Introduction: 1 Thessalonians 4:9–12

We’re going through the book of 1 Thessalonians and then 2 Thessalonians. We’re looking at Paul’s two letters to this church. It was a church filled with young converts that Paul had to leave precipitously—he had to get out of town for his life. As a result, he writes back to them, and we see a great deal in these letters about how Paul builds up new converts and establishes people in the faith.

“Now about brotherly love we do not need to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love each other. And in fact, you do love all the brothers throughout Macedonia. Yet we urge you, brothers, to do so more and more. Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody.”

This is God’s Word.

The Modern Doctrine of Work

Paul says, “Warn those who are idle.”

Paul is not condemning unemployment—that’s people who want jobs but can’t find them. He’s condemning idleness, which is people who have the possibility of working but don’t want to work.

At first, this statement by Paul seems kind of dreary

It seems like he’s scolding them. And who wants to come and sit and listen to a sermon on why we should work hard? What are you doing here today?

That’s actually what I thought as I looked at this. Everybody knows we should work. But in getting ready for this particular sermon, I got the chance to reread an essay I read long ago by Dorothy Sayers. She was a British writer, essayist, novelist, and playwright. She wrote a great essay called “Why Work?”

In it, she says a couple of things that are quite important. Dorothy Sayers pointed out that society as a whole, and individuals in particular, are dying because they do not have the revolutionary old biblical doctrine of work.

She says there’s a view of work in the Bible that’s revolutionary, and people in modern society are dying for lack of it.

The Biblical Definition of Work

Sayers says the modern doctrine of work, which has replaced the old biblical doctrine, is this: Work is what you do for a living. Work is that through which you make money so you can do what you really want to do.

She quotes a surgeon friend of hers who put it very nicely. He says, essentially, that nobody today works for the sake of the thing they do. The result of the work is only a byproduct of their real aim. The real aim in work is money or status.

Doctors practice medicine not primarily to relieve suffering but to make a living. The patient is something that happens along the way. Lawyers accept briefs not because of their passion for justice but because this is the profession that enables them to live.

Then he points out—and you have to remember this was a British man talking during or right after World War II—that the reason many men found themselves so happy and satisfied in the Army was that, for the first time in their lives, they were doing something not for the sake of the pay, which was miserable, but for the sake of getting something done that really needed doing.

Dorothy Sayers gives us a definition of work. I’ll paraphrase it for you.

Though Paul’s statement here is not what you might call a thorough exposition of the biblical doctrine of work, it assumes it and refers to it. I’d like to show you how it’s underneath what Paul says.

Sayers puts the biblical doctrine of work like this:

“Work is the gracious expression of creative energy in the service of others.”

The biblical doctrine of work has two practical guidelines and two motivational principles. They’re all here, directly or indirectly alluded to.

I’ll go to the practical guidelines first. They’ll help you choose and enjoy your work. But unless we understand the motivational principles underneath the practical guidelines, you won’t see the complete, radical nature of the biblical doctrine of work—which we desperately need.

One of the main reasons you and I need this is because, unless you understand the biblical doctrine of work, you’ll never find rest.

That’s the irony.

There’s a kind of work that arises from rest, and there’s a kind of restless work.

Practical Guideline #1: Work as Service to Others

The first practical guideline is that the functional reason you should do any job is because it helps other people.

You shouldn’t do a job primarily because it makes money for you or primarily for the status. More important should be whether it makes you useful to other people.

Paul says, essentially, “I don’t need to write you much about love. You know about love. God taught you about love. You are very loving people.”

Then this new sentence starts: “Yet we urge you, brothers, to do so more and more, making it your ambition to lead a quiet life, mind your own business, and work with your hands.”

In other words, Paul says, “You all think you know a lot about love, but unless you are working, you’re not loving.”

Your work is the way you love.

He says, “I want you to love more and more.” How? Get to work.

