Proclaimer Blog
1 Thessalonians. No microwave meal.
I guess 1 Thessalonians is the kind of book many of us think we know well. We think we’ve got the structure sorted, there are not too many difficulties exegetically etc etc. It’s been refreshing therefore to revisit 1 Thessalonians with Nigel Styles at our Autumn Conference. It’s like this with Bible books, isn’t it? There are some Bible passages (not many, I’m ashamed to say) that I know off by heart. Even so, there are always beauties and delights in the text that we don’t always see first, second or even third time around. It’s tempting to think as preachers that we need to get through the whole canon of Scripture before going back over a book we’ve preached before. That may be true if all you are going to do is rehash the old material, like some microwaved ready meal. But if you’re going to come fresh to the text, fresh to the material, fresh to prayer, fresh to application, then nonsense. Of course you can preach it again. And 1 Thessalonians may be no bad place to start.