1 Thessalonians 1

Today’s Passage: 1 Thessalonians 1

This is one of the oldest letters in your Bible, and it opens with a man giving thanks. Paul had been in Thessalonica only a short while, long enough to reason in the synagogue over three Sabbaths and to gather a company of new believers, before a mob drove him out of the city under cover of night. He left in a hurry, worried sick about what would become of people so young in the faith with no shepherd and a hostile city around them. Then word reached him, and this chapter is what came out of his relief. He thanks God for them. He tells them he knows God has chosen them, and he tells them how he knows. He reminds them what happened when the message arrived, that it did not come as one more traveling lecture but in power and in the Holy Spirit and with great conviction, and that they took it in with joy while it was costing them dearly. And then he tells them the astonishing thing: their story has gotten out. Travelers along the great road are carrying the report ahead of Paul so that he arrives in new towns and finds people already talking about what happened in Thessalonica. The chapter closes with ten words that summarize what a Christian is, in the plainest form the New Testament ever gives it. They turned. They serve. They wait. Everything else in this letter grows out of that closing sentence, so read the whole chapter with your eye on the end of it.

As you read, hold this: A gospel that comes in power turns a person all the way around: away from idols, into the service of the living and true God, and out toward the horizon where His risen Son will appear.

1 Thessalonians 1:1 (BSB)

¹ Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy, To the church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ: Grace and peace to you.

Notice first how short this is. Paul usually spends a sentence or two establishing who he is, an apostle called by the will of God, a servant of Christ Jesus, set apart for the gospel. Here he simply gives his name and the names of the two men with him. There is no need to argue for his authority with these people. Nothing has gone wrong between them. He writes the way you write to family, straight into the greeting with no throat-clearing.

Three names stand at the head of the letter. Silvanus is the man Luke calls Silas, the one who sat in the Philippian jail with Paul at midnight singing hymns with his feet in the stocks, and who was there in Thessalonica when the trouble started. Timothy was the young man from Lystra, still in his twenties most likely, whom Paul had recently sent back into that dangerous city alone to see how the believers were holding up. It is Timothy’s report that has occasioned this letter. Three men, of different ages and backgrounds, standing together over one piece of work. Ministry in the New Testament is almost never a solo performance.

Then look where Paul locates this congregation. He writes “to the church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” They live in Thessalonica, under the politarchs, in a city that belongs to Caesar’s world. But that is not where they are. Their true address is in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, and Paul sets those two names together under one preposition as easily as breathing. This is one of the earliest Christian documents we possess, written within twenty years of the crucifixion, and already the Lord Jesus stands beside the Father as the place where a believer lives. No argument, no defense, no sense that he is saying anything daring. That is simply how the first Christians spoke of Him.

And then, “Grace and peace to you.” Grace first, always, because peace is what grace produces and never the other way around. A frightened little congregation in a hostile city opens the letter and the first word they read is grace.

1 Thessalonians 1:2–3 (BSB)

² We always thank God for all of you, remembering you in our prayers ³ and continually recalling before our God and Father your work of faith, your labor of love, and your enduring hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.

Paul is on his knees before he is at his desk. “We always thank God for all of you, remembering you in our prayers,” and the two habits belong together. He cannot think of these people without thanking God for them, and he cannot thank God for them without asking God for them. If you want to know whether you truly love someone, notice whether they show up in your prayers when there is nothing you want from them.

Then comes the sentence that seeds the entire letter. Three couplets, and every one of them pairs an inward grace with an outward result: “your work of faith, your labor of love, and your enduring hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.” Take them slowly, one at a time, because Paul will come back to all three before he is finished.

Work of faith. Faith is not a feeling that sits quietly in the chest. Real faith does something. It gets a man out of bed, it makes him open his hand, it puts him in the road. The Thessalonians believed the message about Jesus, and the believing produced labor you could point at. James says it in his own blunt way: “So too, faith by itself, if it does not result in action, is dead.” Paul and James are not quarreling here. Both of them are saying that living faith works.

Labor of love. The word Paul chooses for labor is a heavier word than the word for work. It carries the idea of toil to the point of exhaustion, the ache in the shoulders at the end of the day. Love in the New Testament is not chiefly a warmth you feel toward people who are easy to love. It is a thing you get tired doing. Somebody in Thessalonica was worn out from serving somebody else, and heaven had taken note of it.