At the very end, he gives you a hint of this. He says, “So that you will not be dependent on anybody.”

In other words, a Christian says, “I don’t want to be a drain on the community. I want to be an investor in the community. I don’t want to be draining out of the common good; I want to be investing into the common good.”

You can get a job that makes a great deal of money but basically doesn’t help people very much. Hopefully, you can get a job that makes a lot of money and helps people. But if you have to choose, the first practical guideline is: Get a job that makes you useful. Get a job that helps people.

One of the most important facets of the biblical doctrine of work is that one of the main purposes of work is the common good.

We have to be a little careful about this. Very often Christians immediately think, “All I’m doing is making air conditioners,” or, “I’m making chairs,” or, “I’m on the maintenance crew of a highway. That’s not helping people. I want to move into the inner city and build homes,” or something like that.

But you have to recognize something: Good work isn’t necessarily well-paying work. It’s not even necessarily highly skilled work. But all work that is good work is helpful work.

Very soon, my wife and I will go on vacation. We’ll get on a road and go someplace like Philadelphia. It only takes two or three hours to get there because somebody built a road. Somebody maintains the road. Somebody polices the road. Somebody cleans the road.

Without that, I think it would take weeks to get to Philadelphia.

You might think, “I build a road. I make asphalt. I create this or that.” But good work helps.

Good work is not necessarily high-paying work, and it’s not necessarily highly skilled work. Good work is work through which you are promoting the common good.

Work is an expression of love.

That’s the first practical guideline.

Practical Guideline #2: Work as a Calling

The second guideline is more alluded to in the passage. Again, the translation isn’t as helpful as it could be.

Paul says, “Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business.”

It sounds like Paul is scolding them: “Get to work. Stop being such busybodies.”

However, commentators who study this passage have always been a little concerned about this translation. Literally, what Paul says is something more like: Strive for quiet. Strive for rest.

Clearly, the idle Thessalonian Christians who were not working were experiencing a disquiet. They were experiencing a lack of ease—a restlessness, a boredom. They tended to complain. They tended to bother other people. But the point is that there was a disquiet inside, and Paul says the antidote for that is work.

This is an allusion to something that comes out in many other places.

The Bible says—and Protestant Reformers like Calvin and Luther really got a good handle on this—that the work you do should be work that fits with your abilities, talents, passions, interests, and desires.

In other words, the Bible says all work is a calling.

God calls you to do work that you’re equipped to do.

It’s a good idea to look inside and see whether or not there’s a quiet there. If there’s not, you may not be doing the work that you’re called to do. Or you may not be doing any work, because you are called to do work.

But you’re called to do certain kinds of work.

This doesn’t mean that every individual is called to just one job. Think of it like a spectrum of jobs—all the different possible kinds of work.

Your gifts, temperament, abilities, capacities, experience, and all the things that make you unique mean there is a range on that spectrum to which God has called you by who he has made you to be.

There may be hundreds of jobs in that range.

That’s exciting.

You’re supposed to look inside. You’re supposed to look at your quiet—or your lack of it—and say, “I need to find work that thrills me. I need to find work that inspires me, that gets a fire going—work I have a desire for, work I have a passion for.”‍

Integrating Your Gifts with the Good of Others

Now let’s put these two guidelines together.

You ought to do work, first of all, that fits you, but also benefits others.

I was reading a very good article about this, and a Christian man put it this way. He says, ask yourself, “What gets a fire in my belly? What do I have a passion about?”

Then secondly, “What can I do that I’m passionate about that leads to more peace and joy and justice in the world?”

As much as possible, you try to bring those two together.

Some people, in God’s gracious arrangement, find almost ideal jobs. You find jobs in which your calling, your insides, and the benefits of what you’re doing for other people all come together.

You find the ideal job.

Again, it may not be the best-paying job. It’s ideal if these two things come together: It’s something you’re passionate about and something that benefits people.

