As I look at the first verse, I am reminded of the discussion in one part of Shakespeare’s play, Romeo & Juliet.
Juliet is lamenting the fact that Romeo has the long last name, because his family has been in feud with her family for generations.
And she says:
“What's in a name? That which we call a rose.. By any other name would smell as sweet”
So this morning, I will say, “What is in a greeting? And if it is done by Paul, it must have quite a lot in it.
We can see in the greeting before us this morning:
1. Shared Authority
2. Exalted Identity
3. Adverse Nativity
4. God’s Charity
5. Spiritual Harmony
READ I Thessalonians 1:1
1. Shared Authority
There is an extraordinary sharing of authority in the ministry of Paul.
The standard Greek Letter Greeting included the name of the sender and the name of the recipient. So Paul says here it is from three people.
You can go through all of the letters of Paul in the NT, and it is interesting to note, Paul’s greetings almost always include more than one name.
• Galatians 1 Paul, . . . and all the brothers with me,
• Philippians 1 Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus, To all the saints in Christ Jesus at Philippi
• Colossians 1 Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother,
• I Thessalonians 1 Paul, Silas and Timothy, To the church of the Thessalonians
• Philemon Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus, and Timothy our brother,
• Romans 16:21 Timothy, my fellow worker, sends his greetings to you, as do Lucius, Jason and Sosipater, my relatives. 22 I, Tertius, who wrote down this letter, greet you in the Lord. 23 Gaius, whose hospitality I and the whole church here enjoy, sends you his greetings. Erastus, who is the city’s director of public works, and our brother Quartus send you their greetings.
Of all Paul’s letters, only Ephesians does not begin or end contain a list of senders. That is the only one that says it is from Paul, the apostle. All the rest of Paul’s letters do.
Paul was accustomed to working together with a group of leaders. He did not set himself up as the only leader. In fact his style was to build up others, so that others could lead. And then he would leave things in their hands.
READ Acts 13:1-3
This is one of my favorite passages in the NT about church leadership. Barnabas founded the church at Antioch, and then realized this is a group of gentiles and so went down to Tarsus to find Paul. When he found Paul he said, “Paul we need you in the ministry. We have a gentile ministry here and Jesus called you to be an apostle to the gentiles. Come with me. Let’s see what we can do with this church.” So Paul went with Barnabas. They went to Antioch and lived there for a year and a half.
Together the two built the leadership at Antioch to the point that the leaders there felt comfortable sending Paul and Barnabas off.
No hard feelings. No competition. No sense of usurping authority. They taught the leaders of the church to be sensitive to the guidance of the Holy Spirit to the point that they lead the Church together—because it was GOD who was leading the Church through them.
This was Paul’s STYLE. He built leaders, and then left the local church in their hands and he moved on. Because of physical threats to Paul’s life he had to leave Thessalonica, yet he could have left anyway. They were ready to stand on their own with just a one-month intensive course in spiritual maturity. Amazing!
ILLUSTRATION
In the music school, we have a Summer Intensive Course. In about 5 weeks, we give you the basics. It is a one semester, college level music program that gets compressed into 5 weeks. And honestly I would not want to unleash a student from the Summer Intensive Music Course to lead a music program anywhere. They have the basics but that does not mean they are good musicians ready to lead other musicians.
Yet Paul was doing exactly that. He could leave and the church continues to thrive.
So we see Paul, Silas and Timothy writing this letter. Shared authority.
2. Exalted Identity
Who are you? If someone asked you that question, you might say your name or the State you are from, the language you speak etc. But is that who you are? You might also say, you are an engineer or a doctor – but that is what you do.
Paul writing this letter says, “You are in God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.” That’s who you are.
Ramakrishna said “God is in all men, but not all men are in God. That is why we suffer.”
This seems to be almost the opposite of the teachings of the New Testament. Paul quoted the Greek philosophers to say “In Him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). We are, indeed, in God, if we are in this universe, for He is Omnipresent and Omnitemporal. He is in all times, in all place and at all times.
But Jesus said . . . “If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. John 14:23
So if we do not obey His teaching, we do not have Him living in us.
There is a difference between that profound sense in which we cannot escape God and the more profound sense in which we can actually be filled with God Himself.
When He fills us we are truly “in Him”. We are not really “in Him” until He is in us.
