We Always Thank God for You

Well, yeah, as we've heard, a big theme of this morning's sermon is thankfulness. And so I want to start by asking you, what are you thankful for? What are you thankful for? What would be at the top of the list of things on your gratitude list? I think for many of us, at the top of the list would likely be our families.

You're no doubt very thankful for your husband or wife, I trust, if you have a husband or wife. Not that you're thankful for your kids even in harder moments, or your grandkids. Kids, you might even be thankful for your parents, or thankful for your brothers and sisters. When God blesses us with families, that is a reason to give thanks to him. Others of you might be really thankful for your employment.

Jobs are great things, not just to keep a roof over our head and pay the bills, but they give us a way of making a meaningful contribution. Some of you might really love your jobs and be thankful for them. We've got lots of reasons to be thankful, don't we? And you might say even that the things that we are most thankful for are in some ways reflective of the things that we value the most, the things that we kind of prioritise in life. But perhaps an overlooked or unnoticed reason to thank and praise God is the fact that He is at work in our lives and in the lives of people around us.

People are responding to the gospel in faith and love and good works, and often that can be kind of an unseen reality. But it's actually one of the most significant things happening in the world around us. It's something that we do well to notice and value and prioritise and give thanks for. And the chapter of First Thessalonians that Eric has just read for us is a chapter that reminds us to do just that, to thank God for the good things that He's doing in our lives and in the lives of people around us. Really, that's what Paul has done.

He's written this letter to the Thessalonians, and the guts of this first chapter is we're thankful for you, and we're thankful because of what God is doing in your life. That's how the letter opens. It opens in verse two there with Paul and Silvanus, or Silas, and Timothy saying, we always give thanks to God, always for all of you, constantly mentioning you in our prayers. You can find the background to this letter of Thessalonians in the book of Acts, chapter 17. It's recorded there that Paul and his coworkers, they essentially started a church in a city called Thessalonica.

They'd only spent a few weeks there preaching the gospel. They went to the synagogue on Sabbath after Sabbath. And Paul went there and he proclaimed that Jesus is the Messiah, the Saviour of the world who died and rose again. And what happened is people believed, and a church was started. But there were Jewish leaders there who kind of strongly opposed Paul and his coworkers and this new group of Christians, and so they rounded up a mob and they drove Paul out of town.

He had to leave quickly by night so he wasn't detected, and so he kind of lost contact with the Thessalonians. And that made him really worried. They're only a young church, probably still facing all kinds of pressures and opposition. Paul loved them, and he was seriously concerned that they might have lost their faith or given up on Jesus. So he sent Timothy back to check on them, and when Timothy came and gave a report to Paul, he said they're actually doing pretty well.

Their faith is strong. They're loving each other. They're sticking it out. And so Paul writes to them, and he really starts with a bang. He says in verse two, we give thanks to God, always for all of you, constantly mentioning you in our prayers.

And in verse three, Paul tells us what he's praying about. What exactly is he thankful for in these Thessalonians? He says, we remember before our God and Father your work of faith and labour of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ. The content of Paul's prayers is profoundly spiritual, and it rings with thanksgiving. He's deeply thankful for the fruit of the gospel that he can see in the lives of the Thessalonians.

He's always thanking God and praying about this new group of Christians all the time. It tells you something about Paul's priorities, what Paul's values were. You get the impression that he's actually quite stoked, almost like a teacher feeling chuffed when their students make progress. Or if you're a parent and you've got children, perhaps right at the list of your priorities for those kids is that they grow up to love and follow the Lord Jesus Christ. And for Paul, the Thessalonians were like his spiritual children.

And so he was so thankful that their faith was strong and that they were sticking it out. But importantly, Paul directs his thanks to God. It's God's work in the Thessalonians' church, and God is the one who gets the thanks. And really, that's a great example for us to follow. When we see evidence of the gospel at work in other people's lives, that ought to make us really thankful.

