We urge you to live a life pleasing to God (which you are) and do more and more.                         1 Thessalonians 4:1

I love the encouragement of this epistle to live a life pleasing to God.  As many times as I have read this passage it never caught my attention that the encouragement was to do more.  What? Do more?  Striving to live a good life that honors God is hard enough, but do more and more?

I suppose the message is that we are never done.  We never achieve the finish line of becoming a full follower of Jesus and citizen of the Kingdom.  There is always the encouragement to do more.  We are always called to take the next faithful step as we continuously grow in faith and love.  When you please God with living well, do more.  When you serve, give, and bless others in a way that honors God, do more.

This sounds exhausting.  God is pleased with us as we stumble along in faith and the spirit continually lifts us to do more.  However, is that not what a good parent does.  Always encouraging the child to do more.  A child learns to walk, gets better and better at the task, and the parent keeps encouraging to walk more.  Do more, do it more often, do it again.

Our faith life in following Jesus is never done.  We are not perfect, but we are “going on to perfection”.  That means we are doing more and more.  Sometimes the scripture is so encouraging and trying at the same time.  Keep going!  You are pleasing to God, now do more!

Blessings,

Pastor Rafe