Inspiring Work

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We're in the midst of a series based on the apostle Paul's first letter to the Thessalonians. Here's the backstory: The apostle Paul travels to the large seaport town of Thessalonica, and within a relatively short period of time, a number of people receive the message of the gospel and become Christians. But Paul has to leave town rather abruptly because of the opposition that he faced from others in the city.

So now several months have passed, and Paul has received a report on how the Thessalonians are doing from his colleague, Timothy. And therefore, like a good pastor, he writes a letter to the Christians in Thessalonica in order to address some of the specific questions and concerns that they had. Now at this point they've only been Christians for a matter of months. They're living in a Greco-Roman, pagan city, and they now believe very different things about the world than their friends and neighbors and colleagues, and so they're confused. And it's not hard to see why. They want to live an authentic Christian life in response to the gospel, but they need guidance. So where do you think they were confused?

Based on Paul's response, we can do a little mirror reading of this letter, and we can determine that they were confused about essentially three things: sex, work, and death. It doesn't get much more foundational than that, does it? We can't function properly as human beings without some basic understanding of the core aspects of human existence. And so this has been our theme. Last week we explored what Paul had to say about sex. Next week we'll consider death. This week we turn to the topic of work. It seems that some — not all, but some — of the Christians in Thessalonica had gotten confused about how to think about work. And this was not merely a matter of philosophical debate, because their confusion was actually wreaking havoc on their relationships with one another, and that's why it's so serious.

Now over the last several weeks, we've been discussing how the central theme of this letter from beginning to end is the power of the gospel. When we place the gospel in the center of our heart and our life, it unleashes the power of God in the world. And so the gospel transforms lives, it creates community, it catalyzes mission, it instills devotion, and here we see that it inspires our work. And so as we turn to 1 Thessalonians 4, I'd like us to consider three things this morning: Let's consider what Paul tells us about 1) the distortion of work, 2) the dignity of work, and 3) the destiny of work.

⁹Now concerning brotherly love you have no need for anyone to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love one another, ¹⁰for that indeed is what you are doing to all the brothers throughout Macedonia. But we urge you, brothers, to do this more and more, ¹¹and to aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you, ¹²so that you may walk properly before outsiders and be dependent on no one.

The Distortion of Work

Well first let's consider the distortion of work. At the beginning of this chapter, Paul reminds the Thessalonians that he had previously given them instructions. And that shows us that when God calls us into a relationship with himself, he doesn't merely give us ideas or things to believe, but he actually calls us to live our life a certain way in response to his gospel, not as a way to win his love, but rather as a demonstration that we already have it. And so now Paul urges these Christians in Thessalonica to follow those instructions — to do so more and more, so that they might walk and live in a way in order to please God.

But it seems at least some of them had gotten confused about how to approach their work, and here's why. One of the striking features of this letter is that Paul refers to the promised coming of Jesus in literally every chapter. This was a regular part of Paul's teaching. He not only taught Christians that Jesus lived, died, rose again, and ascended to the right hand of the Father, but that He would come again. The resurrection of Jesus was just the beginning. One day, Jesus promised that he would return and finish what he started, that he would usher in a whole new creation, that he would make all things new. And this is referred to as the coming of the Lord. It's what we're about to celebrate during the Advent season. The word Advent means coming. So, Paul refers time and time again to the promised coming of Jesus, and he suggests that you've always got to be ready for it.

Now I'm sure you're probably familiar with the fact that there are some Christians who like to draw up graphs and charts to try to line out where biblical prophecies might match up with world events in order to predict the coming of the Lord. But the irony, of course, is that Jesus said over and over again that you cannot predict the day of his coming; you can only prepare for it. So in Matthew 24, for example, Jesus said no one knows the day or the hour of His coming — not even the Son, not even Jesus himself, but only the Father. And Paul picks up on this teaching of Jesus in the immediately following chapter, 1 Thessalonians 5, and he says, “The Day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.” If you knew the night that your house was going to be broken into, you would have stayed up all night to defend your home. The point is, you can't predict when he will return, so don't even try. All you can do is be ready. So this was a regular feature of Paul's teaching.

But apparently some of the Thessalonians took this teaching to the opposite extreme, and that's what led to this distortion. They assumed that Jesus could come back at any moment, and therefore they stopped working. If Jesus could come back at any moment, well then hey, we don't have to go to work today! And that's why Paul seeks to correct their understanding. Now we know that this is true because in the next chapter, Paul returns to this theme, and he reminds the Thessalonians in 1 Thessalonians 5:14 to admonish the idol. So they figured if Jesus is going to come back at any moment, then we can kick back and relax and enjoy ourselves. They embraced a sort of a “YOLO” mentality. You only live once, so enjoy it while you can.

