Bible Guys Classics: 2 Thessalonians 2 & 3

Show Notes

Faith doesn’t grow by accident—it’s strengthened by endurance and obedience. In this episode of The Bible Guys, Jeff and Chris walk through 2 Thessalonians 2–3, where Paul urges believers to remain grounded, disciplined, and faithful.

Jeff and Chris discuss standing firm in truth, living responsibly, and encouraging one another in difficult seasons. Paul’s words remind the church that faith is meant to be lived out consistently, not just believed intellectually.

If you’re feeling pressure to drift, disengage, or give up, this episode offers a timely call to stay steady and finish well.

🎧 Listen now and learn what it means to stand strong in faith.
#TheDailyBibleGuys #2Thessalonians3 #BibleStudyPodcast #StandFirm #ChristianLiving #FaithInAction

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So today we're talking about how Paul says we should plant our feet and stand firm. This is going to be a really good close out to the second Thessalonian's letter that he wrote. So he's Chris, I'm Jeff, and we're the Bible guys. Okay, Chris. So here's a big one. This is a story that is very near and dear to my heart. But first of all, are you the kind of person who plans ahead and leaves early so that you arrive at the place early? In my mind, I am in your mind, you are in execution. I'm almost never that way. Why why what holds you back from Well? I think it's because I always think best at the last minute. So my wife always tells me she's a You're better under pressure anyway, So I operate better under pressure. So if I'm sitting. There thinking, oh, if I leave myself thirty minutes, I can get to heritage on time, then I'll get up and then as soon as I'm getting ready, I'll think. Oh, I'm going to do these five things? Oh right, you know, and my brain activates. Huh. I think that's what it is. So you're trying to cram three more things in before you have to leave. I really do believe that's the case. But to be quite honest with you, my wife would probably say, I'm just a person who's late. I don't want to be, but I usually am. You don't intend to be. No, it's not like it's oh, who cares about being late? Right? No? No, No, I'm the opposite. I want to be on time. I try to build in a buffer so that I have Okay, if I need to be there in thirty minutes, I'm going to need to shut everything down in fifteen so that I can, you know, so I can get there early. That kind of thing. This is the better way to be. Let's be clear. Absolutely in a lot of things. I think in our life we would discover that that, you know, if you just do things my way. But so, here's an article, you know, from one of the most trusted news sources out there. Right now, people struggle knowing where they can get the true news from the Babylon b Yes, is a place that is very widely respected. If you don't know, Babylon be's all about satire, yes, But anyways, here's one. An article is says Dad has family arrived at airport before it's even built. Well, first of all, the concept is it's hilarious because it shows a family with their luggage and the dad's sort of driving this whole thing, and it's at a. Groundbreaking construction site. Construction site, right, yep. So this is Indianapolis, Indiana. Pro dad and savvy world traveler Chip Dunnings has taking his family on vacation and to avoid missing the flight, has made sure the family shows up packed and ready to go before the airport is even built. Quote. It's important to show up good and early, just to be safe, said Dunnings as he zipped up his fanny pack and directed his kids to bring all your things out to the car. Impact, honey, hurry up. Construction on the new I N D West TERMINALSS SLAVE does start any day now. Why isn't everything packed already? Mister Dunnings then sped things up using his preferred method of walking through the house loudly. Well, let's go, let's go. Let's go, I prefer method. So obviously this is making fun of people who get there in credibly early. Right. This is me, this is me. My wife said, you come busting through the house. Let's go let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go. And she said, I'm the one that's putting the coat on the kids and making sure we've got everything ready and everything's by the door. She said, it's so easy for you to blow and just demand that we all leave instantly, right And you know, she said, I'm the one that's trying to put it all together. So yeah, it's so terrible. Yeah. Yeah, So when it comes down to it, I used to be a person. I will say this. There are certain categories that I'm never laid for. I shouldn't say never, but almost never laid for, and airports is definitely one of them. Uh So, yeah, yeah, I am always extra careful and I am that guy, hey let's go, let's go, let's go. And people say get through this amount of time, I'm like, nope, at a half an hour. So I'm always there super early because I want to be at the gate saying nothing happened, no construction happened, nothing happened with a big long line. I'm always fearful of that. Right. So I've gone, I've got