This introduction to 1 Thessalonians (the series is titled, Hopeful) goes back to Acts 17, where Luke narrates the exciting story of Paul’s arrival in – and hasty departure from – Thessalonica. We will look at the background of the First Letter to the Thessalonians, its structure, and its themes.

Today, we begin a series on Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians that I’ve titled “Hopeful.” We will have more teaching than preaching today, as we get an overview and introduction to the letter. We’ll look at the letter’s background, structure, and themes -what it’s all about and why it makes a difference to 21^st century Christians.

We’ll begin with a little background, which will be helpful when we delve into the letter itself, which we will do next week. Paul is on the second of his three missionary journeys. His partnership with Barnabas has come to an end – a Martin and Lewis, Sonny and Cher, Simon and Garfunkel sad kind of an end – yet the reach of their ministry has effectively doubled. Barnabas and John Mark take the gospel to Cyprus, while Paul enlists Silas to go with him on a tour up the coast, revisiting churches Paul already knew and loved.

Silas was a ministry veteran from the Jerusalem church. He had considerable gifts, a strong character, and a great reputation. Silas is also an excellent writer with a large vocabulary and an impressive style. When it came time for St. Peter to write his first letter, he went to Silas for help (1 Peter 5:12).

When they reached Lystra, where Paul and Barnabas had once planted a church, they met a young disciple named Timothy. Paul knew his mother and grandmother – sterling people – and was so impressed with Timothy that he invited him to join the team. Timothy was young and inexperienced, but he had a great heart, considerable gifts, and was quick to learn. He was also only half-Jewish. His father was a Gentile.

Not too long after Timothy joined the team, Paul had a vision at night, perhaps in a dream, of a man from the Roman province of Macedonia begging for help. The next day, Paul and the team decided that this was a sign from God and booked passage on a freighter headed for Macedonia.

They eventually came to Philippi, which was a Roman colony. The city did not have a Jewish synagogue, so Paul went down to the river on the Sabbath. He wasn’t going fishing – not exactly, at least. He knew that if there were any Jews in Philippi, this would be a likely place for them to come for Sabbath prayers—and he was right. Among them was a businesswoman named Lydia and, as they talked about Christ, she became convinced that Jesus was the Messiah. She became the first convert in the province of Macedonia.

In Philippi, Timothy got to witness the birth of a church and its nurture by Paul and Silas. He was able to see how seasoned veterans plant a church; watched them teach, coach, and pray. It was an amazing experience.

Paul and his companions spent some time in Philippi, teaching the inexperienced converts what it means to be disciples of Jesus and helping the new church get established. The team and the church people became fast friends, and they maintained that friendship throughout Paul’s life.

Everything was going great until Paul and Silas – but mostly Paul, came between a greedy business and its profits. The businesspeople had Paul and Silas arrested. They probably didn’t even know about Timothy, who was still a wet-behind-the-ears junior partner, but Paul and Silas were dragged off by the authorities and beaten. In Roman criminal law, a suspect could be beaten before he was tried. They thought it made him more likely to tell the truth.

The next day, when the two men were released – Acts 16 tells the very interesting story – they reconnected with the team and, glad to be done with all the drama, headed west on the famous road known as the Egnation Way.

That brings us to our text, which is Acts 17:1-9. Let me read it and you can follow along on the screen. “When they had passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia, they came to Thessalonica, where there was a Jewish synagogue. As his custom was, Paul went into the synagogue, and on three Sabbath days he reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and proving that the Christ had to suffer and rise from the dead. “This Jesus I am proclaiming to you is the Christ,” he said. Some of the Jews were persuaded and joined Paul and Silas, as did a large number of God-fearing Greeks and not a few prominent women. But the Jews were jealous; so they rounded up some bad characters from the marketplace, formed a mob” – a lynch mob – “and started a riot in the city. They rushed to Jason’s house in search of Paul and Silas in order to bring them out to the crowd. But when they did not find them, they dragged Jason and some other brothers before the city officials, shouting: “These men who have caused trouble all over the world have now come here, and Jason has welcomed them into his house. They are all defying Caesar’s decrees, saying that there is another king, one called Jesus.” When they heard this, the crowd and the city officials were thrown into turmoil. Then they made Jason and the others post bond and let them go.”

Paul, Silas, Timothy, Luke, and whoever else was on the team traveled the Egnation Way through Amphipolis and Apollonia, which were both fairly large cities. Why didn’t they stop there? There were thousands of people in these cities that needed to know about Jesus.

