What Does Real Faith Look Like? | 1 Thess 2:9-16

Written by Joel Davis 

Actions speak louder than words. And in the case of the Thessalonians, the evidence of their new faith in Jesus is something that was turning their whole town upside-down. Paul is going to commend them for their response to his teaching, and the question I want to ask today is, what does the evidence look like for a group of people running in the overflow, receiving the love of the Father Son and Holy Spirit? 

Paul has many different purposes for writing his letters in the New Testament. Every church is in a different situation and every letter is responding to a different group of people with different sets of challenges. 1 Thessalonians is a very encouraging letter to a church running its race well. It’s a warm, cozy blanket despite some of the painful circumstances the Thessalonians are experiencing on the ground. These verses highlight the joy of their relationship with Paul and describe the behavior of a group of people truly running the race well. So, what evidence do we find? Let’s start in verse 9:  

9 For you remember our labor and hardship, brothers and sisters. Working night and day so that we would not burden any of you, we preached God’s gospel to you. 10 You are witnesses, and so is God, of how devoutly, righteously, and blamelessly we conducted ourselves with you believers. 11 As you know, like a father with his own children, 12 we encouraged, comforted, and implored each one of you to walk worthy of God, who calls you into his own kingdom and glory. 

1. Familial Affection 

We sometimes take it for granted that Christianity has gone global, that there are followers of Jesus on every continent and in every country on the planet. That was not the case for Paul! Thessalonica was AND IS a city in northern Greece, nearly 2500 miles from Jerusalem. When Paul arrives in Thessalonica, he is one of the first followers of Jesus of Nazareth these folks have ever seen. For Paul, it was incredibly important for him to model the behavior of a Jesus follower in everyday life. And he is crystal clear that the way to do that was familial affection, the first evidence of a Christ follower. 

Every single one of us, male or female, can emulate Paul in this. Notice how this is even relevant to how Paul made money while he was staying with the Thessalonians. He knows that he would be within his rights as a missionary to require a room to stay and even a wage from the Thessalonian church, but it was important for him to show that a father doesn’t require payment from his kids for raising them. So, he worked for his own living and preached in the evenings and on the weekends when he was able.  

What Paul wanted to do more than anything was reflect and demonstrate the love of the Father that was pursuing them and stirring their hearts to faith.  

Perhaps you grew up in a very performance-based family or lifestyle. Whether it was a parent or a coach or you yourself doing the pushing, you were always working for the approval of someone and never able to rest in the comfort of knowing someone loved you irrespective of your track record. 

So, when you hear “walk worthy of the call,” there’s a good chance (if you’re like me) that all you hear is: 

“Perform, so that your Heavenly Father will approve of you.” 

“Do better, so God doesn’t regret saving you.”  

If trying to “walk worthily” doesn’t sound like living in the overflow to us, what are we supposed to do when we find it written right there in black and white? It’s extraordinarily easy to misread Scripture on this, so we stop and surrender this worry to the Father and ask for help in seeing His heart for us correctly. 

Paul is offering Christianity as an antidote to every other religion and god before or since. Baal demanded a particular type of worship from his followers. Caesar wanted to be worshipped as god and wanted unflinching loyalty in every area of life, but offered the people nothing in return. But the one true God, revealed in Jesus, is going first and calling them into glorious Kingdom living!  

Walking in a manner worthy of this call is no small task! If you think living the Christian life is easy, you haven’t stepped outside lately. But for every step forward we take, we find that our Heavenly Father has already gone first and supplied us with “immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us.” (Ephesians 3:20) 

Christians in the Thessalonian church, you and I, and every follower of Jesus in between are refueled and refreshed for this kind of living by the next evidence of a Christ follower — receiving the Word of God. 

2. We receive the Word for what it is. 

13 This is why we constantly thank God, because when you received the word of God that you heard from us, you welcomed it not as a human message, but as it truly is, the word of God, which also works effectively in you who believe. 

Have you ever heard of the Rorschach Test? You probably know it as the inkblot test, where someone shows you a big blob of ink on a white sheet of paper and you tell them what object you see in it. The point is that the inkblot itself doesn’t necessarily look like anything. What’s most important is how you respond and interpret the blob.  

Scripture can feel like that inkblot test, too. Have you ever been in a situation where a passage of Scripture was life-giving and satisfying and clarifying to you, but not to the person you shared it with? My daughter and I read a chapter of the Bible together most nights before she goes to bed. I cannot tell you how many times I get to a difficult verse and I’m inwardly bracing myself for how she is going to react. Thankfully, I often come away amazed that she received it for what it really is — true and good and beautiful. On the flip side, I have often shared verses with people who are not Christ followers and am caught off-guard by how angry they are. “This is so exclusionary, and barbaric, and wrong!”  

Similarly, the Thessalonians had at least 2 options. They could have written Paul off as a quack, or a heretic. They could have done what so many other towns like them did, which was take him to court, or try to throw stones at him until he died, or any number of horrible things. Instead, they found themselves strangely moved by the message of this man that was unlike any teacher they’d ever seen before. Paul wrote another to the church in Corinth, where he said that his message of Christ crucified was “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:23). But to those of us who are being saved, it is the POWER and WISDOM of God!  

We don’t have to have all the answers when we suffer and when circumstances hit the fan, but we do know where to look. And speaking of suffering, when we regularly take time to soak in Scripture and allow its view of the world to shape our view of the world, we are strengthened so that we can remain steadfast in the face of suffering. 

3. We remain steadfast in the face of suffering. 

14 For you, brothers and sisters, became imitators of God’s churches in Christ Jesus that are in Judea, since you have also suffered the same things from people of your own country, just as they did from the Jews 15 who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and persecuted us. They displease God and are hostile to everyone, 16 by keeping us from speaking to the Gentiles so that they may be saved. As a result, they are constantly filling up their sins to the limit, and wrath has overtaken them at last. 

Acts 17 covers Paul’s trip to Thessalonica. We learn that a mob started a riot, attacked one of the homes of the believers, and dragged them into court, all because of the spread of the Gospel! It’s hard for most of us to imagine, but we are talking about their own neighbors, people who they sat behind in the dropoff line at school, whose kids were on the same soccer team, who came over for dinner on the weekends, are at their front door with torches and prepared to do the worst. Nothing short of the transformative power of the Spirit can prepare someone not only to stand firm in the face of this, but to lock arms as a church and continue growing and thriving.  

Paul never promised any of the early churches that it was going to be easy. Instead, he constantly pointed them to a greater Kingdom reality they couldn’t see. It’s true that they were pressed down, dragged into court, sued, beaten, even killed. But it was MORE true that their Heavenly Father saw them and would balance the scales of justice once and for all one day.

What did evidence look like for a group of people running in the overflow? It was familial love, how they received and reflected their Heavenly Father’s love for them. It was how they received the Word of God, and allowed it to shape and define how they saw themselves and how they viewed their circumstances. It was how they remained steadfast in the face of the worst circumstances, persecution from their own friends and neighbors. All of this shows us this was a community running the race marked out for them well.