1 Thessalonians: 1:1b.The church is a community which lives in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

We notice in passing the unselfconscious way in which Paul brackets ‘God the Father’ and ‘the Lord Jesus Christ’, as being together the source of the church’s life. Later (in verse 10) he will call Jesus the ‘Son’ of God. Already within twenty years of the death and resurrection of Jesus the coupling of the Father and the Son as equal is the universal faith of the church. This simple fact is enough to undermine the teaching of those who claim that the New Testament nowhere attributes deity to Jesus. --John Stott, because 1 Thess was written 50 or 51 AD, twenty years after Christ died & rose in 33AD