They Quit Their Jobs Because They Thought He Was Coming Tuesday

There was a church in a port city that got a piece of news and made a decision about it.

The news was that the Lord was coming back. That part was true. They had been taught it, they believed it, and they were right to believe it. But somewhere in the telling it got a date on it, or close enough to one, and a group of people in that congregation did the math and came to a conclusion.

If He is coming that soon, why am I at work.

So they stopped. They walked away from trades. They let contracts go. And because a person still has to eat, they started living off the other believers, going house to house, sitting at other people's tables, talking about the end of the world while somebody else's wife cooked.

They were not lazy people. That is the part everybody gets wrong. Laziness does not need a doctrine. These folks had a reason, and the reason came out of a sermon, and it sounded like faith the whole way down.

And a man who loved them wrote them a letter about it.

The verse that gets thrown at poor people

I have to handle this next verse carefully, because it has been used as a club.

For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat. (2 Thessalonians 3:10, King James Version)

I have heard that quoted at people who work two jobs. I have heard it quoted at a woman who was sick. Every time I have heard it aimed at somebody, it was aimed down.

Read who Paul is writing to. He is not writing to a man who cannot find work. He is not writing to somebody laid off when a plant closed. He is writing to people who stopped on purpose, for a religious reason, and then leaned on the church to cover it. And even then, look at the tone two verses later: he does not throw them out. He tells them to settle down and eat their own bread, and he tells the rest of the church not to count them as enemies.

You are not the person that verse is correcting, and God has never once used His own word to shame you for a season you did not choose. That is not me being soft on Scripture. It is what the letter itself says about who it is for, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps a word from becoming a weapon in somebody's hand.

Now here is what it is actually correcting, and this one is worth sitting with.

A doctrine can talk a person out of their own hands

Those people did not stop working because they loved comfort. They stopped because of what they believed about the future.

That is the mechanism. Not sin. Not sloth. A belief. And the belief was mostly true, which is what made it so hard to argue with. Jesus is coming back. That is not the error. The error was the sentence they built on top of it: therefore the ordinary is pointless.

I grew up under a different version of the same machine. Nobody in my house was waiting on a Tuesday. But there was a settled understanding that a man who reached for something was showing you where his heart was, and that a man who stayed low was showing you where his faith was. Ambition was a symptom.

I want to say the honest thing here. The people who taught me that were not frauds and they were not chasing anything. They were sincere, and one of them prayed over me every night of my childhood, and I would not know how to pray at all if he had not.

But sincere and correct are two different words.

You are allowed to build something, and wanting to is not a sickness in you. Go read the verse for yourself: Deuteronomy 8:18 says God gives the power to get, and the getting is right there in the verb, and it is His Spirit who makes a person able to want something honest without flinching at themselves.

Quietness, and your own bread

Watch what Paul tells them to do instead. It is one of the most ordinary instructions in the whole Bible.

Now them that are such we command and exhort by our Lord Jesus Christ, that with quietness they work, and eat their own bread. (2 Thessalonians 3:12, King James Version)

With quietness they work. Not with fanfare. Not with a launch. Quietly, steadily, at something, and eat what your own work bought.

There is no promise of money in that sentence. There is no amount. He does not say you will be comfortable and he does not say you will get ahead. He says work quietly and eat your own bread, and he treats that as a good and dignified thing for a Christian to be doing on a Wednesday.

You have permission you did not know you had, and it is written down. Scripture puts quiet work and your own bread in the mouth of an apostle as a command, and the Holy Spirit is the one who turns a permission on a page into a person actually moving.

I love that he says quietness, too. Because the counterfeit of the poverty teaching is the loud teaching, the one that turns money into a scoreboard and a testimony into a brag. He does not send them there either. He sends them to a quiet shop and a plain table.

You are not required to be loud about it, and you were never required to be ashamed of it either. That is the road 2 Thessalonians 3 actually puts a person on, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps somebody walking down the middle of it.