I think the simple answer is they did not have synagogues. Paul was strategic in his approach. The synagogue was his bridgehead into a new community. He was a highly trained Jewish rabbi. Silas was a prophet and a teacher. The presence of a synagogue was to Paul what a landing strip is to a pilot. There were people at the synagogue who were interested in what he had to say. And because many of them were God-fearing Gentiles – Gentiles who worshiped Israel’s God but had not become Jews – he also had a bridge into the Gentile community.

Thessalonica had a synagogue and a sizeable Jewish community. So, Paul passed by Amphipolis and Apollonia knowing that if people came to Christ in Thessalonica, they would take the gospel to these other cities, which is exactly what happened. A wise strategist can be guided by the Spirit and a Spirit-guided person can be strategic. But strategy without the Spirit soon degenerates into selfish ambition.

What this means is that we can be strategic in talking to our friends, family members, and co-workers about Christ and we can depend on the Spirit at the same time. In fact, the Spirit leads most effectively those who think most clearly. Have you thought about – strategized – how best to tells friends and family about Christ?

Paul spoke in the Thessalonian synagogue on three Sabbaths. Since there were also meetings at the synagogue on Mondays and Thursdays, Paul and Silar might have been giving addresses and holding question and answer sessions nine or more times. Some of the Jews were convinced that Jesus was their Messiah. So were a large number – “a great many” would be a quite literal rendering of the Greek – of the God-worshiping Gentiles who attended synagogue, along with quite a few of the city’s prominent women – probably moneyed folk.

Things were going great in Thessalonica … until they weren’t. Luke writes that some Jews who were jealous of Paul’s success (and troubled by the effect it was having on the synagogue), rounded up some bad characters, who started a riot by claiming that Paul and Silas were violating imperial law.

To understand what is going on, you need to know that Thessalonica was a “free city.” That means that the Thessalonians were allowed to rule themselves without any interference from Rome. No imperial troops were stationed there. Free cities enjoyed unparalleled freedoms. For a city that might have been as large as Grand Rapids, this was extraordinary.

But the people knew that if imperial law was being flagrantly violated, all those freedoms could go away in a matter of days. And fomenting revolution by declaring someone other than Caesar king – this Jesus that Paul and Silas proclaimed – was a clear violation of imperial law. That’s what the “bad characters” claimed Paul and Silas were doing (verse 7). So, the mob went to Paul’s and Silas’s last know whereabouts with murderous intent, but in God’s sovereign wisdom, they weren’t there.

But their host was: an almost new believer named Jason. So, they dragged him and his friends before the court. Verse 9 says that they were made to post bond. In other words, Jason and his friends had to give the court money – possibly quite a lot of money – with the idea that if they were caught associating with Paul and Silas again, their bond would be forfeited, and they would be jailed. What this did was force Paul to stay away from Thessalonica to protect Jason and the other Christians. The whole thing was ingeniously diabolic, and in chapter 2 Paul attributes his inability to return to Thessalonica to Satan.

Notice that nothing has been said about Timothy. It’s possible he wasn’t there, but I think it is more likely that he flew under the radar. He was young, for one thing. He was half-Gentile for another. He was not a principal speaker, like Paul or Silas. So, his name was not included in the charges. That meant that while Paul and Silas could not return to Thessalonica without causing trouble for the Christians there, Timothy could come and go as he pleased.

Two more things about the background to the letter. Paul and Silas were forced to leave in a hurry. They had more to say to the church, but no time to say it. They were leaving brand new Christians behind, men and women who were being oppressed and threatened. And that worried Paul. He says in his letter that he reached a point where he could no longer stand it.

And so, he sent Timothy back to find out how the church was doing and, to his joy, found they were doing great. They were going through some rough times, but their faith held. He also learned from Timothy that there were some pretty big gaps left in their understanding of Christian living and Christian doctrine, which was understandable given the short time they had with Paul and Silas.

There were also some gaps regarding Paul’s sudden departure. Friends and family who were hostile to the faith were saying things like, “Those guys came in here, sold you a bill of goods, then left under the cover of night. How much money did they squeeze out of you before the skedaddled?” The Thessalonians didn’t know where Paul and Silas were when the riot started and didn’t see them before they left. So, they lacked a clear answer to these accusations.

Hence the need for a letter. In it, Paul celebrates the Thessalonians’ faith, gently corrects their misunderstandings, and encourages them to stay true to Jesus during the difficult times ahead.

