Avoiding Idleness

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But we’ve been talking about this subject of finishing well. And in these two letters that Paul wrote to the church at Thessalonica, he was dealing with a church, as I’ve explained to you many times, I’m really just telling you this part for a refresher. He was dealing with a church that always had in the front of their minds the return of Jesus Christ. From their standpoint, he could return any moment, which is still true today.

He could return any moment. He could return any moment for any of us, or he could return any moment for all of us. But they lived with this in the front of their imagination like few of us do, and it made them consider the brevity of life, and it made them consider the importance of using every moment that we have to the fullest for the glory of Jesus Christ and the advancement of his kingdom.

And so a lot of what Paul deals with when he writes to the church at Thessalonica is really advice for them on how to finish well. Now that phrase does not appear to my memory in either 1st or 2nd Thessalonians, but that’s sort of the theme. How they can, well that’s one of many themes that he touches on.

But it runs throughout both books how they can use their time for the glory of God. And we come to this last section of the two books where I think the heading in my Bible sums it up pretty well. It says a warning against irresponsible behavior.

Because if you’re trying to use your time well in his service, few things will wreck a testimony like irresponsible behavior, right? I just think in my mind, just in the last 10, 20 years, the number of people who’ve spent their lives preaching and serving and ministering and have well-known reputations for their service in the kingdom who now are remembered over one incident of misbehavior, whether it’s financial, whether it’s sexual, whether it’s something else, that they’re remembered for one instance of irresponsible behavior that has disqualified them from ministry. Nothing messes up a testimony like irresponsible behavior.

Now, some of you might say, well, I’ve already behaved irresponsibly. Well, there’s never a wrong time to change course, and there’s never a wrong time to start anew. And in many cases, some of those who have the strongest testimonies are those who can show what Jesus has done for them in the aftermath of irresponsible behavior.

But there’s something tragic about somebody who serves Jesus only to have that testimony marred by the irresponsible behavior in the middle of it. You know, start out with the irresponsible behavior and then come to Jesus, that’s one thing. But to have that testimony marred in the middle is a tragic situation.

And so he warns about that. And he says, starting in verse 6, Now we command you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, to keep away from every brother or sister who is idle and does not live according to the tradition received from us. Now, he uses that word tradition several times throughout his letters to the church at Thessalonica.

We talked about that a couple of weeks ago on our last Sunday evening service, where he was talking about them living according to the traditions that they had received. And I explained to you that he’s not talking about church tradition there. This is not a, I’m not trying to pick on them, but this is not a Catholic argument of saying that church tradition is close to or equal with the authority of Scripture.

When he says the traditions you receive from us, he’s talking about the doctrines that were taught by Jesus Christ and explained by the apostles. He’s talking about the things that became Scripture in the New Testament because they didn’t have the completed New Testament at that time. How could they?

It’s what he’s writing to them. So what they had at that time was what became Scripture, the teachings that became scripture only just having been passed down verbally. And so when he says the traditions, it’s not like every church has their traditions.

You know, sometimes we as Baptists say, oh, we don’t go by church tradition. That’s baloney. We absolutely do.

We absolutely do. And there’s not a, well, I was going to say there’s not a thing wrong with church tradition. Sometimes there is.

Traditions can be good and traditions can be bad. But traditions really become a problem when we elevate them to the same level of authority as Scripture. For us to say we’ve always done it this way is not an argument when Scripture says you’re supposed to do something else.

Now, we’ve always done it this way may be an argument. There may be good reasons for why we’ve done things this way if the Bible doesn’t say something opposite. But if the Bible says no, and we’ve always done yes, well, the fact that we’ve always done it, the fact that it’s church tradition doesn’t make yes the acceptable response.

I just want to be clear when we talk about tradition, he’s not talking about that kind of thing. When he says the traditions they’ve received, he’s talking about the teachings that they’ve heard directly from Paul, who heard them directly from Jesus Christ. After he came to Christ, after he converted on the way to Damascus, and after Ananias laid hands on him there in Damascus, he went out into the desert for multiple years just to spend time learning from Jesus Christ. Christ revealed these teachings to Paul. And I know some people have come along in our modern day and said, well, Paul corrupted the teachings of Jesus.