Lots of us, I suspect, spend a fair bit of time praying for other Christians, people in our churches. Different people I speak to have got prayer calendars or like the PrayerMate app on their phone to help them remember to pray for other Christians. Lots of churches will send out like a weekly prayer list. And often the things on those prayer lists include different people's health concerns and other issues, and those are great things to pray for. What I'm proposing is to add another thing to the list of things to pray for: recognising the good things that God is doing in other Christians' lives and thanking Him for that.

Saying, God, thank you so much for the way you're working in the life of my husband or wife or kids or friends or family or other church members. When you do that, it achieves lots of things. It gives God the praise and the thanks that He deserves. It helps you to cultivate a more grateful heart. And importantly, if you make a habit of thanking God for the work that He's doing in other people's lives, that's bound to spill out into actually encouraging other people in that.

That's what Paul did. He didn't just confine his thanks to his prayer life. No. He told the Thessalonians what he was thankful for, what he was praying for them. He wanted to encourage them.

And again, that's a model for us to follow. When you see the fruit of the gospel in someone else's life, point it out. Say, hey, I've really noticed how much you seem to have grown in your faith. I'm so thankful to God for that. Or it's obvious that God is working in your life in this area.

I prayed for you yesterday and I thanked him for that. We need to hear that stuff, right? The Thessalonians needed to hear that because the Christian life is so full of challenges from within and without. We struggle with our own sin.

We struggle with temptation. We struggle with opposition and hostility around us. And so often what we need to hear is, I can see that you're doing well. I can see that God is at work in your life. Have you ever had someone say that sort of thing to you?

Imagine it, very, it puts the wind in our sails. Imagine a culture of this sort of thing happening in our church. A culture of encouragement and thankfulness for the work that God is doing. So I've seen firstly that it's right for us to be thankful to God for His work in other people's lives and to encourage them in that. And something that comes out of that, secondly, is that it's right to thank God because His work through the gospel is tremendously powerful.

We can thank God that the gospel actually changes lives. That's the second thing we see in our text. Paul is so thankful for the Thessalonians because he sees that the gospel has powerfully changed their lives. Notice that word "for," f o r, at the start of verse four if you've got your Bibles open. It's really another word for "because."

Paul says at the start of verse two, we give thanks to God, always. And then here at the start of verse four, get a because. Paul says, we thank God for you because we know, brothers and sisters loved by God, that He has chosen you. How does Paul know that? Well, he goes on to say in verses five and six that it's because our gospel came to you not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction.

You know what kind of men we proved to be among you for your sake, and you became imitators of us and of the Lord, for you received the word in much affliction with the joy of the Holy Spirit. As we've seen, when Paul was with the Thessalonians, he shared the gospel with them. He shared the word with them. He simply told them, Jesus is the Messiah who came into the world to suffer and die for your sins and who rose again three days later. Turn away from your sin and put your trust in Him for salvation.

And if you think about it, all that Paul had done was speak words, plain old ordinary words. But those words weren't just words. Paul says that they came with the power of the Holy Spirit. And the Thessalonians were convicted. They believed.

They received the word. They welcomed the message about Jesus. Even in the midst of suffering, the gospel had come to them with power, and the gospel powerfully changed their life. We read in verses nine and ten that the Thessalonians turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God and to wait for His Son from heaven. A group of people who had been serving idols, who heard the gospel and turned around and started serving God. The gospel totally changed the way that they lived, and that worked itself out practically.

Again, back in verse three, we saw that Paul remembered their work of faith, their labour of love, and their steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ. That's a nice little kind of three-part summary of the Christian life, isn't it? Work of faith, labour of love, steadfastness or endurance of hope. Paul was thankful for the Thessalonians' good works, their works that were produced by their faith. Their faith wasn't dead or empty, but it prompted them to do things, to live differently.

