Sermon Details
- Pastor Name: Jonathan Cornell
- Date & Time: June 22, 2014 | 10:00am
We all need an atta-boy or an atta-girl from time to time. There is nothing like getting a handwritten letter of encouragement, right? Having someone take the time to sit down, think of you, and write something encouraging and then send it to you. Am I right? I have a file in my desk – it’s the thickest of all – and in it are all the letters I’ve received in my ministry. Let me tell you, reading and rereading these is like getting a fresh breath of life.
This week, I was reading about two high school students who noticed a deficiency of this in their own lives, but not in the way you’d expect. It’s not that Samatha Busch and Jessica Sprong were lacking in encouragement, it’s that they realized there were so many people around them who were. So they started a website called the lettersproject.org. There people could sign up, be vetted, and then connected with someone, young or old, hospital or homebound, to whom they could write.
The power of a personal thought, word, or touch has the power not only to lift our spirits and change the course of our day, but as we see from reading the New Testament, letters have the power to transform lives and set us on a new course.
If you were here last week, we looked at a man by the name of Paul, who wrote letters to the new Christian Communities around the Mediterranean. Last week, we saw that he did so to provide the church in Rome with some measure of instruction in the Christian Faith. But there were other reasons for his letters, as well. Paul wrote to encourage and fill in the gaps for them.
We are the people who are living in the wake of the resurrection. We live in the hope of Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit. So to make it, we need encouragement, we need that good word that tells us to keep going in our faith, don’t lose hope. And that’s what Paul does for the church in Thessalonica.
Read the entire transcript here: 1 Thessalonians 1-10
