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But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness Gal 5:22 |
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Dear
Friend,
If you do not already have a habit of gathering daily manna the first thing in the morning (we can look at the example given to us in Exodus 16 and find the pattern for make it a habit. Establish your life and your schedule to allow you the necessary time to do your daily collection first thing every morning to give you the strength to make it through the day. And remember that today’s manna will not be sufficient for tomorrow; tomorrow’s manna must be collected tomorrow morning. Thursday, August 21, 2025
Today's Passage : Today's Passage:Prepare for The Day of the Lord BibleVerse:1 Thessalonians 5:1-10(DP Bible) "It is pointless to speculate about when the Day of the Lord will come — It could come tomorrow or a thousand years from now. But there is one thing for certain: nobody will expect it. It will come as abruptly as labor comes to a pregnant woman, and as unexpected as a thief in the night. While people are talking about how much peace and security they have, it will fall upon them. So ask yourself: Who does a thief take by surprise? Those who are in darkness. And who lives in darkness? The very children of darkness, those who drink the wine of night and sleep in drunken stupor – it is they who will be caught unprepared. They will have no chance of escaping God’s wrath. But we are children of light, standing in the sunshine of our Lord. God has not destined us to suffer His wrath, but to attain salvation through Christ Jesus. Christ died for us, the living and the dead, that we might live with Him for eternity. So stand always in the daylight of Christ, sober and alert, wearing your faith and love like a suit of armor, and the hope of your salvation like a helmet. " Message:
In the previous chapter, Paul discussed the last days, but he focused on the concern of whether those who died before Christ’s return would be taken to heaven. Having satisfied those concerns, Paul changes his focus to a broadly applicable discussion of eschatological timing and preparation. (“Eschatology” is the theological branch concerned with the end of the world, i.e. the final days.) He becomes much more eloquent, and his advice more meaningful, for us today.
If mixing metaphors is a stylistic fault, the news failed to reach Paul. A pregnant woman, a drunk, a sound sleeper, a person surprised by a sneak thief, a child of darkness, people who feel secure, the armor of faith, and the helmet of salvation. He stacks metaphors like cordwood.
But Paul manages to weave them all together in a beautiful collage of images. The most prominent are the themes of light and dark, weaving together the ideas of alertness and moral rectitude as attributes of the daytime. He seems to say that Christians do not sleep at night; but because we know that everybody sleeps, and mostly at night (especially back then), we realize that Paul must be talking about something other than physical repose: those in a permanent state of spiritual unawareness.
Luke 2:8|shepherds abiding in their fields
If one looks at the verbatim translation, Paul actually says “the sleeping of night,” not “the sleeping at night,” which in Greek as in English may be read several different ways. In verse 5, he says that we are children “of light” and “of day,” not children “of night.” We can read this to mean that we do not belong to the night, or that we are not created or made out of night and darkness, or that we are not filled with darkness. On this last meaning, in English, we say “a basket of strawberries” to indicate a basket filled with strawberries; and we might read “a person of darkness” the same way, to mean a person filled with darkness. (Notice the range of possible meaning; we might say a “basket of straw” to mean a basket made of straw, or a basket filled with straw. This is called a “genitive construction” and is a constant issue in Biblical translation, because it is both more common and more vague in Greek.)
In fact, a few verses later, he speaks of those who are “intoxicated of night” — who drink the wine of darkness — and thereby are made stuporous. Even the redoubtable NASB translates this “those who get drunk at night”; it is one technically correct meaning, but it misses the primary metaphor Paul is building. For he is speaking about something more than when people get drunk; he is speaking about what it is that intoxicates them. It is the darkness, itself, that intoxicates the lost and sleeping soul.
The theme of Christ being the “light of men” runs like a golden thread throughout the entire New Testament. Here, Paul builds on it by associating the darkness with drunkenness, stupor, and thus unpreparedness. Nobody could be more vulnerable to a sneak thief than a snoring drunk passed out on a dark night, and nobody is more vulnerable to Satan than a person who does not receive the light of Christ. In this passage, Paul does not depict the unbelievers as purposefully wicked so much as moronic dupes, who invite Satan to take their souls the way a passed-out drunk invites a thief to take his money.
Meditation : The Bible is necessary to teach us, to tell us things that we do not know. Its purpose is not to prove that what we already think is correct. Its entire purpose is to change us. For the Christian, this means that the Bible is most important where it tells us something we do not want to hear, something we disagree with; where it challenges our beliefs, not where it tells us something we agree with Prayer : May the God of endurance and encouragement grant us to live in such harmony with one another, in accord with Christ Jesus, that together we may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. |
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