Now, don't get me wrong, there's a very good and important place for rest and recreation. But here's why this was a problem. Some of them stopped working, but then they became financially dependent upon others within the church community to support them because they were no longer earning a living for themselves. Now this is subtle, but we know that's the case based on the first few verses in this passage. Here Paul is employing a well-known rhetorical device in the ancient world, and it sort of went like this. You would write, “I don't even need to mention [a particular topic],” but then you just did. This is sort of like what parents might do. You know, a parent might stand in the hallway and say to their child, “I'm not even going to mention the state of your bedroom,” but you just did. You may not have gone into a lot of detail, but you did communicate to your child that you are displeased with the messiness of their room. That's precisely what Paul does here at the very beginning, when he says, “Now concerning brotherly love, you have no need for anyone to write to you. For you yourselves have been taught by God to love one another.” Now that's true, but there's a problem.

So Paul says, “I have no need to write to you about brotherly love,” but in fact, he does. Why? Well, the Thessalonians knew that when God adopts us, we not only become sons and daughters of God, but we become brothers and sisters of one another. And the Thessalonians got it. They understood this. We belong to one another. We have a responsibility to love and care for one another. They got it, perhaps better than most. If, for example, you turn to 2 Corinthians 8, this is one of the most important passages in the whole New Testament on Christian giving. And what you read there is the same thing you read here in 1 Thessalonians 4: 10. The Christians in Thessalonica had become famous. They had literally become famous for their generosity. Everybody in the whole region of Macedonia knew about their generosity. They gave not only according to their means but even beyond their means. So they gave sacrificially. And that was wonderful. That was beautiful. That's the way it's supposed to be.

The only problem is that there were some people within the church who were taking advantage of their generosity. See, let me put this as delicately as I can. It's one thing if you can't work, or if you can't find work, or if you can't find enough work, but it's another thing if you can work but you are unwilling to, and then you become dependent upon those with more means than yourself to provide and support you all under the auspices of Christian love. It's one thing to be unable to work; it's another to be unwilling to work and then to become financially dependent on others.

So Paul here provides us with some important principles when it comes to Christian giving. In Acts 4 we read that the earliest Christians were so committed to one another that they were willing to even sell their possessions and then distribute to each according to need. So if we put Acts 4 together with 2 Corinthians 8, what we learn is that we're called to give sacrificially according to our ability, and we're also called to give responsibly according to need. The trick, of course, is always trying to tell the difference between legitimate needs and spurious ones. And apparently, some of the needs that were being addressed in Thessalonica were regarded by Paul and others as being spurious ones.

The Dignity of Work

So what was the problem? Some people had a distorted understanding of work, and as a result, they were refusing to pull their own weight, and they were relying on others for financial support, and that was damaging their relationships with one another. But then next, Paul turns from the distortion of work to the dignity of work. So if you're confused about how we should think about work as Christians — what's the right way to do it — in verse 11, Paul underscores the dignity of work by telling us three things. He tells us: Make it your ambition to 1) live a quiet life, 2) mind your own affairs, and 3) work with your hands.

Live a Quiet Life

Now the first statement is striking, and it probably even seems paradoxical. It's almost as if Paul is saying make it your ambition to have no ambition. Make it your ambition to live a quiet life. What is he driving at here? On the one hand, it is possible to denigrate work. We can treat our work as nothing more than a necessary evil; we just have to grin and bear it. It's rise and grind every day. All we're doing is engaging in the work in order to get a paycheck, nothing more. We rise and grind so that we can get on to the good stuff, like the next vacation, until that time when we don't need to work anymore.

My grandfather retired the year that I was born, and we lived in the same town. He was a civil engineer. He had worked in the construction business. So when he retired, we would pal around together. I'd go to the lumber yard with him. We would build things together. And so when I finally made it to kindergarten and my kindergarten teacher, Miss Hines, asked the class, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I raised my hand and said, “retired.” I think my grandfather had a pretty good thing going. So on the one hand, it's possible to denigrate work. We see it as just a necessary evil, a means of paying the bills. We're only in it for the paycheck.

But it's also possible to deify work, to lift it up, to make it ultimate. Some people work to live. Other people live to work. They treat their work as a god unto itself, because the primary way in which they're trying to find meaning or value or purpose in life is through their work. But the problem, of course, is that no matter how much you achieve, it's never, ever enough. Our ambitions always outstrip our actual achievements. Imagine you get the dream job, you get promoted, you get published, you get a platform, you finally move into that corner office, and then what? Sometimes it seems that as soon as we close our fingers around the prize, it might seem like nothing at all.

So the problem, of course, is that against this restless temptation to do more and more, to achieve more and more, Paul is telling us to live a quiet life. Rather than turning our work into our Lord, we're called to work heartily as unto the Lord, as Paul says in Colossians 3. Some people work to live, others live to work, but as Christians we’re called to work and live for the Lord. That's why Paul says in 1 Corinthians 10, whatever you do, do it all to the glory of God. Do everything unto him.

