Pleasant Stone Devotional Meditation: November 29

“…we beseech you bretheren, that ye increase more and more; and that ye study to be quiet, and to do your own business, and to work with your hands, as we commanded you” 1 Thessalonians 4:10b, 11

In this “pleasant stone” is a subtle streak of “color” which is easily missed, unless we look closely. It is very easy to see “… we beseech you bretheren, that ye increase more and more.” Everyone loves “increase.” The human thing is to think in terms of “numbers.” God is interested in numbers too. He proved it on the Cross, where He died for everyone. Not just several thousand, but “everyone that thirsteth.”

But here, in the verse, is a secret to the true increase. The “increase” God gives. The “increase” that lasts. Here in this “pleasant stone” is the method God recommends: “… that ye study to be quiet, and to do your own business, and to work with your hands.”

Nothing exciting or glamorous or pretentious about this at all. How many of us think we have to make a big noise and fly many banners and blow many trumpets and include many “special numbers” and a three-color mailing piece with photographs before we can “increase” as God commands us to do!

This is fine in it’s place. If God guides that way. But even in the midst of the “promotion,” we desperately need quiet. God knows most of us have to “study to be quiet,” and so it is not at all surprising that He included that in the same verse with His instruction to “increase.” Well to remember also that we are to “do [our] own business.” I know of those men whose wives and children suffer because they insist upon “serving God” instead of obeying God’s admonition to “do your own business, and to work with your hands.”

“That ye may walk honestly toward them that are without, and that ye may have lack of nothing.”