the TSA checked. All that stuff, I get all that, but I still get there super early. I'm flying out tomorrow. I have a conference I have to be at and my wife is going with me, and I always build in enough of a buffer. I've never missed a plane. I've never had, you know, trouble at those at TSA or anything that held me up where I had to go running. The only time one time, I was in Amsterdam and I miscalculated the time change, and so I'm just sitting there texting with my wife and suddenly I realized that they were saying my name over the speaker. And if you ever been in that amster in the airport at Amsterdam, it's huge. Yeah, it feels like miles. So I grabbed my bag and I take off running, and I am so far away from where I needed to be. I thought I had three more hours. I totally missed it. I did the math backwards instead of forwards, right, That's what happened. Yeah, So I'm running and they skipped everything and just walked me on and literally closed the door behind me, and everybody clapped when I got on the airplane. So apparently i'd held the plane. The only time ever that I did, I was there. I just did the math wrong. But most of the time. I'm an early guy too. I'd love to be early. So let me se you real quick. One time I had to lay over in Baton Rouge because my flight was late. It wasn't because of me, and I had to actually spend the night in the airport. So it was like from midnight to six am, and my plane left at like six So I was so bored because it's such a small, you know, airport. I decided to rent a car and just go out to Denny's at like two o'clock in the morning. I was by myself, so I had this rent a car and I'm driving back, you know, after sort of trying to stay up all night, and it was like four in the morning. You know, I'm just thinking this is I can't believe I found myself in the situation. And then I was so tired driving back to the airport. I only had like maybe three miles to go, big long stretch on these service roads, and I pulled over on the side of the road, put it in park, and I said, I'll just lay my head back a second. And I laid back for a second and I woke up and I realized my plane left in like seventeen minutes. Oh no, And so I. Literally put it in drive. And I'm not going to tell you the speed in which I I did, but I pulled. Underneath probably rate at the appropriate speed. Yes, appropriate speed limit. And then I pulled underneath the carport. And as I'm getting out, I grabbed my bag and the guy goes, you can't leave that there. I'm like, it's left there. I'd left it literally with the door open. And then I ran. This is how much I was running for time. And then I turned the corner to go right, and I was passing all of the rented cars like enterprise. I was sprinting as fast as a twenty five year old could sprint. I didn't even slow down. Jeff. I grabbed the keys as I was running by the desk and threw them as hard as I could, and I hit the back wall. And the two ladies behind the desk saw this keys fly by their head and it hits the back wall and I said. There's the keys. I said, it's PERTLYWN. Kept on running and then I go to the and I go to the lady and I'm like, get me on the plane, and she goes, you're not going to make this flight, and I freaked out because my pastor actually had threatened me and told another story, you better be back here on Sunday morning, right and then anyway, so I started screaming, Oh, I gotta get all this flying, and I ran as fast as I could made it. Wow. Yeah, those are back in the old days, before you had all the other checkpoints and TSA tackling you for looking sideways and stuff. Right, yeah, what was after eleven? But wow, wow, that's something else, man, I. Know, I know. Okay, well, actually it wasn't say if you were twenty five, Yeah, it was before. It was before kind of message you're trying to send everybody that you weren't twenty five. Happened when I when I was just two. Years old, Okay, okay. So we are wrapping up now on first Thessalonian or second Thessalonians, and he's really going to lean into uh believing believers, standing firm and closing out this idea, uh, clarifying all of his statements. So we're gonna start off in verse thirteen says as for us, we can't help, but thank God for you, dear brothers and sisters. Love by the Lord We are always thankful that God chose you to be among the first to experience salvation, a salvation that came through the Spirit who makes you holy, and through your belief in the truth. He called you to salvation when he when we told you the good news. But now you can share in the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. With all these things in mind, dear brothers and sisters, stand firm and keep a strong grip on the teaching we passed on to you, both in person and by letter. Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God, our Father, who loved us and by his grace gave us eternal comfort and a wonderful hope, comfort you and strengthen you and every good thing that you do. And say, finally, dear brothers and sisters, we ask you to pray for us. Pray that the Lord's message will spread rapidly and be honored wherever it goes, just as when it came to you. Pray too that we will be rescued from wicked and evil people. For not everyone is a believer, but the Lord is faithful. He will strengthen you and guard you from the evil one. And we are confident in the Lord that you are doing that you are doing and will continue to do the things we commanded you. May the Lord lead your hearts into a full understanding and expression of the love of God and the patient endurance that comes from Christ. And Now, dear brothers and sisters, we give you this command in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Stay away from all believers who live idle lives and don't follow the tradition they received from us, For you know that you ought to imitate us. We were not idle when we were with you. We never accepted food from anyone without paying for it. We worked hard day and night so we would not be a burden to any of you. We certainly had the right to ask you to feed us, but we wanted to give you an example to follow even while we were with you. We gave you this command. Those unwilling to work will not get to eat. Yet we hear that some of you are living idle lives, refusing to work and meddling in other people's business. We command such people and urge them, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, to settle down and to work to earn their own living. As for the rest of you, dear brothers and sisters, never get tired of doing good. Take note of those who refuse to obey what we say in this letter. Stay away from them so that they will be ashamed. Don't think of them as enemies, but warn them as you would a brother or sister. Now, May the Lord of Peace himself give you his peace at all times and in every situation. The Lord be with you all. Here is my greeting and my own handwriting, Paul. I do this in all my life to prove they are from me. May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. So I love that he ends it. Here's my greeting of my own handwriting. And then he signs his name Paul. Right. Yes, he does that a couple of times. So another time we just read what was it relations where he says, notice how big the letters are. I'm signing this so that you know it's mine. Normally he would probably be dictating the letter to a secretary or something, but then he would take up the thing and then write in his own handwriting. And some people estimate that perhaps he struggled with eyesight. There's a couple of issues that come up in his writings, and so that might be why he wrote such big letters when he would write you know that he didn't see well or whatever. That might be the thing. But I always think it's funny, Hey, look at I'm signing this on my own, my own handwriting. So that's kind of the certificate of authenticity, is what he's doing there. His administrator should here sign this. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's great. So standing firm. And by the way that I just want to say, I like you. I actually really love the term standing firm. So I have a life verse for Corinthians fifteen fifty eight, and it says, stand firm, always abounding in the work of the Lord, for as much as you know that your labor in the Lord is never in vain. So that's my life verse. And stand firm is one of those things where it sort of fits the personality that I gravitate toward. You know, no matter what you're going to do, come at me, you're not going to win, You're not going to knock me down, right, stand firm, And so I think that that's you know, it's encouraging to know that you can have that same sort of grit with your faith. And that's really what Paul's doing. He's encouraging people to have a grit with their faith because Paul in this whole chapter talks about, Hey, we were never idle, we worked our butts off, we never coasted, and you know, just because of my title, I never asked to do anything. But he also says, stand firm in your faith because they've modeled it, they've been persecuted, they've been beaten, they've been shipwrecked, they've been you know, all sorts of things, you know, jailed, and so he asks us to stand firm in our faith. Yeah, he says, stand firm. And then he also says, to keep a strong grip on the teaching that we passed to you, right, so you got to hang on to it. A lot of the things that we learned, they slip through our hands. We lose a grip on them if we don't intentionally hang on. And so one of the ways is keep refreshing and reminding ourselves of these words. That's why he had commanded I want these letters read publicly. I want these things out there where everybody has access to these words, because otherwise you forget them and I think a lot of the struggles and difficulties when we shift back from doing things God's way to start behaving like the rest of the world acts like godless people act, is because we've lost our grip on God's words and we slip back into just our normal habits, in the normal way humans would do things, because God's way is so counterintuitive, it's so different from our way. And so you know, stand firm and hang