I am not posting this sermon in the order it was preached because something happened during the sermon that caused a delay in posting it. While preaching, my vision became distorted, and I needed to sit. Our medical team cared for me and sent me home. The following day, I had a cardiac ablation. I am doing well now.
My son Kevin was leading the band that morning, and he stepped up and finished the sermon I prepared – and did a great job! The message examines what St. Paul knew about the Thessalonians, what they knew about Paul, and what everyone knew about what God was doing in Thessalonica. The passage reveals important truths about God and his love for us.
There is only one principal verb in the 78 words of this sentence, and it comes at the beginning of verse 2: “We thank.” What follows are Paul’s reasons for thanking God. We saw last week that he was thankful for the Thessalonian’s faith, love, and hope, which he took as clear signs that God was working in them.
Today, we will pick up with verse 4 and read through verse 10. “For we know, brothers and sisters loved by God, that he has chosen you,because our gospel came to you not simply with words but also with power, with the Holy Spirit and deep conviction. You know how we lived among you for your sake. You became imitators of us and of the Lord, for you welcomed the message in the midst of severe suffering with the joy given by the Holy Spirit. And so you became a model to all the believers in Macedonia and Achaia. The Lord’s message rang out from you not only in Macedonia and Achaia—your faith in God has become known everywhere. Therefore we do not need to say anything about it, for they themselves report what kind of reception you gave us. They tell how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead—Jesus, who rescues us from the coming wrath.”
These verses can be divided into three sections. In verse 4 and the first part of verse 5, Paul writes what he knows about the Thessalonians. Then in the middle of verse 5, he turns to what the Thessalonians know about him and his companions. And in verse 8, Paul turns to what everyone knows about the Thessalonians’ faith in God.
We’ll start with what Paul knows about the Thessalonians. First – and this is an aside in the text, but an important one – he knows that the Thessalonian believers are loved by God. What does it mean that God, the energy and the genius behind the material universe, loves human beings? Before we can answer that question, we need to define love.
If I asked you to finish the sentence, “Love is…,” how would you do it? Did you know that there are over 10,000 songs on file at the U.S. Copyright Office that begin with the words “Love Is …”[1]
For example, “Love is like a shoogy shoo.” That was a song from 1912. “Love is an I.O.U.” (1925). “Love is like the influenza” (1927, about 9 years after the Spanish flu epidemic). “Love is a dimpling doodle bug” (1943). My dad probably listened to that one in high school. Weren’t people weird back then? They were much more mature in my day: “Love Is Hell in a Small Hotel” (1966); “Love Is Psychedelic” (1968); “Love Is Groovy” (1969); “Love Is a Four-Letter Word” (that was the year I graduated); “Love Is a Funky Thing” (1976); “Love Is a Loaded Gun” (1988); and “Love Is for Suckers” (1988).
Is God’s love for us funky or is it groovy? And if God is love, as St. John says, does that make God a “dimpling doodle bug”? What does it mean to say that God loves us?
It means that God always pursues what is good for us. He is committed to his relationship with us, the relationship he established by creating us and redeeming us. The most common Old Testament word for God’s love has the idea of faithful or loyal commitment to a relationship. God is faithful in his relationship to us, even when we are not.
To be loved by the Creator and Sustainer of the universe, and to know yourself so loved, is central to being a follower of Jesus. If you don’t know yourself as God’s beloved, whatever spiritual experiences you may have had, you are missing out.
The Italians say, “Ti voglio bene,” which is translated into English as “I love you.” But a more literal translation would be, “I wish you good,” or “I want what is good for you.” That is a great way of expressing God’s love. He wanted what was good – what was best – for the Thessalonians, just as he does for us.
Paul knew that. He also knew that God had (verse 4) chosen the Thessalonians. A literal translation might go, “For we know, brothers loved by God, your selection,” or “your election.” Paul knew that God had selected the Thessalonians for his own. He wanted them. To be wanted by the Creator and Sustainer of the universe is an unparalleled honor.
There has been endless discussion over what it means to be elected or selected by God. If God selects some people, it must follow that he does not select others. In an election, there are winners and there are losers. The idea that God would select some people for himself and not others has caused many people to question God’s goodness. How is it fair if God elects you to go to heaven but not me?
