How do you test true Christianity?

Summary: The missionary team are thankful for the work and perseverance of the Thessalonian church which flow out of their conversion and hope. They know the new church are loved by God and chosen because the gospel came not just with words but with transforming power through the Spirit.

Big Idea: the gospel isn’t just words; it transforms

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<camera> Hi - My name’s Matt and I’m one of the leaders here at Hope City. It’s my privilege to try and help us learn together from the Bible today.

Perhaps you’ll remember from early on in this present crisis there was a lot of hope, and then a lot of disappointment, over millions of home-test kits our government had purchased? <slide><50%> Apparently we paid twenty million dollars for two million home test kits - but thankfully before people started relying on these tests, they themselves were tested. And they didn’t pass! They didn’t really work - not well enough to be useful anyway.

Testing remains a huge focus as this crisis grinds on - 100,000 a day, 200,000 a day - it’s so important for us to know who has, and who doesn’t have this virus. Testing is going to be key as we begin to open things up again.

Today we’re going to look at a passage from the bible and, as I’ve been reflecting on it, I think it gives us a sort of test-kit for Christianity. And being able to test for this is important too. <camera>

It’s important for you if you’re here today exploring faith. Here’s why: if you’re watching people who call themselves “Christians” or people who you assume are Christians without running a test-kit on them, you might come to wrong conclusions about Christianity. It may turn out they’ve never actually “caught” Christianity in the first place, just a false-positive we might say. You really want to be sure people have the real thing before you go drawing conclusions based on them, right. So how do you do that? What does “testing positive” for Christianity look like?

Perhaps you’re here today and you’d call yourself a Christian? This week’s passage invites you to think about how you really test that. What sort of results should you expect if you’ve really been infected with Christianity? How do you know for sure that you have it? Whether this is for real and just pie in the sky, or just words?

This Sunday we’re starting a new series - so if you’re new with us, you’ve come at a great time. We’re looking at a short letter contained in the bible called “first Thessalonians” or 1 Thessalonians. <slide><50%>Here’s a fragment of a manuscript dated perhaps to 200AD including some of the text. The letter itself is a document from very early in the history of the church, less than twenty years after Jesus died, and it’s written by a missionary team to a group of new believers they left behind in the city of Thessalonica - a city that’s still around today, one of the major cities of modern day Greece, in fact. <slide>

This missionary team got into a lot of trouble with the authorities because of their message and so they had to move on suddenly after just a short time in the city. Worried for the new believers and the trouble they’re probably in, they send a guy called Timothy, a junior member of the team, back from Athens to check on them shortly after leaving. Timothy goes back, does his check, and finally catches up with the missionary team to report, probably in the city of Corinth. This letter is written in response to to that report. It’s the first of two letters to this church - hence first Thessalonians.<camera>

As we hear the start of this letter read out to us, think about how it might invite us to test for true Christianity. How are this small mission team evaluating things? Sam’s going to read for us this morning.

READING

<camera>Thanks Sam. So we’ve been thinking about testing for Christianity. This mission team have confidence these new believers they’ve left behind are the real thing. It’s clear from this short passage that they test positive. What I want us to think about together for the next few minutes is how they know. What tests are they applying? What’s the evidence they are looking for?

Let’s start with the central claim the team make about these new believers which is spelled out in verse 4. <slide><50%>“we know, brothers and sisters loved by God, that he has chosen you” - these are stated as facts of the matter, these are the conclusions - and although it’s easy to become numb to these things if you’re very familiar with them, let’s take a moment again to consider what amazing conclusions they are:

First, there’s the ground for everything that’s happened to these new believers, the root cause: they are <slide>loved by God. That’s what they’re told in verse 4 - that’s why they are chosen by God. That’s what drives all the action here. They are loved by God. Perhaps those words don’t feel like they pack much of a punch but it’s worth giving that phrase some time to sink in. Loved by God.

<camera>The world in which these Thessalonians lived was filled to the brim with gods: over twenty deities has a significant role and following in the city. From Egyptian gods to Greek gods to the Roman emperor himself, worshipped as a God complete with a temple and priests. Why would this truth that they were loved by God, the Christian God, be significant? Here’s why: because it is so radically different to how all these other “gods” related to people.

By and large, the other gods get on with their divine life, minding their own business, and are basically disinterested in people. You could sometimes get them involved, get them to pay attention - but to do that, you’d have to offer something, to “do a deal”. Here’s a few examples recorded from ancient Thessalonica:

<slide><50%>“Artemis .. dispatch this very day that hateful sickness … for Philip will offer the smoke of frankincense about your alters and will make splendid sacrifice of a mountain-roaming boar”

An offering to Apollo from a sailor comes with this petition<slide> “be gracious in return, and send upon the sails a favourable breeze”

<camera>This pattern, “I’ll scratch your back, you scratch mine”, this client/patron relationship, was a fundamental part of life in Thessalonica. It was the norm for how people interacted with each other so perhaps it’s not that surprising that it would be the norm for how they thought about interacting with the gods.