But many people don’t find that ideal job. They don’t find a job in which both their gifts and passions and significant benefits to other people all seem to come together.

Even there, I would press you on this.

Like many people, being a minister is a little bit like being an actor in this sense: You spend an awful lot of time getting ready to act and doing a lot of other things to make money that aren’t acting.

Ministers also have to go to school for such a long time that we spend a tremendous amount of time doing other things besides being ministers and speakers.

One of the things I realized years ago was that, when I had a job that really wasn’t a great mix of my gifts and benefiting other people—being a short-order cook in a golf shop, for example, wasn’t the ideal job for me—you can still take these two principles.

First, you can ask, “How can I use as much as possible of my particular gift mix to do this job in a way that fits me?”

If I’m a communicator but I’m working for a landscape maintenance crew, in what way could I use my gifts?

You can almost always find some way of putting yourself in a position where more of your gifts are tapped into.

On the other side, you also have to consider that maybe what you’re doing—sweeping a street, for example—doesn’t seem to be changing people’s lives, but it’s for the common good.

Even with an unideal job, try to fit it in with your gifts and remind yourself: “This is part of civilization. What I’m doing is benefiting people. I’m producing something. Maybe it doesn’t seem very significant, but I’m helping people. I’m loving people.”

When you fill your heart with that as a Christian, you can take unideal jobs and use these two practical principles to make them tolerable while you’re looking for a better one.

These two practical guidelines are incredibly important for finding a job or enjoying the job you’ve got.‍

The Danger of Working for Money or Status

But this isn’t enough.

We’ve already helped a little bit by saying that, when you’re looking for a job, you’re trying to answer God’s calling to you and benefit the people around you.

Your primary purpose should not be to make money or to get an identity or status from your work.

Yet I’ve found over the years that if I just give you those two practical guidelines, you might say, “That’s all very nice. I’m supposed to honor the talents God has given me. I’m supposed to benefit other people.”

But I continually find myself being pulled into doing my work for the money—or certainly for my identity and status.

When you identify with your work emotionally so that, if you’re not doing well in your work, you’re nobody, work either becomes too important in your life or too unimportant.

On the one hand, if it becomes too important, you burn out. You work too much. You go crazy. You’re completely wrapped up in it.

Or, because work is so draining, you go to the other side and say, “I’m just going to do something to get a paycheck.”

Then work becomes too unimportant. You don’t do your work well. You cut corners ethically. You don’t care that all you’re really doing is manufacturing trivialities and not helping anybody.

Work either becomes too important to you or not important enough.

Dorothy Sayers says it’s not just that, as a Christian, you are supposed to work for the benefit of others. You also have to make sure your work is a gracious expression of creative energy.

What does she mean by that?‍

Motivational Principle #1: Mirroring the Creator

First of all, you have to see your work as an expression of the energy of the Creator.

God is creative.

Interestingly enough, verse 11 says, “Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you.”

Why in the world does Paul say, “Work with your hands”?

Every commentator recognizes that this was a smack in the face of the dominant culture.

The Greeks and Romans believed, by and large, that work was degrading, but some kinds of work were less degrading than others.

Cicero says that if you get paid for manual labor or hard toil, that’s degrading. He even points out that retail is degrading.

The Greeks understood that if you got into the world of thought, the world of the mind, or the arts, at least then you weren’t doing anything too physical. That kind of work wasn’t as degrading.

Paul goes out of his way to say, “Work with your hands.”

He’s really saying to Christians, “Just because you’ve lived in a culture that thinks work is degrading—and that physical and manual labor is the most degrading—I don’t want you to be shaped by the culture.”

Paul is saying something the Bible says that no other religion says.

William Temple put it this way in his book Christianity and Social Order. Look at the Bible: creation, consummation, incarnation, resurrection. What do they all have in common?

God with his hands in the dirt.

In creation, God’s hands are in the dirt creating.

At the consummation, God is cleaning up after the great battle and building a city.

