So clearly refers back to what has preceded, implying “because Timothy has come back with such good news.” This is what encouraged Paul and Silas. At the end of the verse, Paul indicates that Timothy’s message is about the Thessalonians’ faith. Since so must be related to the encouragement and not to an expression of trouble and suffering, it may be necessary to place the phrase in all our trouble and suffering at the end of the first sentence of this verse. This may be particularly important if the phrase in all our trouble and suffering must be turned into a clause.

In all our trouble and suffering. Paul uses here two nouns which are close to one another in meaning, and are both often used in passages about the last days. Trouble suggests the distress which comes from being under pressure, and having little or no freedom of action; suffering implies primarily, though not exclusively, bodily harm resulting from an enemy’s attack. Since leaving Thessalonica, Paul has been rejected at Berea and Athens and has met with many difficulties at Corinth (see 1 Corinthians 4.11; 9.12; 2 Corinthians 11.6). In all our trouble and suffering is often translatable as a clause of what is sometimes called “attendant circumstance,” for example, “while we have been undergoing so much trouble and have been suffering.”

Faith, in this context, is seen as a continuing state of reliance on Christ, rather than an individual act of trust. Its meaning is amplified in the next verse by stand firm in your life in union with the Lord. It involves a relation of trust and dependence which, as Paul suggests in verse 10, can deepen and mature. It has a content which must increase and grow.

There is a direct causative relation between your faith and the encouragement which Paul and his colleagues received, but since in many languages faith must be expressed as a verb, the causative relation may be indicated by a conjunction such as “because” or “since,” for example, “because of the way in which you trust Christ, we are encouraged.” The focus here is not upon the fact that the Thessalonian Christian had believed in Christ, but upon the manner in which they were continuing in their faith. Phillips changes the sentence into the active: “This has cheered us, my brothers.”

Quoted with permission from Ellingworth, Paul and Nida, Eugene A. A Handbook on Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians. (UBS Handbook Series). New York: UBS, 1976. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .