When St. Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, he told them,

He was impressed by three qualities that they demonstrated:
your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ (1 Thes. 1:3)
- faith, love, and hope – essential building blocks of a Christian life
So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love (1 Cor. 13:13)
• Paul may have looked for evidence of these traits in the churches he visited
• do they walk by faith, hang onto hope, and do everything in love?
- "Hope" is the Advent theme for this Sunday