Paul was also thankful for their labour prompted by love. No doubt there was labour involved in continuing this church, making things happen, supporting one another. And that labour for the Thessalonians was prompted by love. Their love for God and their love for each other. And Paul was thankful for their steadfastness, or their endurance inspired by hope in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Yes, they were facing all kinds of pressure, but they were sticking it out because their hope was in Jesus, in His death and His resurrection and the fact that He was going to come again. Their lives had changed. The gospel is powerful to change lives, and that is worth thanking God for. Just over two years ago, my family and I, we relocated up from Tassie. We moved from Launceston up to Brisbane to take the ministry position at Westside Christian Church, and that was a hard move.

You know, Tassie's home. We had a wonderful church community down there, and there are lots of difficulties associated with that move. And a few people have asked me about it since. They've said, what have been the hard things about it? But also, what have been some of the joys that have come with it? And hands down, we can say that one of the best, most encouraging things about moving state has been the privilege and the blessing of seeing God at work in other people's lives.

People that we would never have met if we hadn't moved. There's one lady at Westside who is just an encouragement machine. She comes into church every Sunday, and every time without fail, she's upbeat. You ask her, how are you going? And she says, I'm good because God is good.

She's got joy in Jesus. She's in the Word all the time. You might call her a prayer warrior. She serves in different ministries, and she does it all with joy. This is a lady who doesn't live some kind of charmed life either.

She's got her own struggles and her own difficulties, but her faith in Jesus is accompanied by real joy, real gratitude and good works. Do you know anyone like this? Someone whose life has been so obviously touched by the gospel. If you do, then that is worth thanking God for. Another thing that we've been really privileged to witness has just been the kind of genuine love and care between people.

We've experienced that coming into a new church community, and it's been a real blessing to us as a family. But more than that, it's the feedback that we hear from other people who come and visit church. We had a guy come and visit our church a few weeks ago who hadn't stepped foot in the church for many, many years. His life had kind of gone off the rails. He was mixing with the wrong company, and he said after his visit that he could tell that there was something different about the people at church.

That's lovely feedback. Again, have you experienced this before? Genuine love and warmth and care from other Christians. If you have, that's worth thanking God for. Thank God that He is at work in other people's lives through the gospel, prompting in them genuine love.

This is not to sugarcoat church life. Of course, life can and often is marked by differences of opinion and conflict and division. Those things are very real as well. But even in the midst of those things, in spite of those things, God is still at work. And there are still reasons to notice and give thanks for Him.

Give thanks to Him. Another thing I've been privileged to see is people sticking it out even when it's hard. The Thessalonians say turn to God from idols. And as we turn to God from our cultural idols, that can bring with it real hardship. A husband and father at our church recently made the choice to leave his job because it was putting too much pressure on family life and not leaving them enough room as a family to be as involved in church as they wanted to be.

That wasn't an easy choice. He had a really good job. But they made the hard choice because they wanted to put God first above other things like career progression. And those sorts of hardships, the hard choices, are just one aspect of the hard things that the Christian life can bring. I've witnessed other hardships like the rift that one person's faith can cause in family units when the people around them aren't believers. Just a sacrifice that can be involved in turning up to church week after week, serving in different ministries, doing it for year after year, decade after decade even. That can bring with it real hardship.

But in the midst of that, I see, and you probably see, people sticking it out, enduring, being steadfast, and not in some kind of grim white-knuckle it-to-the-end kind of way, but with joy. Real joy that flows out of their life and infects the people around them. The gospel has powerfully shaped the way they live their life and enabled them to endure. And that is worth thanking God for. The gospel is powerful to save.

It's powerful to change lives. It works. It actually works. And that is a reason to say thank you, God. Thank God for His work in other people's lives.

Thank God that the gospel is powerful to change lives. And finally, thank God that the gospel is on display. It sounds forth from people's changed lives. That's the last thing we see in our text: that the gospel sounds forth from the people whose lives it changes. Look at verses seven and eight.

