1 Thessalonians 2:13–20

¹³ And we also thank God constantly for this, that when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers. ¹⁴ For you, brothers, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea. For you suffered the same things from your own countrymen as they did from the Jews, ¹⁵ who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out, and displease God and oppose all mankind ¹⁶ by hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles that they might be saved—so as always to fill up the measure of their sins. But wrath has come upon them at last! ¹⁷ But since we were torn away from you, brothers, for a short time, in person not in heart, we endeavored the more eagerly and with great desire to see you face to face, ¹⁸ because we wanted to come to you—I, Paul, again and again—but Satan hindered us. ¹⁹ For what is our hope or joy or crown of boasting before our Lord Jesus at his coming? Is it not you? ²⁰ For you are our glory and joy.

In 1952, Flannery O’Connor published her controversial and fascinating novel, Wise Blood. It is a story of a man named Hazel Motes who returns from World War II as an atheist and begins to actively preach his atheism around town. In the process, he encounters a charlatan preacher named Hoover Shoats who realizes he can make some money from Hazel Motes’ atheistic preaching. So, Hoover Shoats changes his name to Onnie Jay Holy and announces the arrival of a new church. He then proclaims the atheist preacher Hazel Motes (who wants nothing to do with Onnie Jay Holy) a prophet!

Onnie J. Holy decides to name his church “The Holy Church of Christ Without Christ” and charges everybody $1 to become a member! He then proclaims that there are three reasons why folks can pay that dollar and trust in The Holy Church of Christ Without Christ.

First:

“In the first place, friends, you can rely on it that it’s nothing foreign connected with it. You don’t have to believe nothing you don’t understand and approve of. If you don’t understand it, it ain’t true, and that’s all there is to it. No jokers in the deck, friends.”

Second:

“Now, friends,” Onnie Jay said, “I want to tell you a second reason why you can absolutely trust this church—it’s based on the Bible. Yes sir! It’s based on your own personal interpitation of the Bible friends. You can sit at home and interpit your own Bible however you feel in your heart it ought to be interpited. That’s right,” he said, “just the way Jesus would have done it. Gee, I wisht I had my gittarr here,” he complained.

And third:

“This church is up-to-date! When your in this church you can know that there’s nothing or nobody ahead of you, nobody knows nothing you don’t know, all the cards are on the table, friends, and that’s a fack!”[1]

In other words, Onnie Jay Holy’s Church of Christ Without Christ:

1. Makes your own understanding of God all that matters and therefore removes all mystery and all possibility of growth.
2. Makes the Bible say whatever you personally want it to say and nobody can tell you that you are wrong in any interpretation.
3. Makes all people’s opinions absolutely equal and so nobody can say that they know more than anybody else.

Well! That might sound crazy to you…or it might sound familiar! In point of fact, when Flannery O’Connor wrote Wise Blood she was hoping to critique some of the kinds of Christianity she was encountering in her own day. O’Connor was a Christian and, because she was, she had little tolerance for the kind of nonsense she depicted in Onnie Jay Holy’s Church of Christ Without Christ.

But if that is what a church without Christ looks like, what does a church with Christ look like? To answer that, we can turn to 1 Thessalonians 2:13–20. The Thessalonian believers had Jesus in their midst. What, then, did they look like?

To get at this I would like to offer you three key words, three Greek words that highlight the difference that Jesus makes in a church. This is what happens when a church gives itself to Jesus!

energeitai: The word at work!

We begin with a word that might sound somewhat familiar to you: energeitai. Paul uses this word in verse 13 to describe a very important reality in a church that has given itself to Jesus.

¹³ And we also thank God constantly for this, that when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work [energeitai] in you believers.

In a healthy church, the word of God is accepted and then works in and among and through and out of the people of God! The idea of energy is not far from this. Indeed, Scot McKnight translates the verse like this:

Because this is true, we also thank God incessantly that, receiving God’s word you heard from us, you welcomed it not as a human word but (as it’s truly) God’s word, who is also energizing among you who are allegiant.[2]

Divine energy in unleashed in a church when, as Paul says of the Thessalonians, the word of God is truly accepted with faith and bold assurance. Paul commends the Thessalonian believers that they did not accept the word of God as merely “a human word” but as “God’s word.” That is, they really and truly believed that the gospel is from God! And when you believe that the gospel really is from God, the gospel takes root in your life and God works through it.

