The King Is Coming: Living as Children of the Light

On Sunday morning, Pastor Chris Parker continued the church’s study of 1 Thessalonians, reading 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11 and pressing home one urgent question: the King is coming—are you ready? Paul, he explained, moves from the practical to the prophetical, from the rapture of the church in chapter 4 to the Day of the Lord in chapter 5, a coming day of judgment that will fall on a sleeping world “as a thief in the night.” Every person, the pastor reminded the congregation, is either a child of light or a child of darkness, and that identity determines destiny: ruin or rescue, wrath or salvation.

Building on previous weeks’ study of light and darkness, Pastor Parker observed that God is light with no shadow, and that believers are to reflect that light without letting the impurities of a careless life cast shadows over their testimony. From verses 6-11 he drew three exhortations for living among the children of darkness. First, be watchful and sober—unlike an idle, distracted world pictured in Sodom, in the days of Noah, and in Belshazzar’s feast, Christians must stay alert and rightly value the things that matter. Second, be guarded, putting on the breastplate of faith and love and the helmet of the hope of salvation—the believer’s confident assurance that God will finish what He has started. Third, claim God’s promises, chief among them that “God hath not appointed us to wrath, but to obtain salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ.”

He closed where Paul closes, in verse 11: comfort and edify one another. We live watchfully and shine the light, he urged, so that others may be saved before that day arrives. Like a child waiting faithfully for a father who promised to return, believers can rest in Christ’s own word, “I will come again.” The King is coming—be ready.