This article is written by N.T. Wright from his book, “Paul for Everyone: Galatians and Thessalonians.” N.T. Wright is a well know biblical scholar, professor, and former Bishop. We hope you will be encouraged.
I hesitated long over the decision. I had to make up my mind whether to admit to the university a student whose grades were not quite as high as we would normally require. She was clearly intelligent, and capable of hard work, but why were some of the grades just a little bit lower than we had expected? Then I thought back to the interview my colleagues and I had had with the student. She had come alive. She was clearly not only interested in the subject, but enthusiastic, and able to take in new ideas and make them her own. Remembering those first impressions vividly, I made the decision. We would admit her to the college. Three years later I was vindicated: she graduated with top honours.
Paul vividly remembers his first impressions of the Thessalonian Christians to whom he writes this letter. Thessalonica—modern Thessaloniki, or Salonica—was, and is, a thriving seaport in northern Greece, roughly 200 miles north of Athens. Paul had come there after preaching in Philippi, further east, where he had been beaten and thrown in prison before pointing out that he was a Roman citizen. The story of that journey is told in Acts 16 and 17.
Though Paul’s normal practice was to begin his preaching in the Jewish synagogue or place of prayer, it seems that most of the people who came to believe his message were non-Jews. For them, there was a double barrier to be crossed before they could accept the gospel. It was not only a crazy message about a man who was dead and then came to life again. It was a crazy Jewish message. Paul must have known, as he went from place to place, that most people who heard what he was talking about were bound to think him mad.
And yet these people had not. Some in Thessalonica, as in most places he went, found that something happened to them when they listened to his message. A strange power gripped them—the power that, Paul would tell them, was the holy spirit at work. They would suddenly understand what he was saying. It would grasp their hearts and minds. Paul and his companions, explaining the gospel to them, would become excited as they saw the message take hold, make sense, and begin its work of transforming hearts and lives. That memory lingered on even though Paul, Silvanus and Timothy had moved south, to Beroea, Athens and now Corinth (Paul doesn’t say so in the letter, but it is likely that he was writing this from Corinth, where he stayed for over two years).
So when he looks back and gives thanks to God for them he knows that God was indeed at work in them as the word of the gospel was preached. His vivid memory of those early days, of their response and strong conviction, was clear proof that God had chosen them (verse 4). They had not come to faith by accident. God wanted them to be his beachhead into that part of northern Greece, a beacon of light to illuminate the world around. Though, as we shall see, Paul nursed anxieties about how they were getting on in their faith and life, his bedrock conviction was that God had taken the initiative in grasping them with the gospel.
This is the centre of Paul’s opening thanksgiving. Like most of his letters, this one starts with him telling his readers how he prays for them—a remarkable pastoral move in itself. Writing with his companions Silvanus (the ‘Silas’ of Acts 15:27, etc.) and Timothy, his young assistant, Paul knows he can address the Christians in Thessalonica as ‘the community in God the father and the Lord Jesus the Messiah’. The word for ‘community’ is sometimes translated ‘church’, but it was a common word for a gathering or assembly. What distinguished this community from others was that it was not only located in a particular place, but ‘in’ a particular god—the god who is in fact God, the one true God, known to Jews and Christians as father, and known now in the gospel as the one who sent Jesus to be Messiah and so Lord of the world. As so often with Paul, his opening words and phrases contain, in a nutshell, a good deal that he will spell out later in the letter.
His opening thanksgiving and prayer actually extend, in a rambling sort of way, for over half the letter—to the end of chapter 3, in fact; and there is probably a good reason for this. The church in Thessalonica is very young, probably not more than a few months old. Already they have faced great difficulties; they have been persecuted, and some of them have died (whether from the persecution or from other causes, Paul does not say). By way of rooting them the more firmly in the gospel, Paul reminds them at length of what happened when he arrived and preached there; of the example he and his companions set them; of Timothy’s recent visit and the good report he had brought back. And he does all this within the broad framework of telling them how they feature in his prayers, which they do constantly (verse 2).
In particular, he recalls how, even in the short time he spent with them after the initial preaching, they already demonstrated three things which he saw as signs of life. Faith, love and hope: Paul uses this threesome elsewhere, particularly in 1 Corinthians 13:13, but clearly it was a regular part of his thinking and teaching about basic Christian living.
Each one demands effort. Faith is something you have to work at. It is not a ‘work’ in the sense of a ‘work of the law’ done to earn favour with God, but a work of love, done out of gratitude for grace. It means thinking the gospel through, and bringing our minds and wills into line with it. Love—which, as Paul will show later in the letter (4:9–12), is a very practical thing—also requires the kind of effort we associate with hard physical work. Hope needs patience, which is also demanding.
The Thessalonians had all three. Could the same be said for your church?
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