The Impact of the Gospel — Part One

First Thessalonians chapter 1. We return to our studies.

Let’s pause again in prayer, shall we?

Father, now, with our Bibles open before us, we want to ask that you will speak to us. It would be a dreadful waste of time to simply come and hear the voice of a man bouncing around the room. Only you can do this. Only you can bring the springtime. Only you can give salvation. Only you can open our dim eyes and our plugged ears. Only you can take the voice of a mere man and use it to speak the very word of God into our lives tonight. So we look to you alone, for your grace and your help, in this time of study. And we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Well, in introducing things last Sunday evening, in the first three verses we noted that Paul commended his readers primarily for these three things which he refers to in verse 3: their “work produced by faith,” their “labor prompted by love,” and their “endurance,” which was “inspired by hope.” Midway through the week, I inquired—at least, it may have been earlier in the week—I asked the folks in the office if they remembered the three things for which Paul had commended the Thessalonians, and I was somewhat encouraged to realize that they were able to get them all, and very quickly.

Having begun with this word of encouragement, he proceeds throughout the rest of the chapter to speak to these dear ones in Thessalonica in terms of great compassion and of love. And he explains why it is that he is absolutely sure of their status in Christ. He says, “For we know, brothers loved by God, that he has chosen you.” And then, in explaining why it is that he has this deep conviction concerning the fact that God has elected them to salvation, he provides for us a very helpful study on the impact of the gospel.

What should we expect to take place when the gospel is proclaimed? Indeed, what is the gospel, and how should it be proclaimed? And are there identifying features for which we might look in our lives and in the lives of those who profess faith in Jesus Christ? Or are we simply to assume that anybody using the right kind of lingo must be okay, because that’s the kind of phraseology and terminology with which we have become comfortable, perhaps, as a church family?

The writer here I think warns us against that and encourages us to realize that the impact of the gospel will be such that we should expect certain things to happen here in Cleveland in the late twentieth century—the same kinds of things that we observe had happened in Thessalonica in the first century.

I would like to try and gather this study around three truths about the believers in Thessalonica and, indeed, about all believers in all generations and in all locations. Whether we are successful in getting through all three of these this evening only time will tell. But we will begin them by noticing first of all and clearly from the text the first thing that was true of these individuals whom he describes in these endearing terms was that they were chosen. They were chosen.

I’m going to tell you the other two points, just so that you know where we’ll go if we ever get there. Not only were they chosen, but they were changed, and they were channels. Those are the three points. Three evidential signs of God’s grace in a life: chosen, changed, and channels.

Look at the lovely designation with which the fourth verse begins: “brothers loved by God.” It’s possible for us just to jump over a phrase like that, and unwise for us to do so, because it is a wonderful and tremendously encouraging phrase—that these people to whom he writes, and we in turn as the readers of this letter down through the centuries, may be described in this amazing fashion; that the identifying features of those who have been incorporated into Christ, from the Godward prospective, are supremely encompassed in this one truth: that we are loved by God.

Now, what makes this so amazing, if you cast your eyes down to the very final phrase in the chapter, in verse 10: “Jesus” has “rescue[d] us from the coming wrath”—that by nature, we are under God’s wrath. We are under his judgment. We are without hope in the world. We’re without any awareness of God. And so it is an amazing thing that as a result of his intervention in our lives, somebody could refer to the company of people who have been gathered up into Christ as those who have been “loved by God.”

It is one thing for us to say, “I love God,” but it is quite another thing to be able to ensure ourselves of the fact that God loves us. And the tense which is used here is an important tense, a present continuous tense, which stresses the fact that God’s love for us is a continuing love. And in Christ, it is an irrevocable love.

Now, in using this phrase, he introduces this notion, this biblical truth, of the choosing of God. The theological word for it, and the word that is found elsewhere in the Bible, is the word election. It is a word that causes great confusion in the minds of some. It is the basis for argument in the framework of others’ thinking. But whatever your perspective on the issue is this evening, I hope that you will come to see that it is impossible to be biblical and to do anything other than accept this amazing truth concerning God’s intervention in our lives.

