God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, set your word in our hearts afresh today and always, Amen.
If any of you has had a holiday in Greece you may have flown to Athens, towards the south, or maybe you arrived in Thessalonike, at the top left of the Aegean Sea, 30 miles from Greece’s northern border.
The people who live in Thessalonike are known, in English at least, as Thessalonians. Today we begin a sermon series on ‘1 Thessalonians’, that is, Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians.
By 50AD the city of
As usual they went to the synagogue and preached the gospel to the people there—Jews and Jewish proselytes (that is, Gentiles who had turned to the Jewish faith). Perhaps because it was such an important trading place, Thessalonica had quite a large Jewish population. Some of the Jews—it sounds as if it was only a few, because Acts goes on to say that, as well as some Jews, a large number of the proselytes, or ‘devout Greeks’, put their faith in Christ as the crucified Messiah, risen from the dead.
In the Acts story, it says that Paul and his friends were in the synagogue at Thessalonica “for three Sabbaths”. After that the Jews who hung on to the old Judaism rented a mob, caused a riot, couldn’t find Paul, and so hauled a few other believers before the city officials. The officials set them free on bail, and that night Paul, Silas, Timothy and Luke were hastily shipped off to Berea, about 45 miles south-west of Thessalonica. From all this it looks as if ‘the church of the Thessalonians’ was started in less than a month and then, humanly speaking, left to get on with it. I wonder how we would have coped in that situation…
Not surprisingly, Paul was a little anxious about this very young church left to fend for itself. As soon as he could, he sent Silas and Timothy back there to find out how things were going. When they reported back, Paul responded to the news they brought by writing a letter, with encouragement and instructions, to ‘the church of the Thessalonians’, as he says in verse 1.
The date of the letter is not quite certain, but most scholars think it was written in 50 or 51AD. If so it was Paul’s first or second pastoral letter, depending on the date of Galatians. Galatians is very strong on the issue that justification is through faith in Christ, not through keeping the law. Controversy about this is absent from 1 Thessalonians, which seems strange if Paul had recently written at length about such a serious problem to a whole group of churches in Galatia, now part of Turkey. So maybe 1 Thessalonians really is Paul’s first teaching letter to a young church. In any case, no one suggests a date later than 56AD for it.
Jesus died close to 30AD. So within 20, or at most 26, years of his death we have written details of the nature of Christian truth.
The news brought from Thessalonica by Timothy seems to have been good, and not so good. 1 Thessalonians is Paul’s response. Good news included their ‘faith and love’, and also their loyalty and steadfastness under persecution. On the other hand, Paul was being criticised for insincerity and ulterior motives, and for his failure to return to Thessalonica. In addition, the Thessalonian Christians needed correction and instruction in the areas of sexual morality, earning their own living, preparing for the second coming of Jesus, and tensions in the fellowship. Paul’s handling of these difficulties will occupy the rest of the sermon series. I have the job of looking at the opening of the letter, with all its positives.
In verse 1 Paul writes of ‘the church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ’. He brackets ‘God the Father’ and ‘the Lord Jesus Christ’ as being together the source of the church’s life. He doesn’t make a fuss about it—he just takes it for granted that Father and Son are equal in the universal faith of the church. [Note that he speaks in verse 10 of the ‘living and true God’, and ‘his Son from heaven’, Jesus.] There are those who claim that the New Testament doesn’t teach that Jesus is God. Here Paul makes it plain that at the heart of the earliest teaching is the confidence that Jesus is God.
The church is ‘in’ God the Father
and the Lord Jesus Christ. In what sense, ‘in’?
Remember that Jesus spoke of his disciples being ‘in him’ as branches
are ‘in’ the vine. Elsewhere Paul writes
that we are ‘in Christ’ as limbs are ‘in the body’. Both these pictures are of a vital, organic
union which makes possible the sharing of a common life. We are not just people who believe in God and
Christ as we believe in
To round off verse 1, Paul says, ‘Grace and peace to you’. How much we have been given them, and how much we need them! So I say too, ‘Grace and peace to you’.
Then he adds verse 2, ‘We always thank God for all of you, mentioning you in our prayers’. Do we sense the challenge here. We give thanks for some of our brothers and sisters in Christ, of course. But all of them? Shall we begin to take this seriously?