Mind Your Own Affairs

But secondly, Paul tells us not only to live a quiet life but to mind your own affairs. Paul is mindful of the fact that sometimes, if you don't have enough to do, it's easy to get into trouble. I see that a lot with my kids. So I wonder how would you respond to this question: What do you think is the root of all evil? The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard had an interesting answer to that question. The root of all evil, he said, is boredom. It’s easy to get into trouble when we don't have enough to do. And so in 2 Thessalonians 3, Paul has to return to this theme. He writes a second letter to the Thessalonians, and he returns to this theme again. And he says, I hear that some of you are walking in idleness, not busy at work but busybodies. See if you're not busy with good work, it's easy to become a busybody, sticking your nose into places where it doesn't belong.

Work With Your Hands

So according to Paul, the antidote to being a busybody is to be busy at good work. In verse 11, he says, “work with your hands, as we instructed you.” And this is a far more explosive statement than you probably even realize. Remember, the Thessalonians had only been Christians for a few months at this point. They're living in this pagan, Greco-Roman city. And the Greeks in the ancient world were dualists. They believed that the material world was bad and the spiritual world was good, and therefore they elevated the life of contemplation — the life of a philosopher — but they considered manual labor to be beneath them. Any form of manual labor was considered degrading. No one should have to do it. It was reserved strictly for slaves. But Christianity, uniquely in the first century, gives dignity to any and all forms of work, including and even especially manual labor. And that's why Paul will repeatedly refer to the fact that he worked with his own hands as a tentmaker, and so did Jesus before him as a carpenter.

In the Bible, work is intrinsically good because God presents himself as a worker, as a maker, as a creator, as a leader, as an artist, as an author, as an investor, as a risk-taker. Think about it. God took on enormous risk by creating this whole world and placing us within it. He risked everything for us in order to bring this world into being. So the Bible affirms the intrinsic dignity of all work. Consider the contrast. In ancient Greek myths, the gods are usually lounging around, drinking wine and eating grapes. But that's not the God of the Bible. No, from the very first pages, God is working, bringing something new into existence that wasn't there before.

When Genesis 2 describes how God creates our first parents, God literally gets his hands dirty and makes the first man out of the dust. And even before the fall, even before humanity's fall into sin and misery, God gives our first parents work to do. He places them in a garden to work it and to keep it. And after the fall, God does not curse work. He curses the ground, so now our work will be more difficult, more painful, but it is still intrinsically good. And we have every reason to believe that when God does finish what he has started through the resurrection of Jesus and ushers in a new creation, we have every reason to believe that even in the new heavens and the new earth, we will have work to do. We're not going to be playing harps on top of clouds. No, work is intrinsically good. So we can assume that even in the new creation, God will have good work for us to do (although I might need to get a new job).

I think that this is important for us to hear, because I think that many Christians today continue to be influenced more by ancient Greek philosophy than by the Bible. Because there are so many Christians today who continue to be dualist; we just draw the lines in a different place. We don't necessarily draw the line between the life of contemplation and manual labor, but we might draw the line between what we call the sacred and the secular. We might assume that it's the religious professionals — the pastors, the missionaries, the full-time Christian workers — who have an actual vocation, a calling from God, but everybody else has a mere occupation, just a job. As if there could be second-class citizens within the Kingdom of God. Or here's a new, modern spin on that divide: The divide may not be between the sacred and the secular, but we might think that there is a split between working for a mission-driven organization and doing something a little bit less inspiring.

But Christianity shows us that this distinction between the sacred and the secular or the mission-driven and the mundane is a false dichotomy, because every sphere of life gives us an opportunity to serve God's purposes in the world, and therefore God calls all of us to a vocation. In fact, most of us have multiple vocations, multiple ways of serving God's purposes. These vocations all overlap with one another, but every last one of us has a calling from God to serve him in both the church and in the world. And it's not limited to what you do for a living. Your vocation could be paid, unpaid, full-time, part-time, skilled, unskilled. It doesn't matter. We all have a calling, and we're called to serve him. We're called to do all things unto the Lord. Which is why I love the way that Martin Luther King, Jr. once put it. He says,

If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michaelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, “Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.”

Some people work to live, some people live to work, but a Christian lives and works for the Lord.

The Destiny of Work

We've considered what Paul has to say about the distortion of work and the dignity of work. The final question we have to ask ourselves is, why does any of this matter? So let me briefly say a word about the destiny of work. Why does Paul want us to approach work in the right way? And the answer is, because it affects our relationships both in the church and out in the world.