In the incarnation, God becomes physical.

In the resurrection, he redeems the physical.

The Greeks thought that, if there was a divine realm, you got to it by getting away from matter. You got away from work that brought you down into the world. Instead, you contemplated. You tried to escape it.

That’s not the Christian approach.

The Christian approach is that all work has dignity and all work has value.

No work is degrading because Jesus was a carpenter.

Because God is a Creator and loves to put his hands into the material world and create, a Christian knows that even if you’re bringing order out of chaos by sweeping the streets of New York, your work has value.

If you’re sweeping the streets or preaching a sermon, you’re doing essentially the same thing.

The Reformers—Calvin and Luther—would say that to sweep a street or preach a sermon is to bring order out of chaos. It’s taking the material world God loves and made and making it orderly, making it livable, and redeeming it.

Therefore, to sweep the street and to preach a sermon are both valuable work—valuable to God.

If you’re an artist, you’re doing what God did. He’s a Creator, and you’re creating.

But if you’re sweeping a street or I’m preaching a sermon, we’re all trying to do basically the same thing.

All of our work has value before God.

Jesus was a carpenter. God had his hands in the mud.

The first motivational principle, then, is that your job is to mirror your Master, who is the Creator and who loves this world.

We’re not being redeemed out of this world. We’re being redeemed for this world.

God invented souls and bodies, and he is redeeming souls and bodies.

Therefore, all work is valuable.‍

Motivational Principle #2: Working to Please God

The last motivational principle isn’t directly in this text. 

Up in chapter 4, verses 1 and 2, Paul says, “We instructed you how to live in order to please God.”

The important thing you have to realize is that Paul says here what he says in Ephesians and Colossians as well:

Fundamentally, you have to work to please God.

You have to work to please God—not your market segment, not your boss, not your supervisor.

God becomes your boss. God becomes your market segment. God becomes your audience. God becomes your supervisor.

At first you may say, “Oh no. That would be terrible.”

A lot of people would say that would be the worst possible thing.

You read Ephesians 6, where Paul essentially says, “When you do your work, don’t work for your boss. Work for God.”

Some people say, “That would be terrible. Right now, at least I can stretch my lunch break a little bit. My boss went to the Hamptons, and there was nobody around, so I did a lot of things I wouldn’t dare have done if the boss was there. If you’re telling me I have to work with God looking at me, my goodness!”

But you’re missing the point.

When the Bible says you should live in order to please God, that is not the same as saying you are to live in order to appease God.

You can do your work tomorrow in order to feel good about yourself, to have self-esteem, or even to appease God.

Plenty of people are moral, and they do their work and say, “I’m doing all this work because I want God to hear me. I want God to help me. I want God to answer my prayers. I want to feel good about myself.”

That’s trying to appease God.

Plenty of people are very moral, diligent, disciplined, and working like crazy to move up their career ladder. They’re saying, “I’m doing this to please my parents, to please God, to know I’m a good person.”

That’s not what the word please means.

When the Bible says, “Live in order to please God,” it means to live for the sheer pleasure of giving pleasure to God.

Living to appease God is not the same thing as living to please God.

Jonathan Edwards, in his book The Nature of True Virtue, lays it on the line in a way I’ve never seen anywhere else.

Edwards says unless you’ve experienced the grace of God, unless you know that you’re not saved by your work, unless you know that God embraces you because of Jesus’ work, then when you go to help the poor or when you go to your job—no matter what you do, as good as it seems to be—you’re doing it out of self-interest.

You never help the person or do the job for the sheer joy of the person or the sheer joy of the job. You’re always doing it in order to get something from God.

But if you know God loves you because of what Jesus has done, if you know God has embraced you because of his work, and you know you’re accepted, now when you move out into the world, you do the work for the sheer joy of pleasing your Master and for the sheer joy of the work itself.

You don’t love people in order to get something from them. You love people for who they are.

