1 Thessalonians 1:2-5 - Full Conviction

2 We give thanks to God always for all of you, constantly mentioning you in our prayers, 3 remembering before our God and Father your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ. 4 For we know, brothers loved by God, that he has chosen you, 5 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.

Target Date: Sunday, 13 February 2022

Word Study/ Translation Notes:

Conviction – πληροφορία – complete assurance/ fully convince/ to bring in full measure – from plero (full, mature) and phoreo (bear, wear). This noun is in the dative case, which might give another translation: TO full conviction rather than “with” since there is no preposition “en” with this phrase.

One person regards one day above another, another regards every day alike. Each person must be fully convinced in his own mind. – Romans 14:5

But the Lord stood with me and strengthened me, so that through me the proclamation might be fully accomplished, and that all the Gentiles might hear - 2 Timothy 4:17

Epaphras, who is one of your number, a bondslave of Jesus Christ, sends you his greetings, always laboring earnestly for you in his prayers, that you may stand perfect and fully assured in all the will of God. – Colossians 4:12

Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile an account of the things accomplished among us - Luke 1:1

Exact - For I want you to know how great a struggle I have on your behalf and for those who are at Laodicea, and for all those who have not personally seen my face, 2 that their hearts may be encouraged, having been knit together in love, and attaining to all the wealth that comes from the full assurance of understanding, resulting in a true knowledge of God’s mystery, that is, Christ Himself, - Colossians 2:1-2

Exact - And we desire that each one of you show the same diligence so as to realize the full assurance of hope until the end, 12 so that you will not be sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises. – Hebrews 6:11-12

This sounds much like this fifth verse of 1 Thessalonians 1:

What Paul illustrates in 1 Thessalonians, the writer of Hebrews expresses somewhat imperatively.

Exact - since we have a great priest over the house of God, 22 let us draw near with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. – Hebrews 10:21-22

Full – πολύς – much/ many/ abundant – while the plero- in plerophoria indicates a fullness or completeness, this adjective, modifying the noun plerophoria, would seem to indicate more of a quantity measure of this assurance, i.e. “to MUCH full conviction”, meaning “to many believers who were fully assured of the gospel.”

Thoughts on the Passage:

Like the two preceding phrases this one concerns the manner of Paul’s preaching of the gospel.

This interpretation seems quite unlikely.

1. If Paul was simply talking about HIS own conviction, in what way would that be evidence that the Thessalonian believers were “elect of God”? Certainly, there is much autobiographical about this (in power and in the Holy Spirit), but it stretches credulity that Paul would here tout his OWN conviction in his preaching, rather than the effect it had on these Thessalonian believers.

2. The placement of “full conviction” without a discreet preposition tends to suggest the dative “to” be filled in, indicating the goal of the power and Holy Spirit.

These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, so that you may know that you have eternal life. – 1 John 5:13

This I recall to my mind, Therefore I have hope. 22 The Lord’s lovingkindnesses indeed never cease, For His compassions never fail. 23 They are new every morning; Great is Your faithfulness. 24 “The Lord is my portion,” says my soul, “Therefore I have hope in Him.” 25 The Lord is good to those who wait for Him, To the person who seeks Him. – Lamentations 3:21-25

Building Points:

New faith - Leave your old faith behind

New desires

New reason for obedience

New relationship with God

Sermon Text:

As we continue our journey into this first epistle to the Thessalonians this morning, we will use our opportunity this morning to continue to focus on verse 5.

I will remind you that we are moving very deliberately through this first paragraph because it most likely represents the first time these ideas were written in the New Testament.

I would not want us to forget that this letter to the church in Thessalonica was most likely the first epistle written in the New Testament, and that it predates all other books in the New Testament.

So to understand verse 5, we must go to the beginning of the sentence and get a running start at it:

For we know, brothers loved by God, that he has chosen you, because our gospel came to you not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction.

He has chosen you!

In his great sovereign choice, also called election, God has chosen these Thessalonian believers to be part of His people.

And when we looked at that great truth a few weeks ago, we saw that if we are in Christ today, God has chosen us as well.

But how could Paul know that God had chosen them?

How could he make such a bold statement?

Had he peered directly into the mind of God, seeing untold secrets?

No.

He provides the evidence he has of their sure election:

because our gospel came to you not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction.

We looked last week at the beginning of that clause,

And found it came to mean something like this:

We preached the gospel of Jesus Christ to you,

And we all saw the power it had in your lives,

Driven by the Holy Spirit to change you from the inside out.

But then we come this week to the last item in this presentation of Paul’s evidence: and with full conviction.

Full conviction:

That is what I would like for us all to think about this morning.

But before we look at what it means, I think we need to take just a moment to make clear whose it is.

Because there are some well-respected commentators who seem to miss on the question of who was fully-convicted.

They reason like this:

The power in this verse was coming through Paul,

And the Holy Spirit was speaking through Paul,

So Paul must be talking about his OWN conviction in the gospel being full.

