1 Thessalonians on Work: For the Glory of God and the Good of Our Brother

In AD 52, the Apostle Paul wrote a letter, either the first or second New Testament epistle ever written, to a small church in the city of Thessalonica, a church he had started not long before.  This church was planted in a highly cosmopolitan, affluent, powerful city where Christians struggled with the same kinds of things with which we struggle. They were asking questions like “How do I share my faith when it’s not popular?” and “How do I think about death and the meaning of my life?” and “What does the gospel have to do with the bedroom?” At every single point, Paul points to how the gospel of Jesus Christ shapes every aspect of their lives—how Jesus, being the eternal Son of God, dying on a cross, and raising from the dead, and saving sinners by his grace, changes everything.

In the middle of chapter 4 of this letter, Paul turns to yet another “What does the gospel have to do with…?” question, this time that of work:

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, for that indeed is what you are doing to all the brothers throughout Macedonia. But we urge you, brothers, to do this more and more, and to aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you, so that you may walk properly before outsiders and be dependent on no one.

I write from Northern Virginia, in the Washington, D.C. metro area. In spite of whatever aspersions may be cast, I can testify—because it has been my home since I was a boy—that this is one of the wealthiest, most highly educated, and hardest working cities in America; work is at the core of our culture. Work is what we do here.

So, D.C. friends—and friends across the country and globe—what does the gospel of Jesus Christ have to do with our work? In only four verses Paul shows something beautiful: the gospel frees us to work for the glory of God and the good of our brother.

If we look at these four verses, we might notice they cover two seemingly separate topics. Verses 9–10 focus primarily on love, and verses 11–12 focus primarily on work. Some commentators try to add a sentence break at the end of verse 10, to divide this into two distinct imperatives. But if we look at the grammar in Greek, and if we look at the way the Bible talks more broadly about work, we find that there is no hard break between work and love. They are interrelated; they support and build on each other. So, we will follow the shape of Paul’s argument as we consider first the work of love and then second the love of work.

Paul begins with the work of love. Paul immediately draws attention to a quite familiar word, two words in English—brotherly love—but one word in Greek—philadelphia. Outside of a city in Pennsylvania, philadelphia carries associations of a universal love of mankind, but when Paul’s audience heard that word it meant even more. To them, brotherly love was far more literal. Ancient culture expected that one looked out for their own immediate family. Beyond that, one had no obligation.

We need to know that narrow connotation because what Paul is saying is radical: he’s enforcing family obligations on the whole church. In one sense Paul does not expand the scope of philadelphia at all; the word still indicates immediate family relations. The real revolution here is that in Christ, our family expands, something Paul has been emphasizing through the whole letter. Consider the language 1 Thessalonians uses for the church. The term “brothers” is first invoked in 1:4; in 2:7 Paul compares himself and his crew to nursing mothers and the Christians in Thessalonica as their children; in 2:11, he compares himself to a father; later he talks about being torn away from the church, which in Greek carries connotations of being orphaned; in many more places, Paul refers to his readers as “brothers.”

Most importantly, consider the first verse of the entire book, where Paul calls on “God the Father” and later references Jesus as “his Son.” The first difference the gospel makes is it makes us family. We often call our congregation our “church family.” That’s not just marketing or a warm up! It is a profound theological reality which Christ has established through his death and resurrection. At one point in Jesus’ ministry, he was told “Your mother and brothers are looking for you.” His response? Mark 3:33–35 recounts, “Jesus answered them, ‘Who are my mother and my brothers?’ And looking about at those who sat around him, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother.’”

Next Sunday, look to your left and right. Those people sitting next to you in the pews are your brother and your sister, your mother and father, your son and daughter. This is probably what Paul is getting at when he says the Thessalonians have been “taught by God.” This is something that can only be true in light of the gospel. So, the gospel makes the church our family—and if someone is our family member, that introduces some important obligations.

Then, somewhat surprisingly, Paul turns to the love of work, not as a new topic but as the extension of the work of love he has already been discussing. This one is tougher for us. But what if instead of feeling burdened or angry by Paul’s words, what if we felt freedom? That’s exactly what the gospel offers, and to help us feel that, I want to poke at just two things, two reasons we might not have a “love of work.”

First, we play the comparison game and end up striving towards an impossible standard. Here is the quintessential Northern Virginian: Heman Bekele. Heman recently won a grant from 3M and Discovery Education to help him develop a soap he invented which could potentially treat and even prevent skin cancer. Time Magazine says…

It may take years before such a product comes to market, but this summer Heman is already spending part of every weekday working in a lab at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, hoping to bring his dream to fruition. When school is in session, he’ll be there less often, but will continue to plug away. “I’m really passionate about skin-cancer research,” he says, “whether it’s my own research or what’s happening in the field.”

Did you catch that line “When school is in session?” You may be wondering, “Wow, this must be a really bright young man. Where does he go to school? Harvard? Stanford? MIT?” No.  Some of my congregants know the answer, because they have seen him around the hallways. Heman is a fifteen-year-old freshman at Woodson High School, the school in which my church meets. In August, he was named Time Magazine’s Kid of the Year.

Clearly Heman is an extraordinary young man, and we should all celebrate his work and pray that his soap really can help treat cancer. But here’s the funny thing about our culture: we look at people like Heman Bekele and have an implicit reaction that says, “That’s the bar. That’s the standard, that’s what I’m being compared to.” As I mentioned, I was born and raised in this area; I know what it feels like to fill out college applications knowing kids like Heman are applying to the same schools. I know exactly what that pressure feels like. If you know that pressure, too, know this: that’s not what God intends for your work. That’s not what God expects of you.

