Today we start a new series, on Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians. This is probably the first letter Paul wrote, although the date of Galatians could be either a few years before or after the date of this letter. In any event, it seems to have been written while Paul was in Corinth. You’ll remember from last week that Silas and Timothy arrived with encouraging news from the Macedonian churches along with financial support that they’d sent. And it seems that this letter is written in response to what they report to him. That means that we can date the letter fairly accurately to around 51-52AD since that’s the period when Gallio was proconsul of Achaia.
You’ll also remember that Thessalonica was one of the places where Paul had to leave town because of the opposition of the Jewish synagogue. So it was a place where it would have been difficult to be a Christian. So Paul spends some time in this and his subsequent letter to them, encouraging the Christians there to persevere, to hold on to their faith as they await the return of Jesus Christ.
But this isn’t just a historical survey of the situation in the early church. It’s also an opportunity for us to think about the relationship between the gospel and a growing church. It’s an opportunity for us to see how we as a Church can be shaped by the gospel and how we can spread the gospel as we seek to live a life that’s worthy of the gospel.
So today, let’s see how Paul addresses this young church, what he has to say about them and the way the gospel first came to them and their response to it.
He begins with the customary formula for letters of the time. First he names the sender, then the person to whom they’re writing, then he greets them, then gives thanks for them. In this case the letter comes from Paul, Silvanus, or Silas, and Timothy. This is a letter of encouragement from the whole mission team. Paul doesn’t differentiate himself from the other 2 by calling himself an apostle, as he does in 1 Corinthians and in Galatians for example. His authority isn’t at issue here. Rather it’s the encouragement of the whole team that matters. It may even be that Silas and Timothy have helped to compose the letter.
What does matter though is the way he addresses the Thessalonians, because here we discover some important things about the Church of God.
1 The Church is a community that lives in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
He addresses the letter: "To the church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ."
It isn’t "to the church of God in Thessalonica", notice. Rather it’s to the church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. So what does that mean? What does it mean to be ’in God’ or ’in Jesus Christ’? Well clearly it’s not a spatial reference is it? We’re not to be found ’inside’ God. But it does have something to do with where we find our life, our sustenance, our being. Jesus used this idea in John 15 when he talked about his followers being part of a vine. Jesus is the vine; we are the branches. So while we remain in the vine we’ll live. If we abandon the vine we’ll shrivel up and die. Paul used a similar metaphor when he talked about the church being Christ’s body and each of us individually parts of that body: limbs and fingers and ears and noses. In that picture we see that we’re the means by which Jesus reaches out to the world
So why does he stress this idea from the start of his letter? Well it could be that he knows the difficulties they face, the opposition they’ll encounter from the enemies of the gospel. So he wants to emphasise the source of their life. He wants to remind them that they need to remain firm in God and Jesus Christ, rooted firmly in the one who gives and sustains their life. As soon as we lose that firm foundation, that strong connection to God and to his son Jesus Christ we lose the source of our strength: that is, the only thing that will give us the power to stand against the opposition of the evil one.
But we also need to be reminded that our being in God makes us responsible for the way we live. In particular it makes us responsible for the way we demonstrate the life of God to those around us.
In any case their being in God leads to the next part of the greeting: "Grace and Peace." The grace that comes as the free gift of God and that leads to true peace, the ’Shalom’ that means far more than just the absence of conflict.
Shalom in the biblical sense has the idea of fullness of health, harmony with your surroundings, both personal and physical, a sense of completeness, of rest from toil as much as from conflict.
2. Central to the life of the Church are Faith, Love and Hope
Paul begins his encouragement of the Thessalonians by telling them how he and Silas and Timothy pray for them regularly, always thanking God for them, particularly for their faith, hope and love. I’m sure you’ve all heard that trio of characteristics of the Christian listed together many times before. But you may not have thought of them in this sense. Each one of them is an outward focussed characteristic.
Faith is directed towards God and results in good works. Because we know that God has saved us, has given us life, has empowered us for his service, we set our minds to serving him wherever we are. Paul, in Ephesians 2 where he talks about our salvation coming by grace through faith, finishes by reminding us that we’ve been created in Christ Jesus for good works that God has prepared beforehand for us to walk in. James tells us that the inevitable result of faith is good works. In fact if good works don’t result from our faith he concludes that our faith must be dead.
Love is directed towards others. These good works aren’t done as a duty, rather they’re done out of love in response to the love shown to us in Jesus Christ. So we have works of faith and labors of love. They’re the same thing really. It’s just that one rests on the past, on God’s nature, God’s promise, and the other works in the present, arising from the love engendered in our hearts by the Holy Spirit within us.
Thirdly hope looks to the future. The assurance of what God has planned for us in the future, the promised return of Jesus Christ to claim us as his own, results in perseverance, steadfastness in the face of opposition.
Calvin described v3 as a brief definition of true Christianity. It might be worth asking yourself whether your life is characterised by these three elements: your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.
