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Hi, I'm Pastor Tom Holliday, and I want to welcome you to Daily Drive Time
Devotions, our study of 1 Thessalonians. We're in chapter three this week, day
one of our look at that chapter. We're going to be looking actually at some of
the verses out of the last chapter today, beginning towards chapter three,
because we're continuing this look at the authentic life.

In chapter three and the last part of chapter two, Paul talks about the emotions
that go along with this authentic life of making a difference in your life,
through your life, because of Jesus Christ. The emotions that go along with
ministry, the emotions that go along with serving people, the emotions that go
along with God using you to make a difference in this world. At first look, this
chapter, chapter three, seems to be just some information about what Paul and
Timothy did, but when you look deeper, you see the heart that's behind it.

It's an honest talk about God using you. It's an honest talk about the emotions,
the feelings that go along with that, both the good and the bad. This week we're
going to look together at five emotions of ministry, and here's the point as we
look at these.

We're all ministers. We all are people that God wants to use to make a
difference in this world, and so we're all going to experience all five of these
feelings. We're in ministry to our families, to the people we work with, to
church.

Ministry simply means serving, and we're all to serve. Jesus said, "I came to
serve," and to give you an example. There's good news and bad news here when it
comes to the emotions, because both are part of ministry.

As we take a look at this passage of scripture, help you to realize that
sometimes the passages of scripture that we think are boring, that are just mere
information, when you look just a little bit deeper, that's where you discover
some incredible truths. These truths about the emotions of ministry, five
emotions, begin really back at the end of chapter two, where Paul talks about
the first of these five emotions, and I would call it the emotion of intense
longing. Let me read 2, 17 through 20, "But brothers, when we were torn away
from you for a short time, in person, not in thought, out of our intense
longing, we made every effort to see you.

For we wanted to come to you, certainly I, Paul, did, again and again. But Satan
stopped us. For what is our hope, our joy, or the crown in which we will glory
in the presence of our Lord Jesus when he comes?

Is it not you? Indeed, you are our glory and joy. " Then going into chapter
three, verses one and two, "So when we could stand it no longer, we thought it
best to be left by ourselves in Athens, and we sent Timothy, who is our brother
and God's fellow worker in spreading the gospel of Christ, to strengthen and
encourage you in your faith.

" Paul talks about this intense longing. He had an intense longing for God's
will to happen in the world, an intense longing for people to grow and lives to
change. Two thousand years later, you read these words of Paul, you can still
feel the love that he had for people as you read this chapter.

When I say intense longing, what do you think of? Let's say you've been on a
diet for nine months, and you really like chocolate, and so you go out to a
restaurant, and the person you're with orders a huge piece of chocolate cake.
They bring this cake to the table, and the person you're with leaves the table
for a few minutes, and it's just you and the chocolate cake.

Is what I'm talking about, when I talk about intense longing, the feeling you'd
have just then, well, let me just say, not at all. Is something a lot bigger and
a lot deeper than even that? All of us know what it means to really want
something to happen for our success.

We all know what it means to intensely long to achieve or to succeed. We all
have that feeling. We have those feelings in ministry too, and we're serving
too, but when Paul talks about intense longing, he's talking about something
even deeper than that.

It's more than an intense desire to achieve, it's a desire to be effective. It's
a desire to be, the Bible word is fruitful. It's a desire to make a difference
in this world, to see people's lives changed.

It's not just about me anymore. It's about other people's lives being changed,
and as Paul talks about this experience of intense longing with the people in
Thessalonica, he gives us some quick ideas of what this feeling, this emotion
grows out of in our lives. This intense desire grows out of three or four things
he talks about here.

First he says it grew for me out of a time when I was torn away, and that's true
for us also. Sometimes this intense longing grows out of times when you're torn
away. Paul had been with them only two weeks, then he'd been forced to leave by
persecution.

There is an intense longing when you try to minister to someone, but you're torn
away from that circumstance. You love what you're doing, and God maybe moves
you. Maybe God's even the one who moves you to a different place.

Maybe you love a church that you're involved with, and God sends you somewhere
else. Or you love your small group, and God tells you to leave your small group
and go make a difference somewhere else, start a new small group. You have an
intense longing that comes out of that.

If you really want a good picture of this intense longing when you're torn away
from something that you really love, all you have to do is go to an elementary
school on the first day of kindergarten and watch all the parents watch their
little kindergartners march off to class. The look on the parents' faces is that
feeling of being torn away, and you have it in ministry too. Paul says even out
of that comes this feeling of intense longing.

