1 Thessalonians 5

Today’s Passage: 1 Thessalonians 5

The letter comes to its close, and it closes the way a wise pastor closes a visit, with a long look at the horizon and then a long list of small things to do in the morning. Paul has just told a grieving church that the Lord Himself will descend and that the dead in Christ will rise first. Now they want to know when. He tells them, in effect, that this is the wrong question, and then gives them a better one. The Day of the Lord comes like a thief in the night, unannounced, on a world congratulating itself that everything is fine. But it will not come on these believers that way, because they are not out in the dark where thieves work. They are sons of the light. So the question is not when but what kind of people, and Paul answers it with a soldier’s picture: stay awake, stay clear-headed, and put on faith and love like a breastplate and the hope of salvation like a helmet. Then comes the sentence that steadies everything, that God has not appointed us to wrath but to salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died so that whether we are awake or asleep we will live together with Him. After that the letter breaks into short, rapid commands, honor those who labor among you, help the weak, be patient with everyone, never repay evil for evil, rejoice, pray, give thanks, do not smother the Spirit, test everything, hold on to what is good. And then, when every command has been given, Paul turns from what we must do to what God will do, and prays the great benediction that ends the letter. Watch where the weight finally rests.

As you read, hold this: The Day that will catch a sleeping world by surprise will not catch you, because you belong to the light, and the God of peace who called you will Himself finish the work of making you ready.

1 Thessalonians 5:1–5 (BSB)

¹ Now about the times and seasons, brothers, we do not need to write to you. ² For you are fully aware that the Day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. ³ While people are saying, “Peace and security,” destruction will come upon them suddenly, like labor pains on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape. ⁴ But you, brothers, are not in the darkness so that this day should overtake you like a thief. ⁵ For you are all sons of the light and sons of the day; we do not belong to the night or to the darkness.

Notice the first thing Paul refuses to do. He has an anxious church in front of him asking about times and seasons, and he says they do not need him to write about that. He does not produce a chart. He does not hand them a sequence of events to memorize, and he does not tell them how to calculate the hour. What he tells them is the one thing about the timing that Scripture actually says plainly: it will be sudden, and it will be unexpected by those not looking for it, like a thief who has taken the trouble to come when nobody is awake. That is all the timetable anyone is given. It is worth saying honestly, once, that faithful Christians who love this Bible have read the relationship between this Day and what Paul described in the last chapter in more than one way, and have done so for a very long time. This study will not settle that for you, and it will not pretend the matter is simpler than it is. What is not in question, and never has been, is the thing Paul is actually teaching here: the Lord Jesus is coming personally, at an hour God alone has fixed, and He is coming on a world that will not see Him arriving.

Look at how the two images work together. A thief comes when you least expect him, and labor pains come when you most certainly should have expected them. Every pregnant woman knows the day is near; nobody knows the hour it begins; and once it begins there is no talking it out of arriving. That is the shape of this Day for those saying “Peace and security.” The tragedy in that phrase is not that they are wrong about wanting peace. It is that they have found a substitute, and the substitute is holding. The word is that destruction comes upon them suddenly, while the sentence about safety is still in their mouth. And then, with the sharpest possible turn, comes verse four. But you. You are not in the darkness. The Day is not a thief to you, because a thief is only a thief to people who are not expecting anyone. Read that again if you have ever lain awake afraid of the end of the world. Paul’s pastoral point is not that believers will dodge the Day but that the Day is not coming for them as a raid. Then he gives them their name. Sons of the light, sons of the day, which is a Hebrew way of saying that light is the family you belong to and the stock you come from. Not people who visit the light. People who are of it. Peter uses the same figure of a thief for the same Day, and it is no gentler in his hands.

"But the Day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar, the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and its works will be laid bare." 2 Peter 3:10 (BSB)

1 Thessalonians 5:6–10 (BSB)

⁶ So then, let us not sleep as the others do, but let us remain awake and sober. ⁷ For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk, get drunk at night. ⁸ But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love, and the helmet of our hope of salvation. ⁹ For God has not appointed us to suffer wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ. ¹⁰ He died for us so that, whether we are awake or asleep, we may live together with Him.

