What the Thief Is Taught to Do Next
In the middle of a letter written to saints, Paul addresses a thief, and the sentence does not stop where we would stop it. Paul could have told anyone who steals to stop and moved on, and most readers would have understood the demand. Instead he keeps going. The hands that took are to work, and the work is to produce something that can be given away.
This is not just an isolated turn of phrase. It is the shape that runs through the paragraph:
"Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another. Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil. Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need. Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you." Ephesians 4:25–32
Falsehood is put away and truth is spoken. Corrupting talk gives way to speech that builds up. And the long list that begins with bitterness and ends with malice gives way to kindness, tenderness, and forgiveness. Most of the lines follow this pattern, and several tell us why: we are members one of another, and God in Christ forgave us. Paul had prepared us for this when he reminded the church that they had been taught to put on a new self, one created to be like God, in genuine righteousness and holiness. What follows in the letter is that teaching in working clothes.
This presses on the way we measure our own progress. We tend to keep score by what we have quit: what we no longer say, where we no longer go, the things we used to take that were never ours. Those are real changes, and Paul does not belittle them. I had one of my own. For a good number of years I used smokeless tobacco, a nasty habit that ran the show, and putting it down counted for something. But in most of the commands we just read, Paul keeps going past the putting down, and a life defined only by what has been removed would still be shaped around the old self.
What, then, fills the space the old practice leaves?
Paul's answer for the thief is an ordinary one: honest work with his own hands. The purpose he gives that work points away from the thief himself. He is to have something to share with anyone in need, so that the hands that once took now labor for others.
Paul had lived this instruction in Ephesus. Sending from Miletus for the elders of the church there, he reminded them how he had lived among them, and that his own hands had supplied what he and his companions needed. Then he told them, "In all things I have shown you that by working hard in this way we must help the weak and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he himself said, 'It is more blessed to give than to receive.'" The apostle who tells the thief to work and share had done both. Behind his practice stood the words of the Lord Jesus, and behind those words stands the Lord himself.
That is where Paul's commands in Ephesians find their ground. Of the Gentile way of life he has just described, Paul tells them plainly that this is not how they learned Christ. He closes the list on God's forgiveness in Christ, and then carries that reason one step further, calling us to imitate God as his beloved children: "And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us." The likeness after which the new self is created is not abstract. It looks like forgiveness given to people who did not earn it, and like a life given up for others. When hands that once took begin to work so that they have something to give, they are being shaped after the one who gave himself.
Paul makes the same point to the Colossians. He forbids lying among them, and the reason he gives is that they have already stripped off the old self along with its habits and clothed themselves with the new one, a self still being made new in knowledge after the image of the one who created it. The command rests on something that has already happened. Ephesians tells us what we were created for: "For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them." The new self is something we put on, and God is the one who made it, which makes the thief's honest labor, done so that he has something to give, one small and concrete part of that walk.
Paul addresses this command to the thief, and we should leave it with him. Most of us are not being told that our paychecks must now fund a set proportion of giving because of this verse. But the paragraph's pattern belongs to every reader, and it leaves us with an honest question about each habit we have laid down. Has it been replaced, or only removed? The lie we no longer tell could become truth spoken plainly to a neighbor. The cutting remark we have learned to hold back could become words chosen "for building up, as fits the occasion."
The grudge we have stopped rehearsing could become forgiveness offered in so many words. None of this is a technique that makes us new. It is what the new self looks like when it gets up in the morning and goes to work, and its measure remains the same: "as God in Christ forgave you."
Developed with the assistance of AI writing tools, under the author's full theological review and final editorial control.
Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. ESV Text Edition: 2016. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The ESV text may not be quoted in any publication made available to the public by a Creative Commons license. The ESV may not be translated in whole or in part into any other language.
