I.
Introduction
Paul has had the opportunity to write a genuinely
encouraged and encouraging letter to Thessalonica.
Having left that very young church in that politically and economically important city, a city tied to showing gratitude to Rome
for the status it had so recently received as the capital of the second
district of Rome’s new acquisition … Macedonia Paul has good news from Timothy of their spiritual condition.
The city of Thessalonica had a recent history of determinedly
tugging its forelock to Rome for Rome’s patronage and it had been rewarded for that in such
a positive way that it wasn’t going to risk all that now … the Christians would
be put under pressure in order to kow-tow to Rome.
But against what you'd think were strong odds, the church in Thessalonica had THRIVED.
Now, at the end of this very positive letter, the
Apostolic team – following contemporary tradition – set out a few short,
staccato wish prayers and exhortations to the Thessalonian church.
Here then are the priorities they are setting for
the church to thrive as a people under pressure.
The wish list is in fact a prayer list … as the
optative formulas indicate in the original, and there are two of them to start
off the apostles’ list of priorities.
II. It’s a
priority under pressure for God to be at work in your life, vv. 23-24
"May
God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through.
May
your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord
Jesus Christ."
The team’s priority for people under pressure is that they
should be in the process of being formed by God.
So may God (first) be at work in you sanctifying you.
Gupta: “The Divine will is set upon guiding
believers towards completeness and maturity in holiness.”
A. Sanctifying
you
"May
God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through.”
1.
Sanctification is what pressurised people need
You wouldn’t
have thought that necessarily, would you?
You might
have thought: encouragement, courage, fortitude? Better at running away?
Well, those
ARE needed, but the first thing is to be very close to God Who is the source of
all these other things you’ll need, and the Apostles know very well that the
first issue with facing persecution is that it tries to alienate a person from
their God.
It tempts
you to soft peddle faith and faithfulness to soften the pressure of that
persecution … drawing you away from the Lord.
According to
the apostles the first concern of the Pressurised believers should be to stay
close to God and that meant Paul & co needed to pray for their
sanctification because sin is what separates from God.
a.
God's work (and ours)
When Paul writes about believers’ sanctification there
tends to be a past tense, a present tense and a future tense about it.
Believers
are those who HAVE been sanctified, ARE being sanctified as now we by the Spirit
put to death the desires of our sinful nature (Romans 8:13) and a future tense
in that we shall only be ‘made perfect’ when Christ comes and believers receive
that holiness ‘without which no-one shall see the Lord’ of which Hebrews 12:14
speaks.
Here in this
passage there is purposeful movement towards the return of Christ, at which
point the believer will be made completely holy … but the prayer that is made
here is about God working on that process until that future day comes.
b.
Through and through - consistency!
The difficulty for us all is that we are aware of and working
on specific areas of our faults and failings and that we can have blind spots
that we are not aware of.
Similarly, we have areas of sin in our lives that we know
about but that we are soft on.
Shogren points out that sanctification here involves both the inner
(hidden) and outward person.
This overturns the idea that Plato had that God is only
interested in the inner spiritual life and not the physical realities of our
human existence.
It also overturns the idea that a person’s spirit can be
wholly sanctified in this life.
Through and through.
But look … He is faithful and He also will do this work in
us, through us and with us, because that is what will secure our destiny … more
on that in a moment.
Just before that please notice in these verses that this
sanctifying work the Lord does in His people is attributed specifically to ‘the
God of Peace’.
2. The work
of the God Who is peace
"May
God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through.”
Why on earth would the apostolic team be praying for ‘the God of
peace’ to sanctify them through and through?
Well, grammatically, we’d probably be correct to take this as a
descriptive genitive to show that peace comes from God, meaning: ‘the God Who gives peace’.
But still, why is THAT title for God (Who does … obviously … give
peace) used here?
Well, if you
think about the way things were in Paradise in the Garden of Eden and then look
at what happened in the world after sin entered the situation ... well, strife, discord
and violence look pretty much to have been born in Eden on that fateful day
when humanity fell into sin.