First of all, Paul is concerned about relationships within the body of Christ in Thessalonica, and so he says in verse 12, “be dependent on no one.” So he calls us to a healthy independence and a healthy interdependence. We're called to belong to one another, but we're not supposed to be a burden to one another, so he warns us against taking advantage of the generosity of others and developing unhealthy dependencies.

But there's more to it than that, because Paul as always has a missional concern for writing. He doesn't want anything to discredit the early Christian movement and to prevent the gospel from sounding forth. He knows that if we don't handle our affairs well in terms of our work or our financial giving that it could discredit the early Christian movement. So we need to be wise in terms of how we approach our work and how we approach our giving. That's why, in verse 12, he calls us to “walk properly before outsiders.” He calls us to strive to be the best workers that we can be, so that rather than being repelled by the gospel, people might be attracted to it. So that the way in which we approach work and generosity would be so attractive, and it would bust all the categories of those around us, that people would be compelled to draw near to the community in order to meet the person of Jesus. So there's a missional purpose to work. It points beyond itself. God has destined our work for a purpose. The question is: How do we pursue that destiny?

On Thursday night I shared this story with some of the young professionals who had gathered together to talk about vocation. When I was a sophomore in college, I took an Introduction to Modern Art class. And there I was, sitting in a large lecture room. The lights went out, and the professor began to project slides on the screen. We began with the post-impressionists: Gauguin, Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec, and van Gogh. And I saw a painting on the screen by van Gogh that I had never, ever seen in my life before. I didn't even know it existed. The entire painting was of an open Bible. It took up the entire canvas. And if you looked closely, you could see that it was open to Isaiah 53. And this led me on a journey to try to find out what would have possessed van Gogh to paint this beautiful canvas of an open Bible. And what I learned was that van Gogh's father was a pastor of the Dutch Reformed Church, and when he died, van Gogh inherited his father's Bible as the eldest son, and so he painted this canvas in memory of his father just a few months after he had died.

But I learned more than just that. I learned that as a young man, van Gogh imagined that he would follow in his father's footsteps and become a pastor. So when he was 23 years old, he enrolled in seminary in Amsterdam, but he dropped out after a couple of months because he didn't have an affinity for the academic side of the Christian faith. Not long after that, he became a missionary. He literally became a missionary in a small mining village in Belgium. And so he's working there among the poor in this mining community, sharing with them the message of Jesus. But you know what happened? He got fired. The people who were responsible for this ministry were concerned that van Gogh wasn't taking very good care of himself. If the people that he was serving didn't have enough to eat, well then he didn't eat. If they didn't have a place to sleep, well then he slept in the dirt. So they were alarmed by his ascetic practices. But in addition to that, they also thought he was a terrible preacher.

So van Gogh is fired, and now he's a little bit disillusioned, trying to find his way in the world. He doesn't have his dad anymore. And at the age of 27, he writes a letter to his brother, Theo, saying, “How can I be of use? How can I be of service? There's something inside of me. What can it be?” But one year later, he came to the realization that he could pursue the very same themes that were so close to his heart — solidarity with the poor, a search for the infinite and the eternal — by becoming a painter rather than a pastor. And the rest is history.

My guess is that all of us, at one time or another, perhaps even right now, are asking the same question. How can I be of use? How can I be of service? There's something inside of me. What can it be? And how then do we go about discerning God's call upon our lives? To answer that question would take a whole other sermon. But let me just end with this: I love this quote by the author, Frederick Buechner, where he said, “The place God calls you is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.”

Jesus supremely exemplifies that for us. Because what is the world's greatest hunger? Whether we realize it or not, the world's greatest hunger is that we would be rescued from the down drag of sin, so that we might be reconciled in relationship to God and see the whole world renewed. That's the world's greatest hunger. But what was Jesus' deepest gladness? What was his greatest joy? Hebrews 12 gives us a clue, because there we read, “for the joy that was set before Him, Jesus endured the cross, despising its shame.” So there was a joy. There was a joy that was so thrilling, so beautiful, so powerful, so all-consuming that it enabled Jesus to endure the cross. It enabled him to go through it all and despise its shame.

But what was that joy? What did Jesus not yet have? What could Jesus only obtain by going through the cross rather than around it? He's the second person of the Trinity, the eternal Son of God. What could he only obtain by going through the cross? What was the joy that was set before him? It was you. It was you and me. It was the thought of being reconciled in relationship to us that was so thrilling, so inspiring to him that it made the horrors of the cross seem as nothing to him. That's what motivated and inspired him to press on.

So you see the place where Jesus' deep gladness and the world's great hunger met was at the cross. And in a smaller, derivative way, that will be true for us as well. The place where God calls us will be cross-shaped. Jesus embraced his calling, his vocation for your sake, and now he's inviting us to embrace our calling, our vocation, for his sake.

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