When you start with that picture, disinterested gods who you might be able to do a deal with, then this amazing truth the new believers discovered, that they were actually loved by God, stands as a sharp and radical contrast. They don’t have to do a deal with God, to offer something in order to get something back; instead they came tobelieve that the God of the universe loved them. And that love for them was the defining element of his relationship with them.

So let me ask you how do you relate to God? How do you interact with him?

<slide><50%>Have you ever tried to “do a deal” with him? Offer him something and ask for something back? I expect many of you have. I certainly have. Back at the start of my journey to faith I sent up a classic: “get me out of this one, God, and I’ll take you seriously”. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.

Do you see what that sort of prayer tells us about how we view our relationship with him? First, it presumes we can do something for him - the God of the universe! What exactly is it that we think we have to offer? Second, it sees him as disinterested, needing persuading to join our corner, to care for our cause.

<slide>Whether you’d call yourself a Christian or not here today, see if you can imagine for a moment what it would mean if this statement was true for you: what if the all-powerful God of the universe actually loved you, personally? What would that mean for your prayers? What would that mean for your life?

Now some of you might be thinking: impossible! <camera>If I was loved by God, how could he let this happen - whatever “this” might be. A COVID crisis. A lost job. A broken relationship. A broken body. But before you write it off, bear in mind that these new believers receiving this letter were facing trials too - you’ll see that as we read on. So the love of God did not mean the end of troubles for them - in fact, if anything, it brought them trouble. The love of God for you does not mean the end of troubles for you, either. It means you are loved even in your troubles and trials - and perhaps even that love has a plan to use them for your good.

So, these new believers are loved by God - but there’s more verse 4 tells us too: being loved by God and chosen, they are also brought into a new relationship with one another - see how verse 4 calls them <slide><50%>brothers and sisters? That’s an automatic consequence of accepting God’s love, coming to call him Father, as Jesus invites us to when he teaches his disciples his famous prayer which begins “our Father”: we are now a part of the one family of God. <slide>

The bible uses the picture of adoption to speak about this - becoming sons and daughters of God through the work of the Holy Spirit. You can find that in Romans 8:15 or Ephesians 1:5. God’s love for us doesn’t just lead him to offer forgiveness through Jesus, but drives him to offer us adoption into his own family: we can become children of God.

So these new believers in Thessalonica haven’t just found life through a relationship with the God who loves them, they’ve found a whole new family too. <slide>That is one of the truly wonderful things about the Christian faith: how it brings believers together into a new family; how we find family wherever we go in the world among his people; how God has taken even those who are alone in the eyes of the world, and made them a part of his family here.

<camera>So if you’re exploring faith today, consider this as a part of the package deal: you get a whole new family. Now depending on your experience of family, that might not seem like such a good thing - but as we continue to consider this letter, we’ll see how it is that the family of God are meant to relate to one another. One word summary for you? Love.

There’s one final thing I want to show you in here which marks out these new believers: loved by God, brothers and sisters, but also <slide><50%>people of hope. You see, in becoming a part of this new family, they came to share in a hope that was stronger even than death. They knew Jesus had died for them - died in their place so they didn’t have to (that’s in verse 10, coming soon!). They also knew this same Jesus had overcome death, risen from it. And ultimately they knew he would one day return to earth to meet them as they also rise from death, bringing justice and renewal (that’s in chapter 4 - you’ll have to wait a few weeks).

<camera>We began talking about how you test for a genuine case of Christianity. Well, see these three things we’ve talked about, here are three key pillars of Christianity: faith that we are freely loved by God; love for our newly adopted brothers and sisters, and hope for the future in Jesus Christ. You want to test someone for Christianity? You want to test yourself? That’s a pretty good summary of what you’re looking for.

And wonderfully, that’s exactly what the missionary team writing this letter find in these Thessalonians: faith, love and hope - each of them practically worked out in real life. That’s verse 3: <slide><50%>“We remember before our God and Father your work produced by faith, your labour prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.”

I know it’s hard to keep listening and concentrating when I’m on screen - I’m sure it’s hard when we’re together in person too - but I want to take just a few more minutes to show you how these three pillars work themselves out practically, to show you what you’re looking for in a confirmed case of real Christianity.

First, <slide>“work produced by faith”. Now there’s lots of debate as to exactly what the authors had in mind here when they talk about work flowing out of these new believers’ faith - and the particular word used here is pretty generic -but it’s worth thinking about the kind of work that would particularly flow out from faith in a God who freely loves us, not a god we have to do deals with - because it’s faith-driven work that’s in view here.