This is why nominal belief or half-hearted belief is always stymied and ineffective. I am not talking about mustard seed faith, which, though small, is nonetheless true faith! Mustard seed faith can move mountains (Matthew 17:20)! I am talking about faith that is not really faith: the faith that believes as a mere intellectual inheritance from one’s predecessors, a faith that believes merely as part of national or ethnic identity. I am talking about cultural faith. This kind of faith will never experience divine power!

But the faith that actually and truly does believe that the gospel is true and is of God, this is the faith that sees God’s word at work, God’s word energeitai!

Would you say that that are experiencing the word of God energeitai, at work in you, taking root in and bearing fruit in and through and out of you? Is there an energy to your walk with Jesus? Does the word of God and the truth of the gospel energize you through the power of the indwelling Spirit? Or is it merely something that you intellectually agree with?

mimētai: The imitation of the saints!

Then Paul speaks of mimētai, of the church’s imitation of the saints. Simply put, when Jesus is present, we are conformed not only to His image but also to the image of those who are likewise so conformed! We look, in other words, not only like Jesus, but like those who look like Jesus! Watch how Paul unpacks this:

¹⁴ For you, brothers, became imitators [mimētai] of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea. For you suffered the same things from your own countrymen as they did from the Jews, ¹⁵ who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out, and displease God and oppose all mankind ¹⁶ by hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles that they might be saved—so as always to fill up the measure of their sins. But wrath has come upon them at last!

So true was the faith of the Thessalonian believers that they, though a younger church than that of Jerusalem, actually demonstrated the same courage as those believers in that first church. The Thessalonians “became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea.” How? In that, like the Christians in Judea, they were willing to suffer for the faith.

When Jesus is present, the church not only demonstrates its commonality with Christ through being the body of Christ, it demonstrates its commonality with the body of Christ itself, with the church around the world where it is faithful to Jesus.

David Chapman put it well when he wrote:

Paul alludes again to a central theme in his Christian ethics: imitation. Christians are to imitate Christ, but they also learn how to follow Christ from observing how other Christians imitate Christ (cf. comments on 1:6–7). Paul earlier commended the Thessalonians for serving as a model for other churches (1:7–10). Here the Thessalonians, as they follow Christ amid suffering and persecution, are said to imitate believers in Judea, the very birthplace of Christian faith.[3]

That is a fascinating idea: that “imitation” is “a central theme in [Paul’s] ethics.”

May I offer an aside? It is because of this that Christian biography is so important. Read and listen to the stories of the brave men and women and boys and girls of yesteryear, and you will find yourself equipped to follow as they did. This does not mean that these heroes of the faith replace Christ. It simply means that they show us what it looks like to actually follow Jesus in different contexts. Take the time to learn, for instance:

• of the selflessness of a Francis of Assisi;
• of the singular focus of the martyr Perpetua;
• of the tender heart of a William Booth;
• of the mind and intellectual rigor of a C.S. Lewis;
• of the love of Christian song of a Fanny Crosby;
• of the courage of an Ignatius of Antioch;
• of the bravery and determination of a Lottie Moon;
• of the love of justice of a William Wilberforce;
• of the conviction of a Dietrich Bonhoeffer;
• of the love for souls of a Billy Graham.

Church, we want to be like Jesus, yes, but that also means being like those Christians and churches around the world and throughout time that have been or are being like Jesus! We want to be mimētai of Christ, but we also want to be mimētaiof those churches that are imitating Christ!

If I may, I think that means we want to:

• have the courage and endurance of the persecuted early church;
• have the pioneering missionary spirit of the Moravian church;
• have the hunger for the word of the underground Chinese church;
• have the prayerfulness of the Korean church;
• have the desire for holiness of the early Wesleyan church;
• have the vibrancy in worship of the Latin American church;
• have the joy and power in preaching of the African American church;
• have the force of conviction of the early Anabaptist church;
• have the love of the poor of the early Franciscans;
• have the biblical conviction of the early Baptist church.

