The Lutheran Hour
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"Christians: Gospel-Echoes and Christ-Models"
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Text: 1 Thessalonians 1:5-10
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PRAYER: Almighty God, grant to Your church Your Holy Spirit and the wisdom which comes down from heaven, that Your Word may not be bound, but have free course and be preached to the joy and edifying of Christ’s holy people. In steadfast faith, we may serve You and in the confession of Your name, abide to the end through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a dozen times: “Life’s not the same after 9/11/01.”
It is true, isn’t it – how much one event of that magnitude can so shape and mold our thinking. It can affect just about every aspect of life. Think how different life is now in our country: travel, security, family vacations, the economy — so many things we used to take for granted — but now? It’s true: “Life is not the same anymore.”
Far from meaning it negatively, St. Paul could say the same thing — and he does in his opening words to brothers and sisters in the faith who were living in Thessalonica. In his first letter to Christians living in this fast-paced, prosperous crossroads between Rome and Byzantium, the apostle observes with great thanksgiving to God what has happened to these people since God called them to know Him through the preaching of the Gospel. “Life’s just not the same anymore,” Paul notes. He is writing to people who knew that firsthand. They had been recipients of the missionary efforts of the apostle and his cohorts. Through the presence and preaching of men like Paul, the Good News of Jesus Christ came to them. It came as it always did whenever and wherever the Good News was proclaimed. It came with power — nothing less than God’s power. And it came with His Spirit. It came — as it always does — to do the work God sends to do: to show people how utterly hopeless life is when it is lived apart from Him, and to rescue them from the ultimate hopelessness of life forever separated from God.
Paul knew that personally. What he was seeing in them — in their “life-changed” response to the Gospel — he knew in his own life. It’s just what happened to him when the Lord Himself rescued him from his own rebel-madness. The “Jesus-chaser” became the “Jesus-follower.”
Because what happened to the apostle Paul, he recognized what was happening to so many who heard and believed the Gospel in Thessalonica.
Paul had come into their midst during his second missionary journey. While he was among them, he took the opportunity to preach in the synagogue on three Sabbath days. People not only heard with their ears this awesome and Good News from God, they saw with their eyes the total life-change this News brought about in the lives of these proclaimers. They heard and saw what great things God had done for them in His only-begotten Son from heaven. They heard and saw — and by the great power of God and because of His even greater mercy, they believed that Good News. Life changed dramatically. It always does whenever people meet Jesus Christ. The apostle recognized this great life-change as nothing less than that [they] “turned from idols to serve the living and true God” (1 Thessalonaians 1:9).
No longer did they worship the pantheon of Homer nor count on the gods of conquering Rome to help them in their need. The One and only God of heaven and earth, in the power of His Spirit, turned these people completely around.
There are no other gods but the One the Bible reveals. The other man-made idols fought for the allegiance of people then in Thessalonica just like they fight for the allegiance of people today. But only the living and true God, the One who is the “God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” — He so loved the whole world that He gave His one and only Son from heaven to bear away the sin of the world in His holy body with His own innocent suffering and death.
There is no other God. There is no other salvation than in Jesus Christ, the Son of the living and true God.
Only He brings such a monumental change of life! Only He re-models life from the inside out with His saving, claiming love! St. Paul and those Thessalonian Christians to whom he wrote here in his first letter knew that. They witnessed it firsthand, having turned away from the old models of life lived in idolatry to serve and love the true and living God. This was such a monumental, far-reaching life-change that nothing was left untouched! Quite literally, these Thessalonian believers were not the same people. Rather, they were being reshaped, molded into the new image of Jesus Christ. He was the new and living model into which they were molded and formed. In much the same way as our coins are imprinted to become legal currency, so God’s people are stamped — imprinted — with the life-saving, life-changing presence of Christ. The imprint of His life, death, and resurrection from the dead makes its mark on people, changing them and renewing them in every aspect of life.
These Christians in Thessalonica, people molded in a new image — the image of Christ and His love for them — lived their lives in such a way to be great examples, literally “models” for others around. And that, notes the apostle, was even “amid great suffering.”