The juxtaposition of the word for God and Jesus indicates that they are equal. They are not, precisely, the same. Yet they are on the same footing.
In John 14:6, Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me”.
In the book of Revelation, John keeps looking at the throne of God and at one glance he sees the Father, the rainbow surrounding Him, and the four living creatures and angels bowing before Him.
The next time he sees this multitude worshipping without number. He turns back at the throne and he sees the Lamb, as if it were slain since before the foundation of the world.
It is almost as if God, treating us as the spiritual infants we are, plays “peak a boo!” with us. When He does, He is God, the Father, the eternal One, the Ancient of Days. And then the next face that comes out is Jesus. When you see One you have seen the other. They are One.
Paul tried to describe this to the church at Corinth. He stated it this way:
"Now I want you to realize that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God." 1 Corinthians 11:3
I have read commentators, that are not comfortable with the obvious implications for marriage and the differing roles of men and women, husbands and wives, try to explain such difficulties in this verse away by stating that the Greek word for “head” can be translated “source,” which, of course, is true, if, in Greek literature, you refer to the head of a river.
But the usual meaning of the word “head” is “head” and, of course, this is the meaning here-the Father is the head of Christ, yet they are unified. (To suggest that the Father is the source of Jesus creates a collection of theological problems which cannot be resolved, and do not need to be resolved). Jesus submitted Himself to the Father in such a profound and beautiful way that to see one was to see the other. (John 14:9)
I have seen marriages in which the wife, seeking to walk in the footsteps of Jesus, submits to and honors her husband to such an extent that her life and vision and work become absorbed into his. You ask her view on a subject and you find her answer is a reflection of her husband’s. You look at her and you see the values and convictions of her husband. Such marriages are rare, yet the more a marriage reaches toward this ideal, the more it becomes a reflection of the unified nature of what theologians call the Godhead.
ILLUSTRATION:
Anna married John when he was thirty-seven. She was only twenty. He had already married and had seven children. His first wife died. Anna bore him thirteen more children. She assisted him in his music work. She learned to copy out his manuscripts so that his students could take copies of his music home for practice. She became so familiar with her husband, Johann Sebastian Bach’s hand that scholars sometimes have difficulty telling where Bach’s hand ends and Anna Magdalena’s begins. Her hand, even in writing, became a reflection of her beloved’s. In essence, they became one, even in the writing style.
It is like that with Jesus. Jesus is the image of the invisible God. He and the Father are one.
To be “in” one is to be “in” the other.
3. Adverse Nativity
Nativity does not just have to do with Christmas, but the time of being born. This church in Thessalonica was born in adversity.
READ Acts 17:1-9
This was the beginning of the church. The tension was so great that Paul had to leave. He was travelling to a couple of places and in Athens he was so concerned about the church in Thessalonica that he sends Timothy and Silas back there to see how they are doing. And Timothy comes back with this report and that is the basis of this letter.
So Paul was only with them a maximum of just short of four weeks. Yet there was established a flourishing, growing, mission-focused church.
And that church was born in a very difficult, painful, adverse environment. Maybe it was healthy because it was born in adversity. A church born out of persecution tends to be a strong church.
As Thomas Guthrie stated so eloquently:
As in nature, as in art, so in grace; it is rough treatment that gives souls, as well as stones, their luster.
4. God’s Charity
God’s greatest charity is His grace.
So Paul says, Grace to you. Grace-the standard Greek greeting: Charis. Grace (χάρις) can be translated delight or favor or benefit. It can be gratefulness. It can refer to spiritual rather than fleshly power.
Charis, grace morphs into charitas-gift, and both are based on the root chara, which means, joy, the root of the word Character.
So you meet a person that is miserable, he may not be a person of good character. And if you meet a person with winsomeness and joy about them in spite of difficulties, that is the person who has experienced the grace of God.
Grace is a gift which comes only from God.
Philip Yancy’s book “What’s so Amazing about Grace?” describes a number of experiences of people who were forgiven, and the power of forgiveness in their lives. He also describes times in his own life, including his childhood, when he failed to see grace exercised in the Church, and the pain that resulted.
He said:
Grace is Christianity’s best gift to the world, a spiritual nova in our midst exerting a force stronger than vengeance, stronger than racism, stronger than hate. Philip Yancy
Grace is difficult to give, and to receive.