Now, there is no question that the believers in Thessalonica had to themselves hear the gospel, they had been called to respond to the gospel, and their response to the gospel, as we will see at the end of this, was that they had turned away from idols and they had turned to serve the living God. All of that they had been called to do. Theirs was the hearing. Theirs was the responding. Theirs was the turning. Theirs was the serving.

And when you think about your own experience in Christ, you can perhaps recount it in similar fashion—that as the gospel was explained to you, somebody said, “The claims of Jesus Christ are these, and I want you to hear them.” And you may have been in that context many times before, but suddenly, on that day, or in that coffee shop, or across that kitchen table, or in that pew, you heard in a way that you had never heard before, and the claims of Jesus Christ calling for a response in your life were such that they stirred within you the very means whereby you might reach out and take hold of this. And if you’ve walked the path of faith for a number of years, you have begun to understand that behind all of the call to our human responsibility, predating all of that, predating all of it in the lives of these Thessalonians believers, was the electing love of God.

Salvation rests on the divine choice, not upon human effort.

Turn to Ephesians 1 for just a moment, and I’ll give you some homework there. Some of you, I hope, have been reading Thessalonians every day, as we suggested. But in Ephesians 1 you have as wonderful a chapter as exists in the New Testament, certainly in Paul’s writings, concerning this truth. And he makes it clear as he praises God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ in verse 3, “who,” he said, “has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ,” because, he says,

he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will—to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.[1]

In other words, our redemption, the redemption of the Thessalonians to whom Paul writes, was no afterthought on God’s part. “But,” he says, to these dear ones here, who are loved by God, “listen: he has chosen you to be his own before even the foundation of the world”—thus removing from them any sense of self-congratulation, any sense of pride, any sense of feeling that they were smart or that they had deserved this intervention in their lives. As they looked back down through what had happened to them—some of them the God-fearing Greeks who’d been hanging around the synagogue, others of them who had been devout in their monotheistic, one-God Judaism—had on this occasion, when the apostle Paul walked into Thessalonica and on three Sabbath days reasoned with them concerning Christ, had thought that perhaps it was all taking place in that moment and in that decisive encounter. And now, as time has gone by and they’ve reflected upon it, he says to them, “I want you to know, brothers loved by God, that he has chosen you.”

The reminder is clear: that salvation rests on the divine choice, not upon human effort. I say to you again: if it were a product of human effort, then we might congratulate ourselves. And indeed, some of us who are tempted to believe that our salvation has its origins in our ability to reply have at the same time very little assurance that we’re ever going to continue. Because a salvation that begins with human initiative may as quickly end with human initiative. But a salvation that begins in eternity with the electing love of God the Father will proceed through all of time and bring us, persevering as saints, into his forever family.

Leon Morris, the most helpful New Testament commentator, says of this, “Left to ourselves, we do not wish to leave our state of untroubled sinfulness. It is only because God first convicts us and enables us that we can make even the motion of wanting to turn from our sins.”[2] Isn’t that a very helpful statement? And doesn’t it help go a long way to explain how it is with some of our friends and neighbors and loved ones, despite the fact that we would invite them to this, and we would speak to them about that, and we would give them this tape, and we would encourage them to that event—as so we should, and so we must, believing that God would use these things in their lives—and yet they’re able to come and to listen and to go, and they’re just quite happy as they are by their own testimony, because they have nothing in themselves that says, “I must leave this untroubled state of sinfulness in which I live. I must be done with this. I must run away from this. I must find a Savior. I must find an answer to my life. I must find fulfillment and purpose.”

Men and women are not running after these things. Have you noticed that? They’re not battering down the doors of churches: “Oh, could you give me an answer for my life? Could you give me an answer to the troubled state of my own sinful soul?” No, they’re saying, “I’m not a sinner. I have no need of a Savior. You may choose to spend some time in religion, but none of that for me.” They may even come along and be pleasant. They may sit and even sing. They may even turn up the hymnal. They may look at the Bible. But they walk out content to live in their state of untroubled sinfulness.

