Children of light

One small note. Yesterday, I said I was talking about chapters 2-3; actually, it was 3-4.

(And thus we can see that there are benefits to having chapter and verse divisions after all. It keeps us on the same page. 🙂 )

Anyway, I had a couple of thoughts as I read this passage.

First, Paul calls us to live as what we truly are: children of light. He says, “You are children of light. So live like it!”

But what does that look like, to live as children of light?

Paul tells us to, “put on the armor of faith and love, and a helmet of the hope of salvation.”  (1 Thessalonians 5:8)

Faith, hope, and love. That triad is something you often see in Paul’s writings, and we see it here again.

A child of light has the hope of salvation. The hope that, as we saw yesterday, when Jesus appears, we will be like him, for we shall see him as he is. (I John 3:2)

That hope helps us take our eyes off of the temporal pleasures that sin offers to the One who truly satisfies. And as we look at him, and we see what we will be, we desire even now to become more and more like him.

I find it also interesting that in Ephesians, Paul talks about the breastplate of righteousness. Here, he talks about the breastplate of faith and love.

I don’t know if he meant this connection, but when you look at his writings, there is a connection between righteousness, faith, and love.

Our righteousness comes not from our own efforts to be good. It comes from putting our faith in Jesus and his work on the cross. And when we do, God counts us as righteous in his eyes (thus leading to our hope of salvation).

But faith always works itself out in love. And because of the love we ourselves have received from God, we start to love him and those around us.

Does this sound familiar? It should. All of God’s law is summed up in those two commands.

And so not only are we declared righteous by God, but we start to change and live righteously as God intended from the beginning. That’s what a child of God looks like.

But one more thing. Paul wrote,

For God did not appoint us to wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep, we may live together with him. (1 Thessalonians 5:9-10)

Here, Paul isn’t talking about being awake or asleep in regards to our normal sleeping patterns. (See I Thessalonians 4:13-18).

Rather, Christ died for us that whether we live here on earth, or die and depart from this earth, we will forever be with him.

Again, that’s the hope that we have. So with that hope in mind, let us live each day as children of light.