‘And the Lord direct your hearts into the love of God and into the patient endurance of Christ.'
Once again he prays that their lives may be filled with love resulting from God's activity within them, and may have patient endurance through Christ's strengthening (compare 2 Thessalonians 1:3-4). It is possibly love and patient endurance worked in them by God and Jesus Christ, rather than God's own love and Christ's own patient endurance, that are in mind, although he may be thinking of Their love and patient endurance to be seen as examples which produce and encourage a similar response. Of course the one would be intended to beget the other. The reference to patient endurance again emphasises the continual persecution the Thessalonian church is facing.