The following resource is from desiring God.org.

Let's pray together.

This outer nature is wasting away, but our inner nature is being renewed day by day

because we look not to the things that are seen, but to the things that are unseen.

And so I pray, Lord, that you would grant us the kind of eyes, Paul called them the eyes of the heart that can look, look at the unseen. I ask this in Jesus

name, amen. So when Paul introduced the teaching on the second coming in chapter 1 of 2nd

Thessalonians and I encourage you to open your Bibles right now we'll be looking in

significant detail at

chapters two and three. But when he introduced the teaching on the second

coming in chapter one of second pesians, like we saw Monday night, he did so precisely to help the church

understand how it was a righteous judgment of God that he would appoint for them to walk through

persecutions and afflictions. So his first treatment of the theme of eschatology is not in a chapter in a

systematic theology book as precious as those are, but as an urgent message

right here to people who are being slandered, being fired from their jobs, being beaten, being jailed, being killed.

In other words, he's writing about the Second Coming for the sake of Pastor Wong-ee in China, who just got sentenced to nine years in jail a few weeks ago.

He's writing for the family of Pastor La One, Andimi in Nigeria who was just beheaded two weeks ago.

He's writing for Fatima Mohammedi in Iran because she's disappeared and we don't know where she is.

That's the context of Thessalenika and us.

However, persecution and suffering are not the only issue at Thessalonika and Paul has another problem to deal with and he deals with it again with the second coming and the question is how?

So what's the second issue?

The second issue is that some people have quit their jobs.

They're not working anymore. And they're becoming a nuisance to the others who have

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