Paul’s First Epistle to The Thessalonians (2)

Thanksgiving for the Thessalonians as a Work of Grace

Work of faith, their labor of love, and the steadfastness of their hope in our Lord Jesus Christ. And so Paul's thanksgiving to God for this church, for these Christians, reflects Paul's conviction that everything commendable about these Christians was due to the grace of God at work in them.

That's why he thanked God. He didn't congratulate them, he thanked God because God was the author and the source of everything good about these people. To all of grace. And so this is why Paul thanked God for them.

And so let's work through verse 3 actually, verses 2 and 3. Hopefully we'll get through this today, in the time we have. We may have to abbreviate somewhat. But first let's consider Paul's grateful thanksgiving to God for these Christians.

Verse 2.

We give thanks to God always for all of you, constantly mentioning you in our prayers. We give thanks. This was a common prayer of the Apostle toward the churches. Now not every church, but most of the churches to which he wrote, he would express right at the outset that he thanked God for them.

For example, when Paul wrote the epistle to the Romans, he wrote in verse 8, First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you all, that your faith is spoken of throughout the whole world, the whole Gentile world.

And then to the church of Corinth, he also said, I thank my God always concerning you for the grace of God which was given to you by Christ Jesus. Really that's the same thing as what he states in 1 Thessalonians 1 verse 2 and 3, just in different words.

He thanked God that they were enriched in everything by him in all utterance and all knowledge, even as the testimony of Christ was confirmed in you, so that you come short in no gift, eagerly waiting for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ, the second coming, who will also confirm you to the end that you may be blameless in the day of our Lord.

Jesus.

But he always thanked God for the church of Corinth, he always thanked God for the church at Rome, and he always thanked God for the church at Philippi. I thank my God upon every remembrance of you, always, in every prayer of mine, making requests for you all with joy, for your fellowship in the gospel from the first day until now.

Being confident of this very thing, he who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ. And then to the church of Colossae also, we give thanks to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, praying always for you.

And so this was a common statement, because it was a common feeling that the Apostle Paul had toward these churches. He saw these people coming out of paganism into the Christian faith, their lives were transformed by the grace of God, and so it immediately led him, caused him to offer thanks to God, because he saw that God was the author and the reason for any change that took place in these people, in bringing them to Christ.

He believed in a sovereign God, and God alone should get the glory for it. And so whenever he thought of them and prayed for them, which was continuous, he thanked God for them. Paul frequently stated in his epistles he was praying constantly for the Christian readers.

And I think this should press upon each of us, our great responsibility and great privilege to pray for our church. Pray for one another, not just for our church, but for other churches also. You know, some pastors in some churches, they get a little mentality that they're building their own little kingdom, and we should not be that way.

You know, we are seeking to further the kingdom of Jesus Christ, and we ought to pray not only for our church, but other churches too. Some that are struggling, some that need the Lord's mercy and grace and help, but we ought to pray for the other churches also.

Paul prayed for them all, and we ought to pray also. The fact is, God has ordained prayer as a major means by which he conducts his work.

In the world.

We would all affirm that, but does our practice reflect that reality, that truth? The scriptures say, if you pray not, you'll have not. We could argue, if you pray not for your brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ, they will have not either.

God has appointed the means of prayer, and it's one of the duties and privileges that we have as Christians within a church. To pray for our church, Paul prayed for the churches, we ought to pray for ours and for.

Others.

And so please be faithful in this matter of prayer for our church, for me, if you would, for your church family, for the Lord's will and the Lord's work to be done through us. We receive contact fairly frequently from our radio listeners, and sometimes they'll request CDs of certain programs because they want to distribute them, and we do so.

We always send them back, of course, with no charge for the CDs or the postage or anything, but I always include in the note, I would ask that you would pray for the Lord's blessing on our church and our radio ministry.

And I hope that they feel somewhat a sense of responsibility to do so, as we put out.

That word.

