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2 Thessalonians 3:5    May the Lord direct your hearts into God’s love and Christ’s perseverance.

This prayer which Paul prayed for the Thessalonian Christians is both simple and powerful.

The Apostle knows that the heart (the Greek word “refers to the bodily organ which is regarded as the seat of life … in a psychological sense, the seat of man’s collective energies, the focus of personal life, the seat of rational as well as the emotional and volitional elements in human life”, and so includes the ‘mind’ in English) is where the Holy Spirit does his work.

It is our hard, rebellious heart/mind that needs renewal in the first place.  God had declared through the prophets, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.  Who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9), and, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.  And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws” (Ezekiel 36:26-27).  Paul would later write to the Corinthians, “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6).

The Lord saves us by giving us a heart transplant  completely changing our orientation towards him.   And Paul says, in effect, ‘his amazing power to do this is like his power to create out of nothing the electromagnetic energy that is the basis of everything that exists (and on Day 1, God said, “Let there be light” – Genesis 1:3)!  It is clearly not something we could achieve ourselves.  So Paul knows it is well within the Lord’s power to ‘direct’ our hearts (cf Ephesians 3:14-21).

And what new orientation does he want the Thessalonians’ hearts to have?  He wants them to reflect the love of God the Father and the perseverance of God the Son.  The love of the Father is described in Romans 5:8 – “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”  The perseverance of the Son is described in Hebrews 12:2 – “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured (persevered – same Greek root) the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”  Is this our prayer for ourselves and our partners in the faith as we strive to be salt and light in a world where love and perseverance are in short supply?

– Bruce Christian