Helmut Thielicke was a German theologian in the 20th century, who lived through the World War II. He saw all of the atrocities of the Nazi’s regime. In his life he experienced quite a lot to forgive.
He said this:
"Grace is unfair, which is one of the hardest things about it… Grace is not about fairness. This business of forgiving is by no means a simple thing… We say, ‘Very well, if the other fellow is sorry and begs my pardon, I will forgive him, then I’ll give in.’ We make of forgiveness a law of reciprocity. And this never works. For then both of us say to ourselves, ‘The other fellow has to make the first move.’ And then I watch like a hawk to see whether I can detect some small hint between the lines of his letter which shows that he is sorry. I am always on the point of forgiving… but I never forgive. I am far too just.”
Bangalore has some of the worst pollution in India, and many of us suffer breathing problems as a result. But there is another pollution which inhibits our ability to breathe in the Spirit of God-it is what Philip Yancy calls “ungrace.”
“We live in an atmosphere choked with the fumes of ungrace.” Yancy
Yet grace is something we must embrace. It is the cool breeze of love, which blows away the pollution of hurt and betrayal. It is the ocean of God’s grace which cleanses the filth of daily injustices.
Grace and forgiveness are connected.
“The first and often the only person to be healed by forgiveness is the person who does the forgiveness…When we genuinely forgive, we set a prisoner free and then discover that the prisoner we set free was us.”—Lewis Smedes
The word resentment – resent, means t feel again. So you feel the hurt of your injury and that builds up resentment.
"Despite a hundred sermons on forgiveness, we do not forgive easily, nor find ourselves easily forgiven. Forgiveness, we discover, is always harder than the sermons make it out to be.” -- Elizabeth O-Connor
Philip Yancy says,
“We nurse sores, go to elaborate lengths to rationalize our behavior, perpetuate family feuds, punish ourselves, punish others--all to avoid this most unnatural act [of forgiveness]. . . .
The very taste of forgiveness seems somehow wrong. Even when we have committed a wrong, we want to earn our way back into the injured party’s good graces. We prefer to crawl on our knees, to wallow, to do penance, to kill a lamb--and religion often obliges us. The very word forgive contains the word “give” (just as the word pardon contains donum, or gift). . . Like grace, forgiveness has about it the maddening quality of being undeserved, unmerited, unfair... Grace baffles us because it goes against the intuition everyone has that, in the face of injustice, some price must be paid.
Grace costs nothing for the recipients and everything for the giver.
Grace is not a grandfatherly display of “niceness,” for it cost the exorbitant price of Calvary." - Yancy
Grace is a kind of strength, which gives us spiritual authority.
A great 20th century theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr said,
“God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.”
Niebuhr’s prayer suggests that grace is a kind of power- Lord, give us the strength - it is a strength which comes only from God-the ability, the capacity to accept, to even embrace and love those people and experiences which cause us harm.
Paul says he is able to do his ministry, and instructs others in what they should do “by the grace” that was given to him. When we receive the grace of God we are empowered to do the work of God.
For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you. Romans 8:3
God’s grace is an empowerment for ministry, to speak into other people’s lives, to have an impact on others so that they can come closer to God.
5. Spiritual Harmony
Almost every writer of the NT, Peter, John, James, Paul, all of the epistle writers begin their letters with grace and peace, or at some point of the letter say, grace and peace to you. They always go together.
Grace is a standard Greek greeting. Peace is the standard Hebrew greeting (Shalom)
In Greek, the meaning is harmony, or tranquility (from the Dictionary of Biblical Languages with Semantic Domains). It can also relate to the Hebrew words Shalom-which is psychological, social, and political wellness. Either way, Paul’s opening blessing speaks of a peace within (tranquility) and without (harmony). It is a peace that is from within which affects every relationship outside.
You must receive the grace of God in order to be at peace with God. In the NT, grace always comes first.
In Paul’s list of the fruit of the Spirit, love, joy (there is chara again), and peace. Inner peace is the fruit of a life submitted to God’s Spirit. Peace with others is the fruit of inner peace.
Paul said, Romans 12:18, “If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.”
People may not have peace with you. The truth is if you are following Jesus there will be opposition. But as much as it has to do with you, you need to be at peace with everybody else. You need to have this tranquility inside with every person you meet. It is a difficult high order! But it is a gift from God.
So Paul gives this to us – Grace and Peace.
That is just the first verse of I Thessalonians and it is so loaded!
