You also became imitators of us and of the Lord, having received the word in much tribulation with the joy of the Holy Spirit, so that you became an example to all the believers in Macedonia and in Achaia. For the word of the Lord has sounded forth from you, not only in Macedonia and Achaia, but also in every place your faith toward God has gone forth, so that we have no need to say anything.

—1 Thessalonians 1:6-8

Since I began writing these weekly devotions, I discovered that one of the best ways to help me focus on my work when my crazy brain wants to work on seven other things instead is to listen to music. It has to be instrumental music because if there are words, I’ll just end up giving my husband a private concert, but when I find a good ambiance music video on YouTube with a slow, relaxing tempo, it calms all the chaos in my mind and allows me to fully focus on my work.

When Paul wrote this letter to the church at Thessalonica, one of the reasons he wrote it was because the Christians there were being persecuted for their faith, and I think that’s why verse eight caught my eye. Because even in the midst of persecution, “the word of the Lord…sounded forth” from them so loudly that the sound waves were rippling out into the cities and even the countries around them.

The original word translated as “sounded forth” describes a sound reverberating loudly and clearly. Paul describes the impact of the church at Thessalonica as if it were the beautiful vibrato of a singer filling every inch of a concert hall with perfect acoustics, except the thing reverberating so clearly is the Word of God.

What a beautiful and pleasing offering that must have been to God and what a beautiful blessing to the people close enough to hear!

So how do we become people whose souls send the Word of God reverberating out to the people around us? We have to build up our spiritual acoustics. 

I didn’t know very much about acoustics before writing this, so I had to do a little research. Turns out there are two main factors that architects focus on when designing the acoustics of a particular space: the shape of the space and the materials the space is built from. Makes sense. Different-shaped spaces will cause the sound waves to bounce off walls at different angles, and some materials do a better job of absorbing or reflecting sound waves than others. 

A similar principle applies when we’re talking about the acoustics of our souls. There are two things that really matter: Who we look like spiritually and what we’re made of. And in verse six, we get to see both of these in action in the Thessalonians.

First, we see Who they looked like. Paul writes that the church at Thessalonica had decided to become imitators of Jesus as well as their mentors in the faith who were striving to be Christlike themselves. That was their shape.

The material they were made of comes a little later in the verse when Paul says they had “received the word in much tribulation with the joy of the Holy Spirit.” Their foundation was God’s Word which led to a joy no tribulation or persecution could cut through.

The result, when you add these two components together, was a group of people so aligned with God and His ways that their lives resounded with His goodness and truth loud enough for the news to reach Paul hundreds of miles away in a different country. 

We’re always going to be under construction. For as long as we are on earth we will be growing and changing, and while much of the work is in the hands of the Architect, we do have a responsibility—to ensure that we are seeking to take on the shape of our Savior and to always be building our foundation on the Word of God. When we do that, it opens the door for God to use us to send His Love and Truth reverberating into the lost world around us.