, here's what I'm requesting from you guys as a church.

He says, in addition, brothers and sisters, pray for us that the word of the Lord may spread rapidly and be honored just as it was with you and that we may be delivered from wicked and evil people for not all have faith. But the Lord is faithful.

He will strengthen and guard you from the evil one. We have confidence in the Lord about you that you are doing and will continue to do what we command. May the Lord direct your hearts to God's love and Christ's endurance.

Okay, let's break this apart and see what we can find. First, he says, pray for us that the word of the Lord may spread rapidly and be honored just as it was with you.

This is a great prayer request that we can pray, obviously not just for Paul and Silas and Timothy back then, but for our churches today, for our pastors, for ministry individuals.

This is our request that just as here the Thessalonians, they had received the Lord. They had, as we learn in 1 Thessalonians chapter 2, they had received the word of the Lord that they heard, not as the word of men but as the word of God.

And so he says, we want this to spread rapidly. Certainly there are times when we declare the gospel, when we declare the way of Jesus, and it's not really taken off. It's not seeming to do a whole lot.

You can look at the life of Avneram Judson who went to Burma, now, I think, Myanmar, back in the 1800s, and he preached for about six or seven years in that context before he finally had some converts.

And here, Paul, Enzaius and Timothy are saying, there's no guarantee that we're going to have like rapid spread of the gospel. From the Thessalonian Church, from Thessalonica, you have the word of the Lord spreading out everywhere.

As we heard in 1 Thessalonians, chapter one, that Paul, Enzaius and Timothy, they said, you know, we hardly have to tell anyone about Jesus for like the very first time, because everyone tells us about what happened in Thessalonica with those

believers, how they turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God. So they say, you know, we want that kind of like honoring and spread of the gospel. We want that to happen again in where we're preaching now. So would you pray for that?

How often is the spread of the gospel, the success of ministers and preachers and evangelists? How often is that what happens in your prayer life?

Do you pray for Tabernacle that the gospel would spread out from us rapidly and be honored that people would be saved and baptized and added to the church?

Do you pray for our local association that with new church plants, like New Southwest Baptist Church, that they would have a revitalization through their new pastor, that they would see a once thriving church thrive once more?

Would you be in prayer for First Baptist Lands Down, that they had once experienced great growth and great power in the gospel, but since their pastor passed a couple of years ago, they've started to dwindle down now.

And our own Pastor Ron has been teaming up with them and helping them and doing pulpit supplying things for them over the past several months. But would you be in prayer for them as they are doing their work?

Would you pray for the Send Network Church Planners, many of whom are even right here in the state of Maryland? I've got some of my friends like Clay Maynard down in North Carolina. We've got Aaron Chan down in Florida.

We've got Zach and Monica Friedrich up in Connecticut. And there was one other one that Jordan and Lori Kaczynski in Sunbury, Ohio. All of these are individuals that we can pray for the gospel to be powerful and to do a work in their lives.

If you're here at Tabernacle, on our back bulletin boards, every single week you can look and there is a... We've got kind of a table, a little list that has churches and church plants and missionaries that you can pray for.

And there are papers that you can just grab one of those out and you can be praying over that list of gospel workers every single week. And we've got our Tabernacle Family Devotions that I've been putting together.

I don't know quite how effective they're going to be quite yet, but we've got those available for people to go through.

And every single week, I've got a missionary or church planter from our Southern Baptist, either North American Mission Board or International Mission Board, that you can be praying for them all throughout that week with your family.

And this particular upcoming week is a missionary to... Oh, man, where is it? It's either South America or in Asia.

I think it's in Asia because, South Asia in particular, because the missionary couple, they had been having kind of a hard time connecting with some people, and they met an individual whose name was Lucky, and through Lucky, they were able to have

many more connections with people and be able to share the gospel. Things like that are so cool to me.

And that's a little info tidbit that you can find on 52sundays.org, and that's something that's put out by our convention, just so we can know what our missionaries are up to and ways that we can pray for them.

And so I include those little blurbs from our International Mission Board and North American Mission Board in our Tabernacle Family Devotions page.

If you would like, if you go on to our church website tbcsex.com/family, you can find those devotions right there on that page, and you can click that PDF. You can read it right on there.

If you prefer regular old paper, you can grab those on the back table on Sunday mornings over in the kids corner.

All of this is kind of reflecting, hey, what we've got, our decorations in the back of the sanctuary or auditorium or whatever you call it, that back section we intentionally put with invitations and resources for you and gospel invites and tracks

and ways that you can pray for missionaries and all sorts of things. And so, yeah, it was a little bit of a rabbit trail.

