2 Thessalonians 1:1,2

(1) В¶ Paul, and Silvanus, and Timotheus, unto the church of the Thessalonians in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ: (2) Grace unto you, and peace, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

It is really delightful to observe how uniformly the Apostle keeps in view the grace of God, when writing to the Churches. And as God's grace, in the everlasting love of his purpose, counsel, will, and pleasure, is the source and spring of all the blessings which follow in the Church of peace, and mercy in redemption, with all their blissful consequences, we may well account for the Apostle's beginning all he had to offer the Church in this manner.

I would beg the Reader to pause over it a moment, and consider some few of the wonderful properties of grace. The first, and best, and highest sense of it, as it relates to Jehovah's exercise of it towards the Church from all eternity, is, in itself, one of the most blessed subjects which can call up the exercise of our awakened faculties, either in time, or in eternity. Grace, in its original source and spring, hath no one motive but as it arose in the divine mind. No predisposing cause, but God's pleasure. Neither worthiness, nor unworthiness, in the persons on whom he causeth his grace to shine, being in the least concerned. It would cease to be grace, if the Lord had been moved to exercise it from the foreview of merit, in any of those on whom he bestowed it, or if he withheld it from the knowledge of undeservings among any of his creatures. Paul elsewhere defines grace with this divine property. If by grace, (saith he), then is it no more works: otherwise grace is no more grace. Romans 11:1. Reader! do not overlook this scriptural account of grace, from the exercise of which all our mercies flow. Redemption by Christ, regeneration by the Holy Ghost, justification before God in Christ without works; yea against all undeservings, sanctification in Christ, the forming the spirit anew in Christ Jesus, together with all those gracious dispositions formed in the new nature by the Holy Ghost, all, all flow as so many streams from this one fountain. And the whole sum and substance of the Bible, in the ultimate design of Jehovah going forth in acts of creation, redemption, providence, grace, and everlasting happiness to the Church, is to this one point, and no other; to the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he hath made us accepted in the Beloved. Ephesians 1:6.