And then one day, something happens. And they come as they came the previous time. They sit where they sat the previous occasion. They listen to the same kind of message, they sing the same kind of songs, and suddenly it’s all different. What has happened? The Spirit of God, at work within their hearts, has begun to convict them of their need of a Savior and to stir within them the ability to reach out and lay hold on Jesus Christ.

And that is why, loved ones—and if I may say it to you in all sincerity and awesomeness—it is a very, very serious thing to hear the Word of God proclaimed, and to find within your heart the stirring of God’s Spirit, and then to walk right out the door on the assumption that the way that you feel in that moment you may feel again in another moment. For you may never feel that way again. You may never hear God’s voice in that way again. There may never come that occasion again. And that is why the Scriptures say so often, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.”[3] You see, because by our very nature, we have hard hearts. And in this great mystery of God’s electing love, we discover the confidence of Paul as he speaks of these whom he loves so very much.

Now he explains why it is that he can speak with such assurance concerning the fact of their election: “For we know, brothers loved by God, that he has chosen you.” Question: How do you know? How may we ever know? Well, you don’t know in prospect; you only know in retrospect. That’s why we are urged to go out and proclaim the gospel. Because God has not only ordained people to salvation, but he has ordained the means whereby they will come to salvation—that it is as we go and as we proclaim that in the great mystery of his purposes, in a moment of time, he uses our mere words and our encouragements and our friendships as a bridge into the lives of others. “And,” says Paul, “we know that he has chosen you, because when our gospel came to you, it came in a certain way.”

Now, he says there were three things that were true of the gospel coming to the church, coming to these people in Thessalonica. First of all, he says, “Our gospel came to you not simply with words.” Now, he doesn’t say that “our gospel came to you without words.” He says, “Our gospel came to you not simply with words.” There were a lot of words! Read in Acts chapter 17. He was there for three Sabbath days at least, and he reasoned with them, and he taught them concerning the Christ.[4] There were many words. But he says, “As I reflect upon it, when the gospel came to you, it didn’t just come with words.”

Now, it’s very, very important. Let me tell you why: because when true preaching takes place, it is not just words. When the Spirit of God takes up the lips of his servant, proclaiming his gospel, it is not just words. Anybody can talk. Syntax is relatively easy. Theological truth may be formulated. Cohesive statements may be made. People may follow a line of reasoning. And yet it’s all just words. But when the Spirit of God comes, it’s not just words.

Now, until men and women understand this, they tend to say things like this: “Why would I want to come and just listen to somebody talk?” You ever heard people say that? “Why would I want to come and just listen to somebody talk? After all, people don’t talk like this anymore. Sermons are out of date. They’re old hat. Why would somebody stand up and talk for thirty-five or forty minutes? This is the age of communications. This is the age of video screens. This is the age of interactive networks and all these different things. Why would I want to come and just listen to somebody talk?” The answer is: absolutely no reason at all! I couldn’t agree with you more. There is nothing I would like less to do than to come and merely listen to somebody talk. But, we may say, when the Spirit of God takes up the lips of the preacher, you are not just listening to somebody talk.

Now, the flip side of it is, when people don’t understand this, they also say this: “You ought to come and hear him talk.” That’s the other side of it, and it’s equally wrong. It reveals the fact that people don’t understand at all. “Oh, you should come and listen to him talk.” Why? Why? No reason. No reason. No reason to talk, no reason to listen, unless this is true. “When our gospel came to you, it did not merely come with words.”

