to get something for yourself: to come into possession of it, whether by paying, by earning, or by holding out
The heart of this word is the moment of getting, not the state of having. Greek kept those two ideas in separate forms of this same verb, and only the getting forms turn up in the New Testament. So every one of its seven appearances is about something becoming yours, never about what you already own.
Most of them stay close to money and property: the gold and silver a traveling preacher is told not to pack, the income a Pharisee counts up before tithing it, the field Judas got with his betrayal money, the Roman citizenship an officer paid a fortune for. Peter uses the word for what money cannot do, telling a man that God's gift is not something anyone gets by paying for it.
Twice it leaves the marketplace altogether. Jesus tells his followers that by holding out under pressure they will get their own lives, and Paul tells the Thessalonians that each man must get "his own vessel" in holiness and honor. Both push the word past buying and toward gaining something by how a person lives. What Paul actually means is one of the most argued questions in the letter.
Set beside the ordinary word for having (ἔχω) and the ordinary word for buying (ἀγοράζω), this verb sits between them. It does not claim you already hold the thing, and it does not name a market or a price. It says only that the thing has come to be yours.
Nuances
What 1 Thessalonians 4:4 tells each man to acquire: a wife, or mastery of his own body.
- contested"His own vessel" is a wife, and the verb keeps its ordinary force of taking or acquiring, so Paul is instructing the Thessalonians about how a man marries.; Christian Maurer, "σκεῦος," TDNT 7:358-67; Abraham J. Malherbe, The Letters to the Thessalonians, Anchor Bible 32B (New York: Doubleday, 2000), on 1 Thessalonians 4:4
- contested"His own vessel" is the man's own body, and the verb is stretched toward gaining control of what he already has, so Paul is instructing them in sexual self-control.; Gordon D. Fee, The First and Second Letters to the Thessalonians, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), on 1 Thessalonians 4:4