1 Thessalonians 4:11

and that ye study to be quiet, and to do your own business, and to work with your hands, even as we charged you;

The three classes addressed here are fanatics, busybodies and loafers; and, as Hendriksen noted, "Often one and the same person is all three!"[16] Whether or not there were special offenders in these categories, the seeds of such misconduct are in every mortal; and the admonition was needed in the preventive, if not the corrective, sense.

Study to be quiet ... Phillips' rendition of this as "Make it your ambition to have no ambition" seems appropriate; for what is condemned here is the restless striving for attention, preferment and for what is vaguely called "success." The quiet, unostentatious and tranquil life of a true Christian is to be preferred against all the more noisy life styles.

Fanatics are doomed to frustration and defeat. Striving for religious excitement requires that something new and different be encountered constantly; and this inevitably leads the seeker into error. Busybodies are carriers of gossip, disturbers of the peace, troublemakers and thorns in the body of the believers wherever they appear. Loafers are especially detestable. While doing little or nothing on their own behalf, they require attention, goods and services of others that might be far better employed than in the maintenance of idlers and spongers off others.

The antidote for all three classes is concisely stated in the great work ethic of the New Testament:

Do your own business ... work with your hands, even as we charged you ...

A paraphrase of Van Dyke's quatrain is:

Shout it ye lords of creation,

And sing it ye sons of the kirk;

The gospel of God and salvation

Is surely the gospel of work!

As Ward expressed it, "This is the charter of dignity for manual labor ... work is not beneath the dignity of a free man."[17] Among the Greeks, work was despised as the employment of slaves; and it will be remembered that the false teachers of Corinth belittled Paul's teaching because he labored with his hands. No wonder a civilization like that perished. "Christianity did not hesitate to insist on the dignity of common labor."[18]

Even as we charged you ... This identifies the work ethic as one Paul had already stressed among the Thessalonians; and, as already noted, "Paul used a verb often employed in the classics of the orders of military officers. There is a ring of authority about it."[19]

[16] William Hendriksen, New Testament Commentary, 1Thessalonians (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1965), p. 105.

[17] Ronald A. Ward, Commentary on 1,2Thessalonians (Waco, Texas: Word Books, Publisher, 1973), p. 101.

[18] Leon Morris, op. cit., p. 81.

[19] Ibid.