Well, if that was the case, he wouldn’t have later gone on and had fellowship with Peter and the other apostles. They would have called him out as the heretic that he would have been. But no, the things that Paul said Jesus revealed to him out in the desert are the same things that Jesus revealed to his apostles, his previous 11 apostles, during his three years of ministry.

So when Paul says, keep with the traditions and stay away from those who are idle and don’t live according to the tradition received from us, he’s talking about the teachings of Jesus Christ that he had passed on to them, not church tradition. But he commanded them to keep away from every brother or sister who’s idle and does not live according to that tradition. He said, there will be people in your midst who do not live according to God’s word.

And it’s interesting here, he calls them brothers and sisters. you know even a Christian can go through a time when they’re not living as God would have them to live and one of the particular problems they were dealing with in Thessalonica was idleness I keep wanting if I slip up and say idolatry tonight I’ll try not to do that but I may have to go back and correct what I meant because every time I say idleness I want to say the word idolatry instead one of the problems they were dealing with was idleness and that was not something that Jesus taught. It went contrary to what Paul had explained to this church.

And so that’s the one he pointed out to him. He said, the people who are living contrary to what you’ve been taught, in particular those who are idle, he told them to keep away from them. And I don’t want to use the word shun.

I don’t think it’s that you pretend they don’t exist. But in the time that they remained walking in that sin, living in that sinful lifestyle, Paul says keep away from them. In that sense, they weren’t in fellowship. And I remember this a few years ago, I had a man in one of the churches that I pastored who committed adultery, but went beyond that.

He was living in adultery. He had walked out on his wife and was living with somebody else, and the church had no option, really, but to disfellowship him, excommunicate him, whatever terminology you want to use. We had to go through the biblical steps of church discipline.

Somebody went and talked to him, and then two or three went and talked to him, and then it was brought to the church, and we had to put him out from fellowship. Well, I told the people, I explained to them, you know, the purpose here is not to get him. It’s not to show that we’re better than him.

It’s to help him to understand the gravity of his sin in hopes that he will repent and get right with God, get right with his wife, and get right with the church as well. Because while he continues to do this, and people know that he’s a member of our church, it reflects badly on our church, and it reflects, more importantly, badly on our Savior. But I said, it’s not a shunning.

If you see him at Walmart, you don’t have to ring a bell and yell unclean and run away. You don’t act like he doesn’t exist. You can be friendly to him. But I told him what you ought not to do, and this is not your pastor trying to dictate every moment of your lives, what you ought not to do is go out to lunch with him and his new lady friend the way you used to go out to lunch with him and his wife.

Don’t go hang out at his house. Don’t go do. .

. He’s not. .

. Boy, this sounds so harsh. You can be friendly toward him, but it should be different now because he’s not part of the fellowship of the body.

And by the way, if that does sound too harsh, I told them, I don’t know exactly where to draw the line for each person on their behavior. You’re going to have to do what the Holy Spirit tells you to do. If the Holy Spirit says, go have a cup of coffee with him, go have a cup of coffee with him.

I said, there’s a line somewhere between shunning him and acting like everything is the way it always has been. And I think that’s what Paul was talking about here. keeping their distance, not shunning them, but letting them know the fellowship is not what it ought to be right now because of this particular sin that had taken over them.

Now, he talks several times throughout this portion of the book about idleness, because as I said, that was a sin that the church was dealing hard with here. And I don’t mean it’s somebody in the church who’s working 16 hours a day at their business trying to make a go of it, and they look at somebody who, you know, works an eight-hour day and think, well, they’re just lazy, good for nothing, because they go home at five. That’s not what I’m talking about.

