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Paul's Deepest Battle • Feb 01st 1990

The Thessalonian Story Part 1 – Background and The First-Century Church

First Century New Testament Paul the Apostle The Epistles

To understand 1 Thessalonians, you must understand the atmosphere that produced it.

This message does not begin by analyzing verses. Instead, it reconstructs the world of the first-century church — the spiritual, cultural, and historical setting that gave birth to Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians.

After the Jerusalem Council settled the debate over circumcision, Paul returned to the Gentile churches in Galatia to repair the damage caused by legalism. His letter to the Galatians had been sharp, urgent, and corrective. But would those churches still stand?

They did.

From Galatia, Paul began his second church-planting journey. After being “checked in the Spirit” from moving east, he moved west — crossing from Asia Minor into Macedonia. With that step, the gospel entered Europe.

The first stop: Philippi.

There was no synagogue. No church building. No religious infrastructure. Only a handful of Jews meeting by a river. Lydia believed. A demonized slave girl was delivered. Paul and Silas were beaten, imprisoned, and miraculously released. A jailer and his household believed.

And then Paul left.

The church in Philippi was tiny — perhaps 10 to 20 believers. No clergy. No hierarchy. No paid leadership. Just a living room gathering of believers meeting informally as the ecclesia — the called-out ones.

This message challenges modern assumptions about church life. In the first century:

  • There were no church buildings
  • No salaried clergy
  • No institutional systems
  • No seminaries
  • No formal Sunday services

Church was organic. Relational. House-based.

Paul’s role was not that of a stationary pastor but of an itinerant church planter. He raised up believers, established them in Christ, and moved on — often after only weeks.

Yet another theme emerges in this teaching: money.

Paul and his companions were broke. After Philippi, they had almost nothing. Paul wrestled deeply with whether to receive financial support. His conviction was fierce: he would not charge for preaching the gospel. He would work with his hands.

The seeds of the Thessalonian story are planted here.

This message helps you understand:

  • The emotional and spiritual pressures Paul carried
  • The split between Paul and Barnabas
  • The significance of Silas and Timothy joining the mission
  • The move of the gospel from East to West
  • The radical simplicity of first-century church life
  • The financial integrity that marked Paul’s ministry

If you want to grasp the spirit of 1 Thessalonians, you must first enter this world — a world of persecution, poverty, courage, and living-room churches.

This is not merely Bible study.

It is a window into what church meant in the first century.

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That’s not all that’s going on. Now, the Lord’s going to do something in our brother’s life. They’re out of money. And Paul, for some reason, is extremely depressed. Now, you wouldn’t think you would be. But let’s go back over this. Paul of Tarsus has been converted. Was beaten in Damascus. Was beaten on the island of Cyprus. Was in a shipwreck. He was beaten in almost every one of the four churches he raised up. He was beaten in those cities. He’s come home. He’s healed. He saw his four churches that he raised up undergo a tremendous attack, and he really felt like he shouldn’t be depressed. The brother has a beaten, bloodied back; it’s beginning to look like a grotesque maze back there. He has been beaten so many times with rods and whips. He’s dehydrated, he’s not as young as he used to be, and he’s broke; he doesn’t know what he’s doing, and he doesn’t know where the Lord is taking him, and our brother has gotten depressed. But I’m going to tell you something, and I’d like to speak really personally here. I think he’s fighting a battle over this business of money. I really do. I think he’s got a right to fight it. He’s broke. Somebody has been neglecting this man. The church in Antioch did not send him out with enough money. Or maybe Silas is not a tent maker?

I don’t know if the church in Philippi gave them no money. That’s all that we can know. All I know is he’s out of money. and he has no prospects of it, he’s probably running a fever. He can hardly move. He has been desperately mauled.

Now, Christian, get into this with me, would you? We have a brother who is really discouraged, and he’s broke. And I think he may be feeling sorry for himself. I don’t know if he’s feeling sorry for himself, but he’s rethinking this whole matter of receiving money. All he has to do is start telling people to help him financially, and they will. But if he does, he’s going to go against every conviction he has on this earth. That’s rough. This is a hard battle. And there have been very few men who have ever in church history reached as high as he did.

Now, I’m going to get off the subject here. I didn’t mean to do this, but I’m going to do it. Protestants all get salaried. I think that’s the worst thing that can happen to a minister is to get a salary, then you owe people things. You have to act a certain way, talk a certain way to get your salary up. Remember, Roman Catholic situations are totally different. They don’t receive very much of any income at all. The Roman Catholic problem has been somewhat different throughout the ages, and that is the ownership of huge, huge, huge estates. At one time, the Roman Catholic Church owned, and I am not making this up, it is a historical fact, one-half of all the land in Europe, and probably approximately one-half of its wealth.

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