The idea of God’s election/selection is so deeply rooted in the Scriptures that it cannot be dismissed. Election is a thoroughly biblical concept – Old Testament and New. But we mustn’t smuggle unbiblical ideas into it, like I did just a moment ago.
I said: “How is it fair if God elects you to go to heaven but not me?” But in the Bible, this word is never used of selecting people to go to heaven. It is used, however, of selecting people for service. For example, the apostles were selected to be with Jesus, to heal the sick, and to cast out demons (Luke 6). God selected Peter (Acts 15) to break the racial barrier by sharing the good news of Jesus with non-Jews. Paul was selected to carry God’s name to the Gentiles (Acts 9). It is used of God’s special people who are selected to declare his praises (1 Peter 2). It is used of Jesus’s disciples, who are selected to be Christlike in character, “to be holy and blameless in God’s sight” (Ephesians 1).
That last one implies that God changes those he chooses. If nothing changes, something’s wrong. A person cannot connect to the transformative life of Christ without being changed.
But how did Paul know that God had selected the Thessalonians? He saw that the gospel came to them with power, with the Holy Spirit, and with deep conviction. That does not happen because the preacher is really good. It happens because God is at work. That the good news of Christ should come to us with power, the Holy Spirit, and deep conviction is something that you should pray for whenever I or anyone else stands in the pulpit to share the word of God.
Remember too that Paul had seen the signs of God’s election: faith, love, and hope. The Thessalonians had responded to the good news with faith in God; they went on to love each other; and their hope was set on Christ’s return. In a political election we count ballots. But in the election of the saints, what counts is faith, love, and hope.
Knowing that God loved the Thessalonians – had committed himself to them – freed Paul from the “It’s all up to me” trap in which so many pastors and missionaries get caught. I’ve been snared by it myself, and I know how quickly it robs a person of joy and peace of mind. But Paul knew that God was on the job.
So that is what Paul knew. What did the Thessalonians know? They knew how coming over to Jesus’s side would affect them, because they had seen the effect it had on Paul, Silas, and Timothy. Paul says, “You know how we lived among you for your sake.” You got to see what living for Jesus looks like in real time.
The church needs people who can play keyboards and guitars and sing, but that is only a few of us. She needs people who can preach and teach. She needs those who are mechanically inclined and can fix things. She needs people with the gifts of evangelism, mercy, administration, and leadership—but again, those who are gifted at any one of these things constitute a small percentage in any church. But all of us should be good at demonstrating how to live as a follower of Jesus. There is hardly anything more important to the overall success of the church. Paul, Silas, and Timothy were intentional – “You know how we lived for your sake” – about modeling the Christ-follower’s life for the Thessalonians.
In verse 6, Paul writes: “You became imitators of us and of the Lord.” To a student of the New Testament, the word order here is, to say the least, surprising. We would expect Paul to say, “You became imitators of the Lord and of us,” giving the Lord top billing. But Paul knew that is not how it works in real time. People see the Lord in us, or they don’t see him. They learn to imitate him by imitating us. Whether one is a pastor or a parent, there is hardly anything worse than affirming the gospel in words while contradicting it in life.
A youth pastor once told me that he had seen students live beautiful Christian lives whose parents were fully committed Christ followers. And he had seen students do very well whose non-Christian parents had modeled all the wrong things—anger, bigotry, drunkenness, unfaithfulness. But he had never seen a student do well whose parents talked like Christians but lived like unbelievers.
We’re in the process of discerning Lockwood’s next lead pastor. It is important to have a capable leader, a good preacher, someone who can handle the word of God. But it is more important to have someone who lives the word of God.
Paul knew that God had chosen the Thessalonians because he saw their faith, love, and hope. The Thessalonians knew what it looks like to live the Christian life because they saw how Paul, Silas, and Timothy did it. And the people all around knew the message of Christ because (verse 8) “The Lord’s message rang out from you not only in Macedonia and Achaia—your faith in God has become known everywhere.”
Even non-Christians in Macedonia and Achaia had a good idea of what the Christian faith was about because they saw it lived out by the Thessalonians. Their faith was making a difference in the world.