Paul writes to the Thessalonians that they became an example to all the believers in Macedonia and in Achaia. For not only has the Word of the Lord sounded forth from you in Macedonia and Achaia, but your faith in God has gone forth everywhere, so that we need not say anything. At the time that Paul was writing this letter, Thessalonica was the capital city of this region called Macedonia and Achaia. They were Roman provinces that pretty much make up what is today modern-day Greece. And if you can sort of picture on a map, modern-day Greece is about twice the size of Tasmania in terms of land size.

And Paul tells the Thessalonian church that in the way that they had accepted the gospel, in the way that the gospel had changed their lives, even in the midst of suffering, they had become examples to believers in that whole area. They changed lives the way that they had turned away from idols to serve God. That had been noticed. And because of that, the Word of the Lord, another way of saying the gospel, sounded forth from them. They're like a church on a mountaintop broadcasting the good news of Jesus like radio waves from Mount Tamborine.

It's a wonderful truth that as the gospel takes hold of your life, that shows a life of faith that leads to action, a life of love for God and for other people, and a life of hope in Jesus is a life that puts the gospel on display. It models the power of the gospel to other people. And again, that is a reason to say thank you, God. Thank God for those people in your life who are examples of the power of the gospel. Lots of us can perhaps point to our parents as those kinds of examples.

One of the things I'll always be grateful for is my dad's example of faith. He was faithful in prayer, regularly in his bedroom, on his knees praying. He was and still is faithful in his local church. He's been an elder there for many years. He was faithful in leading family worship.

I hated it as a kid. I really did. But there's a sense in which God used my dad's faithfulness to convince me that Christianity was real because I could see the way that it had changed his life. His life sounded forth with the truth and the reality of the gospel. And not all of us, but lots of us probably have similar memories of our parents.

And what a profound reason to give thanks to God. Not just for our parents, but for the fact that the gospel has sounded forth from their lives. That even at home, we had gospel examples. But we find those examples, of course, in the context of church life as well. One of the great blessings of being in a church is to be able to share life with people who are perhaps a bit older than you, maybe in the next season or a couple of seasons down the track in life, who become examples and role models.

Again, do you know anyone like that? Maybe an individual or a couple or a family, and you can see something in the way that they do life that tells you that their life has been shaped by the gospel. And there's something in that that you want to emulate. Gospel examples, people whose very lives display the power of the gospel, are a profound reason to give thanks to God. How great it would be if that same thing could be said of each and every one of us: that the gospel has so powerfully shaped our lives that it sounds forth from us, in our families, around the people closest to us, in our church, everywhere that God's placed us, in our neighbourhoods, in our workplaces.

If people could see that something was different about us. See that perhaps we're not just living for this life to fill it with money and experiences and pleasure, but we're living for God. God is real to us. Perhaps people could see that and say maybe there's something to that. As the gospel takes hold of your life, it sounds forth from your life.

And that is a reason to give thanks to God. Because ultimately it's His gospel. It's Him who works, and it's Him who is worthy of all praise and thanks and all glory. Thank God for His work in other people's lives and encourage them in that as well. Thank God that His gospel is powerful to change lives, and thank God that that gospel sounds forth from people's changed lives.

Let's pray. Lord God and heavenly Father, we do thank you that you are a God who is at work. You're a God who's at work in us. You're a God who is at work in the lives of your people all over this city, all over this country, and all over the world. And God, we pray that you would give us eyes to see that and hearts that are thankful for that.

Because with everything else that's happening in life, all the ins and outs of our daily life, all the struggles and challenges of our church life even, Lord, help us to see that you are still working. You're still producing faith and love and good works in people's lives. And we thank you for that. Lord God, ask that you would continue to be at work in our lives even today. Through your Word, help us, Lord, to keep on turning away from idols and serving you.

Help us to keep going in that work of faith and that labour of love. Help us to stay steadfast because our hope is in the Lord Jesus Christ. It's in His name we pray. Amen.