You don’t help the poor because it makes you feel good about yourself. You do it simply because the poor are valuable.

You don’t do things for God so that you get things from him. You do things simply to give joy to his heart because of what he’s done for you.

Edwards goes so far as to say it’s impossible to do anything of true virtue unless you’ve experienced the grace of God in the gospel, because otherwise you never do anything good simply for the sheer joy of its goodness—for the sheer joy of work well done, for the sheer joy of pleasing your Master who is in heaven, or for the sheer value of the person made in the image of God whom you’re helping.

Until you know that you’re not saved by your works but you’re saved by grace, everything you do is filled with self-interest.

Therefore, everything you do is filled with anxiety.

Eventually, everything you do will burn you out.‍

Rested Work vs. Restless Work

This is the great irony.

Until you learn to work for God’s sake, for people’s sake, and for the work’s sake—instead of for money’s sake and status’s sake—the work will not fulfill you.

Until you work not for your sake but for God’s sake, the work will not fulfill you.

That’s why Jesus says you have to lose yourself to find yourself.

If you work for personal fulfillment, work will either become too important to you or too unimportant. You’ll work yourself to death, or you’ll become completely cynical.

If you work for fulfillment, you get no fulfillment.

If you work for him, there will be quiet. There will be rest.

Don’t you see? There’s a kind of work that arises out of deep rest.

It says in Hebrews, “There remaineth a rest for the people of God.”

When you understand the gospel of what Jesus has done for you, you enter into that rest. You rest from your works. You rest from the need to find yourself and earn your sense of self-worth through your work.

Instead, you work in response to the rest.

That means you work in a way that’s good and excellent. Of course you’re working for the Lord—but you don’t overwork.

There’s a famous scene in Chariots of Fire. Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams are both running. Both are seeking the gold medal.

Remember what Eric Liddell says to his sister?

“I believe God made me for China. I do want to be a missionary. But he also made me fast. And when I run, I feel his pleasure.”

“When I run, I feel his pleasure.”

He made me fast. When I answer my calling and seek to please him because I know that I’m his child, I feel his pleasure.

Liddell ran very hard. He worked very hard. He got a gold medal.

On the other hand, you have Harold Abrahams. What does he say?

“I’m 24, and I’ve never known contentment. I’m forever in pursuit, and I don’t even know what it is I’m chasing.”

When he runs, he has ten seconds—because he was a sprinter—to justify his existence.

Do you see it?

Here are two men working very hard: one with joy and one without joy. One doesn’t even know what he’s after. The other certainly does.

And the point of the movie is that there was a limit to Liddell’s work because he ran for the pleasure of God.

He ran very hard, but there was a limit.

He didn’t run on Sundays.

The main meet is on Sunday? “I’m sorry. I always take Sundays off.”

Here’s a man who worked like crazy, but there was a border. There was a boundary. There was a limit.

He didn’t overwork.

If you work for God, God will never overwork you.

You overwork because you don’t have his Sabbath rest—the rest of the gospel—in your heart.‍

Come to Me and Find Rest

Jesus Christ looked at Mary and Martha.

Martha was running around, working like crazy. Mary was sitting at his feet.

Martha came up and said, essentially, “Why doesn’t she get to work?”

Jesus says Mary has found the proper priorities.

“Martha, Martha,” he says, “you’re anxious and troubled about many things.”

Come to me first. Get my rest first.

Then you will work much, much better.

You won’t overwork. You won’t underwork. And you’ll work so diligently that you’ll even work hard when the boss is in the Hamptons.

Jesus Christ says, “Come unto me, all ye who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

The reason you’ll work hard even when the boss isn’t there is because you’re not overworking in your soul.

What kind of work do you have?

Rested work or restless work?

“Come unto me, all ye who are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

Resources: 

Article: Why Work? | Dorothy Sayers

Book: Every Good Endeavor | Tim Keller