On and on we could go. The point is that the history of the church is filled with believers who have indeed shown us what it is to look like Jesus. While our goal is to imitate Christ above all, insofar as His followers show us what it looks like to follow Him, we can also say that we should imitate them.

When believers around the world determine to follow Jesus, commonalities emerge. We should see where the church is actually imitating Christ and we should go and do likewise. mimētai

kauchēseōs: Worth bragging about!

And there is something else. When the church actually determines to actually follow Jesus, we become a kauchēseōschurch, a church worth bragging about. Listen:

¹⁷ But since we were torn away from you, brothers, for a short time, in person not in heart, we endeavored the more eagerly and with great desire to see you face to face, ¹⁸ because we wanted to come to you—I, Paul, again and again—but Satan hindered us. ¹⁹ For what is our hope or joy or crown of boasting (kauchēseōs) before our Lord Jesus at his coming? Is it not you? ²⁰ For you are our glory and joy.

First, let us note that Paul says that he and Silas and Timothy miss the Thessalonian believers and were heartbroken to have to leave them. They are separated from them, he writes, but only in body, not in heart. David Bentley Hart translates verse 17 like this:

But we, brothers, bereaved of you for an hour’s breadth—in face, not in heart—we were yet more abundantly eager in our great desire to look upon your face.[4]

The ESV renders the wording of verse 17 as “we were torn away from you, brothers,” but what Paul says is actually stronger than that. Craig Keener observes that, in verse 17, Paul literally writes, “We were orphaned without you.”[5]David Chapman further explains:

Paul refers to this separation in verse 17 as his having been “torn away,” metaphorically employing the Greek word (aporphanizō) referring to an orphaned child’s being separated from his parents.[6]

There is a profound intensity here. Paul and his team are grieving deeply their absence from the Thessalonian Christians. Then, verse 19:

¹⁹ For what is our hope or joy or crown of boasting (kauchēseōs) before our Lord Jesus at his coming? Is it not you? ²⁰ For you are our glory and joy.

It is hard to imagine a greater compliment for a church! The Thessalonian believers, Paul says, are the “hope or joy or crown of boasting” of Paul and his team “before the Lord Jesus at his coming.” What is more, the church is Paul’s “glory and joy.”

A crown of boasting! Paul’s glory and joy!

When the church finally decides to follow Jesus, it becomes a kauchēseōs church, a church worth bragging about!

Paul says that when Jesus returns he will be able to point to the Thessalonian believers as an example of what God can do in the world! They became their “joy…hope…crown of boasting”!

Church, we should conduct ourselves in such a way that we are bragged about in heaven!

On the bumper of Heaven’s mini-van there should be a sticker that says, “Central Baptist is an Honor Roll Church!”

In the dance recital of Heaven, the apostles should hold up their cell phone cameras when we take the stage and tearfully whisper, “Central Baptist is doing great!”

On the refrigerator door of Heaven, the Apostle Paul should look at our scribblings and say, “Isn’t Central Baptist talented?!”

And in the grand halls of Heaven, when we are finally home, our Jesus should be able to say of us, “You did great. I am so proud of you! Well done! Well done! Thy good and faithful servant.”

 

[1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Wise_Blood/QFjRDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22it’s% 20nothing%20foreign%20connected%20with%20it%22&pg=PT123&printsec=frontcover

[2] McKnight, Scot. The Second Testament: A New Translation (p. 224). InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition.

[3] Chapman, David. “ESV Expository Commentary: Ephesians–Philemon.” Apple Books.

[4] Hart, David Bentley. The New Testament. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), p.407.

[5] Keener, Craig S. The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament (IVP Bible Background Commentary Set) (p. 586). InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition.

[6] Chapman, David. “ESV Expository Commentary: Ephesians–Philemon.” Apple Books.