Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 1 Thessalonians · About this commentary
Make It Your Ambition to Be Quiet
1 Thessalonians 4:11-12
11 and that you make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands, even as we instructed you, · WEB
A church expecting the Lord's return is told to be unremarkable, mind its own affairs, and pay its own way.
Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life. The phrasing is deliberately incongruous — the verb means to strive after honor, to be publicly ambitious, and its object here is quietness. Paul asks them to compete at being unnoticed.
Three instructions follow, and each is ordinary. Lead a quiet life. Do your own business. Work with your own hands. The middle one implies its opposite, and the second letter will name it outright when idleness has hardened into people who do no work of their own and busy themselves in everyone else's 2 Thessalonians 3:11.
Working with the hands is not incidental in a Greek city, where manual labor carried low status. Paul had done it himself in front of them 1 Thessalonians 2:9, which is why he can add even as we instructed you without it sounding like advice from a distance.
Verse 12 gives two reasons, and both look outward. That you may walk properly toward those who are outside — the church's reputation among people who will never read the letter. And that you may have need of nothing, which means dependence on no one, so that the community is not a burden to the city it is trying to reach.
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