1 Thessalonians 4:11

1 Thessalonians 4:11. Make it your ambition to be quiet. The Greeks were naturally restless and ambitious. Juvenal in a well-known passage (iii. 76) satirizes their unsteadiness, their flying from one pursuit to another, their readiness to engage in anything which promised remuneration without hard work, ‘to open schools for grammar, or rhetoric, or geometry, or drawing, or wrestling; to tell the will of heaven, or to dance upon the tight-rope; to administer medicines or charms.' They were especially ambitious of municipal offices, in which their ready tongue might save them from hard labour, and give them an opportunity of intermeddling with other men's affairs. This natural excitability and idleness of the Greeks had found nourishment in the expectation which the Thessalonians had apparently formed regarding the speedy approach of the end of the world; and probably also in the circumstance that they were called to a heavenly citizenship which might seem to exonerate them from earthly drudgery, and to a brotherhood from which they might expect to receive support. That some of the Thessalonians were ‘walking disorderly' and refusing to work, and acting as ‘busybodies,' we read in the Second Epistle. These were in all probability persons who wished to be regarded as spiritual, eager for the Lord's coming, capable advisers and instructors of other men. To these Paul says, Let your ambition lead you not to a flighty, excited, bustling, indolent life, assuming to be superior to, but in reality dependent on, the labour of other men, but to a tranquil, steady, unostentatious engagement in your own ordinary occupations.

Work with your own hands. From this it may probably be inferred that the bulk of the Thessalonian converts were labouring men or mechanics.

As we commanded you. Even while yet with them, Paul had seen symptoms of the restlessness which afterwards developed into what he could only call disorderly conduct-symptoms so significant that the same injunctions to a quiet demeanour and industrious pursuance of their ordinary callings were even then necessary.