‘We give thanks to God always for you all, making mention of you in our prayers, remembering without ceasing your work of faith, and labour of love, and patient endurance of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ before our God and Father, knowing, brethren beloved, your election.'
We have here a threefold pattern revealing the completeness of Paul's concern for the Thessalonians. ‘Making mention -- remembering -- knowing', resulting from and the result of his gratitude to God for their faithfulness. He mentions them in his prayers, he remembers them in his heart continually, he knows in his heart that they are truly Christ's, truly God's ‘elect'.
‘We give thanks to God always for you all.' Note that he includes his fellow-workers in his declaration. They give thanks together as they pray together, and it goes on continually, ‘always', and it excludes none, ‘for you all'. The giving of thanks is in Scripture an important part of prayer, possibly the most important. It expresses confidence in God's working, and gratitude for it, puts the onus on Him and leaves Him to sort out the details. Paul constantly speaks of expressing gratitude to God (1 Corinthians 15:57; 2 Corinthians 2:14; 2Co 8:16; 2 Corinthians 9:15; Ephesians 1:16; Ephesians 5:4; Ephesians 5:20; Philippians 4:6; Colossians 1:3; Colossians 1:12; Colossians 2:7; Colossians 3:17; Colossians 4:2; 1 Thessalonians 3:9; 1Th 5:18; 2 Thessalonians 2:13; 1 Timothy 2:1). He lived and breathed such gratitude.
‘For you all.' Paul had no favourites. He was concerned for, and grateful for, the wellbeing of every child of God.
Modern praying can so often tend to be selfish, concentrating on what we want, (consider your prayer list), but the Lord's prayer concentrated on what God wants, the hallowing of His name by the bringing about of His purposes, the establishing of the Kingly Rule of God and the doing of His will on earth as in Heaven followed by the desire for the minimum necessary physical provision, daily forgiveness and deliverance from the machinations of the Evil One so that we may faithfully seek to achieve what we have prayed for. It lacks a thought of benefit for self and is full of desire for the fulfilment of God's purposes. We need wider horizons.
‘Making mention of you in our prayers.' His gratitude and praise to God was expressed in his prayers. His heart was full of thanksgiving. And he knew that so to give thanks for them was to bring blessing on them as they were remembered before God.
‘Remembering without ceasing your work of faith, and labour of love, and patient endurance of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ before our God and Father.' He gave thanks because he remembered continually what he had seen spring up in their lives. The genitive here probably indicates ‘which springs from'. They worked hard for God because they believed. They laboured hard for God because they loved Him. They patiently endured because of their future hope. And Paul remembered gladly how all three were revealed when he was among them.
What a contrast this was with the Ephesian church in Revelation 2:2. They too had works, and labour, and patient endurance, but they had lost their first love. There is no mention there of faith, love and hope, except for the loss of their first love. We must ever ensure that our service does not take our eyes off Christ. When His listeners asked what they should do to ‘work the works of God', doing God's work along with Him, eager to please, Jesus replied that the first work of God was to enable them to believe on Him Whom God had sent. They wanted some wonderful means of being enabled to live God-pleasing lives. His reply was that God's first work was for their hearts to be rightly directed on Him (John 6:28-29). Then they would work the works of God truly.
This trilogy of faith, love and hope occurs regularly. See 1 Thessalonians 5:8; Rom 5:2-5; 1 Corinthians 13:13; Galatians 5:5-6; Colossians 1:4-5; Hebrews 6:10-12; 1 Peter 1:21-22. The early church recognised that they were the foundation of any Christian life. If one be missing that life will be severely impeded.
‘Your work of faith.' True faith is not something that you do, it is a response which results from knowing God and Jesus Christ. As we see Him and know more of Him faith flows from our hearts, the natural response to His attraction and His truth. We cannot make ourselves believe. We respond because the Father draws us (John 6:44; John 12:32). Thus the faith that saves is not of our doing, it results from the work of God in our hearts as our eyes are opened to see Him (Acts 26:18). We can read His word, we can consider Him, but we cannot make ourselves believe. The faith that saves, while possibly resulting directly from so seeking Him, is His work not ours as our eyes are opened and we respond to Him. Thus the ‘work of faith' is not that of producing faith but that work which results from the arousal of faith. Because we believe, we do, and so our faith is proved genuine (James 2:14-20). It is a faith that works by love (Galatians 5:6).
Jesus constantly told men to believe in Him, and so did Paul, but both did so in anticipation of the work of God in men's hearts. For we cannot make ourselves truly believe in Christ. We cannot make ourselves truly believe anything. Such a worked up ‘faith' would not last, and could only do us harm. Faith can only spring from recognition of truth (or what is conceived of as truth). It is a result, not a cause, although once faith has sprung up it then becomes the cause of our actions. Thus the Pharisees antagonistic to Jesus believed in God and in their own interpretation of the Jewish religion, but it was a faith that led them to demand the crucifixion of Christ, and to condemnation. As James tells us, ‘the devils also believe (in God) and tremble' (James 2:1). They are aware of what He is and that what He is condemns them. But in neither case was it responsive faith.