And so we ought to be prayerful for one another. Let's be faithful in prayer. Pray that our Lord will bless us with his protection and provision of every spiritual blessing for which we're in need, in order that we might live rightly before him and faithfully before him.

And as this old world is going, we may need prayer more abundantly in the future. Is that not right? That we would be faithful to our Lord regardless of what we may encounter? And so Paul makes a marvelous statement regarding this church.

We give thanks to God always for all of you, constantly mentioning you in our prayers. Again, why was it that Paul thanked God for them? Because Paul knew assuredly they were Christians as a result of God's powerful grace working in their lives.

He didn't congratulate them. He didn't pat them on the back. God was the source and cause of their salvation, first to last, in its entirety. It wasn't a cooperation between God and these sinners there in Thessalonica.

It was the grace of God that brought them to Christ. And so God would thank, or Paul would thank God for them. He could reflect upon the beginnings of the church. It certainly confirmed to him that this was so.

It was a remarkable display of the grace of God in bringing numbers to salvation in just a few short weeks of ministry. Three Sabbath days in the synagogue preaching the gospel, and he had a church going.

A number of Jews believed, and a great many Greeks we read last week. And some women, too. Numbers of women. God had first led Paul through a vision to travel to that region of Macedonia across the Aegean Sea by ship to go up that region.

He first established a church in Philippi, and then traveled that trade route. We spoke about it last week, a Roman trade route. And it took him to Amphipolis in Apollonia, and he arrived at Thessalonica.

And there they found the synagogue of the Jews, and there preached the gospel to them. And so the church came into being because God had worked mightily through Paul, transforming.

Their lives.

He had directed them. He was in Troas when God gave him a vision, and a man said, come on over and help us. He would have never gone had that not happened. It was God who had brought the gospel to these people through the Apostle Paul, his minister.

And again, we would argue we should be no less thankful to our God for our church and for our participation in it, for we too are the product of God's miracle-working grace. No less than they. We too.

No, we were not founded due to a heavenly vision, and I suspect few of us can recount miracles in nature accompanying our conversion. Many in the early churches could do so, of course. Nevertheless, our church is a miraculous thing, and the fact that you are a member indicates that it is also a work of God's grace, a miraculous work of the grace of God in your life that you're even here, that you have a desire to know God, that you have a delight and desire to be around other people who know God and want to know God.

And so we have every reason to thank God for this church, as Paul had reason to thank God for the church at Philippi, Thessalonica, all the churches. We read of the work of God's grace in bringing salvation to people in 2 Corinthians 4, 3 -6.

Clearly it's a work of God. Paul wrote, even if our gospel is veiled, it's veiled to those who are perishing. Not everybody hears our gospel. It's veiled to them. They can't understand it. They can't see it.

Why?

Whose minds the God of this age has blinded, that's the devil, who do not believe lest the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine on them. Not only are they sinners and they're not interested and they cannot believe, they won't believe, but the devil's got them bound, and he's blinded them so they cannot see.

But Paul reasoned, we do not preach ourselves but Christ Jesus the Lord, and ourselves your servants for Jesus' sake. And then he explains how salvation happens, for it's God who commanded light to shine out of darkness, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

Paul attributes coming to salvation to be the work of God, the power of God, the same power of God that the Lord manifested in creating the heavens and the earth. He created life in you.

He gave you light.

It was that kind of power. The original act of creation, God employed great creative power to bring each of us who were true Christians from spiritual death into the state of new life in Jesus Christ.

That's amazing. Some of us can testify of the utter state of rebellion and unbelief that characterized us before becoming Christians. And we were transformed, and you cannot explain that transformation apart from the grace of.

God.

And so Paul could say, we give thanks to God always for all of you, constantly mention.

You in our prayers.

And again, we should thank God for each other. We're the products of God's work of grace. He alone receives the glory for what he has done. And we'll see to it, Lord willing, that he gets the glory for all the things that he'll yet do among us.