Because of what you are, live like it. That is the whole logic, and it is the logic of nearly every command in the New Testament. Paul does not say, stay awake so that you may become a son of the day. He says you are a son of the day, therefore stay awake. And see how he defines wakefulness. Not by anxiety, not by scanning the news for signs, not by keeping a nervous eye on the sky. Two words carry it: awake, and sober (νήφω) nēphō, pronounced NAY-foh. Strong's G3525, to be sober, clear-headed, self-possessed. The verb is nēphō, and its plain meaning is to be free of wine, to be unintoxicated. But by the time the New Testament writers reach for it, the picture has widened into something more valuable: the settled clear-headedness of a person in full command of his faculties. It is what a sentry has and a reveler has lost. Peter uses it three times, and each time he pairs it with something urgent, praying, hoping, watching against the adversary, as though sobriety were the state in which everything else a Christian must do becomes possible. And notice what the opposite is. Not sadness, not severity, not the grim face people wear when they think they are being serious. The opposite of nēphō is being fuzzy, over-warmed, softened at the edges, running on something that has taken the sharpness out of your judgment. A believer can be intoxicated by a great many things that never came out of a bottle, by outrage, by ambition, by the endless drip of noise we now carry in a pocket, by a comfort that has quietly become an anesthetic. Sobriety is not joylessness. It is the ability to think straight about what is real, and it is one of the plain marks of a person who actually believes the Lord is coming. . Sleeping and drunkenness are both ways of being present in the world without being present to it, and both belong to the night. The sleeper has checked out; the drunk has dulled the edges. What Paul wants is a Christian who is fully there, clear-headed, in possession of himself, able to see what is actually happening and to act. That is a homelier virtue than we usually make of the second coming, and a far more demanding one.

Then the armor. It is a small kit, only two pieces, and both are borrowed from Isaiah, where the LORD Himself puts on righteousness like a breastplate and the helmet of salvation before He comes to set the world right. What God wears to save, He gives His people to wear while they wait. Over the heart go faith and love, which is exactly the pairing Paul has used since the first paragraph of this letter, trust toward God and self-giving toward one another. On the head goes the hope of salvation, and hope is a helmet because the head is where a soldier is lost. Discouragement kills more Christians than persecution ever has. And then verse nine, which is the pastoral heart of the whole chapter and must never be flattened into a scheme. God has not appointed us to suffer wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ. Hear what that sentence is doing. It is not a piece of information about the order of future events. It is a word about God’s own settled purpose toward you. He did not appoint you to wrath. He appointed you to salvation. And it does not come by being awake enough or sober enough or armored enough, but through our Lord Jesus Christ, which is Paul’s way of saying that the destination is secured by another and not by the quality of your vigilance. Praise God for a hope that rests there.

"Therefore, since we have now been justified by His blood, how much more shall we be saved from wrath through Him!" Romans 5:9 (BSB)

And verse ten reaches back and picks up the tears of the last chapter. There Paul had used sleep for death, comforting people who feared their dead had missed the Day. Here he takes the very same word and lays it down like a hand on the shoulder: whether we are awake or asleep, we may live together with Him. Alive when He comes, or long since buried, it makes no difference to the outcome, because the outcome does not depend on which side of death you happen to be standing when the trumpet sounds. It depends on the four words in front of it: He died for us. That is the ground. He went into death Himself so that death could no longer determine who gets to be with Him. There is no third group. There is no believer who will be left out because the timing went badly. Together with Him, all of us, and the word together is the same one he used in the last chapter for the living and the dead being gathered up in one company. Whatever a Christian may still wonder about the shape of that day, this much has been settled by a cross.

1 Thessalonians 5:11–14 (BSB)

¹¹ Therefore encourage and build one another up, just as you are already doing. ¹² But we ask you, brothers, to acknowledge those who work diligently among you, who care for you in the Lord and who admonish you. ¹³ In love, hold them in highest regard because of their work. Live in peace with one another. ¹⁴ And we urge you, brothers, to admonish the unruly, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, and be patient with everyone.

Watch what the coming of Christ is for. It is not fuel for speculation. It is fuel for the ordinary work of building each other up. Paul has just given this church the highest ground in the letter, and the first thing he does with it is turn them toward the person sitting beside them. Encourage one another. Build one another up, a builder’s word, stone laid on stone, slow and unglamorous and meant to last. And then that beautiful qualifier, just as you are already doing, which tells you a great deal about the man writing. He commands them to do the very thing he has just praised them for doing. There is a way of exhorting people that assumes they are failing, and there is a way that assumes they are on their feet and simply asks for more of what is already there. Paul, who could be severe when severity was called for, is doing the second here.

