The Thessalonian Story Part 2 – The Birth of the Thessalonian Church

Well, they go back to the inn where they’re staying. Their money is now virtually gone. That money has lasted a long time, hasn’t it? Silas says to Paul, Are you maybe pressing this just a little too much? That was pretty heavy what you said to these people. Don’t you want to kind of come into these things a little slower than that? And Paul says, “No, I’ve got to know if these people really mean business. I don’t know if I belong here. I don’t know if this is where God wants me.” So, the next meeting, Paul of Tarsus says to the brothers and sisters, “There is a Christian thing we do if you really are going to give up the world and the kingdoms of this earth, and you’re going to follow Jesus Christ, and you’re going to believe on him with all your heart, then believe on him. But don’t come back to any more meetings. There’s no business for you to be here just to hear me speak; make up your mind. He brought a message then, a very clear message on following Christ and then on being baptized, something they did not even understand.

And then Paul did a very brave thing. He said, ‘Is there anybody in this room who knows what I’m talking about and is willing to be baptized?’ And Jason immediately says, “I am.” And then Paul says, “Good. The meeting is now in your hands. Silas, Timothy, and I are walking out of here. You folks need to make up your mind about what you’re going to do. Because if you’re going to go further on with the Lord, you’re going to have to believe him, confess him, and you’re going to have to be baptized.” Well, this is an astonishing thing. Paul walks out of the house; so does Silas, who doesn’t know what’s going on, and so does Timothy, and they leave.

Paul goes out. He’s…Paul is fighting. He has hope, but he doesn’t know. And he is pressing hard. By the way, folks, please remember that when you open I Thessalonians, a great deal of what I’m telling you now in story form, you will find there. By the time we get through the introduction, you ought to be able to read Thessalonians and know everything, understand everything in it, just from the introduction.

All right, Paul leaves. Well, about an hour later, they come down the street where the torch is lit, and it’s obvious that no one’s there anymore. Obviously, everyone has left. And Paul says, let’s see if Jason is still home, let’s see what happened. And Jason’s wife meets him at the door and says, “Oh, Paul, it’s the most wonderful meeting you’ve heard in your life. You can’t imagine what happened.” And Paul’s still, you know, he doesn’t know what to think about this. And the story unfolds that Jason and his wife make a declaration for Christ to leave whatever it is that they have done.

And Jason explains that he and his wife had been seekers for a long, long time. Someone else speaks and says, ‘I’m about to lose one of my children to the Hindu religion. Another one tells why he’s been going to the synagogue, even though he’s Greek, and what’s really been going on within him and the restlessness that is there. And then Aristarchus says, I want to be baptized. I want to become one of these people like they are down there in Jerusalem and Judea.

And someone else and someone else. And by the time the smoke clears, about 40 of the people have said they will dare join in this new thing that’s just hit town; they don’t know exactly what it is. And about 10 others of them say, “Well, we’re not sure, but we want to go home, talk to our family. We want to have a little time.” Well, Paul of Tarsus has already announced to those people that if there’s anyone who’s prepared to be baptized on a certain day at a certain time, they’re going to be baptized, so let’s imagine that there happens to be a nice heathen holiday that week, and everybody – during that particular era of the first century there was no seven day week, there were just a lot of heathen holidays throughout the year  – let’s imagine one of them showed up this week. Everybody has the opportunity to go worship Zeus or Jupiter or whatever. But the Christians all show up at a nearby river. And here they come, and there are about 40 people who are baptized.

Now, I’m not going to describe the baptism to you because if you’re Catholic, they got sprinkled. If you are a dinker or a dunker, then they all got baptized face forward. If you’re a Baptist, they all got baptized in the water back that way. If you’re a Methodist, they all got something doused on their heads. So, we’re just going to say they got baptized, about 40 of them. And they sang in praise of the Lord. And Paul brought a message on the Holy Spirit to those people and told them what baptism meant experientially to them. Now again, you find a lot of this in Thessalonians.

