2Grace to you and peace from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. 3We ought always to give thanks to God for you …
Gratitude accompanies Paul’s usual greeting of grace and peace, a heart of appreciation for his readers, the Thessalonian believers. Often significant words are grouped together in Scripture. For example, faith, hope, and love frequently find space in the same breath of the apostolic writers, most notably in Paul’s love sonnet of 1 Corinthians 13, ending with, “But now faith, hope, love, abide these three” (1 Cor. 13:13). Paul’s signature greeting always includes the duo of grace and peace from God. (For those who think Paul wrote the book of Hebrews, this Pauline expression is conspicuously absent from that letter.)
Here, in Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians (as also in his first letter), he follows his greetings of grace and peace with an expression of thanksgiving. We find it notable that he doesn’t thank the believers, but thanks God for the believers. In what sense does he mean this? He expands this further shortly, but we want to pause to consider how a heart of gratitude ought to be normative for the Christian. Paul uses this word thirty-nine times, mostly in a personal statement in the first person, for example, “I thank God” (Rom. 1:8) or “Thanks be to God” (2 Cor. 9:15). It rolls off his pen as he writes, which reflects a heart that is conditioned and saturated by the grace of God.
Think of it for yourself. As you grow in your understanding and experience of God’s grace (mentioned eighty-three times in Paul’s writings), does not your heart naturally well up in thankfulness to God for His grace? How can it be otherwise? God’s favor and gifts to us are completely undeserved. All that we have and are and do come by and through His grace.
We need to learn from Paul’s example, because we can easily lose sight of God’s grace. We can fall into entitlement—that we somehow deserve what we have—or conversely into bitterness, that we do not have what we think we deserve. The apostle had been run out of Thessalonica because of persecution; he had suffered tremendous hardship in his travels and efforts to preach the gospel to the lost. How can someone be thankful during and after such difficulties? The greeting of grace (and peace) invites the readers (us) to a higher plane, to see amid this fallen world that God’s grace is indeed greater than all else. Indeed, Peter and John understood this, when after being beaten severely, “they went on their way … rejoicing that they had been considered worthy to suffer shame for His name” (Acts 5:41).
Lord, thank You for all You do in my life. Help my unthankfulness! Help my ingratitude.
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