There were people, you can always find somebody who works harder than you, and you can always find somebody who works less hard than you. That’s not what it’s talking about. There were people in their day, in the church at Thessalonica, who because of their belief that Jesus was returning any minute, he could come back at any time.

They had gone full-on herald camping here, and they had decided if he’s coming back at any time, that’s all we’re going to do is sit around and wait on him. If you’re not familiar with the Harold Camping reference, he was the man who ran family radio, which is not the same as American family radio. Some of y’all may listen to AFR.

They’re not Harold Camping. He ran a network of radio stations that since, I think, the early 2000s, he’d been telling everybody, come out of the churches, they’re all apostate, they don’t teach the Bible, which is weird because I thought that’s what we did here. and in 2012 he said sometime in May that Jesus was going to return and that it would usher in the end of the world.

He set the date. I believe it was May 21st but I can’t remember offhand. He set the date.

A lot of his followers as the time approached they began to sell their businesses, they began to sell their homes, they began to empty out their bank accounts and they began to give the money to herald camping so that the church or whatever they called it, their network of people could buy billboards all across the country, could buy trucks that drove around with advertisements warning about the end of times, and they just sat around for months waiting for it to happen. Some of them. Some of them did.

That’s sort of what was going on in Thessalonica. We’re going to get rid of everything. You know what?

If Jesus is coming back, If Jesus is coming back anytime, I don’t want to go back to that job. Why should I? Why waste what time I’ve got on that job?

Have any of you ever had a job like that where you thought, you know, if Jesus was coming back today, I wouldn’t have to do this nonsense. Anybody else ever been there? I have.

I wouldn’t have to put up with this. If Jesus is coming back this afternoon, I’d never have to fold laundry again. I’d never have to do another dish as long as I live.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? sometimes in the spring I’ll think about some project I need to do around the house this this year it was cleaning out the closets that was here before last this year it was cleaning out the garage so I need to clean out the garage but I was looking at the weather forecast thinking we’ve got some days coming up that they say there’s a pretty high chance of some tornadoes so clean out the garage or wait and see if god just takes it I think I’ll wait and take my chances with the tornado Because I’m going to be mad if I spend my whole Saturday cleaning out that garage and a tornado comes through on Tuesday. That’s a Saturday I won’t get back.

All right? So that’s what I did, and it didn’t happen. But that was sort of their attitude.

If Jesus is coming back any moment, I don’t have to clean out the garage anymore. I don’t have to worry about the dishes. I don’t have to worry about folding laundry.

Who needs to go to a job or clean house or feed my kids? We’ll just sit around on the mountain and braid each other’s hair and sing Kumbaya and wait for Jesus to come back. That was what was going on in Thessalonica.

But the problem with that, incidentally, the problem with every experiment like that that’s gone on through history, that, oh, we’re all just going to get together in a community and we’re just going to live on love. The problem is you eventually run out of things to eat, and you eventually run out of things to sell. And what these people found themselves in the, once they found themselves at the point of, oh, we have nothing else to eat, then these people who were members of the church at Thessalonica, but had decided that they were just going to wait for Jesus to come back and that’s all they were going to do, then they start going to the folks in the church who hadn’t stopped doing everything, and they were expecting them to feed them and to clothe them and to house them out of the goodness of their hearts.

Now, as Christians should take care of our brothers and sisters when there’s a legitimate need. We should help even people who are not our brothers and sisters. Just because they’re our neighbor, we should help them out of the goodness of our heart and to share the love of Christ. But some of these were not looking for help.

They were looking for a handout. They were looking essentially for the church to take them to raise. And there was enough of a problem with this.

It wasn’t just one or two people. There was enough of a problem with this going on that Paul said, you know what? Keep away from them.

Keep them at arm’s length. Again, I think there’s a line somewhere in there that we all have to find between shunning them completely and enabling them, acting like it’s okay. He said, keep away from them.

And I think it’s probably important too for him to tell them that under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Because how many times have we had discussions? Greg, how many times have you and I had discussions over whether we should help this person that comes in or not.