That what he means is that he and his companions believed completely in the gospel of Jesus Christ.

But while that would be true in itself,

the result of that interpretation, when we place it into the context, makes this passage become almost nonsensical:

For we know… that he has chosen you, because our gospel came to you not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and [we believed it with all our hearts].

So, in answer to whose full-conviction it was, we see the only possible answer was that this conviction belonged to the believers.

By seeing that meaning, we find the verse can be understood as:

For we know… that he has chosen you, because our gospel came to you not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and [the result was that you were fully-converted to the truth of the gospel].

Paul wasn’t tooting his own horn, proclaiming the effectiveness of HIS faith;

He was declaring that when the gospel was brought to the pagans of the city,

these had, by the power of the Holy Spirit, been fully converted from unholy idolaters to children of the True God.

Oh, Christian, pray!

Pray that the gospel will be preached and proclaimed in our day with equal power and effect through the Holy Spirit.

That we would see the elect of God brought into the church from every tribe, tongue, nation, ethnic group, culture, and people in a great harvest!

And how will WE know they are elect? Or put better – how shall we know to consider them among the elect?

Because it is impossible to know the true state of a person’s heart with absolute certainty.

God knows, but He has not given that gift to us.

We will recognize them the same way that Paul did:

Because the gospel will come to them in word, power, and the Holy Spirit, resulting in full conviction in them.

And as we see them grow in grace and obedience to Christ, we and they shall become ever more certain of their salvation.

We can only know who God has chosen from the very beginning AFTER they come to Him in faith, responding to His effectual call.

God knows who are His all along – we only find out when they come to Him.

And they come to Him, in almost every case, because WE took the gospel to THEM.

I remind you of the passage we read last week to this point in Romans 10:14-15:

How then will they call on Him in whom they have not believed? How will they believe in Him whom they have not heard? And how will they hear without a preacher? 15 How will they preach unless they are sent?

Now, to move on to the great question of the morning: what does it mean to have full conviction?

What is “full conviction” after all?

The first thing I have already mentioned this morning is that it means to be fully converted from your old life.

We see in the later verses of this chapter this testimony to the completeness of their conversion:

They turned to God from idols to serve a living and true God, 10 and to wait for His Son from heaven, whom He raised from the dead, - 1 Thessalonians 1:9-10

Without fearing exception, I tell you this: everyone who truly comes to Christ leaves his idols behind.

An idol is, on the surface, something or someone besides God we put our faith in.

But if we look at that more closely, we see that an idol is also a god (little -g) we make.

It may or may not “look” like us, but the idol will almost always reflect what we consider to be our highest characteristic.

Where people lived from the land, they worshipped fertility gods like Baal, Asherah, and the like. They wanted to be prosperous.

Where people made their living by the sea, they bowed before fish gods like Dagon of the Philistines.

Where people sought conquest, they made gods like Ares or Thor.

And when people felt they had become enlightened, they made for themselves gods of wisdom, like Isis and Athena, or our modern god, Science –

Not to be mistaken for the search for truths in our world.

No, the god Science declares his truths, and we are told to “believe the Science” or “Trust the Science”.

The modern priests to the god Science spend almost no time searching – only declaring.

I could go on because EVERYONE who is not in Christ is in the depths of idolatry.

What is idolatry but:

A worship of yourself,

And the creation of a god you can control?

That is one reason the true gospel is so jarring to people – our God cannot be controlled.

The True God is holy, not corrupt and sinful like we are.

The God of the Bible does not do OUR bidding – He calls us to seek and obey His.

The God of Creation will not be judged by us – He will judge us all by His righteous standard.

And this God of the Universe did not sit content to leave us in our rebellion against Him – He sent His Son to die on the cross to bring us to Himself.

When this gospel was preached in Thessalonica, these believers repented from their sins and trusted Jesus Christ alone for their salvation.

Full conviction.

Where their faith used to be in themselves, or in some blob of wood or stone,

They put their faith fully on God alone for their justification.

Of the people I have shared the gospel with that rejected Christ, all I can remember have done it because they didn’t want to give up their idols.

They loved their sin.

They trusted their superstitions.

They believed in a god they called God (big -G), but they just knew He would let them into heaven because they were pretty good people who often said they tried hard to be good.

I even recall one man whose father had died in his sin, and this man felt he would be disloyal to his father to follow Jesus Christ.

I told him, based on the story of the rich man and Lazarus, that I was certain his father WOULD want him to follow Christ, but to no avail.

When someone comes to Christ with full conviction, they leave behind those worldly gods for the sake of the one True God.

There simply is no room to embrace Christ and any other god.

No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. – Matthew 6:24

This is true for any so-called god – whether Mammon or any other.

The second thing it means to have full conviction is that not only do we have a new faith, we have new desires.

We see the Thessalonian’s desires changed as they wait for His Son from heaven (v.10)

There are many believers who have been in church for a very long time.

And many of us came to Christ as little more than children.