Enduring hope. And here is the third, and Paul gives it the fullest phrase: hope “in our Lord Jesus Christ.” Hope in the Bible is never a wish. It is a settled certainty about something God has promised but not yet delivered, and it shows itself in the ability to keep standing when standing is expensive. The word behind “enduring” is a soldier’s word, and it deserves a closer look. But notice before we get there what Paul is actually praising. He does not thank God that these people felt sincere or that their meetings were moving. He thanks God for what their faith, love, and hope produced. Feelings are real and God made them, but they are not the evidence. Work, labor, and endurance are the evidence. That is a mercy for every believer who has ever wondered whether a heart as cold as theirs could belong to God. Do not go rummaging in your emotions for proof. Look at what your faith has you doing, what your love has you carrying, and what your hope has you enduring (ὑπομονή) hypomonē, pronounced hoo-po-mo-NAY. Strong's G5281, steadfast endurance, remaining under a weight. The noun is hypomonē, built from two ordinary pieces: hypo, meaning under, and menō, meaning to remain. To stay under. It is the picture of a man with a weight on his back who does not step out from beneath it, and the ancient world used it of soldiers holding a line and of farmers waiting out a bad season. Older translations often render it “patience,” which is far too mild for what Paul means. This is not the mood of a man in a long queue. It is the grit of someone under real pressure who refuses to quit the field. Notice, too, that Paul ties it to hope rather than to willpower, and that changes everything about how it works. You cannot manufacture hypomonē by gritting your teeth harder. It grows out of certainty about what is coming. A woman who knows that morning is three hours away can hold on in the dark in a way that a woman who thinks the night is endless simply cannot. That is why Paul plants the word right next to “our Lord Jesus Christ.” The Thessalonians were staying under the weight of neighbors who despised them, and they could do it because they knew who was coming and that He was worth the wait. If you are carrying something heavy this morning, the answer is not more resolve. It is a clearer view of Him. .

1 Thessalonians 1:4–5 (BSB)

⁴ Brothers who are beloved by God, we know that He has chosen you, ⁵ because our gospel came to you not only in word, but also in power, in the Holy Spirit, and with great conviction—just as you know we lived among you for your sake.

Sit with the way Paul addresses them: “Brothers who are beloved by God.” Not brothers who love God, though they did. Brothers who are loved by God, and the grammar points to a love already settled and still resting on them. Before he says one word about their choosing (ἐκλογή) eklogē, pronounced ek-lo-GAY. Strong's G1589, a choosing out, selection, election. Eklogē is the noun for a choosing or a selection, from ek, out of, and legō, to gather or pick. The verb behind it turns up in the everyday Greek of picking the good fruit out of a basket, and in the Greek Old Testament it is the word for God’s setting His love on Israel, a nation He plainly tells them was not chosen because they were impressive: “The LORD did not set His affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than the other peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples.” Keep that flavor when you meet the word in Paul. Election in Scripture is never a compliment paid to the deserving. It is a mercy laid on the undeserving, and its whole purpose is to make boasting impossible and gratitude inevitable. Notice also how Paul uses it pastorally. He never brings it out to start an argument or to make anyone anxious about whether they are on the list. He brings it out to steady people under pressure, as if to say: your standing does not rest on your grip, it rests on His purpose, and His purpose was in motion before you were born. That is a good and solid floor to stand on when the city has turned against you. , he tells them they are loved. God’s choice is never cold. It comes out of love and it arrives as love.

Then, “we know that He has chosen you.” How does a man come to know a thing like that about other people? Not by peering into the secret counsels of God, and not by any private revelation whispered in Paul’s ear. Watch him tell you exactly how he knows, because it is the whole point of the sentence and it is easy to miss: “because our gospel came to you not only in word, but also in power, in the Holy Spirit, and with great conviction.” Paul reasons backward from what he saw. He preached, and something happened that no preaching can produce on its own. The words went in and the Holy Spirit came with them. Hearts that had bowed to idols all their lives let go. People took a message that would cost them their standing in the city and received it with joy. Paul looks at that and says: God has been here. This is His work, and He does not do that work in a soul He has not chosen.

Consider what a comfort this is, and how differently it works from the way we often think about the subject. If you want to know whether God has set His love on you, Paul does not send you climbing up into heaven to read a hidden list. He sends you back to your own life to ask whether the gospel ever came to you as more than words. Did it merely reach your ears, or did it lay hold of you? Is Christ precious to you now who once was nothing to you? Then take the comfort, because that change is not a thing you did to yourself.

Faithful believers who love the Bible have long differed over exactly how God’s choosing and our believing fit together, and this is not the day to settle it. Some read the New Testament to say that God’s choice is what makes a heart willing, and some read it to say that God’s choice takes account of the response He knows a heart will make, and both camps are full of people who love Christ and honor Scripture. Paul does not stage that debate here, so neither will we. He simply tells a frightened little church that they are loved, that they are chosen, and that the evidence is standing in the room.

And then the last clause turns the light back on the preachers: “just as you know we lived among you for your sake.” Paul will not separate the message from the messengers. The gospel came in power partly because the men who carried it lived in front of these people in a way that matched it, working with their hands so as not to be a burden, taking the blows when they came. That does not make the messengers the point. It means a life that contradicts the message muffles it, and a life that matches it lets it ring.