According to a Barna study, only 21 percent of non-Christians have a favorable view of the church. Fewer than half of non-Christians consider the pastors who live in their community trustworthy. Almost one in three think the church is irrelevant, hypocritical, or judgmental.
That’s a big problem, but the bigger problem for the church is that non-Christians don’t think about us at all unless they are asked. We’re not even on their radar. Twenty percent of non-Christians in the United States say they don’t know a Christan. But the Thessalonians faith in God was known everywhere (v. 8). How were they so successful at this when the contemporary church is not? Did they have some effective branding strategy? They did. God had branded them as his own with faith, love, and hope. That is God’s branding strategy.
The faith we read about back in verse 3 was evident in the Thessalonians (verse 9) because they had turned to God from idols. In first-century Thessalonica, people prayed to Isis and Cabirus. They opened guild meetings with offerings to Dionysus. But those who put their faith in Christ were ignoring Cabirus and Dionysus and worshiping the God and Father of Jesus. Their friends wanted to know why.
The love we read about in verse 3 shone through the Thessalonians’ service to God. They weren’t all talk. They got involved by serving God in the lives of his people. Your friends and neighbors know what you love. It’s where you spend your time, talk, and money.
And the hope we read about in verse 3 was also obvious in the Thessalonians. Do you know how to discover where a person has placed their hope? Find out what they are waiting for. Some people are waiting for college, some for marriage, some for a job, some for retirement, some for success, some for revenge. What a person is waiting for will always reveal their hope.
The Thessalonians were waiting for Jesus. They talked about Jesus. They ordered their lives to be ready for his return. When a person’s faith has been transferred from cultural idols to God, when their love is evident in their service to God, and their hope is in Christ’s return, and when that is not just true of scattered individuals but of an entire church, people will hear about it.
We’ve covered a lot of ground, but I’d like to zero in on one of things already mentioned: God’s love for us. When Jerry Root, the C.S. Lewis scholar from Wheaton College, was waiting on a flight in Vienna, he was approached by a young woman who was taking a survey for the airport. Dr. Root asked what her name was. She told him it was Allegra. He asked, “Allegra, are you from Vienna?” She answered, “No, I grew up in southern Austria.” So, he asked, “What brought you to Vienna?” She had come for school.” Where do you go to school? What are you studying?
After about 20 minutes of this, Root knew a good deal about Allegra. Her mother had abandoned the family and gone to Canada with her lover. Her father’s bitterness was toxic. Her brother attended the University of Vienna with her, but he and Allegra weren’t speaking.
When Root expressed sadness over her estrangement from the people closest to her, she admitted that things were even worse than she had told him. Her boyfriend, who had gone to study art in Florence for six months, had asked her to wait for him. He had arrived back in Vienna the day before and told her he had met somebody better in Florence.
Twenty minutes had gone by, and Root hadn’t answered even one question on her survey. He told her that he knew she had a survey to fill out but that he had been sent to tell her something. She immediately thought that the airport had sent him to spy on the student survey-takers. He assured her it was nothing like that but said he did have something to tell her once she finished her survey questions.
She rushed through survey, put down her pen, looked him in the eye, and asked, “What were you supposed to tell me?” He said to her, “Allegra, the God of the universe knows you and loves you; He would never abandon you or forsake you.” He said it to her again: “Allegra, he loves you!”
Knowing that it can take three times for the words to sink in, he said it again: “Allegra, he loves you!” After the third time she burst into loud sobs. Everyone in the gate area turned to look. Through her tears, she blurted out, “But I’ve done so many bad things in my life!” Root said, “Allegra, God knows all about it and that’s why he sent Jesus to die on the cross for all of your sins and to bring you forgiveness and hope.”
Followers of Jesus, I want to say this to you: The God of the universe knows you and loves you. He will never abandon you or forsake you. He loves you.
If you are not a follower of Jesus, I want to say this to you: The God of the universe knows you and loves you too. You can experience that love by entrusting your life to Jesus Christ. I invite you to do that this morning. If you need help in knowing how to do that, or if you need to know more before you make such an important decision, someone here will be glad to help.
[1] Neil Genzlinger in Harper’s Magazine (February 2003), p. 28
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