Make inner peace your ambition

Work, yes, but don’t make your work about you. Make your work about God, especially if you work outside the church.

Jun 17, 2024

Make it your goal to live a quiet life, minding your own business and working with your hands, just as we instructed you before. (1 Thessalonians 4:11)

Maybe it’s just me, but have you guys noticed the resurgence of “traditional values” posts and reels in social media? There are so many homesteading YouTube channels that talk about meal prepping and gardening. There are so many content creators focusing on “the simple life.”

Does anyone else find that ironic? As someone who creates content for a living, I can tell you that it’s time consuming. And I don’t even do videos (yet). Simply preparing the materials to post on a regular basis absorbs an extraordinary amount of time, and when you mix that with all the things most of these "simple life” proponents are talking about, I honestly don’t know if you can call it simple anymore. (Not trying to be judgy… just find it interesting.)

And that’s not to say that we shouldn’t strive for success in our individual industries. We should. If God has called us to a certain career field or work industry, we should seek to do our best in Jesus’ name. So what do we do with verses like this one in 1 Thessalonians 4?

The word “goal” there is really like ambition. So, yes, the Bible says make it your ambition to live quietly. At first glance, this sounds contradictory, because if your ambition is to be quiet—well, most ambitious people who are pursuing goals don’t get to live quietly. But a “quiet life” as we understand it isn’t exactly the point here. It’s always wise to consider the context of a verse before you try to interpret it. Knowing who this epistle was written to gives us some insight into the purpose for it.

See, Paul was writing to the Church at Thessalonica, which was a Greek city. Typically, Greeks hated manual labor. That’s why they had slaves. So Paul made sure to set an example in his own life to demonstrate that work isn’t bad; work is a blessing. And the fact is if God’s people are busy doing God’s work, they don’t have time to get themselves or others into trouble with gossip or other issues that trouble the mob-minded mentality of our day-and-age.

God wants us to work, but, make no mistake, He wants us to work for Him.

When we work for ourselves, we tend to go overboard. We take on too much because we want to impress our authorities. Or maybe we say yes to things out of guilt or trauma. In all of those cases, we aren’t working for God. We’re working for our own personal fulfillment (i.e. we’ve made our work an idol, which can absolutely happen even if our work is good and godly). Every time we work for ourselves, we put ourselves in bondage. We’ve hitched our identities to someone else’s standards of performance, and the one element you will never achieve that way is the quiet inner life of someone who is content with obeying God.

That’s the quiet life Paul is talking about here. Inner peace. The surety that no matter what you get done (or what you don’t get done), you’re still loved and accepted by God because His love isn’t conditional according to your productivity.

Work, yes, but don’t make your work about you. Make your work about God, especially if you work outside the church. Let your success come from God. Let your advancement come from God. Let your directions come from God. That doesn’t mean you can’t pursue a career, but don’t make your status or influence or wealth the goal.

Our goal should always be to live for Jesus, to live a life of peace inside. Because when you have inner peace that’s founded on Jesus, there’s no chaos in your outer life that can take it away.