Do you remember the great chapter on love in 1 Corinthians—chapter 13—which ends, ‘these three remain: faith, hope and love—but the greatest of these is love.’
In this earlier letter, in verse 3, we see the same three Christian graces—faith, hope and love.
Do you notice how they are all outgoing, directed outwards? Faith is directed towards God. Love is directed towards others (both within the Christian fellowship and beyond it), and hope is directed towards the future—especially the glorious coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being with him. So we are turned from our natural state of being concerned mainly with ourselves, through the gift of the three graces of faith, hope and love, towards God, Christ and other people.
But more is said. ‘We continually remember before our God and Father your work produced by faith, your labour prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.’ Faith, hope and love are not just airy-fairy ideas. They have definite practical results. Faith works. Love labours. Hope endures.
A true faith in God leads to works. Faith that doesn’t lead to works is dead, as the letter of James reminds us. A godly love for people leads to labour for them. The Greek word for ‘labour’ here emphasises the tiring nature of what is done, the large amount of exertion or effort required. We have the phrase ‘a labour of love’, don’t we, which expresses the same idea.
Christian love is sacrificial, makes the extra effort with no thought of reward, goes the extra mile. In any relationship—in a marriage, in a family, with friends, in a church—we only see this kind of love when things are tough. When we are all in sweet agreement with one another and things are easy, then we hardly need this specifically Christian love which comes from God alone. We can manage in our own strength, on sentiment. When people who are supposed to be nice to us are difficult, annoying or unpleasant, we rapidly discover our need of God, to give us his kind of love, that labours for their good alone.
A true hope, based on confidence in Christ, leads to endurance, which is patient strength in the face of opposition. The Christians in Thessalonica were certainly facing opposition.
Well, we’ve looked at verse 3, so with ten verses to cover I suppose we’re 30% of the way there.
No, I shall have to restrain myself. A quick dip into verse 4, and then we’ll focus on just one more issue—the gospel.
Verse 4 reminds us that we are ‘brothers and sisters loved by God.’ Do you feel loved by God this-morning? Well, even if not, the fact remains that you are. Do you remember the picture of the steam train, with engine, tender and carriages? The engine, which pulls the whole thing along, is FACTS. The tender which links the engine and the coaches is FAITH. With these two in place, the FEELINGS can be pulled along behind. Feelings are never the engine. Feelings depend on our personalities, our moods, and what we had for breakfast. The fact is, you are loved by God!
It takes Paul all the way to verse 5 before he mentions the Holy Spirit, So right at the beginning of his letter we have the Father, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. He does not use the word ‘Trinity’, but all three persons are vital to his message. They are vital to us too—three persons and one God.
The gospel—the good news. Our gospel came to you, says Paul. It came not just as words—there were words, certainly, because the gospel is news, a message—but the words weren’t alone, they were backed up by the Holy Spirit’s power, his power to transform lives. The Thessalonian Christians had welcomed the gospel, with such joy (from the Holy Spirit) that it had rung out from them.
One aspect of their transformation
was their turning from idols to God—the living and true God. Religious idols have tremendous power in
communities where they are worshipped, where people have grown up from infancy
to believe that they must be appeased at every opportunity. What fearful revenge will they take if we
reject them and turn to Christ? Well,
reject them and see! Remember how Elijah
laid on at
One was Boniface, the missionary
to the tribes in northern
So the gospel was brought by Christ’s messengers. It resulted in changed lives and the church came into being. The church embodied the gospel, and it spread out from the church to others. The church grew and new churches were planted. So the gospel creates the church, and the church spreads the gospel!
Was all this bogus? No, for every believer it resulted in the beginning of a new life of service, service to God.
How are you serving God? How am I? Of course imperfectly—but we are loved by God. How can we serve him better—not just by what we do church-wise, but in everything we do, all week. Do we think about God’s goodness to us, and gossip the gospel to others? We may attract opposition—can we quietly persist anyway?
John Stott
says this: “No church can spread the
gospel with any degree of integrity, let alone credibility, unless it has been
visible changed by the gospel it preaches.
We need to look like what we are talking about. It is not enough to receive the gospel and
pass it on; we must embody it in our common life of faith, love, joy,
peace, righteousness and hope.”
Lord, as we come to receive you afresh
through the symbol of communion, fill us up so that your glory flows from our
lives to others. In
Christ’s name, Amen.