Now, you would think our brother would be content with that, would you not? That absolutely, that would be evidence enough for him that the Lord has done something in this town. But Paul of Tarsus is still restless. And so, he sits down, and he spends a lot of time considering this, and he comes back to the next meeting, and he says to the saints, to these believers, he says, ‘Now there’s something you have to do; you have to do away with your idols.” And they can hardly understand or comprehend what he means. And one of them says, Paul, do you not understand that these idols of ours have been passed down from generation to generation? They’re part of our inheritance. And they’re our wealth. Many of them are made of gold. Some of them are silver. Some of them are encrusted with jewels. You don’t get rid of your idols.

Paul tells the story about the man who beat his idol to death. And so there are a lot of questions. They’re not really clear about this. They can’t comprehend having a home without idols. They are not sure at all. Every person in that room listens. Oh, it is a somber, sober meeting. This is a grave situation, and they realize it. They discuss with one another. “You mean we are going to go home and kill our gods?” And so on into the evening they talk about this, they have some prayer, and in the next session when they get together (if someone were to come into your church and tell you, the fellowship, yes it’s not quite a church yet if you are having an automobile, you’re never going to have an idea of how these people felt. ‘They’ve told us that whatever God is in your home, they had gods in their homes; everyone did. And there was the cultural, emotional attachment to those gods that is very difficult for us to comprehend today.) And here are an entire people faced with giving up their gods. It’s almost an incomprehensible thing they are facing. There’s a lot of prayer; there’s a lot of crying.

Once again, Paul is pressing to his limits. He’s still not sure, so they have another meeting a week later, and they’re going to come back and share what they did by the next morning, though, it’s all over the community because they have returned to their homes, they’ve talked to their kinfolks, they’ve given the idols to their other kin, some of them have broken them, some of them have melted them down, whatever they did with them, it’s all over the community Now, can you imagine a word like this coming out all over town? They killed their gods? A whole group of people killed their gods? They got rid of their gods? Does that mean that they don’t believe in gods anymore? And someone else said, Does this mean they’re still Roman citizens? A lot of questions came out of this, but the interesting thing about it is that there were rumors all over town, which have now, for the first time, really put these people into the spotlight of the town. They are now the rumor in this city. Everything that’s being discussed in the marketplace and in homes centers around this strange group of people who are in Jason’s house. Everyone knows who Jason is now. Everyone knows where his house is. And they know something strange is happening. The rumors are twisted. They’re crazy, but they’re real, and it is going to, in the near future, begin to affect their lives.

Well, the meeting in which everyone shares what they have done, and they do share, and the meeting is still informal. I mean by that it is totally informal. You cannot know what’s going to take place in one of their meetings. They weep. They share. They cry. They rejoice. There is a knitting taking place among this people who are in the town of Thessalonica, but there’s another crisis going on, and it has got to be resolved, and it’s a crisis of the heart on the part of Paul of Tarsus.

If you don’t mind, I’m going to get just really intimate here. It’s going to be hard for you to comprehend what’s happening to Paul right now. Let’s say that they know that tomorrow will be the last time they will be able to spend in the inn. The money is gone. They are hungry. Paul’s still discouraged. With all that’s happened, that lack of assurance is still in his life. But that’s not the problem. The problem is that he could tell these people his needs financially, and they would begin giving him money. And he would join virtually every minister in the world at that point, would he not? I’m not going to say he would then be salaried. I would simply say he would be financially dependent on those people. Whether or not at this point they could support him at all, I do not know, and you don’t know, and we’re never going to know, and as I said to you in an earlier message we don’t know where Paul and Barnabas got their money on the first trip; all I can tell you right now is these men don’t have a penny left on this earth, which puts them in an awkward position. They can’t even leave town; they don’t have anything to leave town on. They can’t stay, or if they do, they’re going to have to begin receiving money from this church, this fellowship of believers. Paul’s never done that, and he is having the fight of his life.