<camera>I don’t think we’re stretching things at all in suggesting the work these new believers put into sharing the message about these three pillars - God’s free love for us, adoption into a new family, and the hope they had in Jesus - this work flowed out of their faith. You can see this very same term, “work”, being used to describe the earlier missionary efforts of the team who brought the message to the Thessalonians in Acts 13:2 - their mission trip is “the work to which [God] has called them”. And in verse 8 of this letter we’ve begun to study together you’ll see that these new believers were known for their missionary endeavours: “the Lord’s message rang out from you,” the authors encourage them.

So what’s the test here for a real and confirmed case of Christianity? <slide><50%>Working to share this message of God’s free love and hope in Jesus. It’s a big thing for us as a church, something we’ve tried to make a priority because God’s love for us is something worth sharing - but we believe this message is primarily communicated personally, and in relationship - so we don’t run many big, central events. Instead we encourage each one of us to try and take small steps towards passing on this hope to the people we’re already connected to.

<camera>Want to test yourself? Well, are you trying to engage with sharing this message? Why not join us 5pm each Sunday as we make this a part of our conversation together week by week.

And if you wouldn’t call yourself a follower of Jesus but you’ve had someone try and share this message with you, however bad they are at it - ‘cause I’m really not much good at this, and I know many of us struggle - if they’ve tried to share, then perhaps you’ve rubbed up against someone who’d pass this first test for a genuine and confirmed case of Christianity.

So that’s “work produced by faith” - <slide><50%> what about “labour prompted by love”? Again, the specific word isn’t that much help in identifying precisely what’s in view beyond it requiring serious effort - but if we dig back again to the source, love, labour prompted by love, then perhaps we might reasonably connect this with practical actions which demonstrate love for newfound brothers and sisters both locally and further afield.

<slide>In chapter four, the authors commend these Thessalonians for their love for one another. 1 Thes 4:9 - and we can see that it stretches outside of their local church and on to brothers and sisters around the region - 4v10 - even around the world. They’re held up as an example of practical love for the wider church in another letter, 2 Cor 8:1-5, because of their generous giving towards distant believers who are in a moment of dire need.

So what’s the second test for a real and confirmed case of Christianity? <slide>Love for the family of believers, both our own church, and others in our region and throughout the world. Love that shows itself in action, through serious effort. Want to test yourself? Then ask yourself when you last worked up a sweat to act out love to another believer. When you last gave out of what your hard labour had earned to support other believers.

If you wouldn’t call yourself a Christian but you want to know about somebody else, watch them and see if you can tell they love their church, love the wider Church.

<camera>Do they give? Us Brits are famously private and awkward when talking about money but why not dare to ask them if they give? Statistically, Christians are generous people: Christians in the UK give more per fortnight than Red Nose Day raises from the whole UK population in a year.

Or let me give you another data-point: as a church we spend about one hundred thousand pounds a year on people, buildings, equipment and suppliers. That’s a lot of money - and all of it comes from the generous giving of a pretty small number of Christians. People freely give hours and hours of time to the work of the church each week too. Labour prompted by love.

<slide><50%>Final test? “endurance inspired by hope”. Here we don’t need to wonder about exactly what is in view - we know this young church in Thessalonica faced serious persecution; the missionary team are run out of town by a mob, and trouble continues for the church (as we’ll see in chapter 2). How do you respond to opposition to your faith, and to trouble? There are only two options really: you can bow to it, or you can persevere. You can let go of your faith, or you can endure.

<slide>The hope these new believers have, the confidence they have in the endgame, enables them to persevere through difficulty, knowing it is worth it. In those days - and in ours - there are some people, even some famous ones, who don’t run the race to the finish - but they are vastly outnumbered by the many quietly faithful followers who hold their course. When we consider the harshness of persecution that much of the church has faced down through the centuries and even today, it is a remarkable testament to the strength of their hope that so many have persevered.

<camera>So what’s the final test we’re given here? How we respond to opposition and pressure. Whether we own our faith and continue to swim in a different direction, or whether we’re drawn into the flow, returned to the world’s normal. Standing out from the crowd, from the world around, isn’t easy. It draws attention, brings pressure. And I guess the test here is whether our hope in Jesus - our confidence in his return, our certainty that he is coming to judge - is enough to sustain us, or whether we’ll be driven back into something the world finds more acceptable.

So, three transformations fundamental to Christianity, and three demonstrations of these:

Faith that we are freely loved by God works itself out in sharing this message

Love for our new brothers and sisters works itself out in generous service, and

Hope for the future return of Jesus Christ works itself out in perseverance despite opposition.

The gospel isn’t just words, it has the power to radically transform people - so a case of real Christianity is easy to test for.

Do you have it? Do you know someone who does?

Just a few seconds to reflect on what you’ve heard and we’ll pray.<slide><fullscreen slide>

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Let’s pray

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