Alright, as we start our introduction to 2 Thessalonians, the inductive Bible study, you probably already have done your homework, you had your discussion, and so I wanted to clarify that the Bible study going forward, this recording will not be the Bible study. This recording is just going to be highlighting, maybe giving some pointers, just kind of help wrap things up, but if you rely on this to do your Bible study, you're not going to be able to participate in what's happening in the home groups or the small groups.

We want the church to be able to be truly Bereans, not Berean as members, obviously we're talking about Acts 17 and 11 where they examined everything to see if they were from God's Word, to test everything. And so in order to do that, we can't just accept doctrine and say what's biblical and not biblical because it makes sense to us or doesn't make sense to us, or you trust one leader over another leader.

Our confidence really needs to be from God's Word, and the only way to ensure that is if every Christian knows what the Word of God says. And so we want everyone to come to Bible study, committed to do inductive Bible study, not to attend Bible study, but to committed to study and to be able to dig and ask questions.

So again, it may be a little bit more tedious, it may require a little bit more work on your part, but again, God has invested and ordained His very breath, according to God's Word, into His Word. So it is not possible to know God without committing to know His Word.

There's so much you can learn from sermons, from experience, when you don't fully grasp His heart in what He intended in His Word. And so again, all of this is to just encourage you. So if you're in the habit of just attending Bible study, to really commit to do the inductive Bible study.

So let's look at first, just again as a wrap up, and I'm not going to be pointing to every single part of the text, but just kind of give you a highlight. You know, we talked about in 1 Thessalonians, it's good to know the background behind Silvanus and Timothy.

So don't skim over the introduction, because there's a lot in there that kind of helps you to understand the mindset of what's going on. So knowing Paul, Silvanus, Timothy, their relationship, who they are, how old are they, why did they join? Silvanus joined for the second missionary journey along with Timothy, but Timothy was a lifelong companion ever since he met him.

And Silvanus was a peer of Paul that was sent with him to give the letter to the Gentile churches that they didn't have to be circumcised to become Christians. And then the greetings, "Grace to you and peace." Again, we learned last time that the term "grace" was a common greeting from the Greek world, and "peace," "shalom," was a common greeting from the Jewish world.

So Apostle Paul has created a unique greeting with a combination of the Gentile world and the Jewish world, "grace" and "peace." But along with that, even the greeting in itself contains the gospel message, because the Jews were constantly looking for peace, for "shalom" from God, and the only way to get that was from grace.

And so even in the very introduction, "grace and peace to you," is pretty much a simple summary of the gospel. In verse 1 and 2, asking a lot of questions is helpful. What I highlighted here is the preposition "in" and "from." This is something that I noticed that even as I was preparing this video, I looked at this text so many times throughout the years.

I've probably done inductive bio-study in 1st and 2nd Thessalonians probably over a dozen times. But for whatever reason, I've always asked the question, "to the church of the Thessalonians, in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ." And then he says the same thing again, "grace to you and peace from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ." And why is it here, "in God the Father" and here, "from God the Father?" And I realized that what he was saying here is not Paul and Silvanus and Timothy, who is "in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ." He was actually saying, "to the church of the Thessalonians, in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ." So again, I don't know if you missed this, but I definitely did.

That he's basically saying that the Thessalonians who are "in God the Father," and then he's saying "we're bringing grace to you from God the Father." So even in the introduction, Apostle Paul basically is acknowledging that all of this is because of God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

He's sending greetings from God the Father to the church who is "in God the Father." And this sovereignty of God, that all of this is happening because of what God is doing in their midst. And that's why it leads to the second part of it, where he's compelled to give thanks.

So again, it may be a simple introduction, but even in the simple introduction, it kind of gives us the theological mindset of the author and how that affects his perspective on all these different things. All right, in verse 3 and 4, I did the sentence structure for you. And again, get in the habit of dividing each verse into main parts of the speech and what are supporting phrases.