on, hang on tight to right these words, right, these teachings. Yeah, and then he goes on and he talks about how those are idle. Remember what we said, the reason why he wrote the second Thessalonians was because people were being idle and they were misunderstanding what he meant about the Lord's coming. And by the way, Paul was a tent maker. By trade, so he worked day and night, never to be a burdened with everybody. And then how are you like this for a policy? Those unwilling to work will not get to eat. Yeah, yeah, some political. There be some political debate about that. Well, I told you about the domestic dispute. The whole village was having a domestic dispute. East in West Africa, northwest Kenya, and we came into this village and all the women, there's probably seventy five eighty women and probably one hundred and fifty children are throwing rocks and they have sticks in their hands, and they're yelling at the men who are all together on the other side of the road. And I wanted to know what's happening. And my translators like, oh, I don't want to get involved. I said, I don't want to get involved. I just want to know what's happening. You know, we'd gone for days and days and days without any television, so now this is the biggest drama i'd seen it in a while. And most of our work was done for that day. Sun was just setting. It was right around dinner time. And finally he said, well, the women have discovered in the Bible that it says that if a man doesn't work, he shouldn't eat. And the women were saying, you are a bunch of lazy men, and so we cook the meals and we're not gonna let you eat any more food unless you work harder. And it is true. In that village. Alls I ever saw the men do is they all sit on they have stills, they'd make this really horrible hoots apparently, I mean it's rock kind of stuff. They would drink and they played like this. It's like a dice game. It's kind of like have you ever seen Mancala where you move the stones and the thing. It's kind of like that. They would make these grooves in the dirt and they would play this game kind of like that's called bao and they're playing it in the dirt. And that's how they do all day long, is play. And then on occasion they'd fight battles and steal other people's cow. So that's basically it. And so the women were like, we build the we call the water, we take care of the children, we cook the meals, we maintain the fires. You guys don't do anything. So the guys they all stand up and then they go, we're going to go out and talk about it. We'll come back later and I will tell you what we're going to do. So then about an hour later they all came back. They went out in the bush. They come back by an hour later and the leader stands up. He says, you're right. We've decided you're right, and so what we're going to do is we're going to provide better security and we're going to make sure that the boys take better care of the cows, which meant they weren't changing anything. They didn't. They didn't change one thing, but it was that's what was happening, is the women were frustrated because the men were being lazy. That's it. When we are surrounded by lazy people, it makes it so much harder for everybody else because everybody else has to pick up the load that you're leaving, you know, all this stuff undone and everybody else has to do it. So it becomes very frustrating and causes a lot of struggle. But when everybody gets in and helps, then it makes things so much easier. Yeah, I agree for sure. It's fantastic, what a great thing. And he's really going after him on it. By the way, this is a big I mean, he takes a bunch of verses. Right, Yeah, he sure does. And then there's a whole section in here. He calls for prayer. He asks to pray, pray that the Lord's message will spread rapidly, you know, pray for us, Pray that the wicked people will will leave us alone, and that we'll be rescued from them because not everyone is a believer. And you know, and then and by the way, there's a promise in there too, he says, But the Lord is faithful. He will strengthen you and guard you from the evil one. Yeah, and which is a great verse to take. And just you know, remind ourselves with God will strengthen us and protect us from the evil one. So he's his great desire with all the other things he has to talk about. His great desire is regardless of the persecution, regardless of the theological confusion, regardless of the interpersonal struggles that we have. The most important thing is pray that the Lord's message will spread rapidly. Right. So sure, there's all these peripherals that we got to work on. I'm going to write your book to talk about it. But the most important thing is that nothing hinders the gospel. We need strength, we need protection, we need courage. And then pray that you know, people's hearts will be prepared and ready to hear the good news of the Gospel, so that the word continues to spread quickly. And he talks about how it came to you, right, just like you received it, you know, I'm reminded often and one of the most profound thoughts I think I've