Repentance means that they had turned around, but also that they were turning around. It was a definitive break from their former lives. But it was also continuing to walk away from their old way and learning to walk a new way. Repentance isn’t about perfection; it is about direction. If you are walking towards God, you are living a repentant life. There will be some steps back and some steps forward at times. But the direction of your life will always get turned around towards Jesus.

Turning to God from idols and serving the living and true God, these should be happening together. That is not only the goal but the only way to truly repent. It is two parts of the same process. You see, people can leave an idol, and not turn to Jesus. They can take up some other idol. And some people start serving Jesus, but they still cling to an idol. The way forward in this process is that you learn to leave your idols behind like the Thessalonians did. How was that? They turned from their idols in order to serve Christ. Part of successfully putting off the old is by putting on the new.

And this is a process. You don’t become completely repentant or fully sanctified the first day you get saved. The first time you repent isn’t the last time you repent. In the first of his famous 95 Theses, Martin Luther said, “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, 'Repent,' he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance." A repentant lifestyle is by necessity an ongoing process, a walk. Even if we never falter, we are all still on a road of repentance, towards God, with faith in Jesus Christ.

But we get impatient and we get frustrated. We have turned, and yet we are still in “the process of the turn.” Yet no matter how well you are doing, it is still a process. When Paul says you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, you see the process happening there. And Paul was talking to them about their process of repentance by pointing to the other evidences of salvation that he mentions in 1 Thessalonians 1:3-8. Paul points to his own process in Philippians 3:8-14. And he gets specific about the process and how that looks in regards to specific sins in Ephesians 4:17-32.

Here is a brief, practical way that describes the process. You go from “I don't need it,” to “I don't want it,” to “I can't stand it,” with the ultimate reason being because God’s not in it. You can be “done with” something for a long time before your motivation is as sanctified as it can be.

In Paul’s day, people were still bowing down and sacrificing to manmade idols of wood, metal, and stone, etc., but not so much today. But the concept is still the same. People had served idols because they felt that they must serve them or they would not receive the protection or blessing they wanted. People today have idols when they think there are things they cannot live without, or that they cannot be happy without.

The word “serve” in vs.9 is from a Greek word that means slave. People are slaves to their idols, and they become slaves of Christ. They drop this other thing that they are in fear of losing, in fear of not having, in fear of thinking they cannot live without it, that they won’t be happy without it. And they now serve Jesus, in the fear of the Lord. Jesus has become the one ultimate thing in their lives, the one thing that everything else revolves around, the one thing that matters most, the one thing they cannot live without, the one thing that they find their significance, satisfaction, and security in. Instead of being a slave to some dead thing they are a slave to the One who is Life itself.

Now let me tell you that you can do this, if you will apply your faith. You see, in the path of the process, you begin to discover something. The process isn’t just some matter of an increasing willpower. Rather, it is a truth that you need to tenaciously hold onto, and have faith in, because it makes all the difference. Here it is: Repentance toward holiness is not some awful process of losing your happiness.

This is where faith comes in, because the battle is that the world, your flesh, and the devil try and convince you otherwise. They try and deceive you into thinking that holiness means no happiness. Every time you try and tackle some sin, that old lie comes back at you again. But the truth is that holiness means you find new reasons for happiness, and being happy in Jesus and the things of God, this is how you find true joy, without having to find some temporary fix or sinful coping mechanism.