Turned
1 Thessalonians 1 (NIV)
1 Paul, Silas and Timothy,
To the church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ:
Grace and peace to you.
2 We always thank God for all of you and continually mention you in our prayers. 3 We remember before our God and Father your work produced by faith, your labor prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.
4 For we know, brothers and sisters loved by God, that he has chosen you, 5 because our gospel came to you not simply with words but also with power, with the Holy Spirit and deep conviction. You know how we lived among you for your sake. 6 You became imitators of us and of the Lord, for you welcomed the message in the midst of severe suffering with the joy given by the Holy Spirit. 7 And so you became a model to all the believers in Macedonia and Achaia. 8 The Lord’s message rang out from you not only in Macedonia and Achaia — your faith in God has become known everywhere. Therefore we do not need to say anything about it, 9 for they themselves report what kind of reception you gave us. They tell how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, 10 and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead — Jesus, who rescues us from the coming wrath.
A Church Only Weeks Old
Paul did not get much time in Thessalonica. Acts tells us he reasoned with them in the synagogue on three Sabbath days, and then a mob formed and he had to leave at night. He planted a church and was gone almost immediately.
So when he writes this letter, he is writing to people he barely got to teach. He had no chance to finish the job. Any of us would be anxious about that. You leave something half-built and you wonder whether it stood.
And then the reports start coming back. That is the surprise of this chapter. Paul is not writing to repair a weak church. He is writing to say he keeps hearing about them from strangers.
Work, Labour, Endurance
He thanks God for three things, and he words them carefully.
“your work produced by faith, your labor prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope”
Faith, love and hope are the three we always hear together. But Paul does not leave them as feelings. He attaches each one to something you could watch happen.
Faith produces work. Love prompts labour, and the word carries the sense of effort that costs you something. Hope holds you steady when staying would be easier to quit than to continue.
That is a good test, and an uncomfortable one. If my faith produces nothing I actually do, I should ask what it is. If my love never costs me any labour, I should ask who it is for. Paul is not measuring their sincerity. He is noticing their output.
Not Simply With Words
Then he explains why he is confident about them.
“our gospel came to you not simply with words but also with power, with the Holy Spirit and deep conviction”
He is not boasting about his preaching. He is saying something arrived that he did not generate. The words were his. The power was not.
And he adds one more line that I keep coming back to.
“You know how we lived among you for your sake.”
Three weeks. That is all the time they had to watch him. Apparently it was enough for his life and his message to be saying the same thing. He can point to it as evidence without embarrassment.
I find that sobering. The people who hear me talk about God also watch how I behave when I am tired, or losing, or not getting what I want. They are not grading me. They are just forming an impression. And whatever that impression is, it is quietly doing more work than my words are.
Joy In The Middle Of It
Verse six is the one that stops me.
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“you welcomed the message in the midst of severe suffering with the joy given by the Holy Spirit”
Not before the suffering. Not afterwards, when it had all been resolved and they could look back and see the point. In the middle of it.
We usually treat joy as the reward at the end of the hard season. Here it shows up inside the hard season, and Paul is explicit about where it came from. It was given. It was not manufactured by positive thinking or by pretending the suffering was smaller than it was.
That matters, because it means joy in this sense is not a mood you owe God while you are struggling. It is something he supplies. You can be genuinely in pain and genuinely given joy at the same time, and neither one makes the other a lie.
The Message Rang Out
Because of all this, something happened that nobody planned.
“The Lord’s message rang out from you”
The Thessalonians did not run a campaign. They were a young church in a hostile city, trying to survive. But travellers kept passing through, and the story kept travelling with them, until Paul says he no longer needs to tell anyone about these people because everyone already knows.
There is a freeing thing buried in that. They did not set out to become a model to all the believers in Macedonia and Achaia. Verse seven says they became one. It happened to them while they were busy being faithful in an ordinary way.
Influence, when it is real, is usually a by-product. You get it by doing the thing, not by positioning yourself as someone who does the thing.
Turned, To Serve, To Wait
Paul finishes the chapter with the report he keeps hearing, and it comes in three verbs.
“you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven”
Turned. Serve. Wait.
The turning is the break. Something was put down. Notice that Paul says they turned to God from idols, in that order — the arriving is named before the leaving. You do not usually let go of something by staring at it and trying harder. You let go because your hands became full of something better.
The serving is the present tense. A turn that does not change your Tuesday is not much of a turn. He calls God living and true, which is the quiet contrast with the idols. An idol cannot ask anything of you, and that is exactly its appeal. The living God can, and does.
The waiting is the direction. They are not serving in order to earn the ending. They already know how it ends, and they serve because of it.
I notice I am usually strong in one of the three and weak in another. Some seasons I am serving hard and have stopped waiting for anything, so the work turns heavy and joyless. Other seasons I am waiting for God to move and have quietly stopped serving while I wait. The three belong together.
Walk On
This chapter is a report card nobody wrote for themselves. Everything Paul praises, the Thessalonians found out about second-hand, through people who had passed through their city and could not stop talking about what they saw.
That is worth sitting with, because it is probably the most honest version of our own lives too. The account of us that is already circulating was not written by us.
So two questions to carry today.
What did you turn to God from, and have you turned back toward it quietly since? Not dramatically. Just the slow drift back to the thing that asks nothing of you.
And of the three verbs — turning, serving, waiting — which one has gone thin lately? Name the one. Then do one small thing today that belongs to it.
All glory to God — forever and ever. Amen. 🤍
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