But these are ways that you can intentionally pray for the word of the Lord to spread rapidly and be honored even in your own local church. Verse number two, that we may be delivered from wicked and evil people for not all have faith.

Paul was no stranger to interacting with wicked and evil people who put him in jail, who ran him out of town, who incited mobs against him, who would stone him, who put him on ships that were then shipwrecked, who beat him, who spoke falsely about

him. And here he's praying for deliverance from these individuals. And I want to encourage you in two ways. Number one, pray for this for ministers, preachers, gospel, witnesses, all of that, because we certainly need it.

Number two, I want to encourage you, don't be a wicked and evil person who, perhaps, your pastor or your ministry leader would then be like, oh man, I really hope that this person doesn't come talk to me, because they're always complaining, or

they're always gossiping, or they've always got some way that they think I need to be better, but they never want to hear about what they need to grow in their spiritual life. One of the recurring themes in scripture is certainly there are outside

things that come in to harm a church, and the world's never particularly happy about the gospel of Jesus, otherwise, they would just accept it wholesale. But a much more insidious and a much more effective way that Satan disrupts a church is through

people that they bite, and they bicker, and they attack. And if you've been in church for any length of time, that has certainly happened. I want to encourage you if you're like, Oh, man, I don't know.

I don't know if I've ever like heard of any of that. Like, I certainly give lots of suggestions, and I certainly give lots of, you know, prayer requests or things that other people need to be aware of, that other people are doing and this and that.

But, man, I've never really known that there were people that were disruptive in the spiritual life of a church. May I, may I cautiously recommend that you maybe look inwardly a little bit and go, wait a second, am I this person?

Am I one that maybe I've been unwittingly used by Satan to, as Proverbs would put it, so discord among the brothers and sisters. God's church is far too valuable for us to co-opt it, for us to demean it in any way.

I gotta tell you, as a pastor, there are times when I need to check my heart, because, you know, very rarely will people just come up to a pastor and be like, hey, here's like all these amazing, wonderful things that God's doing, and here's ways in

which like God is using these things, or the preaching, or my small group, or whatever, in my life, and just man everything is on fire. There are certainly times that that happens, and that is just like an amazing, like shot in the arm of energy of,

yes, wonderful, God's at work. But often as a pastor, you get all of the bad things. It's all of the people going, hey, so-and-so forgot about me. So-and-so wasn't nice to me.

I'm afraid of what so-and-so is going to do. Hey, did you hear that so-and-so is doing this? And in all of those things, it can be easy to get a hard heart that just goes like, oh, man, people just don't get it.

God's, you know, this church is just this or that. It can be easy to try and be tempted to have that mindset towards the Church of God. But this is not just like a church or a group of people.

This is Christ Church. These are, this is Christ's Bride. And so I want to encourage you, like, think well of the church.

There will always be problems. There will always be problem people. There will be those wolves that Paul talks about in Acts 20.

There will be people that are seeking to get the best of others, that want control, that want power, they want this and that. But at the end of the day, this is Christ's body. And I can't say that I love Jesus and hate his bride.

I can't say Jesus is my everything and want nothing to do with his body. So have even in recognition of problems, have a love for Jesus' church. Don't view it as something that is non-essential or that you shouldn't be a part of every single week.

At the very least, every single Sunday, view Jesus' church as important, something to be loved, something to be spoken well of, because it's his bride. It's the one that he died for.

It is the one that he is making known through the church, his wisdom to all of the angels, the spiritual beings, the principalities and powers as Ephesians 3 states. So we can pray for deliverance from wicked and evil people.

We can realize that that can sometimes even be within a local church, and it can be within us. And so may we pray for deliverance. God, help me to not be a gossip.

Help me to not be unkind. Help me to not be cruel or selfish or self-centered or not evangelizing. Help me to be a part of the solution of God's church, spreading rapidly of the word going out and being honored.

May that begin in me. And Lord, may that happen in your church. Okay.

That was definitely a rabbit trail that I hadn't intended to take, but Lord willing, I'll say this and I'll move on because I think we're about done for time today.

We can often point fingers and be like, hey, you know, so and so does this or so and so is the problem. But I want to always remember that my biggest enemy is not other people.

My biggest enemy is my flesh that wars against the spirit like James 4 and Galatians 5 say.

And I want to always be aware of the fact that the temptation is going to be strongest in pride and in ignoring how God is speaking to my soul to say, hey, you're not right here, buddy.