We hope to get this sanctuary finished painting and repair maybe this week. And I've had for some time, hopefully, maybe having a verse going up and over the arch, declaring that the glory be to God and the church forever, taken out of Ephesians.

I think that would be a wonderful verse to have that would always be before our church family. And so we want the glory of God to be proclaimed, and we want to make people know that this is our aim, our desire, that God be glorified.

And we certainly can glorify him in not taking any credit for our salvation. You know, I didn't find Jesus. You know, he found me, and I was running from him when he caught me. Many of you can testify to the same thing.

Oh, yeah, in our ignorance, we thought we found Jesus. I found the Savior, but that's not what happened at all. We were the ones who were lost. He wasn't lost. He found us and subdued us, conquered us, and we're thrilled that he did so.

Prayer as the Means God Uses

Now notice also what's implied here in Paul's words. Paul believed prayer should be offered frequently, even consistently, on behalf of God's people. Now this might seem to be a rather obvious thing, but how often do people who believe in God's sovereign grace fail in this matter of prayer?

Oh, we believe in the sovereign grace of God here, they would argue. You know, God has elected people from eternity to bring his salvation, and he does, and we.

Know that.

And we'll talk about that some next week. Basically, you know, how do you know you're one of God's elect? Paul describes that in the next verses. We'll look at it next week. We believe in sovereign grace.

But we also believe in responsible prayer, and they don't always go together. In fact, some fail because of their very understanding, misunderstanding of the nature of God's eternal decree and his sovereignty.

Why pray? I mean, God is sovereign. What will be, will be, for God has decreed all things that come to pass.

Why pray?

And even if we do pray, does it really matter? We're not going to change anything. Certainly not going to change God. Can we change God's decree, his plan? Of course not. That cannot be. And so, prayer is often neglected or not viewed with great importance, at least the importance that the Holy Scriptures place upon the matter of prayer.

And we might glibly claim what we believe in the sovereignty of God as an excuse, and it's a poor excuse, a sinful excuse for not praying. We don't have time to go into great detail about Daniel's example.

We'll just kind of highlight it. Daniel was in Babylon. He'd been there for almost 70 years. He's reading Jeremiah's prophecy one day, and he realizes, hey, God has consigned us to judgment in exile for 70 years, and the 70 years is almost up.

We're going home. We're leaving Babylon, going back to Judah, and the Lord's going to restore us. Now, did Daniel just sit back and pack his bags and get ready to go? No, there's a whole passage of Scripture that we'll not read, but it basically describes Daniel immediately going into fervent prayer, confessing the sins of himself and his people, the acknowledgment that God had judged them rightly for their sin, and then a request that God's anger would be removed from them and that God would, in His mercy, restore His people to their land.

He believed in the sovereignty of God.

He believed.

He knew that they were returning to the land, but that did not cause him in any way to give.

Off prayer.

It actually was a motivation for him to pray more clearly and faithfully, and that should be our understanding as well. His understanding of what God was about to do motivated him to pray more fervently, even as he then could pray more intelligently.

And that's how we ought to be. Now, some Arminians—that is, those who deny God's sovereign grace, who wrongly argue against the idea of God's sovereignty by saying that the sovereignty of God, as you believe it, renders prayer meaningless and useless.

From Daniel's example, we see clearly that this is a false charge. Daniel knew God's decree. Nevertheless, it was not a disincentive to pray, but rather it stirred him greatly to pray and to give him specific information for which he should pray for.

Yet again, some sovereign grace people, I fear, give weight to the Arminian's charge, for they fail to pray, assuming that God's decree will occur irrespective of prayer. And that's just not how God works.

God has ordained the means as well as the end, and so we should be the most prayerful of Christians, for we believe in a bigger God than most. We believe in the God of the Bible, and so we should be the most faithful Christians in our prayer, for we know that God will bring to pass what we ask when we ask according to His will, and nothing can withhold His hand.