Then he asks them to notice their leaders. This is a church perhaps a year old, with no seasoned elders and no apostle in residence, and somebody has stepped up to do the work: labor, care, and admonishment, which is to say the tiring part, the tender part, and the awkward part. Paul asks that such people be acknowledged and held in highest regard, and he is careful about the reason. Not because of their gifts, not because of their office, not because of anything they are, but because of their work. Honor in the church follows labor, not personality. And it is to be given “in love,” which keeps it from becoming the sort of admiration that turns a servant into a celebrity. Then, immediately, “Live in peace with one another,” because nothing splits a congregation faster than the question of who is respected.

Verse fourteen is one of the wisest sentences in the New Testament about caring for people, because it refuses one-size-fits-all pastoring. Four groups, four different treatments, and the whole art of loving a church is knowing which one is in front of you. The unruly are the out-of-step ones, the disorderly, and in this congregation almost certainly the ones Paul had told in the last chapter to work with their own hands. They need admonishing, a firm word, not coddling. The fainthearted (ὀλιγόψυχος) oligopsychos, pronounced ol-ig-OP-soo-khos. Strong's G3642, fainthearted, little-souled, discouraged. The Greek behind “fainthearted” is oligopsychos, and it is built out of two ordinary words, oligos, little, and psychē, soul. The little-souled. It appears nowhere else in the New Testament, though the Greek Old Testament uses it for people worn thin by hard service, for Israel in slavery whose spirit was broken so that they would not listen, and for the discouraged of Isaiah 35 to whom God says, be strong, do not fear, your God will come. It does not mean cowardly, and it does not mean faithless. It describes a soul that has simply run low, the way a lamp runs low, someone whose courage has been used up by grief or pressure or the sheer length of a hard season. There were people exactly like that in Thessalonica, holding on under persecution and burying their dead. And notice what Paul prescribes for them. Not correction. Not a rebuke for weak faith. The word is to come alongside and speak comfort, the same tender word used for consoling mourners. God does not treat a low-burning wick the way He treats rebellion. Neither should His people. If you are the low-souled one just now, that verse has your name in it, and the church is under orders about you. If you are not, look around the room for the one who is. need something else entirely, and if you admonish them you will crush them. The weak need to be held onto, the word means to cling to, to keep hold of, the way you take a stumbling person’s arm rather than shouting instructions from across the road. And then the line that covers everyone and lets no one off: be patient with everyone. Not patient with the deserving. Everyone. Including the unruly one you just admonished, and the fainthearted one who is still faint next month, and the weak one who is weak again.

1 Thessalonians 5:15–18 (BSB)

¹⁵ Make sure that no one repays evil for evil. Always pursue what is good for one another and for all people. ¹⁶ Rejoice at all times. ¹⁷ Pray without ceasing. ¹⁸ Give thanks in every circumstance, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.

Before the great triplet comes a command about revenge, and it is placed here for a reason. This church was being harmed by its own countrymen, and the natural motion of a wounded people is to pay it back, first in the world and then, when that proves impossible, on one another inside the church. Paul blocks it at the door. Make sure that no one repays evil for evil, and notice it is a corporate charge; the whole congregation is made responsible for seeing that no single member does it. Then he does not stop at the negative. Not repaying evil is only half a Christian. Always pursue what is good, the verb is to chase after, to hunt down, an active going out to find good to do. And the reach of it widens in the same breath, “for one another and for all people,” so that the very neighbors who were making their lives hard are inside the circle of the pursuit.

Now the three short lines. They are so familiar and so brief that they can be rattled off like a slogan, and they deserve better than that. Rejoice at all times. Not, feel cheerful about everything, which no honest person could manage and which this letter, written to people burying their dead, could never have meant. Joy in Scripture is not a mood; it is the response of a soul that knows what is true, and what is true does not change when circumstances do. A man can weep and rejoice in the same hour, and many of the saints have. Pray without ceasing. Not endless words, and certainly not a life spent on your knees with nothing else accomplished, since Paul told this same church to work with their hands. It is the habit of a heart left in the open toward God all day, the running conversation of someone who has stopped thinking of prayer as an appointment and started living inside it. If you have felt guilty about this one for years, hear the freedom in it. You are not being told to pray longer. You are being told to stop hanging up.

