The Broader Implications Of 2 Thessalonians 3:10

It's popular to apply the passage to something like a situation in which a man refuses to look for a job and wants to live off of government assistance instead. But the principle in 2 Thessalonians also has a broader application that tells us a lot about why the world is in the state it's in.

Working a job isn't the most important work in life. In the contexts that are the most important, religious ones, the large majority of people are negligent. If you aren't willing to do the work needed to persuade people about theological issues, moral issues, and so on, why do you expect to reap the benefits of that work you aren't doing?

Why is our culture so secular and trivial and so uninformed and misinformed about religious and moral issues, for example? Largely because most people don't want to do much work in those contexts. To the extent that they have any concern about something like the honor of God, theology, or the nature of the afterlife, their interest doesn't go much beyond being spectators. They may hope that somebody else will do the relevant research, speak up, and so forth (if they even hope for that much), but they aren't willing to do much of the work, if any, themselves. Look at YouTube threads, Facebook, radio programs, etc., where only a tiny percentage of people even speak up about the relevant issues, and most of those don't do it well. They're largely looking for other people to fight their battles for them, so that they don't have to do much fighting themselves. And the standards they apply in choosing who they want to fight for them are shallow and produce a lot of bad results.

Our culture is in the state it's in largely because of the principle behind 2 Thessalonians 3:10. Few professing Christians want to do much religious work, and so they aren't eating much in terms of benefitting from the results of that sort of work. Sometimes good work doesn't get the response it should, for a variety of reasons. But that's not the only problem in our context. There's also a problem with how little work Christians (and non-Christians) are doing. We don't do much religious eating, because we don't do much religious work.

Part of the problem is that Christians have been conditioned by the culture to spend little time on religious activities. They'll spend dozens of hours a week on their general education during their school years, dozens of hours a week working a job, many hours on family issues, many hours on housework, many hours on sports, etc., but not much on religious matters. They act as though spending ninety-some percent of their time the way the culture does is acceptable, as long as there's a small percentage they spend on religious activities and they affirm certain conclusions about certain religious issues. But the culture's time management is part of the problem with the culture. And they aren't just a little wrong about it. They're very wrong about it. If you aren't concerned much about God and advancing the kingdom of God, you won't spend much time on those things. But Christians are supposed to be concerned and to be concerned a lot.