¹Paul and Silvanus and Timothy, to the church of the Thessalonians in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ …

God loves all believers (Rom. 5:8). Christ loves the church (Eph. 5:25). Paul loved the individual churches. While he doesn’t use that specific wording, his actions of sacrifice, hardship, and tears reflect his love (Acts 20:31–38). He never gave up on any of them. It does not sit well with God when Christians pompously blast the church with criticism! It is true we must be open to honest self-evaluation, but to derisively dismiss the church with an air of superiority and pseudo-spirituality—God will have none of that!

God holds the prerogative to criticize churches, as He does in Revelation 2–3, and He has the authority to snuff out their candlestick of light in the world. To be sure, many, many churches have lost their effectiveness in being salt and light in the world. But we are thinking at this junction of the attitude of judgmentalism that is often expressed something like this: “I love the universal church, but it’s the ‘organized’ church that I have a problem with.” A real problem arises when a person isolates himself as being separate from, above, and passing judgment on “the local church.” We who are believers are the church. Criticism must begin with ourselves. If the local church has a problem, withdrawing from the local church altogether is not the answer.

A telltale sign for determining your attitude on this matter is how you refer to the local church that you attend. Do you see it as “those people” or “them” as opposed to “us” or “we?” We are the church, universal and local. We all must become an active part of a body where we embrace the people in love, and refer to the gathering with first-person pronouns, not third person.

Note the one small change Paul makes in his opening verse of this letter in contrast to his first letter. He refers in his first letter to the church in Thessalonica as being in God “the” Father, whereas in this second letter he refers to the church as being in “our” Father. We must not press the interpretive value of this small change too much, but it suggests that if the local church belongs to “our” Father, then it follows that the local church is “our family” with God as our Father. These are our people, our heritage, our family, with whom we will spend eternity. Therefore, the local church is a place for the family of God—for us—to practice our Christian lives, to learn to love and grow together. So “by our love” we will have a positive effect on the world through our loving witness. Did not Jesus say, “By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35)?

Lord, thank You for giving me my local church to help me grow in love.