Verse: 2 Thessalonians 1:11- 12
With this in mind, we constantly pray for you, that our God may make you worthy of his calling, and that by his power he may bring to fruition your every desire for goodness and your every deed prompted by faith. We pray this so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Devotion
I like to make lists. To-do lists, steps of a process, lists of people. Anything can be a list if you try hard enough. I’ll write things I’ve already done on a list just so I can check them off. It’s an obsession.
Paul’s the same way when he’s writing letters to churches in the Bible. He’s writing to the Thessalonian church in this case. In the first verses he’s explaining God’s character, but shifts in verses 11 and 12 to explaining God’s plan.
What’s the plan? Well, Paul’s got it lined up pretty tightly here, but let’s distill it:
1. Others pray for you
2. God improves you and increases your faith
3. You do good deeds in his name
4. God gets the glory
Easy!
I think it’s common to focus on steps 2 and 3. For people who don’t believe in God, you might substitute self-improvement and personal empowerment of some kind. The point? Improve yourself so you can do great things.
But God’s plan is all-encompassing. Step 1 starts with a network of people praying. It’s spiritual planning, and is a prerequisite to any sort of action. Could God go straight to step 2? Sure, and I’ll bet he does with some frequency, but it’s not his ideal.
Even more interesting is the why. Are we doing good deeds just for the sake of it? No, we’re doing it because it glorifies God. God wants to be glorified. He wants to be made well-known, praised, prioritized, admired, and worshipped. He made us to love us, and so that we can glorify him.
I don’t know about you, but I feel like I have a pretty good lock on steps 2 and 3. They feel fairly easy to integrate into life, and I really like the improvement and excellence aspects. They make sense to me! Step 1 feels like a waste of time, and step 4 grates against my nature to want to glorify myself or to do things for my own benefit.
But I think that’s what’s great about God’s plan—it’s not really something we could accomplish by ourselves. There are pieces of it that aren’t natural or comfortable. We’ll definitely fall flat on our own. Your strengths are going to be different from mine, and nobody’s going to be great at all of these, which brings us to an obvious but annoying conclusion that we can’t do it by ourselves, and we need God and others to help us fulfill all aspects of the plan.
Prayer
Think about somebody you can pray for today, and pray specifically that God would develop their character and improve them for his purposes.
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