Thoughts on 1 Thessalonians 4:11-12

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 live may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody.

I was just working on a Sunday School lesson on 1 Thessalonians, and this passage hit me in a way it really hasn’t before. Maybe there’s a sermon in it someday, but there’s at least room for some initial unformed thoughts here, I hope.

I am so challenged by Paul’s writing—always, really, but especially here: “Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life.” I never used to think of ambition this way. I have had several ambitions in my life.

Go to college: check.
Meet a lovely girl and get married: check.
Go to seminary: check.
Get a Ph.D. in Old Testament Studies: no check. Thankfully. I can’t believe I used to want to do this.
Become a dad: check.
Pastor a church: check.
Get a Ph.D. in Liturgical Studies: che. (Half a check.)
Write a book. Not yet…

I used to think I was going to achieve this out of my own strength and sheer force of will. Then I discovered that some mountains simply don’t move, no matter how hard you shove them.

So I discovered the usefulness of a “quiet life.” A quiet life has been invaluable to me in pursuing my ambitions. I have found that a life and spirit rightly ordered, a quiet life where God is in control and I learn to be happy in submission, does amazing things. It is a quiet life that enables me to pursue these ambitions, ambitions that I deeply believe God wants me to pursue. A quiet spirit is essential to all my tasks now: without it, I couldn’t pastor, go to school, be a husband, be a father, nothing. In fact, I believe my performance in these areas is often tied to how quiet my spirit is.

So I was feeling pretty happy with my spiritual growth in the last few years, and this key recognition about a “quiet life” that changed my way of thinking.
Yet Paul wants to push me deeper.

Apparently, a “quiet life,” for Paul, is not a tool to be used to achieve ambitions. A quiet life is itself a worthy ambition. A quiet life is the goal, not the tool used to acheive goals. This, of course, carries a lot of connotations. If your sink is leaking, and the proper tools are not close at hand, then you can rig something else up to stop the leak. It might not be exactly what the tool was designed for, but in the end, it’ll work (at least for a little while).

When we treat a quiet life as a tool, this is the risk we run. Paul doesn’t want us to see the quiet life as a tool because it’s all too easy for some of us to forget the quiet life altogether and use inferior tools which seem to get the job done but are doomed to failure. We fall back on our personality or our intellect or our drive and soon forget the quiet life altogether.

For Christians, a “quiet life” is not a tool, but the goal. It is that we must pursue recklessly, even when it makes no sense to others, even others we care about. Not because we need it to accomplish something, but because if we don’t have it, we miss something essential to Christianity.