The Great Commission
The Apostle Paul tells us,
“Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business, and to work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody”.
-1st Thessalonians 4:11-12
In the time those words were scribed, Thessalonica was a flourishing metropolis, a port city, and a hub for cultural “free expression” that attracted secular thinkers like Lucian of Samosata, to its many hollow corridors. From this context, we Christians are instructed to make it our ambition to lead a quiet life, and mind our own business. Followers of Jesus Christ lay down our lives, daily, in service to our beloved Lord and King. In the book of Acts, we see it clearly recorded that it was ordinary Christians expositing the Lord’s Gospel after receiving their Godly instruction directly from the Apostles.
The secular mind is apart from God, self-absorbed, seeking prestige, and extols himself above all. The secular way is practiced deception sponsored by Satan and is packaged neatly in the rhetorician’s standard operations for worldwide shipping. As Christians, we must be separate from this influence. We must maintain a presence of mind that we are in fact “the body of Christ”, Our daily life is the primary practice of humility, obedience, and gratitude. Likewise, we work with our hands, because our hands are meant to accurately picture God’s hands.
To the outsider we are properly seen as honest, patient, kind, and down to earth. We earn the respect of secular peoples and our Christian siblings, by giving more to others than we keep for ourselves. As Christians, we are responsible to love others, even our enemies. We find our joy in the truth of God’s word.
Winning respect as Christians is to acknowledge and accept our great commission to compete for the hearts, minds, and souls of all humanity! This is our most urgent and important objective since the masses are presently teetering on the precipice of eternity, absent the light of God.
The last bit is this, Paul purposely learned a trade/skill (tent-making) and although he was an educated man, he worked with his hands in exchange for an honest living. It is in this Oath that Happy Window Cleaning is dedicated.