Because as a church, we want to help. We want to help people. But eventually, word gets around that you’re helping people, and some people want to make getting your help their full-time job.

I’m not talking about anybody in particular, but a lot of times I’ll go to Greg, number one, he’s here, and can go in there with me to talk with him. But also, Greg and I are usually not on the same page. And I don’t mean that bad.

When I’m feeling like I’m just you know, wide-eyed and want to give away everything in our bank accounts, Greg’s saying, wait a minute, you didn’t find out your electricity was getting cut off today. That’s a problem you’ve known about for two months. Why is it just now an issue?

And I’d say sometimes the roles are reversed, but no, it’s usually that. I fall for every sob story. And Greg has wisdom about how to deal with this, and I’m thankful for somebody who can help out that way.

But I’m sure they were having discussions in their church of that nature, too, And there were people saying, you know, I want to help. I want to show the love of Christ. But am I doing more harm than good? If I don’t help them and I let them starve, you could go round and round about that all day long, back and forth.

And I’m not talking about an argument. You could have that discussion within yourself. What do I do?

And Paul comes along and under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit says, it’s okay. It’s okay. If they are not willing to do something, If they just want to sit around and sing kumbaya all day, you are not responsible to feed them.

If they’re not contributing something to society, if they’re not contributing something to their families, if they’re not contributing something to the church, he said, you don’t have to take them to race. That’s what he’s telling them when he said, keep away. He says in verse 7, all of that was just from verse 6, and we’ve got a few verses to go.

In verse 7, he says, For you yourselves know how you should imitate us. How you should imitate us. Paul says this several times throughout his letters.

Imitate me, but it’s never a statement of how great Paul is. It’s usually Paul saying, imitate me as I imitate Jesus. So what’s he really telling us there?

Be like Jesus. But he said, imitate us. And by the way, we’ve talked about this some on Wednesday nights.

Jesus told his disciples, I didn’t come to be served. I came to serve. And Paul said, we came and served among you.

Imitate us. You know, he says, we were not idle among you. He could have very easily walked in being the Apostle Paul and gotten anything he wanted.

There are people out there that to make speeches, to teach somebody something, and not just in the Christian world, but to teach somebody something in the secular world to come in as a guest speaker, they can command $10,000 a speech, $50,000 a speech, $100,000 a speech. The Apostle Paul could have come in and gotten anything he wanted just because I’m the Apostle Paul. He said, we weren’t idle among you.

He said, we did not eat anyone’s food free of charge. Instead, we labored and toiled working night and day so that we would not be a burden to any of you. Verse 9, it is not that we don’t have the right to support, but we did it to make ourselves an example to you so that you would imitate us.

Now, I’m always hesitant to spend much time on it. when he talks about things like this because I don’t ever want it to sound self-serving. Paul was clear that those who are in ministry, those who are devoting their time to ministry, have the right to be supported in their ministry.

And I like what one man said before. He said, we don’t pay you to be our pastor. We support you so that you can be our pastor.

Paul’s position throughout his letters, throughout the New Testament, is that those who are in ministry, those who devote their time to serving the church and to serving the Lord in the church, have a right to the financial support to enable them to do that. That’s where I say, I don’t want to spend too much time on that because as one of those people, I don’t want to sound self-serving. But he said that.

But he said to the church at Thessalonica, we came in and as an example to you, as an example to you, we didn’t take anything. Now, why was he that example to Thessalonica? because we know that he took support from the church at Philippi.

As a matter of fact, he took support from the church at Philippi when he was serving them, but he also took financial support from the church at Philippi when he was out serving other churches. The church at Philippi, they were such good givers that they paid him even when he wasn’t there with them. So why would he need to be a different kind of example at Thessalonica?

Because of the problem of idleness that they were dealing with. He didn’t want any of those people to look at Paul and say, well, that’s all he does is focus on Jesus coming back. Well, yeah, Paul’s teaching.

Paul’s teaching. He’s leading people to Christ. He’s helping people understand the scriptures. He’s discipling people.