What form that suffering took, what trials and burdens they carried because of their new faith in Christ, we can’t say for certain. We can only guess their that allegiance to the One true and living God and their rejection of pagan worship all around them had invited plenty of tension. Like St. Paul and his fellow apostles, and like countless others, those Thessalonian Christians endured hardship and persecution as they “kept their eyes fixed upon Jesus” — imitating Him. Seeing Jesus by faith, they sought to imitate Him in life — to be “little Christs” (which was Martin Luther’s favorite phrase to describe the daily life of believers), little Christs in the world.
In the midst of this broken and dying world, these Christians in Thessalonica accepted their hardships and sufferings not with whining, nor regret, but with an inner peace and divine joy that only the Spirit of the Lord gives. With head held high and hearts humbled in the power, presence, and peace of Christ, these believers modeled what the Lord was shaping and molding them to be: a people belonging to Him, living their lives in eager anticipation of His glorious return! He is, after all, the true and LIVING God and because He lives, His people shall live also!
The outright, yet humble, generosity of those Thessalonian believers had accomplished so much for the needs of fellow-believers that the apostle pointed to it as a pattern for others to follow. The Thessalonians became a model for others. Theirs was a reputation to which St. Paul pointed — a reputation worth emulating as it flowed from a life shaped and molded in Christ, a life imprinted with His love.
That is still what happens today, too, when Jesus Christ meets people and calls them out of the darkness into light and life! The Good News of the Risen, Living, soon-to-return Christ leaves its mark on people so they model Him through the way they go about living life, life lived in neighborhood and school, at work and at home, in business and in service. Christian life is not the same as the old and former way of life.
That way of living is a ringing endorsement of the Gospel’s great power. That’s what St. Paul observed about those Thessalonians Christians. “The Lord’s message rang out from [them]” writes Paul. “It rang out not only in Macedonia and Achaia – [their] faith had become known everywhere!” (1 Thessalonians 1:8).
It is an interesting picture Paul paints with his use of the words, “rang out” — “the Lord’s message rang out from them.” That’s precisely what a heavy bell does as it gongs, or a clap of thunder as it rolls and reverberates — you can hear those rippling sound waves for miles.
Even more revealing: that Greek verb translated as “rang out” can rightly be translated as “echoed.” Christians, you might say, are echoes, living echoes. Not only was their lifestyle a model for all, but these believers in Thessalonica echoed (a verb) the Lord’s Word. His was a message that left its mark on them and rang out, says Paul, from them! In the canyons of emptiness created by idolatry, in the hopeless pits of despair in life lived apart from God, Christians are Gospel-echoes. Theirs is a new story about a new life — a life given them from Christ’s rescuing love.
Life, you see, was no longer the same! It was so totally reshaped and so completely renewed in the rescue of Jesus Christ. These Thessalonian Christians just could not keep it to themselves — this News so good, so life-changing. Even in the midst of trial and suffering, they could not — and would not — hold back. The Word of the living God rang out! What great things God had done for them — wandering and lost in self-deception in the midst of a pagan culture. Yet Jesus, the Son of God, came looking for them. Through the bold, uncompromising witness in word and life of people like Paul, they heard the news of God’s great world-rescue: “His Son from heaven.” It was a rescue not just for past and present. It was a rescue for an eternal future — a future in the presence of the true and living God! For He took upon Himself God’s wrath for the whole world’s sin and pronounced it “finished” in His death on the cross and “conquered” in His triumphant resurrection from death. He is the same One who will rescue His people on that day when God deals one last time with this world. From that day and God’s coming wrath, Jesus rescues!
Who can keep this quiet?
We Christians are Gospel-echoes and Christ-models wherever we find ourselves. By our words and by the way we live our lives we call attention not to ourselves, but to Him who has rescued us in His redeeming love for the whole world. We say — in word and lifestyle — what all the world of science and technology and modern thinking can never know and recognize on its own: there is one living and true God. He loves the world. His love moved Him to send His own Son from heaven on a rescue mission that leaves no one stranded.
With this confidence and in this hope we eagerly await His coming again. Our waiting, though, is hardly thumb-twiddling or ho-hum passivity.