And so knowing and believing in the sovereignty of God and bringing His people to salvation should not be an impediment to prayer. According to Scripture, it should be an impetus to prayer. So one of our chief responsibilities as Christians is prayer.

We should be as a patress, a servant of Christ, who Paul could write to the church at Colossae, He's always laboring fervently for you in prayers that you may stand perfect and complete in all the will of God.

I could only wish we could have men and women like a patress in our church, many of them. That would be a wonderful thing, would it not? Now what did Paul remember? What was Paul grateful to God for when he was praying?

Faith, Love, and Hope as Paul’s Grateful Remembrance

Paul's grateful remembrance of these Christians, verse 3. What was it that Paul remembered every time he prayed for the Christians in this church? Well, he tells us in verse 3, "...remembering before our God and Father your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.".

Every time he prayed, these things came to his mind. Paul commonly looked forward, delighted in the presence of this triad work of grace, faith, hope, and love. You see it there. And you can see it elsewhere.

Paul, of course, wrote in 1 Corinthians 13, "...now abide faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of these is love.". But all three are important, aren't they? And Paul lists them here, faith, hope, and love.

He did elsewhere, Colossians 1, which we studied some months ago.

Paul wrote,.

"...we give thanks to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, praying always for you since we heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, your love for all the saints, and because of the hope...".

There it is, faith, love, and hope. A different order here. "...which is laid up for you in heaven.". And so here we have these three gifts of grace listed, but in different order. First faith, then love, then hope.

Here are Matthew Henry's comments on this. "...faith, hope, and love are the three principal graces in the Christian life, and proper matter of our prayer and thanksgiving.". First, he gives thanks for their faith in Christ Jesus, that they were brought to believe in him, and take upon them the profession of his religion, that is, Paul's Christianity, and venture their souls upon his undertaking.

And second, for their love, besides the general love which is due to all men, there is particular love owing to the saints, or those who are of the Christian brotherhood. We must love all the saints and bear an extensive kindness and goodwill to good men, notwithstanding smaller points of difference and many real weaknesses.

Some understand it of their charity to the saints and necessity, which is one branch and evidence of Christian love. And three, for their hope, the hope which is laid up for you in heaven. The happiness of heaven is called their hope because it is a thing hoped for, looking for the blessed hope.

What is laid out upon believers in this world is much, but what is laid up for them in heaven is much more. And we have reason to give thanks to God for the hope of heaven, which good Christians have, or their well-grounded expectation of the future glory, their faith in Christ, their love to the saints, and an eye to the hope laid up for them in heaven.

The more we fix our hopes on the recompense of reward in the other world, the more free and liberal shall we be of our earthly treasure upon all occasions of doing good. Let's consider these three rather quickly.

First, the grace of faith. He remembered their faith whenever he prayed. He wrote of this in 2 Thessalonians 3 .2.

Not all have faith.

Why then do some have faith and some do not have faith? Faith is the product of God's grace in the soul. Faith is that grace that God gives His elect whereby they believe God's word containing His promises and His warnings.

Why do some believe and some others do not believe? It is because by God's grace He enabled people to believe. They hear the word, they hear the promises, they hear the warnings, and the Holy Spirit confirms to the soul that it is true.

That it is true, and the one who hears it initially may not like it, may not want to hear it, but he can't get away from it because grace is operative in his life. They hear the way of salvation freely offered them in Jesus Christ as the only Savior of guilty sinners, and they embrace Him as such, as God's great provision for their great.

Need.

That faith is the result of God's grace is clearly set forth in scripture. We read of Apollos traveling to Achaia, which is southern Greece, to minister the word of.

God.

When he desired to cross into Achaia, the brethren wrote, exhorting the disciples to receive him, Apollos, and when he arrived, he greatly helped those who had believed through.

Grace.

If you believe on the Lord, it is due to the grace of God. God enabled you to understand. God enabled you to be attracted to that message, desire that message, and to have that message confirmed in your own life.

