The Christian walk is a daily effort. We don’t walk for a couple of hours and then arrive; we continue walking (v 4). It sounds easy to keep God’s love as our beginning and end, but the lure of other things means it isn’t. Hence Paul’s prayer for perseverance (v 5).

Have you ever been involved in church discipline, either giving or receiving it? It’s so difficult to get right that many churches shy away from it. But Paul had a high view of the church as a community and family, and he knew how critical its members’ behaviour is for its reputation with outsiders.

Paul also knew how dangerous disruptive behaviour and disobedience can be (v 6). They spread through a community like cancer, eating away at the heart, killing the roots. They need to be challenged, but carefully and graciously. We need to be careful not to treat our Christian brothers and sisters as the enemy (v 15). For, even as he warns those who are idle and disruptive (vs 11,12), he includes all the family in his final prayers (vs 16,18).

‘May the Lord direct your hearts into God’s love and Christ’s perseverance.’¹

It can be tempting to adopt a rose-tinted view of the early church, but it’s clear that even among the exemplary Thessalonians there were some who refused to comply with the apostles’ teaching and example (vs 6,9). How would you advise the church to deal with this situation? In Paul’s view, the time for gentle persuasion is past. He urges such people to comply (v 12) and commands the rest of the Thessalonians to avoid them (though not to excommunicate them altogether), to shame them into realising that their behaviour is wrong (vs 6,14,15). However, before we unquestioningly adopt similar tactics in our communities today, it’s worth reflecting on potential differences between the Thessalonians’ culture and our own. 

In first-century Mediterranean societies, the honour of belonging to the social group, and the shame of exclusion, were powerful motivations for people’s behaviour,² but today, certainly in Western cultures, shaming someone is usually a blunt and cruel instrument for changing their behaviour, more likely to lead to hurt or further antagonism than to redemption. What tactics do you think might be more appropriate or effective?

The nature of the insubordination among the Thessalonians is a refusal to work (v 10). It seems unlikely that this was connected with their belief in Jesus’ imminent coming, or Paul would surely have addressed that issue here.³ More plausibly, they have become reliant on donations from patrons, busying themselves on their behalf in the public assembly and failing to earn their own food.⁴ We cannot extrapolate from this that manual labour is somehow more Christian than working in politics, for example, but we might reflect: is the way I spend my time, whether paid or not, honouring to God and to others?

Prayerfully, reflect over the next few weeks on how you use your time. Do you feel called to make any changes?

¹ 2 Thess 3:5  ² Green, Thessalonians, Apollos, 2002, p355  ³ Furnish, Thessalonians, Abingdon, 2007, p177 ⁴ Green, p351