1 Thessalonians 1:6–7 (BSB)

⁶ And you became imitators of us and of the Lord when you welcomed the message with the joy of the Holy Spirit, in spite of your great suffering. ⁷ As a result, you have become an example to all the believers in Macedonia and Achaia.

“You became imitators (μιμητής) mimētēs, pronounced mimee-TACE. Strong's G3402, imitator, one who copies another. Mimētēs is the ordinary Greek word for one who copies another, and it is the root behind our word mimic. There is nothing lofty about it. In the ancient world a boy learned a trade by standing beside his father at the bench and doing what he saw done, and a student learned philosophy less from a textbook than from following his teacher around and watching him live. Paul uses this word and its family more than any other writer in the New Testament, and he is never embarrassed by it, though he always keeps it pointed past himself: “You are to imitate me, just as I imitate Christ.” That is the chain. Christ is the original, the apostle is a copy, and the young believer copies the copy until he can see the original clearly enough to copy Him directly. Two things follow, and both of them matter this morning. The first is that following Christ is learned, not merely decided. You will imitate somebody, so choose carefully whose life you spend your hours near. The second is heavier: somebody is already imitating you. A child, a younger believer, a neighbor who has not said a word about it. The question is not whether you are a model. The question is what you are a model of. of us and of the Lord.” That is a bold thing for a preacher to say, and Paul says it without a blush, because he had earned it in front of them. But mark how he orders it. Not imitators of the Lord and, incidentally, of us. Imitators of us and of the Lord, and the joining is deliberate, because what they had imitated in Paul was the very thing Paul had imitated in Christ. What was it? Read the rest of the verse and you have your answer: joy inside suffering. That is the family likeness. They welcomed the message “with the joy of the Holy Spirit, in spite of your great suffering,” and that is exactly what the Lord Jesus did on a scale none of us will ever match, and what Paul and Silas did at midnight in a Philippian cell with their backs bleeding.

Look closely at that phrase, because it is the strangest thing in the chapter. Joy and great suffering, in the same sentence, in the same people, at the same time. Paul does not say the joy came afterward when the trouble let up. He says the joy was there while it was happening, and he tells you where such a thing comes from, since it certainly does not come from us: it is “the joy of the Holy Spirit.” This is not cheerfulness. It is not the thin smile of a person pretending the wound does not hurt. It is a gladness poured into a believer from outside, unaccountable to circumstances because it never depended on them, and every generation of the persecuted church has testified to it. Praise God for a joy that suffering cannot get underneath.

And then a wonderful thing happens, and Paul says it as a simple fact: “As a result, you have become an example to all the believers in Macedonia and Achaia.” These people had been Christians for a matter of months. They were young, hard-pressed, and by every worldly measure unimpressive, a handful of tradesmen and slaves and a few leading women in a hostile town. And they had become the model that older, larger congregations across two Roman provinces were looking at. Macedonia is the north, Philippi and Berea and Thessalonica itself; Achaia is the south, Athens and Corinth and the rest. That is essentially the whole of Greece. Nobody in Thessalonica set out to become an example. They simply took the message in with joy and stood their ground, and God took their small faithfulness and put it on a hill where the whole country could see it. You are never in a position to know what God is doing with your obedience beyond the walls of your own house.

1 Thessalonians 1:8 (BSB)

⁸ For not only did the message of the Lord ring out from you to Macedonia and Achaia, but your faith in God has gone out to every place, so that we have no need to say anything more.

There is a wonderful sound in that verb. “The message of the Lord rang out from you,” and the Greek word behind it is the one used of a trumpet blast, of a peal of thunder, of a shout rolling back off the hills. It is a word for noise that carries. Something happened in that city loud enough that people at a distance turned their heads.

And notice the two things that traveled. First, “the message of the Lord,” which went out along the Via Egnatia in the mouths of ordinary Thessalonians going about their business, sailors and merchants and travelers who could not stop talking about it. Second, and this is the remarkable half, “your faith in God has gone out to every place.” Not only the announcement, but the effect of the announcement. People were not merely repeating a doctrine they had heard from Thessalonica. They were telling the story of what that doctrine had done to a city block. A message can be argued with. A changed household is harder to answer.

Then Paul says something almost funny, and you can hear the delight in it: “so that we have no need to say anything more.” The apostle arrives in a new town ready to tell them about the wonderful work God has done in Macedonia, opens his mouth, and finds they have already heard the whole account. He is out of a job as a reporter. His own converts have run ahead of him. Any true minister of the gospel knows that particular joy, of being overtaken by the very people he was sent to serve.

There is one more thing here worth pausing over, because it quietly answers a question most believers carry. Nobody in this chapter is described as a preacher. Paul does not say the Thessalonians organized a mission or trained a team or held a campaign. He says the word rang out from them, and their faith went out to every place, and the whole thing seems to have happened by the ordinary friction of daily life in a port city. They had been believers for a few months. They had no buildings, no Scriptures of their own beyond the Hebrew Bible in the synagogue, and no standing whatever in the world. And the report of what God had done among them crossed two provinces. You do not need a platform. You need a real work of God in you and the ordinary traffic of your week.

1 Thessalonians 1:9–10 (BSB)

⁹ For they themselves report what kind of welcome you gave us, and how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God ¹⁰ and to await His Son from heaven, whom He raised from the dead—Jesus our deliverer from the coming wrath.

Here is the summit of the chapter, and it is one of the oldest summaries of Christian conversion in existence. Many students of the letter think Paul is quoting something the churches were already saying, a compact account of what happens to a person when the gospel takes hold, worn smooth by use before Paul ever wrote it down. Whether or not that is so, look at its shape. Three movements, in an order that will not be rearranged. They turned (ἐπιστρέφω) epistrephō, pronounced eh-pee-STREH-foh. Strong's G1994, to turn, to turn around. Epistrephō is built from epi, upon or toward, and strephō, to turn, and it is the plain everyday word for turning yourself around. It is what a man does when he stops on the road, faces the other way, and starts walking back. The Greek Old Testament uses it constantly for Israel returning to the LORD, and the prophets wear it out calling a wandering people home. It is not a word about feelings and it is not a word about opinions. It is a word about direction. Notice that Paul puts it in a form that means the Thessalonians did the turning; they were not shoved. And notice equally that everything in the chapter before this verse says God was the one at work in them, choosing them, sending the message in power, giving joy by His Spirit. Scripture holds those two together without apology and so should we. The heart of it for you is this: repentance in the Bible is not primarily an emotion you work up but a direction you take, and it is measured not by how sorry you felt but by which way you are now walking. Whatever a person turns from, the turning is only real if there is Someone he has turned toward. . They serve. They await.

Turned to God from idols. Notice which direction Paul names first. Not “turned from idols to God,” which is how we would probably say it, but “turned to God from idols.” The positive comes first, because that is how the thing actually happens. Nobody sets down an idol in a vacuum. You let go of what you were clutching because something better has taken hold of you. And this was no small adjustment of religious opinion. Every household in that city had its gods, in the entry hall, at the guild dinner, in the oath sworn at the magistrate’s table, in the festivals that were the whole social calendar of the town. To turn from all of that was to walk out of your own community with the door shutting behind you. Paul calls the God they turned to “the living and true God,” and both adjectives are aimed straight at the shelf of statues they had just left. Living, over against gods with no breath in them. True, over against gods with no reality behind them.

To serve. The word here is the word for a slave’s service, and the tense in Greek points to an ongoing life rather than a single act. They did not turn from idols to sit down. They turned in order to serve, and there is the whole answer to anyone who imagines Christian conversion is a private transaction with no consequences for Monday. You changed masters. That is what happened. You were serving something before, because everyone serves something, and now you belong to the living God and your days are His.

And to await His Son from heaven. Here at last, in the closing line of the first chapter, the great theme of the letter puts its head up, and see how simply Paul says it. His Son will come from heaven. He is the One God raised from the dead, which is why the promise is credible: a Man who has already come out of a grave is a Man who can be expected to keep an appointment. And He is “our deliverer from the coming wrath,” which means that the judgment of God on human evil is real and settled, and that the very One who is coming is the One who takes His people through it safely. Paul does not explain the mechanism here and he does not lay out a timetable. He states the fact and moves on.

Now weigh where that word await sits in the sentence. It stands right beside serve, joined to it by a single “and,” as though the two were the most natural companions in the world. That is Paul’s whole doctrine of waiting in one stroke. Christians who truly expect their Lord are not the ones staring at the sky with their hands in their pockets. They are the ones working, because they know their Master is coming and they would like Him to find the house in order. Take away the waiting and service becomes drudgery with no horizon. Take away the service and waiting curdles into idle speculation. Scripture will not let you have one without the other.

And notice, finally, what Paul does not say. He gives no scheme, no sequence, no chart of the last days. He says the Son will come from heaven, that He was raised from the dead, and that He delivers His people from the coming wrath. Faithful Christians who honor the Bible have read the details of the end differently for a very long time, and they still do, and this letter has been at the center of those conversations. We will not settle it here, and these pages take no side in it. What is not in doubt, and what no honest reader of this verse can miss, is that the Lord Jesus Christ will personally, bodily, and gloriously return, and that His people are to live leaning toward that morning.