You see, Paul is convinced that the power of God is present in the preaching of the gospel. First Corinthians chapter 1. We studied this a long time ago now. But in 1 Corinthians 1:18, he says, “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” It is no corruption to the text to put, in hypothesis, in brackets from after “cross” and before “it.” Well, let me just say it; that doesn’t make a lot of sense. You may read this without detriment to the text: “For the message of the cross is the power of God.” “For the message of the cross is the power of God.” So when we proclaim the message of the cross—whether it’s across a coffee table tomorrow morning at the twenty-minute break that you get, and you proclaim the message of the cross—it’s not just talk. It’s not just words. It’s power! The power is inherent in the message. That is why the message is so significant and the messenger is ultimately insignificant.

Now, this was apparent to the Thessalonians. This gospel of God, he says, is actually referred to as “our gospel.” What does he mean, “our gospel”? You mean that Paul and his friends had a gospel all of their own, and that somebody down the street, they had a gospel, and there was another gospel over here, but he was just referring to “our gospel”? No! Paul understood that the gospel had its origin in God—that it was the very word of God spoken out and breathed by the Holy Spirit. What he’s saying here is this: this gospel is our gospel.

You see, he couldn’t forget the fact that he hated Jesus for most of his life. He hated Christians. His whole purpose in life was to shut the operation down. It was “our gospel” in the sense that it was the work of the cross of Jesus Christ, the atoning work of Jesus on the cross, that had transformed the life of the apostle Paul himself. And so what he was proclaiming was his personal experience of the life-transforming power of Jesus.

Now, let me just point out something to you in passing: if you go to a church where the pastor, or the minister, or whatever you want to call the chap, has never been changed by the gospel himself, I don’t care who he is; I don’t care whether he wears his collar back to front; it’s irrelevant whether he’s involved in religious affairs or theological jargon; he is absolutely, totally useless in the issues of redemption. He may be a good social worker, he may be a nice man, he may be very kind to different people, and he may be able to carry a group along with him. But he is absolutely useless when it comes to the issues of salvation. Because it is only a gospel which may be communicated out of the heart of those who have been changed and transformed by it. And when a man stands in the pulpit to talk of that about which he himself knows personally nothing or may, even worse still, want to deny the necessity of the life-changing power of Jesus in the lives of his congregation, then all that you will ever get from that man is words. And the people will say, “Why would we ever listen to this?” And the answer is: no reason at all.

Now, in direct contrast to such emptiness, the gospel came, he says, “not simply with words,” but with dynamite. That’s the word here for “power”: dúnamis. Dúnamis. He says when the word of the gospel came to Thessalonica, there was dynamite in the message—enough to shatter the gods of the idols whom they’d been serving, according to verse 9.

It’s not, you see, that the gospel tells of power; the gospel is power. Do you understand this? Do you understand this distinction? This is so important. The gospel is power. You see? It is inherently powerful in and of itself. It’s not merely a matter of standing behind a box and providing information or declamation or exhortation. You can do all of that and nothing happens! The gospel is the power of God.

And that, you see, is the reason that I have such problems with the idea of trying to entertain people into the kingdom of Jesus Christ. Because you are not proclaiming the very message which is absolutely foundational for people to come to faith in Jesus Christ. So you can make them feel good, you can entertain them, you can encourage them, you can send them away with a spring in their steps; but it’s all words, it’s all rhetoric, it’s all slick, it’s all methodology, it’s all pragmatism. And only in the gospel itself is there spiritual dynamite.

The gospel is the power of God.

Not only did it come “with power,” he said, but it came “with the Holy Spirit.” “When our gospel came to you, there weren’t just words but power, and power came by the Holy Spirit.” You will always find power and the Holy Spirit interwoven when you read your Bible. That’s what Jesus had to say to his disciples in Acts 1:8: he said, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Spiritual dynamite. Power. That which is not inherent in ourselves. Not that people are powerful by means of their personality. This is not something that can be explained in terms of extroverts, but it is that God brings with him this inherent power by his Spirit.

When Paul writes to the Romans, in chapter 15 he makes the same thing perfectly clear. Romans 15:13: “May the God of [all] hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” The same thing in verse 19 of the same chapter: “by the power of signs and miracles, through the power of the Spirit. So from Jerusalem all the way around to Illyricum, I have fully proclaimed the gospel of Christ.”

