Your Work Matters

Scripture—1 Thessalonians 4:10-12

[Y]ou do love all the brothers and sisters throughout Macedonia. But we urge you, beloved, to do so more and more, to aspire to live quietly, to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we directed you, so that you may behave properly toward outsiders and be dependent on no one.

Devotion

After urging the Thessalonian Christians to grow in love, Paul and his co-writers add several exhortations. Aspire to live quietly! Mind your own affairs! Work with your hands! As we read these instructions almost two millennia after they were written, they can seem rather strange. Why did Paul and his colleagues urge the Thessalonians to do these particular things?

Often, when we encounter something in one of the Pauline letters that is difficult to decipher, our problem is that we don’t know enough about the context of what we are reading. In the case of 1 Thessalonians 4:10-12, for example, most commentators believe that certain immature believers, assuming that the return of Christ was just around the corner, stopped working. They relied completely on their fellow Christians for financial support and used their spare time to meddle in other people’s business.

This interpretation receives strong support from the letter we call 2 Thessalonians. In that letter, Paul and his team state that some of the believers in Thessalonica were “living in idleness, mere busybodies, not doing any work” (2 Thessalonians 3:11). In 2 Thessalonians they are instructed “to do their work quietly and earn their own living” (2 Thessalonians 3:12). It is reasonable to assume, therefore, that such people were already living as unemployed busybodies at the time in which 1 Thessalonians was written. When the gentle rebuke in chapter 4 of the first letter didn’t work, Paul and Co. were much clearer and firmer in their second letter.

In today’s Life for Leaders devotion, I want to focus on the exhortation “to work with your hands” (1 Thessalonians 4:11). It’s likely that this command was a direct response to those in Thessalonica who had stopped working and were living in “idleness.” They needed to get to work. That makes practical sense. But why did Paul and his co-writers mention hands?

Of course, much work in the ancient world was manual. Most people did work with their hands. But it’s possible that Paul and his team mentioned hands for an additional reason. The Greeks, whose culture dominated the Roman world, looked down on manual labor. They believed it was appropriate for slaves but not for others. That negative attitude toward working with one’s hands may have been part of what led certain Thessalonian Christians to stop working, in addition to their belief that Jesus was soon to return. But Paul and his crew thought differently about work. Influenced by the Jewish tradition going all the way back to the opening chapters of the Bible, they saw work, including manual labor, as honorable. It was part of the goodness of creation. So, the exhortation “work with your hands” wasn’t only a pragmatic imperative. It also expressed a theological conviction about the value and goodness of work.

No matter the kind of work you do, as long as it’s morally good, your work is part of your living as a faithful Christian. God is glorified when you use your hands – or your mouth, your brain, your feet, your arms, or you name it – to do good work. So, whatever work you do today, recognize that it matters. It matters to those you are serving and it matters to God.

Find all Life for Leaders devotions here. Explore what the Bible has to say about work at the unique website of our partners, the the Theology of Work Project online commentary. Reflection on today’s Life for Leaders theme can be found here: The Problem of Idleness in Thessalonica (1 Thessalonians 4:9–12 and 2 Thessalonians 3:6–16)

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