And then the third, which is the hardest, and which is regularly misquoted in ways that wound people. Give thanks in every circumstance. Read the small word carefully. It says in every circumstance, not for every circumstance. Paul is not telling a widow to be grateful that her husband died, or a suffering church to give thanks for the cruelty of its neighbors. Evil is evil, and Scripture never asks you to call it good or to pretend that a wound is a gift. What it asks is that in the middle of it, with the thing still hurting and still wrong, you turn your face toward God and name what is still true of Him. He is still good. He has still not appointed you to wrath. Christ still died for you. That is thanks given in the dark, and it is a very different act from cheerfulness. Then Paul adds the clause that settles all three commands at once: “for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” People spend years agonizing over the will of God for their lives, and here it is in plain sight, printed in the text, available this afternoon. Rejoice, pray, give thanks. An old prophet who had nothing left to be cheerful about showed us exactly how it is done.

"Though the fig tree does not bud and no fruit is on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though the sheep are cut off from the fold and no cattle are in the stalls, yet I will exult in the LORD; I will rejoice in the God of my salvation!" Habakkuk 3:17–18 (BSB)

1 Thessalonians 5:19–22 (BSB)

¹⁹ Do not extinguish the Spirit. ²⁰ Do not treat prophecies with contempt, ²¹ but test all things. Hold fast to what is good. ²² Abstain from every form of evil.

Here are four short lines that hold each other in place, and they must be taken together or every one of them goes wrong. Fire is the picture. Do not extinguish (σβέννυμι) sbennymi, pronounced SBEN-noo-mee. Strong's G4570, to quench, extinguish, put out a fire. The verb is sbennymi, and it is the word for putting a fire out: dousing a lamp, quenching a torch, smothering coals. It is used of the fire that is not quenched in the Lord’s warning about judgment, of the flaming arrows quenched by the shield of faith in Ephesians, and of the wise virgins whose lamps were going out. So the image Paul hands us is unmistakable. The Holy Spirit at work in a gathered church is a fire, and fire is a living thing that can be put out. Not by an enemy, notice. Paul is not warning them about persecutors here. He is telling believers not to do it themselves. You can put out a fire two ways. You can throw water on it, by contempt, by mockery, by treating what God is doing among ordinary people as beneath serious attention. Or you can simply stop feeding it and let it go grey and cool while everyone stands politely around the hearth. The second is quieter and far more common. Whatever your convictions about the particulars, this command stands over every congregation and every believer in it: do not be the reason the fire is smaller than it was. Bring wood. the Spirit, Paul says, which assumes that the Spirit is at work among them like a flame and that a congregation is entirely capable of putting it out. That should sober us. It is possible for a church to be so orderly, so careful, so well managed and so guarded that nothing living is left in the room. Coldness can be dressed up as discernment. On the other side stands the opposite danger, and Paul names it just as quickly. Do not despise what God says, but do not swallow everything either. Test all things. Weigh it. Hold it against Scripture. And then the two-handed instruction that follows, hold fast to what is good, keep away from every form of evil, which is the posture of a person with both eyes open. Some Christians have only the first instinct and burn down their discernment. Others have only the second and quench the fire. God asks for both hands.

What this passage does not do is settle the arguments Christians have had about which gifts continue and in what form, and it would be unfair to the text to drag that debate in here. Paul is not addressing it. He is addressing a young congregation’s temptation to shut down what it could not control and to accept uncritically what sounded impressive. The abiding force of these lines is plain enough for any reader in any century: do not smother what God is doing among His people, and do not switch off your judgment either. Every word claiming to come from God is to be examined, because the truth has never had anything to fear from testing, and error has always thrived where testing stopped. Then hold on to the good with both hands, and let go of evil in every form it takes.

1 Thessalonians 5:23–28 (BSB)

²³ Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely, and may your entire spirit, soul, and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. ²⁴ The One who calls you is faithful, and He will do it. ²⁵ Brothers, pray for us as well. ²⁶ Greet all the brothers with a holy kiss. ²⁷ I charge you before the Lord to have this letter read to all the brothers. ²⁸ The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.