This is what happens, you see, when the gospel comes: the Holy Spirit applies the work of Christ to a person’s life. Here it is in a trilogy; this is salvation: God the Father planned it, God the Son procured it (that simply is a fancy word meaning “made it possible by his atoning death,” actually achieved it by his atoning death), and the Holy Spirit then applies it. So those are three things that are true of every Christian: their life has been changed as a result of God the Father’s plan, God the Son’s work, and God the Spirit’s application.

Now, you see, this is something very different from merely deciding to be religious—something very different from merely making a decision to attend church, to turn over a new leaf, albeit a religious one. That hadn’t happened to these Thessalonians. The gospel came not merely with words but with dynamite, with the Holy Spirit.

And thirdly, he says—and we’ll conclude here—and thirdly, “with deep conviction.” Or if you have a different translation—perhaps the King James Version—it may well read, “And it came with full assurance,” or with “much assurance.”[5] When I read this at first, I assumed that the issue that was being referred to here was that the Spirit of God brought the truth of the Word of God home in such a way that it brought deep conviction in the lives of those who as yet had not turned from idols to serve the living God. But the more I studied it, the more I realized that the “deep conviction” or the “full assurance” is referring to those who preached—that this is why he is able to say, “He has chosen you.” He says, “Because when the Word of God came, it didn’t come merely in words. It came with power, it came with the Holy Spirit, and it came with the accompanying conviction on our part that in the proclaiming of the message, a work of grace was taking place in your lives.”

Now, loved ones, for this we need to pray. If you want to have a thing to pray always for the opening up of the Scriptures in this place, pray this. Pray 1 Thessalonians 1:5: “Father, I ask today that whoever is in that pulpit, that we won’t just have words but that the gospel may come with power, with the Holy Spirit, and with deep conviction. Full assurance.” The gospel, says Paul, is the very word of God. God is at work in the hearts of people, stirring them to respond. He has ordained that through the preaching of the Word, not simply from a pulpit but as you proclaim it in your daily routine—as you proclaim “the Lord’s message” (verse 8), “the message” (verse 6), the “gospel” (verse 5)—you’re proclaiming the very word of God itself.

You see, I think God needs to bring us to a renewed conviction concerning this. Because we’re being worn down in our day. The way we are referred to by our culture is just a sort of little group of people who have embraced a philosophy—just another philosophy. And to the degree that we are sucked into that kind of notion, believing that “well, you know, our friends are nice people, and they’re… I know they don’t believe what we believe, but…” As soon as you start to find yourself going down that line, you’ll never be an evangelist. You’ll never gossip the gospel. You’ll never know the zeal—and neither will I—of the first-century preachers who went through the country proclaiming what God had done for man. Therefore, we need to ask that God would bring us as his people, first of all, to a deep conviction that the gospel is the word of the Lord. And because it is, we can and we must present it without apology and without amendment.

May God bring us to those kinds of convictions.

Let us pray:

Our God and our Father, we humble ourselves before you tonight. We know that you know us altogether. You know where we’ve come from. You know the condition of our souls. You know those of us who are merely going through the motions but who have never, ever cried out to you for mercy and for grace and for forgiveness. Frankly, when we sit here regularly, it’s all just words. And we cry to you that we might hear these words through different ears; that they may be the very power and dynamite of the work of the Spirit, calling us away from our own idols and our own preoccupations to know and love and serve the living God.

Hear our prayers, and let our cry come unto you. For Jesus’ sake we ask it. Amen.

[1] Ephesians 1:3–6 (NIV 1984).

[2] Leon Morris, The First and Second Epistles to the Thessalonians, rev. ed., The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 44.

[3] Psalm 95:7–8; Hebrews 3:7–8, 15; 4:7 (NIV 1984).

[4] See Acts 17:2.

[5] 1 Thessalonians 1:5 (KJV).