And then of course the verse, as we know intimately, we should, for by grace you have been saved through faith, and that of not of yourselves, it is a gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.

Now what is the gift of God?

Is it grace? Is it faith?

What is Paul talking about? Well, the clause, it is the gift of God, it's neuter, it's referring to everything there within the context. It's all the gift of God, grace as well as faith. Notice Paul says he didn't just remember the grace of faith alone in these believers when he recalled, that he recalled when he prayed for them, he wrote of remembering before a God and Father your work of faith.

It wasn't just your faith, but it was the work that faith wrought in your lives. True faith is seen in what it produces in the believer. True faith will show itself in good works. Paul had written to the churches of Galatia, for in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision availed anything but faith working through love.

If you have a faith that is not being worked out in love, it's not saving faith. And it's at this point we come to a very great problem area among evangelicals. Most Bible believers in churches are taught pretty well the doctrine of justification through faith alone, which is a glorious, biblical, foundational doctrine of salvation.

But they wrongly think, therefore all I have to do is believe and I can be saved. Now it's true that God only looks at faith to justify the guilty sinners, but to argue that all you have to do is believe is not what the scriptures declare.

The Lord Jesus said, unless you deny yourself and take up your cross daily, you have no salvation promised to you. You've got to deny yourself. You need to be obedient. You need to follow the Lord over and over and over again throughout the scriptures.

Again, it's not because we do these things that we earn or merit salvation in any way, but these are manifestations of true faith, because faith alone justifies. But there are many conditions that we have to meet.

If you refuse to forgive others, God will not forgive you. And again, it's faith that moves us to forgive others, doesn't it? And so there's lots of things that we have to do. Jonathan Edwards, the great congregational preacher out in Northampton back in the 1700s, the Lord used him to bring about the Great Awakening, the Great Revival.

As many as a third of the colonists were converted in just a few months, not too many months. And he preached a sermon on justification by faith alone. And in this sermon, he wrote this. And again, you know, Jonathan Edwards was Mr. Orthodoxy.

I mean, this guy was the best American theologian ever produced. But he wrote in this sermon on justification by faith alone, there are many other things besides faith which are directly proposed to us to be pursued or performed by us in order to eternal life, which if they are done or obtained, we shall.

Have eternal life.

And if not done or not obtained, we shall surely perish. Now that's a message that most evangelical churches never hear, never. But this is what the Lord used actually to bring about the Great Awakening.

Everybody was a member of a church. They were nominal. And Jonathan Edwards came along and said, you think just because you believe the right things, you're saved? No, unless your life manifests what you believe, you're in your sin.

And people were brought to a true understanding of salvation. Obedience and salvation are connected in fact. He wrote, which nobody denies, but I tell you what, a lot of people are denying it today. As long as you believe the right things, you have salvation.

No, you have to believe the right things, but that belief should shape your attitudes, your actions, how you live and interact with the world. True faith does. The faith that grace creates and sustains is transformative.

And so he was remembering their faith, their work of faith, and also their labor of love,.

Verse 3.

The grace of love. He remembered their faith, he remembered their love. He recalled their labor of love. And again, when God converts a sinner, this will be seen. The scriptures tell us in Romans 5 .5 that the Holy Spirit sheds abroad in our hearts the love of God.

A true Christian loves God. A true Christian loves God's people. Two evidences convinced Paul when people became Christians. They had faith in the Lord Jesus and they had love for the saints. If a person claims they love the Lord Jesus and they believe on Him, but they can't stand Christians, that person's got a problem.

He's still in his sins. Because the Lord teaches, we're going to see in Thessalonians later, the Lord teaches every one of His people to love the brethren. Arthur Pink wrote of this grace of love. Regeneration, that's the new birth, when a person's born again, is that miracle of divine grace wrought in the soul which enlists the affections of God, affections be what you love, what you desire, which brings the human will into subjection to the divine, which produces a real and radical change in the life.