And we’ve seen the evidence during this set of lockdowns we’ve been
going through that unrestrained human nature is pretty much as described in Titus
3:3 “At one time we too were
foolish, disobedient, deceived and enslaved by all kinds of passions and pleasures. We lived in malice and envy, being hated and hating one another.”
Peace and holiness go together … more obviously viewing things from
the other end of the proposition … sin is the partner of discord and strife,
you see?
Sin divides, breaks up and breaks down, and what God has done with the
life, death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus is to act decisively through the
Gospel to bring peace with Himself and start working to re-unite the whole of
Creation under Christ’s headship.
Dealing with sin is the work supremely of the God Who gives peace.
In our struggles with sin, I think that bigger picture is worth
thinking about.
And because of how this whole issue of sanctification fits into the bigger
picture of salvation when Christ returns, the first prayer for sanctification leads
into the second prayer for their security in salvation.
B. Securing
you
"May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept
blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ."
The eschatological reality is that sanctification
is security.
III. Assurance
in Faith, v. 24
"
The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do it."
It often seems to us like our faith will not be
enough.
It sometimes seems to us, too ... especially
under pressure ... that we cannot keep on going, can't keep it up.
Paul reassures these pressurised people in
Thessalonica that this doesn't depend on their strength.
He Who called you is the one Who will sort it.
There are two anchors for the hope that Paul
gives them ...
A. The
Calling One is the Faithful One
Firstly, we need to remember, that these
Thessalonians famously had a clear experience of God at the start of their
Christian lives.
They KNEW that they'd been called by God.
1 Thessalonians 1:4-5
"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."
B. He has
picked up the responsibility for the job
Simply because the One Who called you is
faithful, it follows that He is going to DO it.
He will do it.
He is ὃς
And then again the focus shifts, as it has been shifting all along, from prayer for them to have assurance, and now ... this close to the end of the letter ... the apostolic team requests three things not
FOR now but FROM the new believers at Thessalonica.
First Paul
and the team ask for prayer for themselves.
IV. Fellowship
in prayer, v. 25
"Brothers
and sisters, pray for us. "
The team’s prayed for them, now the team demonstrates
a bit of ‘body of Christ’ thinking and says we need your prayers too.
Paul & co are demonstrating graphically to
new believers that their life, faith and ministry depend just as much on God's
grace for their life as ministry as the apostles do for theirs.
Now it is a theological fact that they need God’s
grace just as much and it is the Biblical teaching that just as leaders pray
for those they lead, so those who are lead really need to pray for their
leaders.
If you raise your head above the parapet in Christian leadershipor a useful Christian initiative, that head will got shot at ... as your families' will too.
But raising the matter now with this new and
persecuted church speaks of humility and it speaks of vulnerability.
I came across this great quote from Lesslie Newbiggin this morning:
"The Church is not an organisation of spiritual giants. It is broken men and women who can lead others to the Cross."
Fundamentally, the ground is level at the foot of the Cross, and
so Paul asks these young believers for their prayers.
The team hangs by the thread of God's mercy and
intervention as much as the lives of the Thessalonians are dependent on the
Lord too.
V. Fellowship
in Love, v. 26
Here’s the
second request that their brotherly love should be made tangible.
"Greet
all God’s people with a holy kiss."
Wow!
Let me stop you there!
I’m not sure that I’m up for this!
This group in Thessalonica is a mixed Jewish and
Gentile church ... and if we’re bothered about this kissing lark, can you IMAGINE the
implications of what Paul's saying to a mixed Jewish/ Gentile group of new believers
at Thessalonica?
Interestingly, and I don’t know quite WHAT to
make of this if anything, the references to the holy kiss always arise in Paul’s
letters either to or from Corinth (Romans 16:16, 1 Corinthians 16:20, 2
Corinthians 13:12).
I don’t know why that should be.
Certainly there is no reference to this sort of
kissing thing going on in asny religious community outside the early Christian
church, and definitely kissing in Judaism was reserved for family members.
Let’s
look into what’s going on here.
Ernest
Best explains the significance of a kiss in Paul’s world:
“The kiss was given on the lips (normally only in sex), on
the cheeks, brow and shoulders (among kinsfolk), on the hands and feet (in
honouring a superior).”
