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Home > Bible on Money > Major Themes > 1 and 2 Thessalonians
Quiet Obedience
By Justin Borger
with assistance from Generous Giving staff
A man once observed that Christians talk a lot about Jesus’ death but don’t say much about his life. “Yes,” the man acknowledged, “Christians will tell you about the last few years of Jesus’ life when he was performing miracles, but all of that happened at the very end. What about the first 30 years of his life? What was he doing for all that time?”
It is true; for most of his time on earth, Jesus seems to have lived a remarkably quiet and commonplace life, about which Scripture tells us very little, underscoring his quiet submissiveness more than anything else (Luke 2:51-52).
Our Lord’s willingness to spend the majority of his life in relative obscurity and quiet obedience helps to illumine one of the apostle Paul’s more difficult commands given in his first epistle to the Thessalonians. After commending the church in Thessalonica for the brotherly love for which it had become well known, Paul told the Christians to press on and to grow in this love “more and more” (1 Thessalonians 4:10). Interestingly, however, rather than calling the Thessalonians to exhibit their love through social spectacles that would attract overt public attention, he did almost the exact opposite, calling them to develop a sense of urgency about the common lives they were living:
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 (1 Thessalonians 4:9-12).
As Christians, we have the unique opportunity to excel in the minutest details of life. Loving God with our whole heart and our neighbor as ourselves means that an ordinary life will not cause us to be anxious or ashamed, because the objects of our affection are a God who sees everything and the people next door. Unlike the rest of the world, we have no reason to jockey continually for an ever better position. Perhaps Anna Waring best captured the attitude Paul was after when she described it in the following stanzas of her famous hymn:
I would not have the restless will that hurries to and fro, seeking for some great thing to do, or secret thing to know; I would be treated as a child, and guided where I go. I ask thee for the daily strength, to none that ask denied, a mind to blend with outward life, while keeping at thy side, content to fill a little space, if thou be glorified.
Related Passages: Proverbs 28:25; 29:25; Matthew 6:1-18; 12:15-21; 14:23; 23:5-7; Luke 2:51-52; 1 Corinthians 4:12-13; 1 Thessalonians 4:9-12; 2 Thessalonians 3:11-13; 1 Timothy 2:1-2; James 4:1-8; 1 Peter 3:3-4
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