And certainly we ought to care for others and help them in their spiritual walks as well.

But let's be faithful to shepherd our own soul before, if you will, to take out the beam from our own eye before we try and take out the sliver that is in someone else's. Okay, verse number three.

He says, not everyone has faith, so we need deliverance from evil people. And he says, but the Lord is faithful. He will strengthen and guard you from the evil one.

At times we need strength to battle temptation, but at times we also need just guarding. So there are times we're going to have Satan going, hey, just do this and you will have this happiness. Just do this and you'll have joy.

But there are other times when we can pray, like happened with Job where Satan comes to God, he says, hey, I want to attack Job, but you have put a hedge of protection around him.

That is that God had made it so that there was no way for Satan to tempt him in these areas until God specifically gave the okay. And so we can also pray for that. Like, God, would you protect us?

That we wouldn't even have to battle this temptation in the moment. But we can know that when God does allow temptation, that he will strengthen us in it. Sometimes he guards us from having any temptation.

Other times he strengthens us within it. Verse number four, we have confidence in the Lord about you that you are doing and will continue to do what we command. What a wonderful comfort it is.

Just as a pastor, when you have confidence that specific people are going to do what God wants for their life.

I've got people right now in my church that every single week, they are in the word, they're praying, they're evangelizing, they're sharing their faith or they're inviting to Tabernacle people within their life. They're being a consistent witness.

They're talking about opportunities for service and love and caring. And man, it just, it fires me up. I'm thankful for that Holy Spirit confidence.

Can I encourage you? Be that kind of person for your spiritual leaders. October is Pastor Appreciation Month.

And certainly, it's great to be appreciated. But the way I could feel most appreciated as a pastor is if God's people are doing God's work. I don't necessarily like, right now, I'm not like, oh man, I need all these gifts.

What I want is for God's people to do God's work, to love in the Jesus way and to accomplish his goals. All of that just like sticks out to me. And I'm like, yes, everything that's going on right now is amazing.

And I love hearing how God uses his people in the various areas of their life. So I want to encourage you to do that. Verse number five, may the Lord direct your hearts to God's love and Christ's endurance.

And certainly that's what we need in life. We need the love of God. We need to feel it and to experience it because Satan wants us to despair and to condemn our hearts.

And God wants to show us his love. And he wants that love to flow out to other people, to our fellow brothers and sisters. By this shall all men know that you are my disciples.

Jesus said, if you have love for one another. So we need that kind of love. And we need a love for the world.

Same kind of love that God had. For God loved the world in this way. That he gave his one and only son so that whoever believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.

So we need God's love. And then secondly, Christ's endurance. And I'm going to end with a quote from Hebrews chapter 12 because this has a great little statement in there.

Therefore, since we also have such a large cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us lay aside every hindrance and the sin that so easily ensnares us.

Let us run with endurance the race that lies before us, keeping our eyes on Jesus, the source and perfecter of our faith. For the joy that lay before him, he endured the cross, despising the shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

We ought to have a Jesus endurance that endures the cross, endures the sufferings, endures the persecutions that we might go through, endures times when even God's people let us down.

But we can go through it, because we've got a Jesus endurance that we know the joy that's coming before us. And so, we're going to ignore the sin and the shame, because what's waiting for us is the presence, the throne room of God.

And we want to get there and hear, well done, my good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of your Lord. And that's what we're heading towards. So, hope that would be an encouragement to you today.

There's a bit more of a focus on kind of the local church and our lives, and the way that how we live and operate affects one another today, than I intended going into this. But hopefully, that was of the Lord. And I want to encourage you.

I'm specifically saying this for those that aren't at Tabernacle, because I know what pastors go through.

If you've got a pastor that you appreciate, like I mentioned, number one, like live and love like Jesus this month, and let your pastor or pastors know like what God's doing in your life. That's what they love to hear.

That brings us more joy than anything else. Of course, if there is something that you can do for your pastor, like do it.

We ought to show honor to whom honor is due, as Romans 13 tells us that we are to give the pastors, the elders that rule well, they are worthy of double honor, as 1st Timothy 5 says.

And so, I want to encourage you in that way, just as it is Pastor Appreciation Month, to have a love and a care for your pastors.

I'm so thankful for Pastor Dennis Fountain, Pastor Tate Thronson, Pastor Craig Scott, as well as some different pastors that I had in college that were a great encouragement to me, and without whom I would not be here today.

And so I want to encourage you to express some gratitude and love in that way to your pastors wherever they may be. Thank you for tuning in. Have a wonderful day.