Ambitious

Daily Reading: 1 Thessalonians 3-4

Scripture Focus: Aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you, so that you may walk properly before outsiders and be dependent on no one. (1 Thessalonians 4.11-12, ESV)

Devotional Thought: Do you have ambitions as a Christian?  Paul told the believers in Thessalonica that they should aspire to...

• Live quietly.  I remember a meeting in my first job after college. During the meeting, we made a phone call to one of the offices across the street.  I was leading the conversation, and I vividly remember someone opening the window and signaling that there was no need to use the phone.  My voice would carry just fine without it!  There’s a problem with making a lot of noise, isn’t there?  When we make a lot of noise we get on peoples’ nerves.

• Mind your own affairs.  Not only do noisy people get on peoples’ nerves, nosy people do!  Those two vices tend to travel together, don’t they?  But Paul says that we each have enough of our own business to tend to, that we don’t need to tend to someone else’s business.  Too many people want to play God in others’ lives – telling them what they need to do and how they need to do it.  Typically these are people who don’t mind their own affairs.

• Work with your hands.  In Paul’s day, most labor was done with the hands.  Today’s economy is different, but the principle is the same.  We shouldn’t expect to get paid for doing nothing or for doing things that do not benefit our employers.  As I’ve often quoted, a Jewish rabbi once said, “To receive without giving corrodes the soul.”

So, in other words, Paul is saying that Christians are to be ambitious – in the best sort of way.  Why?  To gain the respect of outsiders and to live independently to the glory of God.

Prayer: Lord, help me to be ambitious to live quietly, to mind my own business, and to work hard.  Today, may my life not only please you, but may it also serve as a testimony to others.  Amen.

Psalm of the Day: Psalm 31.8-13

8 and you have not delivered me into the hand of the enemy; you have set my feet in a broad place.

9 Be gracious to me, O LORD, for I am in distress; my eye is wasted from grief; my soul and my body also.

10 For my life is spent with sorrow, and my years with sighing; my strength fails because of my iniquity, and my bones waste away.

11 Because of all my adversaries I have become a reproach, especially to my neighbors, and an object of dread to my acquaintances; those who see me in the street flee from me.

12 I have been forgotten like one who is dead; I have become like a broken vessel.

13 For I hear the whispering of many-- terror on every side!-- as they scheme together against me, as they plot to take my life.