“May the Lord make you increase and abound in love to one another and to all, just as we do to you, so that He may establish your hearts blameless in holiness before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ with all His saints” (1 Thess 3:12-13).
To be blameless is not the same as “sinless”; it means that we have sought diligently to set our affairs right with God and men. In the spring of 1931, Mr. and Mrs. R.W. Porteous were taken prisoner by Communist bandits and led to a lonely hill. The executioner placed his blade at their necks. Suddenly the couple began to sing:
“Face to face with Christ, my Savior,
Face to face, what will it be?
When with rapture I behold Him,
Jesus Christ who died for me.”
The man dropped his sword in the face of such courage. The Porteouses were released and, after an arduous journey, returned to their native England. As Jim Elliot wrote before his own martyrdom, “Make sure that, when it comes to dying, all you have to do is die.”