That change is from worldliness to godliness, from disobedience to obedience. At the new birth, the love of God is shed abroad in the heart by the Holy Spirit, and that love is manifested in a dominating longing and sincere purpose to please, in all things, the one who has plucked me as a bran from the burning.

There is a greater difference between the genuine Christian and the deceived, professing Christian than there is between a living man and a corpse. None need remain in doubt if they will honestly measure themselves by the word of God.

How do we know we love God? Well, I listed, and we're not going to read through them, I listed, what, 13 ways in which the scriptures tell us 14 ways we love God. And this is true of every Christian. It's not as true of every Christian as it should be, but it's true of every Christian, because this is a product, a result of the grace of God.

And lastly, we close with this third triad, or this third aspect of the triad of grace, the grace of hope. Page 10, if you happen to be looking at your notes. Whenever Paul prayed for these Christians, he remembered their steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.

Hope is that grace that God gives to his people in order to comfort them and strengthen them in their walk of faith. When trials get difficult, when troubles come on every front that would squash anybody's faith, it is hope that strengthens the person and enables him to endure, her to endure.

Hope is a certain anticipation of what most assuredly will occur. God has promised in his word, I know it's coming to pass. Think of Abraham offering his son Isaac. God had told Abraham, through Isaac your son, I'm going to bless you.

And then Abraham is called to sacrifice his son Isaac. How can this be? Hebrews tells us, Abraham believed God was going to raise Isaac from the dead. And he got in Isaac a figure of the Lord Jesus Christ.

He was so confident in God's ability and God's faithfulness to his word, he knew Isaac could not remain in a state of death. And so the Lord Jesus Christ could not abide in death. And he rose again. Hope, the certain anticipation of what most assuredly will occur, is the deep settled certainty that all the good that God has promised will most certainly come to pass.

No question about it. And the person who has that faith will have that hope. Faith is in what God has done. Faith is in what God has promised. But hope is based on what God has promised, yet has not been realized as of yet.

And so Romans 12 says, Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation. How can you be patient in tribulation? By rejoicing in hope. Just like we're seeing in the Pilgrim's Progress in Sunday School. How does Christian and hopeful deal with the trouble in Doubting Castle as they're being bludgeoned by a giant despair?

Oh, I've got a key, I've had it all along. Get us out of this cell, said Christian. And the key was named Promise. And hopeful, as he was having those encouraging words, sustained Christian in his difficulty.

And they all realized that they had the promises of God they could have resorted to. And they were needlessly in despair and desperation for that period of time. And so the Lord gives his people hope.

And that is given to us when we see the glorious future before us, the absolute certainty of God's promises of future blessing. And it comes to us through Jesus Christ. And therefore we are to be a people living in the anticipation of the future.

Not the near future. You know, this world doesn't look very bright, does it? At least in the near future. But there is a glorious future before us. And we live in the prospect of that. We anticipate with joy our future resurrection.

And our deliverance from this fallen world. And this whole fallen world is going to be delivered from itself. And we'll have a new heavens and a new earth. And therefore we just have to get through this time, this difficulty.

And we'll do so as we use the means that God has appointed, prayer, and recognition of the grace of God. And principally in these three graces, faith, hope, and love. And the Lord will see us through on to the end.

And one day we'll all, we who know Christ, will be standing before his throne. And we'll probably be overwhelmed with delight and wonder. And don't mind me if I just said I told you so. I might do that.

Who knows? Let's pray. Thank you, Father, for your word. And we thank you, our Father, for the glorious truths that are as true today as they were in the first century when Paul penned these words. We pray, Lord, that you would help your grace to be manifest in our lives.

Characterize our God by faith that works. By love that labors. And by hope that strengthens. That we be the kind of Christians that we should be. Again, we pray your blessing upon our new members, Lord.

We welcome them to our family. Bless them greatly. We ask these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.