ever had was the Gospel came to me on the way to someone else. God's goal wasn't just so I could go to heaven. Two thousand years ago and two thousand years of Christian history was not supposed to culminate with Finally Jeff Forster became a Christian. God wipes the dust off his hands as well, We're finished. Now, that's great, we did it right. The Gospel. Good top guys finally got it. The Jeff two thousand years later, or to any of our listeners, God's goal wasn't just to get you to heaven. God's goal was to bring the Gospel to you so that it would transform your life. But it was to you on the way to someone else. And so it's incredibly important for us to understand that our mission is not done the moment we trust Christ, or the moment we start developing the ways of Jesus in our own life and the character of Christ to grow up to become more like him, that's not it. Our mission will be finished when he calls us to heaven. But between here and there, he wants us to go reach other people, not only that the gospel would spread, but that it would spread rapidly. And so God's goal is not just to trickle along. And maybe someday you'll have the guts to bring up a spiritual conversation with your lost friend. God said, do it. Do it now, be rapid about it. Push, keep pushing forward with the gospel. I love it. I love it. Yeah, And it's a great reminder that, you know, we can do a lot of really good things in the world, but you know, furthering God's message, his plan of salvation, it's the one thing that matters the most. So I did a funeral just an hour ago, an hour and a half probably ago. And by did of funeral, I just mean for these those who officiate, yes and so. And the funeral director was there next to me, and I said, yeah, I don't mind doing funerals at all. And he said why, And I said, well, for three reasons. Number one, and I do funerals and I don't mind them because Number one, I always give the Gospel unless the family tells me not, to which. I'll honor the request. I always give the gospel. I always tell people how to get to heaven always, and I've done seven hundred and something funerals and I've done it almost every time. And then number two, I give it. I give the gospel to people who are at a time in their life where they're most susceptible and they're most sensitive to it because they're around death. And then number three, those people most likely will never set foot in the church. Those aren't church people or people that are prone to go to church. Those are people that just have to go to funerals and they may never set foot. In the church. Yeah, to clarify you, you help out at funeral homes around the region for people who don't have a minister to do a funeral. You didn't do seven hundred funerals at our church. It's not dangerous to attend to here to the church. Right, It's especially since I've only been there too. Yeah, exactly. But it's that you've you've reached out and made yourself available to the families in our community who otherwise don't have a spiritual leader or somebody to depend on in these crisis. But I'm also referring to all the funerals I did before I got here. Yeah, yeah, church, sure, So my over thirty one years, I've done X amount of funerals. But yeah, for sure. I mean because I think in my whole ministry, I've done like maybe seventy five funerals and your whole Messageah yeah, yeah, yeah in thirty years. Is that so? Yeah? Yeah, because I've always been in younger churches, and so you don't do as many funerals in younger churches, right, yeah, with young people. But so to do seven hundred and fifty, that's a lot of funerals. Yeah. Well. The only reason why I even know that number is because I have a little file on my computer and you click on get info and it tells you how many files are in it, and right now it's like seven hundred and something. Yeah. Yeah, Well, what a great ministry to be there when people, You know, the ministry of a chaplain is to is the ministry of presence being with somebody, uh in a spiritual way, being with somebody in their their most difficult times. And so for you to be able to step in, not as the pastor at Heritage Church or the pastor at Kensington or whatever, but stepping in instead and saying we don't know each other, but I'm willing to be here for you spiritually in this moment. It's that there's tremendous power on that. It's the same thing for our listeners at work. You might know the people loosely kind of know the people in your in your your office, but when there's a crisis and you step up say I just want you to know I'm praying for you, and then circle back with them later and say, how is. Anything I give you piece of godly advice? Yes? Or hey, I've been praying for you. How can I pray for you? Right, and engage on a spiritual level. That this ministry of presence is very significant and it opens the door for sharing the Gospel, which is your primary motivation. Right. Yeah, that's awesome. Oh that's brilliant man, I think it's great. All right, Well, that's it's a good place to end, and we will see you next time on the Bible guys. MHM