He’s doing that. But he didn’t want to give the people sitting around on the mountaintop singing Kumbaya an excuse to say, well, that’s what Paul’s doing. So Paul said, we provided our own support.

Now, I’m sure some of it came from other churches. I’m sure some of it came out of their own pockets. I’m sure some of it was Paul going out and making tents because that was the skill he had.

And sometimes you have to do that. I’ve been in that situation where pastoring a church and teaching school, trying to make ends meet, and you do what you’ve got to do. Paul raised his own support and didn’t take anything from Thessalonica because there was a big enough problem with these people over here just sitting around that he didn’t want them to even think.

And we all know it’s different what he was doing from what they were doing. But he didn’t want them even to think that it was the same thing and try to justify what they were doing, really trying to mooch. Is that an actual word, trying to mooch off of people?

I don’t know if it’s an actual word, but it sums up what they were doing. And he didn’t want to give them any reason to think that it was okay. He said, it’s not that we don’t have the right to support, verse 9, but we did it to make ourselves an example to you so that you would imitate us.

And furthermore, he wanted to give those people sitting right on the mountaintop an example that says, hey, we came here and not in spite of our calling, but because of our calling, we worked hard. Verse 10, in fact, when we were with you, this is what we commanded you. If anyone isn’t willing to work, he should not eat.

Pretty simple, right? For we hear that there are some among you who are idle. They are not busy, but busy bodies.

There were people in the church that they thought what they were doing was sitting around and just waiting for Jesus to come, but oh no, they were finding other ways to occupy their time. And so Paul said, if they’re not willing to work, they shouldn’t eat. Now this is very different from the socialist model of things.

As far as I know, this was the only verse that Marx and Lenin ever quoted in their writings. But they took it way out of context. This wasn’t the idea that you contribute everything you can and you have to be contributing enough to meet what you consume.

It’s not the idea of George Bernard Shaw who said you have to be able to justify your existence and if you’re not producing more than you consume, you have to turn in your life. It’s not that idea. It’s more like in our house.

Do my kids do enough chores around the house to pay for all the food they eat? No. Especially Charlie.

because he eats a lot and we can’t get him to clean up his toys. Benjamin and Madeline help out with things. They’re good helpers.

But I’m telling you, even if we were paying them minimum wage, we’re not getting enough work out of them to pay the expenses of all the food they’re eating. And yet we take care of them. But you know what?

They’re our children. Number one, it’s the law. We have to feed them.

But also, we’re looking for them just to contribute something and be part of the family. You know, I’m not expecting Benjamin to go get a job at Sonic and carry his weight at eight years old. I just want to see him help with the dog and help me occasionally with the trash and show me that he cares about what we’re doing together and being part of the family.

Because there were going to be people in the church still at Thessalonica who were working, who were doing things, who were trying, but still needed some help. And that was okay. He’s not saying everybody fend for yourselves when he said if you’re not willing to work, you shouldn’t eat.

He was saying they need to be willing to contribute something. If people still need help, that’s fine. But are they contributing?

Are they showing that they care? Are they showing that they have skin in the game? Are they showing that they’re invested here?

And, you know, that’s all I’m looking for from my kids. Show us that you care. Show us that you’re invested.

Show us that you’re on the team. Now, I’m not feeding them when they don’t do chores. I want to be clear on that.

But there are other benefits that they don’t contribute enough to earn, but they don’t get if I don’t see that they’re, you know, we don’t have to go buy them the toy they wanted if they’re not willing to show us that they want to be part of the family. So he’s telling these people at Thessalonica, be willing to work, be willing to do something productive with your time. If you’re just wanting to lay around and be lazy, he said nobody else has the responsibility of subsidizing your whole life.

for we hear that there are some among you who are idle. They are not busy, but busy bodies. He says they’re idle, but that’s when it comes to anything productive.

It doesn’t mean they’re idle all the time. He said they’re not busy, they’re busy bodies. And that old saying that idle hands are the devil’s workshop, there’s a lot of truth in that.

