The rules of conduct for Christians whom the Lord obligated to preach the Gospel are repeated by the apostle Paul more than once or twice. And here in today's reading we have a concise statement of the foundation of life for everyone. First, witness is not instead of ordinary life, but together with ordinary life, with daily duties, with care for daily bread. We cannot justify our inaction by saying that our life is too complicated. Second, holy, righteous, blameless conduct. Easier to say than to do. But before us stands a person with an obviously difficult character, with his own problems and illnesses that plainly burden and torment him. And he tells us that our conduct before God must be blameless.

But most strongly of all, Paul defines the center of his preaching: "we asked and persuaded and implored you to walk worthily of God, who called you into His Kingdom and glory." It is unbearably painful for a modern person to accept this phrase. Because it is most convenient to imagine God as something abstract, mechanical, many-faced, and cruel. Such a god is easier; he is controllable. But with one phrase we find ourselves before the face of God, in whom there is no darkness; before the face of the Son of Man, the apostle Paul implores us to be worthy of the One who has called us into His wondrous Light. Readiness to bear witness to the Light, to the Glory, and to the Kingdom is based precisely on the fact that all of this is not an abstraction. We are speaking about the properties and qualities of a real Person.

Recalling his ministry in Thessalonica, Paul especially emphasizes the fact that he never used his position as an apostle in order to get something from those to whom he preached. And this is not only about some personal advantages: Paul, as is clear, did not try in general, as people say, to "throw his authority around." Here a very important principle of Christian witness was revealed, one the apostle always followed: witness must be unobtrusive.

The issue is not only that any forcing of Christianity can turn into formalism in the religious life of the community that results from such preaching. The issue lies in the very essence of spiritual life in general and Christian life in particular. Indeed, spiritual life comes down entirely to relationships - a person's relationships with God and with other people. And relationships cannot be transferred; one can only speak about them and introduce another person to the One whom one knows oneself. But the one who seeks relationships will have to establish and maintain them; no one else will do this for him.

Here the process is deep and internal, and no one has access to it except God and the person establishing the relationship. Pressure is useless here: another person's authority will not help the matter in this case. But it can easily "help" with something else: imposing an ideology on a person, for example, a religious one. Christianity, if one wants, is not so hard to turn into a religion, although such a transformation will mean its spiritual degeneration.

But when the issue is another person's authority, leadership in the usual sense of the word, in which the leader shows the way and defines what to believe and how to live, the spiritual degeneration of Christianity (and of any spiritual life in general) is practically inevitable. A true spiritual teacher is therefore always unobtrusive; he only helps a person see and hear God when that person is already ready to see and hear Him. Such was Paul's witness to Christ: he helped those who were ready for the meeting and wanted it to meet Him, but he was not going to lead anyone anywhere, and he was not going to tell anyone how to live with Christ. Each person had to establish his own relationship with Him and find his own path into the Kingdom.

For Paul the flattery and covetousness are connected things. Of course, there is in principle nothing surprising here, if it is about the life and the laws of the non transformed world: each knows that with flattery we can sometimes obtain considerable profits. But it is indeed about the Church, besides about the first Christian church, where sin and evil of the fallen world didn’t have yet all the same such a power, as in the structures of church of the following centuries. What then wants to say the apostle? It is probably about this character of the sermon, which sounded from the mouth of the apostle. In fact, there were already unfortunately in the Church in those days, preachers wishing to please the listeners and putting it as the goal of their sermons.

But this can be achieved in different ways: it is possible to charm or shock the public, the most important is to draw attention to oneself. And later comes the moment of the reception of these profits. And it is not at all obligatory to be material: because the main profit, the main covetousness here is the power, this power over souls, which will not give any formal authority, no structure. Sometimes for such power its owners are the same ready to suffer a little bit (but not to death, of course, otherwise the game is senseless). And so in what such power over souls convert depends only on its owner.

It is not necessary to say many about it because such a sermon has exactly no relation to testimony. And it is horrible not only by the fact that the preacher like that violates in reality the first commandment, by putting himself in God's place (although such a preacher will never of course say aloud anything similar), but also as well by the fact that he provokes the same violation on the side of those who listen to this kind of sermon. In fact, all this kind of activity represents the most real spiritual perversion, the worship of man under the guise of Christian sermons. Paul, as seen, witnesses of himself that he has never allowed anything similar.

It is necessary to recognize that it is an extraordinarily difficult task for the witness: because to make oneself the center of his own sermon is easy, such a substitution can remain completely unnoticed for the preacher, at least at the beginning, and when it all the same shows up afterward, it will probably be very difficult to admit to oneself and to others what happened. Only the fullness of immersion in the life of the Kingdom and the complete trust to the one who brought this Kingdom in the world can protect from that. As it was the case with Paul.