Believers should work hard

Paul cites two reasons why it is so important for Christians to work hard. Look at 1 Thessalonians 4:12. First, so that you may walk properly before outsiders. You see, lazy Christians disgrace the gospel. If people look at us and say, Is this what belief in Jesus Christ creates?—and if they see us as lazy people who are useless to others and not working hard, if you run a business and you are not honest, you do not have a good product, and you are not treating people with care—well, what will people think of the Christian faith? That is Paul’s reasoning. Able-bodied men especially, he says, who are not working hard to provide for themselves and their families, are a disgrace to God’s people. Consider 1 Timothy 5:8, where Paul wrote scathingly, If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his own household, he has denied the faith; he is worse than an unbeliever. In 2 Thessalonians 3:10, he will give this command: If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat. See, the point is that Christianity makes people better citizens and neighbours, better parents and relatives, and so unbelievers should be able to look at the way Christians work and live and at least respect us deeply. So that is Paul’s first concern—that you might walk respectably before the world.

Now, secondly, also in 1 Thessalonians 4:12, Christians should work hard so as not to be dependent on anyone: to be dependent on no one. Unbelievers should provide for ourselves so that others do not have to—so we are not a burden on other believers. Now, that exhortation does not apply to those who are not able to provide for themselves. We have people sometimes in our church who have an illness, or a sickness, or an accident, or maybe there is genuine unemployment—and they are trying for work and they can not find it. That is not what Paul is talking about. People like that should be helped by the church, and we should do so cheerfully. Paul’s point is, though, because that will generally be true, that those who are not really in need should work hard to provide for others. We should only be dependent if we really are. Otherwise, we should work hard to provide for those in need. We should not be a burden on the church, but we should contribute to others. You see, here is the point: that love does not take advantage of generosity but works hard to contribute to those in need. In fact, in Ephesians 4:1–32, Paul pointed to this kind of way of thinking as part of how the gospel changes the way someone lives Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labour, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need (Ephesians 4:28). Well, it is obvious that Paul considered the love of God at work in his people to be an important part of our witness to the world.

And so I think we can conclude this study by noticing that we are to have a brotherly love that is quiet on the one hand, it is busy on the other, and altogether, it is very revealing to the world about our God and his Christ and the gospel of salvation. And you know, according to church history, that is exactly what happened in the ancient world. Many people have done studies asking, How is it that this little, obscure band of Christ-followers—in a relatively short period of time, with no resources to speak of in a worldly sense, and officially persecuted—how did they, over a couple or three centuries, spread throughout the ancient world and basically take the whole thing over? How did that happen? Well, one answer was given at the end of the second century by Tertullian of Carthage. He wrote an ironic view of pagans’ contradictory views of Christians in his Apology:

See, they say, how they love one another, for they themselves are animated by mutual hatred. See how ready they are even to die for one another, for they themselves will only put others to death.

You see, what Paul is speaking of here is essential. It was then, and it is today, to the work and witness of the gospel in the world—because these Christians gathered on the Lord’s Day to hear a letter from Paul. What do they do the other six days of the week? They scatter to their jobs, and the love that they practiced among one another—and in some respects, learned from one another: What were they then to do? They were to take it to the world: in their workplaces, in the neighbourhoods where they lived. They were to sprinkle this same gospel witness and gospel love in all the places where they worked and lived.¹

Richard D. Phillips