Two safe assumptions we
can make about what Paul is talking about might be that firstly the apostolic
team is not referring to a kiss on the lips.
Secondly, the
pervasiveness of this ‘holy kiss’ amongst believers and the fact that here it is
mentioned without further explanation (which is unnecessary because they knew
exactly what this was talking about) show that this was a common thing to
happen in the church from its early days.
Given the cultural
background described for us by Ernest Best, it seems likely that the early
church tapped into the way family members kissed to greet each other to express
the family love, the brotherly love that spoke eloquently of all God’s adopted
children … His church … being brother and sister to one another … members
together of the family of God.
But it gets problematic in church!
John Bunyan commented on
attempts to resurrect the practice in the seventeenth century that it was noticeable
that the holy kiss seemed often to be given to ‘the most comely maidens’ …
indicating clearly how the custom could be open to abuse!
Late in the second century
we find Athenagoras trying to deal with the problems that can arise from this
practice and around the same time Clement of Alexandria wanted the emphasis to
be shifted from the literal kiss to the inner feeling of love then by the time
of Augustine in the fourth century not only was the kiss same-sex, the sexes
were segregated in church!
Now, of course, it makes
sense in our culture – particularly in COVID times – NOT to go reviving the
holy kiss tradition.
But showing fellowship and
love for one another on a regular basis as brothers and sisters in Christ … how
DO we show that to one another?
Answers on a postcard
please!
The point is that warm
family relations need to be shown in the church and the apostolic team is
looking for that.
Fellowship in prayer, fellowship in love, and now ...
VI. Fellowship
in the Word, v. 27
"I
charge you before the Lord to have this letter read to all the brothers and
sisters."
Grk “I adjure you by the Lord,” “I put you under
oath before the Lord.”
That word ‘adjure
is a weird one and this is the only time the Greek word used here crops up in
the New Testament.
It’s not easy
to put in modern English, but it is saying: ‘I hereby make you responsible
before God, as if you yourself have taken an oath’ to do this thing.
What thing?
Get this
letter read out so that everybody gets to hear it.
No-one is to be left out.
Firstly, it’s not just for the leaders to keep it
to themselves … the Scriptures are for everyone.
Secondly it is to be read aloud to everyone, you don’t
just give them a book!
Non-literacy
is no bar to Christian life!
And as everyone, not just the elders, is
responsible for the health and growth of themselves and the church then
everyone must be encouraged and helped to access God’s Word.
VII. Living
in the blessing of Grace, v. 28
"The
grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you."
This looks like a really nice book-end to the
opening prayer for grace in 1 Thessalonians 1:2
The key thing for these folks in their
pressurised and exposed situation is for the Lord Jesus – He Who gives us God’s
grace - to pour out His favour and goodness on these people.
But a prayer for grace that is made in the presence of the subject of that prayer makes this sound very much like a blessing.
All I'm going to say about that is that this is a great thing to do for one another!
Conclusion
Paul and the team write to a young,
pressurised and persecuted church that has not had the greatest start in life
and they highlight these outstasnding clear priorities for them:
Guard the reality of God at work in your
life and for that the team prays that God would sanctify them and secure them
by His grace.
Next the team addresses the issue of their assurance
of salvation … for the sake of their perseverance under pressure, highlighting
that the One Who HAD called them is faithful and that He would see to it.
And the team then highlights the priorities
for the young church to maintain their fellowship in prayer, in love and in the
Word – working together as the body of Christ.
We have been looking at this letter to
this church under pressure during the course of the COVID lockdown that has put us all under pressure
across the course of the last year or so.
My suggestion to you is that the
priorities applied to the Thessalonians are the priorities also for us.
We need prayer for ourselves that we would
know the daily reality of God at work in our lives, sanctifying and securing
us.
We need assurance in our faith, born of
the clear knowledge that He has called us and that He Who has called us is
faithful … so that He will carry us forward to His eternal glory.
And ourselves we need to pick up daily and
practice our fellowship in prayer, in the Word and in love.
May He help us forward, whatever lies in
front of us … to His Glory.
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