A Thought For The Week Of March 2

"But we must always give thanks to God for you, brothers and sisters beloved by the Lord, because God chose you as the first fruits for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and through belief in the truth." (2 Thessalonians 2:13) What a wonderful verse this is for emphasizing how important Christian community (and those we're in community with as Christians) is to our faith. We should indeed be thankful for those who are our brothers and sisters in Christ and who have joined us on this faith journey. And I think that the emphasis on being thankful for each other because of what God has done (and not for anything in particular that we've done) is such an important lesson. So, we're not to be thankful for what others Christians do or for what other Christians believe or for how other Christians live; we're just to be thankful for them! Too often, we find that hard to do, and the result is that we fall into judgement of our fellow Christians instead. If they don't believe exactly the way we believe or if they don't do all the same things that we do, or if they do things that we don't do, or if their church services look different than ours - or whatever else we can think of - then instead of being thankful for them, we just decide that they're wrong, or that they're being bad Christians - or, in extreme cases, that they must not be Christians at all, because real Christians would do things the way we do them. Let's be honest. We're always tempted to believe that we're always right! It's part of being human and it's part of having convictions. But when we find ourselves so convinced that we're right that we're tempted to criticize a fellow believer who doesn't agree, maybe we should take some time to reflect on the example of Paul here in 2 Thessalonians, and commit ourselves to just being thankful for our brothers and sisters in the Lord, even if we don't always agree with them.