3. A Community that is loved and chosen by God.
If you remember back to last week’s reading from Acts 18, you may recall that Paul was given a vision, while he was in Corinth, of Jesus telling him that he had many people in that city. It may be that that was in his mind as he wrote this letter. He says: "We know, brothers and sisters beloved by God, that he has chosen you." The doctrine of predestination and election has worried lots of people over the years. But the fact is that it runs right through the Biblical revelation. The 39 articles says this about it: "It is full of sweet, pleasant, and inexpressible comfort to the godly and to those who feel within themselves the working of the Spirit of Christ,... This consideration establishes and confirms their belief in the eternal salvation to be enjoyed through Christ and kindles a fervent love towards God." And so it is here. Paul reminds them that God has chosen them, that he loves them, in order to encourage them to persevere. And in case they’re wondering how he knows God has chosen them, he says "Look at what happened when I preached the gospel to you. It wasn’t just a matter of the words I spoke. No, the gospel had a powerful impact on you. You felt it’s conviction in your hearts. The Holy Spirit was at work in you in a powerful way." It takes God’s power for someone to be converted. But the other evidence is in what he’s already mentioned, Their faith and love and hope that result in a godly life, in good works. Some people think that the doctrine of election means we don’t need to preach the gospel, that if God has already chosen people, they’ll become Christians anyway. But what we find here is that election is the guarantee of success for the evangelist, not an excuse for failing to tell people the gospel. In fact it’s as they’re converted from our preaching that we see God’s election in action.
4. A Community that continues the work of Gospel proclamation
The fourth thing we discover about the church here is that the work is never finished. The Gospel came to them in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction (v5). But that wasn’t the end of it. The power of the Holy Spirit wasn’t something given for their use alone. Rather it resulted in them becoming imitators of Paul and Silas and Timothy.
Despite the fact that they quickly became the targets of persecution, they began to proclaim Christ to others. You may remember that when the Jews stirred up a rent a mob, Paul escaped and instead Jason and his friends were caught. But that hadn’t slowed them down. Already word has come to Paul that the gospel has sounded forth from them in all Macedonia and Achaia. The image is of a loud trumpet call ringing through the hills of Macedonia, or a thunderclap that’s heard for miles around.
What’s more it isn’t just the message that’s had an effect. He says "in every place your faith in God has become known, so that we have no need to speak about it" (v8). Their faith, love and hope have been contagious. Everyone’s talking about it.
There’s an important lesson for us to learn here isn’t there? We need a two-pronged approach to sharing the gospel with people. We need to proclaim it in words. So we need to have events that allow opportunity for people to hear the message. We need to take the opportunities that arise to ’gossip the gospel’ with our friends. But we also need to demonstrate the power of the gospel through our lives, through the way we interact as a church, by the way we show God’s love to others, by the way our lives demonstrate the certain hope we have of a future with God.
The result of them responding to the gospel wasn’t just a new found faith, love and hope. It resulted in them turning from idols to serve a true and living God. And that turning to the living God is a large part of what people have noticed.
I wonder is this a call to us to examine our lives to see whether we’ve turned away from the idols of our age to serve the true and living God. Are our lives any different from those around us? Can people see that there’s something different about us, about the things we value, the things we put out time and energy into, the things we talk about and plan for? Or are we still caught up in the worship of false gods? Of consumerism, of family, of wealth, of possessions, of pleasure? Is our hope for the future tied up in our house and our superannuation fund and our professional life, or is it, like the Thessalonians, depending on the true and living God as we wait for his Son to return from heaven to rescue us from the wrath to come? It’s so easy to ignore our real future destiny and concentrate only on the world we currently live in. Perhaps our problem is that our life in this world is all too often too easy.
The Thessalonians, you see, faced the possibility of severe persecution in this world, so the hope of the world to come became an important anchor to help them persevere. We need to think beyond the relative comfort of our world to the far greater joy stored up for us in heaven when Christ returns. And if we do that it may provide us with the added incentive we need to continue to serve the true and living God until he returns.
Trinitarian thought
Finally, I wanted to comment on the way Paul speaks about the work of God in this passage. Some theologians would want to argue that the doctrine of the Trinity wasn’t used until the third or fourth century AD, until the council of Nicaea for example. But what we find here is clearly a Trinitarian thought process going on. Notice he refers to God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ in the same breath in v1. The Church is in both God the Father and Jesus Christ. The word ’Lord’ which might elsewhere have been used of God, he uses here for Jesus in the phrase "hope in our Lord Jesus Christ." Similarly he refers to Jesus as the Son of God, who will return from heaven on the last day. So already, in the earliest days of the church Jesus is considered equal with God.
What’s more the Holy Spirit is in the forefront of Paul’s understanding of the way God has worked to call out those he’s chosen. It’s the Holy Spirit who brings about their conversion. It’s the Holy Spirit who inspires joy in the word of the gospel.
So here in about 51/52 AD we already have a Trinitarian view of God, even if the word Trinity isn’t actually used.
But that was really by way of a side issue for those who are interested. The real point of the passage for us today is twofold:
First the Church that receives the Gospel has a responsibility to pass it on. Just as James said that faith without works is dead, so too, the church that receives the gospel but fails to pass it on might want to question whether they’ve really understood and taken on the implications of that gospel.
Secondly the Church that passes on the gospel must first embody it. It’s no use speaking the words if the actions that go with the words don’t agree. Conversely if we live out the gospel in our lives then our words will have that much more power. So let’s be a church that proclaims the gospel in both word and deed and let’s pray that God would bring many to faith through our witness.
For more sermons from this source go to home.vicnet.net.au/~sttheos/
