Sunrise Church

Worship is an act or response to God’s movement: thanks for EVERY thing and praise for who He is and His work. When we gather to worship, we experience the goodness of the presence of God among His people and have an opportunity to offer praise back to Him together.

Idleness is not merely a failure to work, but a failure to steward the time that God has given to each of us for His glory.

Does the endurance of Christ and the love of God draw us into the faithfulness of God and His promised protection and deliverance from evil men and, thereby, lead us to call out for God to speed ahead the gospel message?

God’s elect find comfort in the gospel and are sanctified to perform the work of proclaiming that gospel...the comfort and hope we receive by God’s grace translate into real world comfort.

Intrigue about the end of days can lead to deception by false teachers and undermine confidence among the weak.

In suffering God is making us worthy of His kingdom, our preparation for the coming King is focused and for our affliction we have a Father who will not let the afflictions we have suffered go unpunished.

Paul commends the Thessalonians for their growing faith, their increasing love and their steadfast endurance; Christians should seek the same today.

Paul's short exhortations at the end of the first letter to the Thessalonians serve as helpful guides to our response to God’s grace in our lives.

The imagination of too many Christians is captured by the unpredictable part of Christ's coming instead of comforted by the inevitable part.

The certainty of Christ’s return gives us hope and our individual hope informs our encouragement to one another.

In today's text, we see what happens when an individual is not a victim of their flesh, but is, instead, driven by what God wants for them whether in matters of purity or the ways in which we live our lives day-to-day.

In the hundreds of prayers in scripture, we see that, as one commentator puts is, “prayer becomes a means of bringing our vision and desires into line with God’s will (rather than vice versa).” (Holmes, Michael; The NIV Application Commentary: 1 and 2 Thessalonians) 

Paul is encouraged by the faithfulness of the Thessalonians while navigating affliction and spiritual opposition.

Paul's faithfulness is a testament to the motives and marks of a faithful gospel messenger.

We may be tempted to live our lives for ourselves, but if that’s how we feel most comfortable living, we may find the Kingdom of God an undesirable place. However, if our hearts long for that Kingdom, then we will live according to the hope of that Kingdom in this life. 

Not much has changed for Christians today compared to the Thessalonian Christians. The challenges and threats faced in the early days of the Thessalonian church continue to be faced by Christians today and Paul's letters to the Thessalonians seeks to bolster the faith of the fledgling church.

Life in America for Christians is more like life in Babylon than life in the Promised Land.

Christ's justification renders the justified at peace with God, giving hope in suffering, an avoidance of God's wrath and reconciliation with the Father.

Jude’s call to us to build ourselves up in the faith, pray in the Spirit, remain in God’s love while we await the coming mercy and, while we wait, let us hold out the message of God’s mercy, grace and forgiveness to those in need for Christ is deserving of all glory, majesty, dominion and authority forevermore.

In our day, with the flow of information so steady, we treat it as though it is nothing. We listen to lies and conspiracies and give our minds to those that mock our Savior and would seek to lead us astray. We give them our eyes and ears for a host of reasons, but at the heart is a desire for something new or something that satisfies us, but its end is our destruction.

Jude wants us to see that this fight to which he is calling his hearers, to contend for the faith once delivered to all the saints, is part of a bigger picture and bigger war. Through false teachers, the Enemy who seeks to erode the faith and uproot believers and blunt the tip of the gospel as it goes forth to the nations.

Christians are not charged with a mandate to shape the culture by the values of the church. Instead, we are to fight diligently to ensure that the church isn’t shaped by the values of the culture.

With all that seeks to beset and cause fear for followers of Christ, our hope is found in God's sovereign power and a confidence in His everlasting ability to preserve His people.

As Jesus declared, there is only one way to salvation and Heaven, by grace alone through faith in Christ alone.