Life is not the same anymore! We are not the same!! We are God’s rescued people in Christ, modeling Him, shaped and molded by His love, with a message for the whole world. His Word of victory from Calvary’s cross and the empty Easter tomb echoes through us. We are His living echoes in Christ until He comes again in glory to speak His final and triumphant welcome home Word. Amen.
LUTHERAN HOUR MAILBOX (Questions & Answers) for October 27, 2002
ANNOUNCER: We’re talking about trust in God. I’m Mark Eischer and my guest again this week is Dr. Louis Brighton, professor emeritus, Concordia Seminary in St. Louis and author of “The Concordia Commentary on the Book of Revelation.” Dr. Brighton, a listener asks, “How do I know God is always there for me?”
BRIGHTON: There are many places in the Bible one can point to. In Romans 8, Paul says, “Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.” And it gives a catalog (I’ll kind of put in my own words) — neither death, neither hell, neither sin, neither sorrow, neither depth nor the heights, nothing can ever separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus; nothing, as long as an individual holds to Christ, because He died for that person. And then, of course, in 1 John chapter 1: “If we confess our sins, God is always faithful and just to forgive us. A few verses later, “because the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin.”
ANNOUNCER: I wonder what our listener means when she says she wants God to be there for her. What has God promised to do for us, and what form might that take?
BRIGHTON: 1 John 2 says, “My little children, I write these things to you that you don’t sin. But if we should sin,” it’s sad that we do, “remember we have a defense lawyer–” the Greek word is “paracletus” or advocate. We have a defense lawyer who never leaves the case before God in heaven, and He defends us by being our blood covering. He covers all our sins — not only our sins but the sins of the whole world. There is also the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus says, “Seek first the Kingdom of God and I’ll take care of everything else, your clothing, your food, and I can add your health. Don’t worry about those things. I’ll be there always as your shepherd. I’ll take care of those things. Always seek first the kingdom of God then always hold to Me and My cross in Jesus in helping others through My cross that they might come to know. I’ll take care of everything else; your health, your job, loss of your job, I’ll take care of everything.”
ANNOUNCER: What sort of tangible thing could we point to and say, “God is there for us, right there?”
BRIGHTON: Well, “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son,” John 3:16. But a wonderful example is John 4 — you remember, Jesus was tired, sitting at the well of Jacob. He had sent His disciples to buy some food for them. Here comes this lady. The lady, to say the least, had a very awful reputation. She was an outcast. She’d been married five times; living with a man in open adultery. She had been made an outcast by her village. She went out at noon to draw water because no one would go out at noon back then. As she draws nearer, she sees this man sitting there. You can imagine, “Oh, no, now here comes the hurt.” But the man “doesn’t know me. He’s a stranger. So I’ll go and get the water and go back home.” Astoundingly, this man who was Jesus, knew all about her. Yet, He treated her as if it were an honor to know her. She said, “Oh, You are the Messiah?” “Yes, I’m the Messiah.” God can forgive us. God would have forgiven Judas even, any sin if we only turn to Jesus. How do we know God is there? Because of the cross and as Hebrews says, God has sworn with an oath, the oath based on the blood of this Lord and God will never go back on a promise He’s made to us, as long as we cling to that promise in Jesus. We know He’s always there for us.
ANNOUNCER: How do the sacraments show us that God is there for us?
BRIGHTON: That’s what Holy Communion is all about. When the Lord gives us His body and blood, true body and blood with the bread and wine, it’s as if He is letting us see Him to assure us, “I really did die for you and I’m alive. Nothing can ever hurt you again as you hold to Me.” Of course in baptism, we go through that once, and that’s when God adopts us. He adopted us and we didn’t even know it, if we were little babies. I didn’t know it. Oh, I belong to God. I belong to God because of Jesus.
ANNOUNCER: Finally, Dr. Brighton, where should we look for God?
BRIGHTON: Always in the Scriptures. If we don’t go to the Bible, we begin to make up our own way of going to God and then there will always be doubts and fears. But the Bible — that’s everything. It’s God’s Word.
ANNOUNCER: We’ve been talking with Dr. Louis Brighton. Dr. Brighton, thank you for being with us.
BRIGHTON: Thank you very much. My pleasure.
ANNOUNCER: The next Lutheran Hour message is titled: “A Good Mourning.”