View devo: https://bit.ly/4s13gwF
1:1 Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy, To the church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ: Grace to you and peace. 2 We always give thanks to God for all of you and mention you in our prayers, constantly 3 remembering before our God and Father your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ. 4 For we know, brothers and sisters beloved by God, that he has chosen you, 5 because our message of the gospel came to you not in word only but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction; just as you know what kind of persons we proved to be among you for your sake. 6 And you became imitators of us and of the Lord, for in spite of persecution you received the word with joy from the Holy Spirit, 7 so that you became an example to all the believers in Macedonia and in Achaia. 8 For the word of the Lord has sounded forth from you not only in Macedonia and Achaia but in every place your faith in God has become known, so that we have no need to speak about it. 9 For they report about us what kind of welcome we had among you and how you turned to God from idols to serve a 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. (1 Thessalonians 1:1-10 NRSV)
Good Tuesday, Friend! I pray this finds you well and being a great blessing of God to others! We're about to read someone else's mail, shhh! Don't tell anyone, but in our country that is a federal offense; in the Bible, it might be a biblical offense NOT to read it! We will take it from there as we'll eavesdrop on what God may be sharing with an important church! Please pray for this old man as Nellie and I will be traveling to Del Rio to preach at First UMC there at their two morning services, 8:30 and 11:00. Pray the Lord share a good word with me!
"Bless be the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love; the fellowship of kindred minds is like to that above." That line is more than a line from a loved hymn that is, for the most part, rarely sung anymore. It is to me a strong and loving reminder of faith in college students; in this case, a ragtag group of kitchen, rather cafeteria workers, who worked breakfast and lunch on Sunday, then had the evening to fend for themselves in securing a meal. This group, at my urging, joined me in a nice walk from the campus of Lon Morris College to the steps and sanctuary of First United Methodist, then within walking distance of the campus. The Rev. Dr. Gilpin was pastor and he loved worshiping God even at a night worship service on a Sunday, no less! Not many people came, but the welcome we all received was a blessing. At the end of worship, Dr. Gilpin would gather us in a circle and we would sing this hymn. I confess I did not know many hymns in English; I was raised a Spanish-singing United Methodist and I quickly learned this hymn because our hearts were truly binded to God and to each other as we sang after worshiping together in this church. The benediction was given and this group would then walk to Dairy Queen, a long-sanctified place of meals in many a Christian tradition even to this day. The week had started on a positve note and onward and upward we would go in faith.
Paul in this letter is saying something along the same lines, as he opens with one of the warmest greetings in the New Testament. He's writing to the Thessalonians — a church he planted under genuinely difficult circumstances, having been run out of Philippi before arriving there, and run out of Thessalonica not long after — and yet the tone is not cautious or guarded or tinged with the anxiety of someone checking on a fragile plant he's not sure survived. It is grateful, affectionate, and almost bursting with a pride that he can barely contain. We always thank God for all of you, he says, and we continually remember you in our prayers. Always. Continually. This is not the prayer life of someone going through the motions. This is a man who thinks about these people constantly and is genuinely, unreservedly glad that they exist. What he remembers when he prays for them is worth sitting with, because it gives us one of the clearest pictures in the New Testament of what a genuinely healthy church looks like from the outside. He remembers their work produced by faith, their labor prompted by love, and their endurance inspired by hope in the Lord Jesus Christ. Work, labor, endurance — these are not passive words. They are words of sustained, costly, active engagement. And they have three different energy sources: faith, love, and hope. The work comes from believing something true. The labor comes from loving someone real. The endurance comes from hoping in something that hasn't fully arrived yet. Put those three together and you have a community that is not just surviving but moving — forward, outward, with genuine momentum.
And then Paul says something that sounds straightforward but carries enormous weight: we know, brothers and sisters loved by God, that He has chosen you. We know. Not we hope, not we assume, not we're pretty sure based on available evidence. We know. And how does Paul know? Because of what happened when the gospel came to them. It came not simply with words, but with power and with the Holy Spirit and with full conviction. The gospel arrived in Thessalonica doing things that words alone cannot do — it changed people, it produced faith in people who had previously had none, it generated the kind of conviction that held up under the kind of opposition Paul is about to describe. When the gospel comes with the Spirit behind it, you can tell the difference. There's a quality to what happens that mere rhetoric, however eloquent, cannot produce.
And the opposition was real. The Thessalonians received the word in the midst of severe suffering, Paul says, and yet they received it with the joy given by the Holy Spirit. Severe suffering and joy in the same sentence, held together by the Spirit. This is not the joy of people who have been spared difficulty. This is the joy of people who have discovered that the Spirit is sufficient for the difficulty — that the peace and the presence and the life of God that came with the gospel does not evaporate under pressure. They became imitators of Paul and of the Lord — which means the pattern of their lives began to mirror the pattern of a crucified and risen Savior, someone who went through the worst and came out the other side not merely surviving but transformed.
And the result of all this is something Paul describes with what sounds like genuine delight: their faith has become known everywhere. Not just in Macedonia and Achaia — everywhere. Paul says that when he arrives somewhere new, people are already telling him about the Thessalonians before he even has a chance to bring them up. Your reputation has gone ahead of you, he says to them. Everywhere we go, people are talking about how you turned from idols to serve the living and true God, and how you are waiting for His Son from heaven — the one He raised from the dead, Jesus, who rescues us from the coming wrath. The church's reputation in the surrounding region is not for its building or its programs or its eloquent preaching. It is for the fact that people's actual lives have changed — they turned from something to Someone, they left behind what was false to serve what is real, and the evidence of that turn is visible enough that strangers are mentioning it to Paul on the road.
This is what a Spirit-filled community looks like from a distance. Not a community of perfect people — Paul will address various problems in subsequent letters. But a community whose faith is working, whose love is laboring, whose hope is holding through the hard parts, and whose changed lives are making the gospel audible to everyone around them. That is the Thessalonian church. And it is, in its best moments, the church that the Spirit poured out at Pentecost has been building ever since — in every city and every century where a group of people turned from idols to the living God and let the evidence of that turn speak for itself.
PRAYER: Lord, make us a community whose work comes from faith, whose labor comes from love, and whose endurance comes from hope — a people whose changed lives make the gospel visible and audible to everyone watching. This we pray in Christ Jesus' strong name, amen.
Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Ask yourself honestly today what an outside observer would say your community is known for — and identify one specific thing you can contribute this week to making it known for the right things.
I love you and I thank God for you, just like Paul! You matter to God and you matter to me. Winning hearts in love is a good way to win the world for Jesus!
Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.