And it'll kind of help you to focus in on the study. So if you look at verse 3, it says "we ought always to give thanks," which is the main phrase here. And then why does he give thanks? Because if your faith is being enlarged and love for each one of you grows ever greater.

So that's the main thing. So you could make this sentence without these fillers, right? Where like, who are you giving thanks to God? Because it's fitting and because of faith, love toward one another. So you can see the main parts of the speech, right? And then focus on these as supporting what he's saying.

So giving thanks because of their faith and because of love. And same thing with verse 4, it says "we speak proudly of you for their perseverance and their faith," right? And so here it describes their perseverance and faith in the midst of persecution and affliction, right? Here it says "we speak proudly of you to the other churches." So after you've done that, it's easier to focus your attention and ask good questions because the verse kind of like, instead of seeing one big blob of two, three verses, you can see it in the sentence structure of what's going on.

So here, you know, we talked about, at least in our Homegroup Leaders group, "ought always to give thanks." And again, it's good to be in a habit of having several translations open. So you can see that there's something going on in the text, and that's kind of like your first line after you've done the sentence structure to see what's going on.

The word "ought" here talks about, has an idea of being compelled or obligated to give thanks. And he's compelled and obligated to give thanks to God because it's only fitting. It's the right thing to do, right? And you know, we can say it's easier to do that because Thessalonians was a model church, right?

And he says he's giving thanks for two reasons, because of their faith being enlarged and because of love. And that's basically what he is saying here. But if you look at 1 Corinthians 1, verse 4, Apostle Paul also has a couple of verses where he gives the same kind of phrase here about the Corinthians.

And so if you know anything about the Corinthians, it was, Corinthians is probably one of the harshest letters that Apostle Paul wrote. And even there, he begins by being thankful. And I think this idea is related to what he says in verse 1 and 2 in the beginning, when he recognizes that the Thessalonians are in God the Father, that he is being sent from God the Father and the Son.

And so he sees God who's working behind the scenes, even when there is struggle, persecution and affliction going on, that his thankfulness is not necessarily just because he sees that they're responding well, but he sees evidence of God's grace and his love in them. And that's why he feels compelled and it's only fitting for a Christian to have a thankful heart because Thanksgiving obviously is directly related to our ability to worship.

An individual who is not thankful is an individual who cannot worship, right? So here he says he's obligated to give thanks. And it's only fitting to do that because the faith is greatly enlarged, that it's growing, right? They didn't just have faith and have the same faith for 30, 40 years, but faith can, if it can grow, it can probably decrease, right?

The effects of the faith. So he says their faith is being enlarged, right? And their love for one another is also growing. So there's progress from the first Thessalonians that when he writes, right, he was very thankful for them. But when he writes second Thessalonians, he says he's compelled to give thanks because he sees progress in them.

Even though they were a model church, they were growing continually. And he speaks proudly of them among the other churches, right? So his Thanksgiving wasn't just like obligation only. He was being forced to say something they didn't really mean. Or else he wouldn't be speaking proudly of them in other churches.

Now we've already done an overview of second Thessalonians and we know that there were problems in this church, right? There's false doctrines being penetrated. Some people were not living disciplined lives and so they need to be disciplined. There's concerns about the persecution and encouragement to persevere. And so it wasn't like the second Thessalonians didn't have problems.

But Apostle Paul was able to fix his eyes on God's sovereign plan that he has them completed and he sees God working in them. And that's why he's able to be thankful. And remember that when he was writing this, he was in Corinth. So if you know anything about Paul in Corinth, he was beaten up.

He was tired. He was burned out. And Jesus actually had to tell him to continue to do the ministry. And that's why he kind of stayed in Corinth for a long period of time because it was sort of a way for him to recuperate. And so he was not in the best of condition in Corinth.

So when he is writing this letter, humanly speaking, you would think that there's a lot of frustrations and things being poured out in these letters. But again, Paul is genuinely thankful because he sees God's sovereign hand in what's going on with them. And then so again, here, just like in verse three, he gives thanks because of their faith and love.