Now to the structure of the letter. Like many of Paul’s letters, it falls into two main parts. It is an oversimplification, but we could say that the first part is doctrine, and the second part is application. Or we could say that the first part is a description of what God has done while the second part is instruction on how people ought to respond. Or the first part, which covers the first three chapters, looks back, while the second part, which covers chapters 4 and 5, looks forward.

Paul constructed the letter to the Thessalonians so that its two main sections are buttressed by three supporting prayers, one at the beginning, one in the middle, and one at the end, like a building braced by support pillars. The first prayer (1:2-3) is a thanksgiving prayer for what God had done in the Thessalonians lives through Paul, Silas, and Timothy.

The center prayer (3:11-13) supports Paul’s instruction in the second half of the letter. He prays that the Thessalonians will love each other well, that they will live counterculturally as God’s holy people, and that they will endure with hope until Jesus returns. Love, holiness, and hope are the focus of Paul’s instruction in chapters four and five.

Paul ends the letter with a final pillar prayer in 5:23-24, a hopeful request for God to keep the Thessalonians blameless until Christ returns. I have found these to be some of the most reassuring verses in the Bible. I have meditated on these verses often, sometimes in the middle of the night, and have been deeply encouraged. They are great verses to memorize.

So, what can 21^st century Christians get out of this ancient letter that will help navigate life in our complicated world? For one thing, we will see what it means to live counterculturally and get some pointers on how to do it. We are like people dancing an Irish reel at a rave. We are in everyone else’s way, and they are in ours. Our dance is going somewhere, theirs is not. That can make for opposition and temptation.

Paul gives attention to these stress points. The Thessalonian Christians had turned away from their culture’s gods – the things people sacrificed for and considered necessary. I say, “their culture’s,” but understand that meant their parents, their friends, and their coworkers. This led to misunderstandings and conflicts. We in our day face the same kind of thing.

Most people raised in Thessalonica didn’t understand the Christians’ thinking about sex. Christians believed that sex was a wonderful gift within the bounds of marriage, like a fire is a wonderful thing in a fireplace. Thessalonian culture believed that sex was an enjoyable diversion and placed no bounds on it.

That sharp distinction between what Christians and culture believe about sex is present today. Our culture has removed nearly all the protective limits to sex – the fire has escaped the fireplace – and they cannot understand why Christians think that is a mistake. When we say that sex should be reserved for a man and a woman within marriage, they say calls us bigots and haters. It is hard to stand by your convictions when people think you are a bad person. Many American Christians have forsaken their convictions. 1^st Thessalonians can help us to stand firm. 

Another important, time-transcending theme in this letter is the emphasis Paul places on hope. When people endure unremitting difficulty, like the Thessalonians (and like some of us), they can lose hope. This letter is full of hope. I don’t know how it ever escaped me, but it wasn’t until this time through that I realized that every chapter of Thessalonians ends on a hopeful note about Christ’s return. Paul ties the believer’s hope to the savior’s coming.

But that raised a question for the Thessalonians, a question which apparently had not been answered before Paul and Silas were forced to leave town. If our hope is that Christ will return and set everything right, where does that leave people who die?

It seems that during the interim between Paul’s hasty departure and the arrival of Timothy, there were deaths in the Thessalonian church. Some scholars believe those deaths were the result of persecution. How unfair it seemed that these people – brothers, sisters, friends – would die for Jesus before they had the chance to be rescued by Jesus. It was a cause of great grief.

In chapter four, Paul responds to this concern. He says, “Your friends won’t miss out. They’ll be with Jesus when he returns.” Nothing, as Paul says in Romans 8, will separate Jesus from the people who love him, not even death. Death is not a problem for God.

Another relevant theme for us from this letter is love. Lockwood has been working for years to create a culture of caring and a climate of love. The Thessalonians had such a culture. In that center pillar prayer, Paul says: “May the Lord make your love increase and overflow for each other and for everyone else, just as ours does for you.” In chapter 4 he wrote, “…about brotherly love we do not need to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love each other… Yet we urge you, brothers, to do so more and more.” We can learn about a culture of caring from the Letter to the Thessalonians.

It is not easy to pull out application points from an introduction to a new series, so I am only going to give you one thing to do: read the Letter to the Thessalonians – it will only take the average reader about 7 or 8 minutes.  If you are able, read it two or three times over the next few weeks. You will be amazed at the difference that makes in what you get out of this series. You won’t just hear Shayne teach. You will hear God speak. And that is what is important.