So we take a look at the “before and after” of our hearts when we came to Christ as a child and think:

“I have done greater sin since coming to Christ at age 10 or 11 or 12 than before.”

So we allow doubts and fears to come in and overwhelm us.

When we talk of full conviction meaning we have new desires, we need to look at more recent history than what happened for us 30 or 50 years ago.

For the Thessalonians, their conversion, almost completely as adults, was still fresh in their mind.

That wasn’t ancient history – that was their current news.

I have known believers who wasted a great deal of time trying to figure out if their conversion at age 11 was “authentic” or “real”.

When the greatest assurance you can have is obtained by the evidence of your obedience to Christ NOW.

But often people plumb their memories to see if that salvation experience way back yonder saved them,

Forgetting the fact that the greatest evidence of a saved and converted heart is perseverance in obedience.

By this we know that we have come to know Him, if we keep His commandments. – 1 John 2:3

You are not saved by your obedience – you obey because you are saved.

Your desires have changed.

Remember those idols we tossed in the first point?

Now our heart doesn’t even want to return to them.

When we desire to do the right thing, it is because it pleases God, not because it makes people think well of us or helps us to feel better about ourself.

But what if I didn’t have bad desires to begin with? What if I was raised in church?

Am I spiritually handicapped because I didn’t have a massive change of heart?

I would like to respond to that question in two different ways:

First – This is the testimony I would want for you all:

Namely the testimony that you have followed God all your life,

And you didn’t fall into those traps of sin that are so common.

I would wish you all a boring testimony, not one filled with leaving behind massively destructive behaviors or life-shattering choices.

Praise God if His hand is so graciously on you that you cannot remember a time you did not trust in Him.

Second, though – beware thinking that because you don’t have those “big” sins like drugs or alcoholism or the like, that you are not as far away from God as those that are in those sins.

That is a most dangerous lie.

I don’t care if you were raised singing in the nursery choir and never stepped out of line once:

You are JUST AS FAR from God as the most hopeless derelict on the street.

You may recall when King Saul was commanded by God, in no uncertain terms, to utterly defeat the Amalekites,

But instead, he and the people he led took spoils from them.

Samuel came to him and told him:

For rebellion is as the sin of divination, And insubordination is as iniquity and idolatry. – 1 Samuel 15:23

Saul thought he was better than the idolatrous Amalekites, but in trusting in himself and not God, he proved to be just as sinful as they were.

And then, remember when Jesus was eating at the Pharisee Simon’s house,

And the “immoral woman” came in, breaking the alabaster vial of perfume over Jesus, kissing His feet, and wiping her tears from them with her hair.

Recall the parable Jesus told when Simon was quietly judging this disgraceful spectacle:

A moneylender had two debtors: one owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. 42 When they were unable to repay, he graciously forgave them both. So which of them will love him more?” – Luke 7:41-42

Obviously, Simon replied, the one who was forgiven more would love more.

But Christian, when we look to those who have been set free from addictions, crimes, and the like,

Our problem is not that we were in less debt, but that we do not recognize the depth of our own sinfulness.

Which is worse – drunkenness or pride?

Which will take longer to recover from?

Drunkenness, while sinful, may be remedied in a night, and if the drunkard repents, never repeated.

But for the prideful, we are told in Proverbs 16:5:

Everyone who is proud in heart is an abomination to the Lord; Assuredly, he will not be unpunished.

So as we consider whether we have full conviction, and we look at our desires, don’t look only at what you no longer desire, but at what you now DO desire.

That will be fresh no matter how long you have been a Christian.

Is your heart longing for God?

Do you find His word, the Bible, a delightful portion in your day?

Is your heart now filled with compassion for others?

Can you rest your head at night in peace because your conscience is clear?

Do you live in faith that God controls all things for your absolute best?

Do you rejoice in that?

Do you return love and kindness even to those who would oppose you?

Are you striving each day to put away fleshly thoughts and desires to make room for spiritual things?

the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. 24 Now those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. 25 If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit. - Galatians 5:22-25

I expect that no one at present will pass that last test perfectly, but the places where you could not answer a truthful “yes” may help you find some corruption that remains to be removed.

Lastly, not only does “full conviction” mean you have a new faith and new desires, it means you have a new relationship with God.

No longer is He your enemy.

No longer can you expect only His displeasure and judgment.

No longer will you expect to hear “Depart from Me”,

Because you have obeyed His call “Come unto Me”.

Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. 29 Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.” – Matthew 11:28-30

The choice in the gospel is clear:

Be in rebellion and war with the God of all Creation,

Or accept His gracious terms and be forever safe from wrath in Christ Jesus.

If you have believed, trusted Jesus Christ, with full conviction, He who was once your enemy has brought you into His family.

If you have not followed Him, the time remains where you can repent, trust in Christ, and follow Him.

As long as you draw breath, God’s offer through Jesus Christ remains – the good news:

Acts 13:38-39 - let it be known to you, brethren, that through Him forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you, 39 and through Him everyone who believes is freed from all things