And here he says, I'm proudly speaking of you, bragging of you to the other churches because of their perseverance and the evidence of their faith in the midst of persecution and affliction, which they endure. So again, there's a lot more stuff going on in here. But I think just to kind of give you an idea of how to break down the verse, and I know you've already had the discussion and this is more for, you know, hopefully going forward, you would apply this to the next passage in verses five through ten.

So I kind of wanted to give a summary of what's going on here in the next slide. It's good to get in the habit after you've done your studies, you've asked questions, observations, and cross-references and application, you know, to kind of wrap up the study into the highlights of what you learned here.

I put four down that I briefly discussed. The relationship between Paul and Silvanus and Timothy as co-workers of the gospel. That was, again, something that we paid attention to in verse one. Paul's view of God's sovereignty in his work and in the work of Thessalonians, where I talked about in and then from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, and how that perspective really resonates in everything else that he sees and what he's thankful for.

Thanksgiving that is compelled by what he sees God doing in their midst. So not necessarily because of human work, but he's thankful to God for what he's doing in their midst. And then fourthly, growing faith, evidence by perseverance and through affliction, an increase of love for one another. And so basically, these are the four main points and application in my life should really be coming from these main points, right?

So the fact that Apostle Paul always had companions working, who are my co-workers and what is my relationship with them? God's sovereignty, right? Am I absolutely convinced of his sovereignty? Is this just a doctrinal statement or does that actually affect the way I perceive everything, good and bad? When it's hard, when it's easy, do I actually believe that God is fully in control?

And does that show in the way that I talk, in the way that I view things, the way I hope for, what makes me sad, what makes me happy? How does God's sovereignty affect all of that? Thanksgiving. Is my life and my speech being compelled by Thanksgiving because I believe that God is sovereign and what is happening?

And then the evidence of faith, like, am I persevering in affliction? Am I just putting up with it or do I genuinely see God's sovereign hand in the affliction that is happening? Is there an increase in love? Not just to tolerate difficult situations or difficult people, but is there an urging or compelling or movement toward greater love in my life?

And so those are things that for application, once we've done the study, like, how do we apply these things? So again, like I've always said, right, application without interpretation is abortion. Interpretation without application is abortion because then you haven't completed your study. And then application without interpretation will be a miscarriage.

And so that's what my professor would always say in our hermeneutics class. And so we want to make sure that every study is concluded by application. So this is something that I strongly encourage you to do for every study. I just wanted to give you a quick guide for the study of verses 5 through 10 for the coming week.

It's a little bit lengthier than most other verses that you're going to be looking at throughout the study. So whenever you do a large chunk like this, it's helpful to, again, to break it down into sentence structure. And what are the main points? What are supporting clauses? And make sure that once you outline it like that, it'll give you a clear direction of what's going on in the text.

So one of the main things that I encourage you to do is to get a good summary of this text. What's the main point? Right. What are the major points and what are the sub points? And then once you've identified that, then you can go back from verse to verse and then ask the question, do the observations cross references.

But when you have a larger text that you're dealing with, before you do verse by verse, make sure you get the complete thought flow that's going on in this text. So again, once you've identified that, I think the other study that you will do in more detail will be helpful.

So that's the first thing that I encourage you to do. And no matter what you do, you can't speed up your devotion. You have to commit to do it. You can't just look at this text and sit in front of it for 10 minutes and hoping that you'll be able to get all these insights.

So especially in the Bible study, the more time you put into digging and meditating on the text, more insights you'll get. And I encourage you to do this early on because sometimes you'll read through it and then you'll have it in your head. And then as you're driving, you'll have a thought that's connected to something that you read.

And it'll make a lot more sense the more you take time to meditate on it. So I encourage you to start this sentence structure and get the main overview and do it early so that you'll be able to get as much out of this text as you can. Because this has so many good things in this text and I don't want you to miss out on it by skimming on it.

Okay. Okay. Thank you.