I want to do more because I realize I can do more. He goes on and he says, "This
feeling for me grew out of times when I tried again and again, for we wanted, he
said, to come to you again and again. " We think sometimes, well, if I'm serving
God, if I'm trying to make a difference in the world, it's always going to work
out.

If I really want to do it for God, if I feel like God has called me to do it,
it's going to be pretty easy to see it work out. The surprise sometimes about
ministry is that you can pray the greatest prayers, you can have the greatest
faith, and it's not going to happen every time the way that you want it to
happen or when you want it to happen. There are many, many, many times when
you're ministering to someone in your family or someone on a mission trip or
someone in a small group, and you have to try again and again.

It is not in the first try when God uses you to make a difference. Now, he
begins to use you in that first try, but it's not in the first try that you see
him using you to make a difference. It's in the 10th or the 20th try that you
see it.

God's been working all along, but that's when you see it. And out of that need
to try again and again, to give yourself to it again and again, comes this
intense longing. You either give up or you give in to this feeling of intense
longing.

Paul says, "This intense longing also grew in my life through times when Satan
tried to stop me. " There are times when Satan tries to stop you. When you're
stopped by opposition or by persecution or by temptation, who do you think is
behind that?

Satan is behind that, and Satan will stop you. There will be times when he
throws up a barrier in your way of ministry. He doesn't want us to succeed in
ministry, so he will stop you.

God allows Satan to have a certain degree of power in this world. Just until the
end, then it'll be gone. Now, Satan can't make you fall to a temptation.

That's your choice. But he can throw other barriers in your way, things that
other people do that do stop you. So yes, Satan can throw up barriers to stop
you, but only for a time.

Let me just say to you, you don't have to be afraid of that. Because Satan
cannot stop God. He may stop you, he may stop me, but he cannot stop God's
ultimate will from happening in this world.

That is good news. He can stop you or me for a moment. He can't stop God from
being at work.

He can't stop God's will from ultimately being done. You can take comfort in
that, even in your intense longing. As we read through this passage, there's a
fourth thing that this intense longing is generated by in Paul's life.

He says in chapter 3 verse 1, "When we could stand it no longer, we thought it
best to be left by ourselves at Athens, and we sent Timothy to you. " And then a
few verses later, he says, "When we could stand it no longer, I sent to find out
about your faith. " There are times when you can stand it no longer.

That's an expression of intense longing. There are times when a concern for
others and a conviction about what needs to be done meet in your life, and they
can't be denied. You can stand it no longer.

You hear God saying, "You need to be doing this. You need to be living there in
order to make a difference. You need to help with that area of church ministry.

Maybe it's with preschoolers. Maybe it's junior highers or senior highers. You
need to make a difference with your life in this area of ministering to women,
or you fill in the blank.

" There's this time when you have a sense of that is the right thing to do, but
then that on that thought grows louder and louder and louder into an intense
longing. There comes a point when the volume gets so loud, like in your car, if
the stereo volume keeps getting turned up and up and up, it gets so loud you
have to do something about it. You have to do something about it now.

That's the intense longing that we're talking about. What do you do when you
have an intense longing? You do something about it.

I want you to notice in this passage what Paul did. Paul sent Timothy to
strengthen and encourage them. That's an incredibly important biblical
principle.

When you have an intense longing about ministry, do something about it.
Strengthen God's people. Encourage God's people.

That's the best thing to do, but notice that Paul sent Timothy to do that. Even
if you can't do it, someone else can. It is important to remember that intense
desire does not mean that you have to be the one doing it all.

A lot of us make that mistake. God may have given you the desire so that you
could pass it along to someone else. If he prevents you from doing it, guess
what?

That doesn't mean he doesn't want someone to do it. You pass it along to someone
else. As we take a few minutes to pray together today, let's pray about the
intense longing that God may have put into your heart.

Let me just ask you in a spirit of prayer, is there something that you feel
needs to be changed for God's sake? You can stand it no longer. That's an
intense longing.

When it comes to serving others and making a difference in this world for
others, that is an intense longing. What can you do about it? Well, you start
with prayer.

Talk to God about it right now and say, "God, here it is. Here's the way that I
feel, but I don't know what to do about it. I don't know where to take this
feeling.

" So I begin by taking it to you, and I ask you to help me to know just the
first step of that. God, I'll be honest. I would love to know the whole plan.

I'd love you to paint the whole picture. Show me the entire map, but I know
that's not going to happen. You show me one step at a time.

So show me the next step. And then God, by your grace, give me the strength to
take that step. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, tomorrow we're going to be looking at verses five to seven, two more of
these Five Emotions of Ministry.