II. The salutation supplicates the bestowment of highest Divine blessings.—1. Grace. A term of vast significance, inclusive of all the blessings that can flow from the superabundant and free favour of God. Grace is the source of all temporal good—life, health, preservation, success, felicity; and of all spiritual benefactions—pardon, soul-rest, guidance, strength, deliverance, purity, final triumph. The generosity of God is illimitable.
2. Peace.—Grace expresses the spirit and fulness in which Divine manifestations come to us; peace the result they accomplish in us. Peace with God. Sin has thrown human nature into a state of discord and enmity. The reception of grace must ever precede the enjoyment of peace. The universal mistake is, in first seeking, through many avenues, the happiness which peace with God alone can bring, instead of accepting humbly, penitently, believingly, the grace of God in Christ. Peace with each other—peace in the Church. How great a blessing is this! One turbulent spirit can ruffle the tranquillity of thousands.
3. The source of the blessings desired.—“From God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” The Father’s love and the Son’s work are the sole source and cause of every blessing to humanity, while the Holy Spirit is the agent of their communication. The Trinity is ever harmonious in acts of beneficence; the Divine fountain is inexhaustible.
Learn.—1. The broad, deep charity of the apostolic spirit. 2. The scope and temper of the prayers we should offer for the race.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.—Verses 3–5.
The Causes of Ministerial Thanksgiving.
It is customary with the apostle to begin his epistles with the ardent expression of thanksgiving. This showed the devout habit of his mind, his constant and emphatic recognition of the grand source of good, and his deep interest in the spiritual condition of those to whom he wrote.
I. Thanksgiving an essential element in prayer.—“We give thanks, . . . praying always for you” (ver. 3). The participle marks the thanksgiving as part of the prayer, and the adverb makes it prominent, indicating that when they prayed for them they always gave thanks. There is no true prayer without thanksgiving. Gratitude intensifies the soul’s sense of dependence on God and prompts the cry for the needed help; and, on the other hand, earnest prayer naturally glides into fervent thankfulness. As one sin is interlinked with and produced by another, so the use of one grace begets another. The more temporal things are used, the more they wear and waste; but spiritual things are strengthened and increased with exercise. Every spiritual grace has in it the seed of an endless reproductiveness. Underlying every thanksgiving for others is a spirit of tender, disinterested love. Moved by this passion, the apostle, from the midst of imprisonment and sorrow, could soar on the wings of gratitude and prayer to heaven. “Thanksgiving will be the bliss of eternity.”
II. The Being to whom all thanksgiving is due.—“To God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (ver. 3). God is the Father of Jesus Christ, not only as God, by an eternal generation and communication of His whole essence unto Him in a method to us mysterious and ineffable, but also as man by virtue of the personal union of the two natures in Christ, and in a special sense exceeding every other way in which He is Father to man or angels. Thus, God and the Father of our Lord Jesus are one; the particle “and” being exegetic of the same thing, not copulative of something different. All our blessings have their source in the bosom of the Divine Father. Christ is the only revealer of the Father, and the active agent in bestowing the paternal benefits on humanity. The paternal aspect of the Divine character as unfolded by Jesus Christ is most fascinating and assuring; and the loving heart delights to trace its blessings up to the Parent of all good and to render Him devout and grateful praise.
III. This thanksgiving was grounded on the reputation of their faith in the Author of Christianity.—“Since we heard of your faith in Christ” (ver. 4).