It is not faith that saves, but the response of faith to the truth as it is revealed in the heart by God. Great faith, if it is in what is not true, can only finally lead to disaster. The truth about the state of a man's heart is discovered by what he believes. The faith that saves is faith in Christ wrought in us by God. That is saving faith. (Although strictly speaking it is God Who saves, faith is only the channel). And it then results in service.
What then was their ‘work of faith'? That they turned to God from idols to serve a living and true God and to wait for His Son from Heaven (verse 9). This was the result of their faith, not the cause of it.
‘Your labour of love.' Having believed, the Thessalonians were then filled with love for Christ and responded by hard work in His service. The word for ‘labour' means hard toil and the willingness to endure much hardship. True love for Christ is all demanding and expresses itself in service, both in witnessing and praying, and in doing good and revealing concern for those in need. It is not without significance that the provision of hospitals and schools for the poor in Europe in centuries past originally arose from the activities of men and women of God, and that many of the great nineteenth century reformers were evangelical Christians. Jesus' parables constantly stressed that we are ‘servants' who are to go about our physical duties in readiness for His coming.
The word for love is agape. It was not a word in common use, as far as we know, in classical Greek, and when used tended to contain the meaning of the highest and noblest form of love, spiritual or rational love for what is noble. But especially in its verbal form it was regularly used in the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament) to express covenant love, love between God and His people on the basis of His covenant, resulting in similar love between the covenanters. It was not emotional so much as responsive in action for the good of the object of that love, having a genuine desire to be pleasing and for the wellbeing of the one loved.
Analysis of human emotion is always tricky, the subject is so intricate, but agape in this sense must be distinguished from romantic love, sexual love and human affection, although it did come to be used more generally for the latter and agapao and phileo are sometimes used indistinguishably. But the general Christian thought behind the word was of a higher love, as described above. It is used of God's love, a general benevolence that then results in activity for the wellbeing of its object, and is willing to do so at great cost. It is not a love only of the deserving, but also of the undeserving who are chosen out without merit for that purpose.
‘And patient endurance of hope.' Becoming a Christian produces ‘hope' for the future. It is a certain hope because of the One in Whom that hope is placed. In the final analysis it is the assured hope of eventually being a totally transformed being in the presence of God, often expressed in terms of Christ's second coming which will bring that about. Indeed the thought of Christ's return to raise the dead and take the living into His presence, while judging and destroying all that is evil, is central to the idea of hope. And because we have that hope it affects the whole of our lives, and results in patient endurance (see Luke 21:19; Romans 5:3-4; 2 Corinthians 6:4-10; Colossians 1:11; 2 Thessalonians 1:4; Hebrews 6:12). It is not the wistful hope of the dreamer, but the fortitude of the soldier who is confident of final victory. It enables us to ‘keep on going on' whatever the circumstances.
Such patient endurance of hope is well illustrated in 2 Corinthians 4:14-18. ‘He Who raised up the Lord Jesus will also raise us up with Jesus --- wherefore we faint not --- for our light affliction, which is but for a moment, works for us to a greater and greater extent an eternal weight of glory. While we do not look at the things that are seen, but the things that are not seen, for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.'
‘In our Lord Jesus Christ before our God and Father.' This must be attached to all three expressions ‘faith -- love -- and hope', for without it they are incomplete. It is ‘faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, love for our Lord Jesus Christ and hope in our Lord Jesus Christ' that is the essence of the Christian message. The Christian's faith, love and hope are set on a Person, the One Who is Lord, the One Who saves, the One Who is God's enthroned King. And it is response to Him, and to Him alone that is the test of the genuineness of our faith. It is not love for a church or love for a creed that finally proves our faith, but response of heart towards the One proclaimed by that church or creed if they are true to their responsibilities. Without that both church and creed are irrelevant for the purpose of salvation.
‘Before our God and Father'. Paul does not hesitate to exalt Christ in the presence of God, and what is more to turn all our thoughts on Christ while in that Presence. The Jew would argue for faith in God as being supreme, and that to put faith, love and hope on any other in His presence would be blasphemy. It would be to sideline God. And Paul agrees. And yet in the presence of our God and Father he centralises attention on the Lord Jesus Christ. This can only be because to love Christ is to love God, to believe in Christ is to believe in God, to hope in Christ is to hope in God. In this is clearly expressed that in Christ dwells all the fullness of the Godhead in bodily form (Colossians 2:9). It confirms His co-equality with the Father. When we love Christ, serve Christ, worship Christ, it is always in the presence of our God and Father, and is worship too of Him. The Fatherhood of God results in response to the Son Who reveals Him (John 1:14; John 1:18; John 14:9).