Thursday 27 May 2021

Thought for the Day 27/05/21 - Things that we don't like the sound of ...

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  • Hard work

  • Discipline

  • Medicine

  • Dentist

... things that we don't very much like the sound of can often be the way to get what we really do want.


With the Olympics coming up in a few weeks, hundreds of people from all over the world are putting themselves through pain, effort, physiotherapy and worse to get to the objective they have trained for throughout their lives ... their moment of glory on the podium.


They live painfully now for a future hope

According to what's become a bit of a favouriyte website of mine,  www.solvingprocrastination.com:

"People often procrastinate on tasks which are associated with rewards that they will only receive a while after completing the task, since people tend to discount the value of rewards that are far in the future, a phenomenon known as temporal discounting or delay discounting.

Accordingly, people often display a present bias when they choose to engage in activities that reward them in the short-term, at the expense of working on tasks that would lead to better outcomes for them in the long term."

Genuine faith in Christ involves the willingness to lay aside things in the short term to benefit in the long term.

So ... in the words of the Verse for the Day, it is a sign of the genuineness of the Thessalonian Christians faith that they ...


"... turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, 

and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead 

– Jesus, who rescues us from the coming wrath."

1 Thessalonians 1:9‭-‬10




This is a sign that something has definitely changed for these Thessalonian Christians, as ...


This was no small thing in Thessalonica

Their commerce and business, as well as their social lives, were tied up in the guilds that revolved around the worship of idols.

They turned away from those things .... and that was personally costly.

Serving the living and true God involved costly ethical personal choices too.

And even to this day, the ethical and professional or business choices genuine Christianity leads into can involve implications for believers in the here and now, who are living faithfully for the coming there and then.


The Point

But the Thessalonians' genuineness was evident, as they made those costly choices in the here and now because they genuinely believed and genuinely realised the importance of the coming there and then.


The Takeaway


Paul writes to the Corinthian church:

"So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, 

but on what is unseen, 

since what is seen is temporary, 

but what is unseen is eternal."

2 Corinthians 4:18


So, where are we fixing our eyes?

Are we making the best possible choice?



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