When you’re not busy with something productive, a lot of times we find ourselves busy with things that are counterproductive. I’ve seen this in church too. The churches that are doing the less ministry a church does, the less time and energy we expend on working together for the kingdom, the more energy we expend burning up the telephone lines talking about each other and about the church.

I’ve seen that. You know, we need to be tired because we’re doing ministry, but we don’t have the energy to pick each other apart. Now, I’ve not seen that here.

I have seen it, but I’ve not seen it here. That’s just an example. He said they were not busy.

They were busy bodies. They were running around. They were getting involved in everybody else’s business.

They were stirring things up. They were taking the time and the effort and the ingenuity that should have been involved in supporting themselves and building the kingdom. And they were putting it into things that were tearing down.

You know, some of us have talked at different times about these financial scams that go on. whether it’s people getting your credit card number or people calling you and pretending they’re somebody else and they’ve got to do all this research. Some of the things that people do to try to scam money out of other people are things that I am not smart enough to have come up with.

Not only smart enough to come up with, I’m not smart enough to understand what they just did. I know in my mind it’s a scam, but I can’t figure out how that scam works. That happens all the time.

And I’ve told many of you in these stories, as we’ve been discussing them, If these people would take half the ingenuity and half the effort and half the energy that they expend on these scams, just half of it, and put it into something productive, we could cure cancer. We could come up with cold fusion. I mean, we could lick the great scientific problems of our age.

And the same thing is true here. But they spend their time tearing down instead of building up. And that’s what was going on in the church.

They were these idle people. They turned to gossip. And they turned to dissension.

it’s better it’s better for us to stay busy doing the Lord’s work so he says in verse 12 now we command and exhort such people by the Lord Jesus Christ to work quietly not just go to work but do it quietly live a quiet life live at peace you know don’t go around stirring the pot all the time work toward a peaceful life that they work quietly and provide for themselves. But as for you, brothers and sisters, do not grow weary in doing good. So he talks to two different groups of people there at Thessalonica, those who were being idle.

He tells them, stop it. Go find something productive to do and do it quietly and seek peace. And to those who were doing what they were supposed to be doing and probably were getting frustrated at the fact that they were having to subsidize those who were doing nothing, he said, you just keep doing what you know you’re supposed to be doing.

And by the way, just because I use hand gestures with one side of the room and with a different side of the room doesn’t mean I’m making any accusations about anybody in here. But he said, you know, if you’re not doing what you’re supposed to do, straighten up and do it. And if you are doing what you’re supposed to do, don’t get discouraged because you see others prospering or at least being taken care of when they’re not doing what they’re supposed to be doing.

He said, you just keep being faithful. Don’t be weary. Don’t grow weary.

If anyone, verse 14, if anyone does not obey our instruction in this letter, take note of that person. Don’t associate with him that he may be ashamed. And I told you it kind of sounded harsh.

It might have sounded harsh to you. It sounded harsh to a few of the people in the church where it took place when I said, you know, don’t go hang around and have dinner with him. It sounded harsh, but it wasn’t what I said.

It’s what the Apostle Paul said. Don’t associate with him so that he may be ashamed. Yet, and this is, we forget this.

This is so important. Verse 15, yet don’t consider him as an enemy, but warn him as a brother. Anytime there’s any kind of sin in the church and it requires church discipline, we need to be careful not to forget that.

We’re not trying to get somebody because of their sin. Ooh. Benjamin sinned.

Now we can point it out and we can make him feel so bad and it’ll make me look so good. That’s not it. And shame on him and we’re going to punish him.

We’re just going to get him because how dare he sinned. That’s not it. It’s pleading with our brother.

You’re trying to win them back. Trying to help them see the gravity of the sin. And he said that even with that sin of idleness.

Trying to win them back. Verse 16, May the Lord of peace himself give you peace always in every way. And they needed it with the church being divided this way.

The Lord be with you all. I, Paul, am writing this greeting with my own hand, which is an authentica