This is the summit of the letter, and everything in the chapter has been climbing toward it. Paul has just fired off a dozen commands, and any honest reader who has been keeping count is now quietly overwhelmed. Stay awake. Stay sober. Honor the workers. Admonish the unruly. Comfort the low-souled. Cling to the weak. Be patient with everyone. Never repay evil. Rejoice, pray, give thanks, do not quench, test everything, hold the good, avoid all evil. Who on earth is equal to that? And precisely there, at the point where the ledger is longest, Paul stops commanding and starts praying, and the grammar changes in a way you should not miss. Up to now the verbs have been aimed at us. Now the subject is God. May the God of peace Himself sanctify you. The word Himself is emphatic in the Greek and it is doing heavy work. Not you, sanctifying yourself with God’s assistance. God Himself, doing it. And notice the name Paul chooses for Him at this exact moment. Not the God of demand. The God of peace, which is a striking title to set at the head of a sentence about holiness, and which tells you the whole tone in which the work is being done.

Then look at the scope, because Paul stretches for words to say how far it goes. Sanctify you completely (ὁλοτελής) holotelēs, pronounced hol-ot-el-ACE. Strong's G3651, complete, whole through and through. The word is holotelēs, and Paul appears to have built it himself, since it turns up nowhere else in the New Testament and scarcely anywhere in Greek before him. It fuses holos, whole, with telos, end or completion, so it means something like whole-completely, entire all the way through and entire all the way to the finish. Extent and depth at once. And then, still not satisfied, he immediately reaches for a second word in the next breath, holoklēron, whole-lotted, every allotted part present and accounted for, the word used of a body with nothing missing and of a stone unchipped and sound. Two heaped-up words, one after another, because the man is trying to say something about God’s intentions toward you that ordinary vocabulary cannot carry. God is not aiming at your improvement. He is not tidying the front rooms of your life and leaving the back ones shut. He intends the whole of you, entire and through and through, sound in every part, and He intends to have it finished by the day Christ appears. That is what He is working toward in you right now, in the parts you would rather He left alone. . And then, as if that were not enough, may your entire spirit, soul, and body be kept blameless. He is not handing us a technical anatomy of a human being, and Christians have read that threefold phrase in more than one way. He is doing what a man does when he wants to say all of you and nothing left out, and reaches for every word he has. Not the religious part of you. Not the visible part. The whole of you, down to the body that will be raised, kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Notice too that it is kept, guarded, watched over, which is not something a person can do for himself any more than a house can stand guard over its own door.

And then verse twenty-four, which answers the only objection a serious reader can raise. Every sentence in that prayer sounds too good to be true, and the heart says: but I have watched myself for years, and I know what I am. Paul does not argue with that. He simply moves the whole question off you and onto God. “The One who calls you is faithful, and He will do it.” Read it slowly. The One who calls you, present tense, still calling, the same God who reached into a pagan Roman city and turned idol-worshipers into sons of the light. He is faithful, which is a word about His character and not about your progress. And He will do it. Not He is able to, not He would like to, not He will if you cooperate sufficiently. He will do it. That is a promise, not a task, and if you have spent your Christian life exhausted by the suspicion that the whole thing finally rests on your grip, this verse is here to take the weight off your back and put it where it has always belonged. The God who began this does not abandon unfinished work.

"being confident of this, that He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus." Philippians 1:6 (BSB)

The last four lines are ordinary and lovely. The apostle who has just prayed a benediction over them asks them to pray for him too, which is a small thing and a large one. He was not above needing them. Greet all the brothers with a holy kiss, the ordinary family greeting of that world, taken up by the church and made holy because these people were now kin, and it stretched across every line the city cared about, slave and free, Greek and Jew, the leading women of Acts 17 and the day laborer who worked with his hands. And then a solemn charge, which is the strongest word in the chapter: see that this letter is read to all the brothers. Paul knew that most of them could not read, and that no household owned a copy, and he would not have a single believer left outside of what God had said to them. The word of God is not for the literate, the leisured, or the leaders. It is for everyone in the room. Then, as always, the last word is grace, because that is where Paul begins every letter and where he ends every letter, and because it is the only note on which anything he ever wrote could rightly close.