Come back to our passage and see what Paul says in verse 11. Paul says you should “aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you.” One commentator calls this verse a “splendid oxymoron”; a pastor friend of mine summarizes it, “make it your ambition to have little ambition.” Paul is helping put the bar in the right place when it comes to gospel-shaped work.

Jesus gave us the parable of the talents, a picture of every person’s God-given gifts and stewardship responsibility, in which one servant was given one talent, another was given two, and another five. If you’re a five-talent guy like Heman, God bless you and all power to you. Use it well! Turn that five talents into ten! But we need this reality check: most of us are not five-talent servants and that is okay! God does not love the two-talent guy less than the five-talent guy, and he is not upset when the two-talent guy only turns it into four talents. They are all given different amounts but the same expectation: that they use well what they are given.

Paradoxically, but likely as a result of their striving culture, there were others in the Thessalonian church who had decided work wasn’t for them, maybe an overreaction to their culture. Later in the letter Paul orders those who were lazy to get a job; for them, he was raising the bar. Therefore, we shouldn’t use Paul’s words as a license for laziness; don’t swing to the other extreme and check out of work or school altogether.

Feel the freedom of God’s vision for work. You don’t have to compete with Heman, you get to be exactly who God made you to be with your specific talents and limits. Who has God made you to be? What are your talents and your limits? One way we can grow in our love of work is by knowing our limits and stewarding our God-given talents well.

Second, we struggle with the love of work because all of us, regardless of culture, look to work to provide things it can never deliver: namely, identity and security. We want to find our meaning and purpose in our jobs, and we want our jobs to provide us with enough security that we will never have to fear being in need. The problem is that work is a terrible foundation for identity. What happens when you bomb a project? What happens when you don’t get into your top college? What happens when you get laid off? Further, work can never deliver on ultimate security. Suddenly you realize you always could provide just a bit more for your family—a nicer car for your wife, and bigger bedroom for your kids, a better boat for your lake house.

Fortunately, the gospel provides the remedy for this problem, too, because God gives us exactly what we are looking for. Rather than looking to work for identity, we find our true identity in where we started: family. God invites us to call him Father because of the work of Jesus, and when we know we have purpose and meaning in being children of God we can take the pressure off of our jobs. Rather than looking to work for security, we find our true security in the same place: in our Heavenly Father, who provides us with everything we need. Jesus teaches us to ask God for our daily bread and promises that he will always provide it; that frees us from spiraling into anxiety or greed.

So where does that leave us, not living in Thessalonica in the first century, but living in the West in the 21^st century? First, when we think about our work, we ought to think of it right alongside “brotherly love.” When we go to work Monday through Friday, God wants us to think about the people we sit next to on Sunday. This connects to and explains Paul’s comments on minding our own affairs and being dependent on no one. Paul is not endorsing the archetype of the rugged American individualist. What Paul is saying is more like “Put your own oxygen mask on before assisting others.” As much as we are able, Paul wants us to not be a burden on the family. There will be times when we need help, and that is okay! That’s what the church is here for! But we should not abuse the charity of the church; rather, if we can, we should contribute to it.

Second, consider Paul’s exhortation to work with our own hands. Paul is not saying we all need to be manual laborers; he is not mandating a particular kind of work. Rather, he is affirming that any work we do for the good of our brothers has dignity. Dirty jobs are good jobs. We do not have to be a doctor or a lawyer or a pastor or the inventor of cancer-curing soap. As long as we put our talents to good use to please God and serve the community, God delights in us. Working at Chipotle can be God-honoring and brother-blessing work. So can being a plumber, or a professional musician. God has equipped each of us to do one of many different kinds of work.

The gospel shows us exactly what the work of love and the love of work look like together. Think about it like this. The Son of God became a man, and before Jesus worked a single miracle he spent about two decades working as a carpenter. And at the end of those two decades of hard, honest work when he was baptized in the Jordan river, God said, “This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17). Not “Well it’s about time you did something meaningful.” No expression of frustration or impatience. If living quietly, minding his own affairs, and working with his hands was good enough for the Son of God, it is good enough for each of us. We can be satisfied in honest, hard work without setting the bar impossibly high.

But note this as well: Jesus has to be more than an example for us. Jesus spent the next three years of his life doing what only he could do—establishing the kingdom of God, forgiving sins, and overthrowing death. At the cross, God was pleased to crush Jesus in our place for all the ways we have sinned against him—and Jesus endured the cross for the joy that was set before him. Because Jesus was willing to die to redeem us—the humblest, hardest work of all—God is pleased to highly exalt him and give him the name above all names. And Jesus is still at work on our behalf! He sends the Holy Spirit to wash us clean and to unite us to himself so now, when the Father sees us, he sees Jesus. And whenever we sin, whether it is getting work wrong or hating our brother or anything else, Jesus stands before the Father to intercede on our behalf. So, when God the Father looks at us, he says “This is my beloved son, my beloved daughter, with whom I am well pleased.”

The reason we do not have to work to please God is because God loves us already, and Jesus has done everything necessary to reconcile us to him. That truth frees us from making work the foundation of our identity or security, so it can be simply a way to delight in God and to love others.

To the high school student dreading school tomorrow because you feel like you need to compete with kids like Heman Bekele: know that you do not need to be the top of your class for God to love you; you are precious in his sight. Parents, display the beauty of the gospel before your kids by practicing healthy work habits and encouraging them to discover who God made them to be; help them practice their talents and find their limits, and show them your unconditional love no matter how high or low achieving they may be. If you open up your email tomorrow and find out you have lost your job, remember that your identity is not in your job, it is in Jesus; you do have security, your church family will take care of you. Whether you’re a carpenter or a preacher, a soldier or a teacher or a contractor or a student, the gospel frees you to work for the glory of God and the good of your brother.