Our New Preaching Series

Steve Petch

February 1

We're starting a brand new preaching series at Welcome Church this Sunday, and I'm really looking forward to it. I'll be preaching the first part of the series myself this weekend.

All change

If you look inside the green book we've been giving out from the start of this term, page 5 says that our spring preaching series is on the book of Exodus, and that was the plan. For a variety of boringly practical reasons, which I won't list here, we decided to push that series back into May, so it will become more of a summer series.

Instead, for the next seven weeks, we're going to look at the book of 1 Thessalonians from the New Testament. We've called the series, "Our Great Hope", and of course it's going to be all about Jesus.

Some Background To The Series

A little while ago I felt what I think was a 'Holy Spirit nudge' (you may know what I mean) that we should preach through this book in 2024. We would have done it later on this year, but we like to stay flexible as circumstances change and, after discussion, we decided to go for this first.

To give some background to the book itself: 1 Thessalonians is probably the earliest of Paul's letters that we have, dating to around AD50 or 51. It was written to the church in Thessaloniki, in Greece, which Paul and Silas had planted. Sadly they were forced to move on from the church very quickly due to persecution breaking out and the church sending them away (see Acts 17v1-10)

Paul was subsequently very concerned about how the church was doing, so he sent his co-worker Timothy to find out. Timothy returned with a good report: the church were doing well, although they missed Paul and Silas. They did have some theological questions, including questions about what happens to Christians who die, and about the return of Jesus.

In response Paul, Silas and Timothy then wrote to the church to answer their questions, to encourage them to remain true to Jesus, and to spur them on to live holy and faithful lives in the midst of real persecution. That letter is the book of 1 Thessalonians that we have in our Bibles today.

The best summary of this book that I've come across is a short video created by The Bible Project. (It's actually my favourite of all their videos that I've watched so far, and it even brought a small tear to my eye 😟)

Here's a link to the video: https://bibleproject.com/explore/video/1-thessalonians/

In order to get the most from the series, why not watch the video before we begin? It will set you up really well for the series. See you on Sunday!