Thoughts on 2 Thessalonians 3

Today’s reading: Leviticus 8; 2 Thessalonians 3

What strikes me this morning out of 2 Thessalonians 3 is how “unloving” biblical love can be.

Now, obviously love cannot be “unloving,” and God Himself defines what real love looks like, so the picture of love we get in the Bible is the real picture, but at times it is just so different from what we are told love should look like.

It is increasingly popular today to have churches pursuing and teaching a very unbiblical Jesus. They teach about how kind, gentle, and loving Jesus is, and how that means He would never turn someone away or say a “mean” word to or about someone. But this isn’t Jesus. Jesus, in love, was willing to call a spade a spade. When He saw hypocrisy, He publicly called it out. When He heard people misrepresenting God, He didn’t mince words in the correction. When people were following Him with wrong motives, He sent them away. He is the one who told us that the way is wide and easy that leads to destruction, but the way is narrow and few find it that leads to eternal life. And He is the one who told us that on the last day many will come to Him telling Him about all the works and miracles they did in His name, and He will send them away to eternal darkness because He did not know them.

Biblical love is not about being nice all the time and making people feel good about themselves, it is about pointing people to the truth of God and helping them get rooted and grow in His grace and truth.

This starts with knowing Christ. If we do not have a relationship with God through the death of Jesus on the cross to pay for our sins, then we are on our way to eternal separation from the Father, no matter what our life does or doesn’t look like here. This is why Paul, in speaking to the Corinthians, asks them what we have to do with judging those outside the church? He instructed them not to associate with Christian brothers and sisters who were pursing lives of sin, but he explicitly says that doesn’t apply to the world apart from God or else we would have to go out of the world! So loving someone who does not have a relationship with the Lord is helping them find that relationship, not condemning or “correcting” their sin.

But the flip side of that is that it is unloving to ignore the sin in the lives of our fellow Christians.

Twice in this very short chapter Paul tells the Thessalonians to distance themselves from other Christians who are contentedly continuing on in a life/pattern of sin. The first is the person walking in idleness, refusing to work and support themself (obviously speaking of a person with the ability to work and support themself), and the second is the person who is generally disobedient to what they have been taught and know to be truth. But notice that, while he instructs them to keep away from such people, he specifically says not to treat them as enemies, but warn them as brothers. The point, just like Jesus gives us in Matthew 18, is not to cast the person off, but to turn the brother or sister back to the Lord.

Real love is not content with sin. Real love is not content with the status quo. Real love is willing to stand on the truth and move into another person’s life, at times uncomfortably, knowing that what the Lord has for us is significantly better than any life of sin could ever be.