1 Thessalonians 4:10-11

QUIET WORK

‘We exhort you … that ye study to be quiet, and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands, even as we charged you.’

1 Thessalonians 4:10

While no good man can look on with indifference at the conditions of life in England, while a selfish acquiescence in mere personal comfort is profoundly immoral, it is quite possible, on the other hand, to dwell on these things in a morbid and unprofitable manner. Let us, as one help against morbid anxiety, leading as it so often does to spurious excitement—let us remember always that the world is in God’s hands, not in the Devil’s, and not at all in ours; and further, that things may not be as bad as they seem to us. Nor is it true to assert that the masses are being utterly neglected, or that a very vast permanent work has not been, and is not going on among them. Much is being done, but much more is required.

I. The whole aim of our lives should be to work for God, to spread His kingdom.

II. The life of Christ and the life of His holiest saints will save you from needless self-reproach, if while doing your best you are neither called to, nor fitted for, any loud or prominent ministries. What was the life of our Blessed Lord on earth? Except one anecdote of His boyhood, the far greater part of His life—thirty years of His life from infancy to manhood—are summed up in the one word: ‘the Carpenter.’ During all those years of silent preparations and holy quietness, growing as a lily by the water-courses, He was teaching us the eternal lesson that the Kingdom of God is within us; that the life of the true Christian is ‘hid with Christ in God,’ and that the main work in the world of the vast majority of mankind is—each in our own sphere, each by the use of our special gifts—to set the example of faithful duty. Let nothing rob us of the meaning of that life of utter calm and holy self-repression, of lowly service and humble silence.

III. If now and then in the centuries, the Church has needed the apocalyptic fulmination of the Baptist, the battling words of St. Paul, the fretting restlessness of a Bernard, the high thunderings of a Savonarola, the fierce utterances of a Luther, the passionate oratory of a Whitefield, there is yet more constant need for virtues which are within the reach of every one of us; for the quietude of Mary sitting humbly at her Saviour’s feet; for the soft, silent pictures of Fra Angelico; for the inward collectedness of St. Thomas à Kempis; for the genial playfulness of Addison; for the magnificent studies of Newton; for the secluded life of Wordsworth; for the pastoral calm of Oberlin; for the sweet songs and parish charities of Keble; for the cloistered retirement of Newman—yes, and for millions of men who have possessed their souls in patience, and for millions of women, happily innocent of all oratory, and not learned save in gracious household ways.

—Dean Farrar.

Illustrations

(1) ‘When Livingstone was charged with neglecting missionary work he boldly answered, “My views of missionary duty are not so contracted as those whose only ideal is a man with a Bible under his arm. I have laboured in bricks and mortar, and at the forge, and at the carpenter’s bench, and in medical practice, as well as in preaching. I am serving Christ when I shoot a buffalo for my men, or take an astronomical observation, or write to one of His children who forgot, during the little moment of penning a note, that charity which is eulogised as ‘thinking no evil.’ ” ’

(2) ‘Have we not many examples of that “ornament of a meek and quiet spirit which is in the sight of God of great price”? There was that good Lord Hatherley, whose glory and happiness it was, although he had I been Lord Chancellor of England, to work for forty years as a humble I Sunday-school teacher. Sunday after Sunday he had taught the children of the poor.’