We are going to look through a lot of scriptures today, so I am not going to have you open your Bibles to any one particular scripture. Today, I want to open up with a question. How many of you remember your very first job that you earned a paycheck? For me, my first job, I hate to mention, was back in the early 1970s. I got a job as an usher for General Cinema Corporation in Florissant, MO. It was kind of a cool job because I got to wear a nice blue sport coat with a little bow tie. There were a lot of perks that came with the job. One of the perks was that I got to eat as much popcorn as I wanted to eat. My favorite day was when I was assigned the Saturday morning shift where I would have to come in early and I would go up in the private room where they had this huge popcorn machine and all day long I would make this popcorn and fill these huge bags. I got to just shove as much in my mouth as I could at that particular time. There were a lot of perks to being an usher, including the fact that I got to watch several movies over and over again. I think I watched Chitty Chitty Bang Bang about 12 times at least. Along with the perks, you had some of the downside. The downside was that I only made 75 cents an hour. The other downside was that my boss was more like a drill sergeant instead of a boss. He was very tough on me. I didn’t like him and he didn’t like me. Back then in the early 70s, we tended to wear our hair a little bit longer and he told me one day to get a haircut because he thought I looked kind of sloppy. I said I’m not going to get a haircut and he said you’re fired and I said I’m out of here. It made me realize something as I looked back on that time. He was just trying to do his job. He was just trying to make us look nice and sharp and crisp. What I demonstrated by me quitting was that I valued my haircut more than I valued that job. That is what we are going to talk about today: the idea of valuing your work.
As you know, we have been talking about our four core values of worship, discipleship, outreach, and community. Today, we are swinging back around and talking about the value of worship. Some of you are thinking where does the value of work fit in. Hopefully you could see as you watched that video that, in some sense, when we do our jobs with excellence, with integrity, with professionalism, and with honesty, our work can actually become a form of worship. When we think about work, most of us can relate to work. Most of us have had at least one job and a lot of you have a job right now. In fact, some of you work a lot of hours, 50, 60, or possibly even 70 hours a week depending on the season. Many of you, including myself, have had a number of jobs. The statistics are that between the ages of 18 and 36 every person has at least nine jobs. That is one job every two years. When I look back on my period between 18 and 36, I think I had about a dozen jobs so I skew the average up a little bit. Most of us can relate to that. We switch a lot of jobs especially early in life. Work is important to us. In fact, it is a very big, hot-button issue in politics this year. In the news you keep seeing the unemployment is up to 7.9%. They keep talking about the unemployment. About 9 million people are supposedly out of work. So jobs are important to us. Work is important to us.
The question you want to ask yourself today is why is it that we work? When you think about it, a lot of people work for a lot of different reasons. They work because they are trying to gain some sort of sense of significance or some sort of sense of fulfillment. Some are actually working because they want to gain some sense of power. Many of us would just say we work because we want to get a paycheck. The whole phrase “I owe, I owe, so off to work I go”. We are going to earn that paycheck. I imagine if we were to take a survey about why people work, I really doubt if anybody would say I work because I want to care for God’s creation. I want to be a good steward for what God has given us. When you think about it that was God’s original purpose for work. We find that simply by going all the way back to the book of Genesis. The second chapter of Genesis actually lays out our job description. It says “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.” That is our job description from day one. Work at that particular time was meant to be a sense of joy, a sense of satisfaction because we had the awesome responsibility and privilege to be able to care for God’s creation. But as you know, something went wrong. Sin entered into the equation. Because sin entered into the equation, work became a thing of obligation. It became toilsome. It became like a sweatshop. It became unbearable. We see that in chapter 3 where God said to Adam “Cursed is the ground because of you.” This is because of his sin. “Through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food.” Sin entered in and began to manifest itself not only in the lives of the people but also into the work environment.
Whatever you think about the whole story of Adam and Eve, I think most of you can attest to the fact that sometimes the work environment is not that good. In fact, sometimes it can be like a sweatshop. There are some people that really love their job, but if you think about it, in even the best jobs, they leave something to be desired because there is probably some element of sin that has crept into that work environment. When sin creeps into a work environment enough, whether it is greed or selfish ambition or underpaid employees and overworked employees, eventually what is going to happen is the employees are going to be discouraged. Eventually the people are going to say I don’t even see the meaning to this. I see no sense of purpose in my job anymore. At that time, you begin to relate to what the writer of Ecclesiastes said when he says “What does a man get for all the toil and anxious striving at which he labors under the sun? All his days his work is pain and grief; even at night his mind does not rest. This too is meaningless.” Has anybody felt that way? Sometimes you feel that way. You get home at night and you can’t even rest because you are thinking about work. You are thinking about why am I doing this thing. It seems so meaningless. What is the benefit of the job that I am doing? What is the benefit of the service or product we are providing? All this just seems meaningless.
As we know though, when things seem meaningless, what we have to do is begin to look to the One who provides meaning to our life. We look to Jesus because Jesus is the one who came to provide meaning where there was no meaning. By the sacrifice on the cross, Christ came down and through the redemption that came through him through the death, burial, and resurrection, we as individuals were now given a sense of value and a sense of significance. That value now would also flow out into our work environment and into our homes and schools and elsewhere. When we find our work meaningless, what it means is that maybe we need to begin to look back to the one who provided meaning. In other words, we need to refresh our memory about the Gospel story. In the Gospel story is where we find the meaning of work. As the story goes, as I have already mentioned, God did create everything. His fingerprints are on everything. He created the whole world as we talked about several months ago. The universe, the stars, the planets, the animals, all the things we see around us and then he said to man, here take the keys to the kingdom. I am going to give it to you and you are going to be in charge of overseeing all the work of my hands. The only thing I ask from you is to make sure you do it under submission to me and that you obey me. We see that very clearly in the Psalms. In Psalm 8, speaking of man, he says “You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You made him ruler over the works of your hands. You put everything under his feet.” The psalmist is speaking of the man. The psalmist is speaking of what the man has been given by God. You have crowned man with glory and honor and you put all the works of God’s hands at the feet of the man. And yet we know, as I already mentioned, sin entered the world and man decided to be disobedient and say listen I don’t want to play by your rules. I would rather do my own thing. What happened was the crown and glory came off of man. The relationship with God was broken and sin entered into the world. Subsequently, that sin entered into the work environment. Pretty soon over time, we had work environments that include things like discrimination based on race, based on ethnicity, based on sex or whatever. We have seen places where there is a hostile work environment, where there is lust, where there is abuse, where there is verbal abuse, greed, low pay, and long hours. We see this hostile environment from the very beginning. In fact, not two steps out of the garden what do you see? You see Cain killing his brother Abel. He killed him because Cain’s product was not quite as good as Abel’s. There was jealousy at the workplace. You see that continuing to unfold all through history. Not only were people affected, but the workplaces that they populated became affected by this thing called sin.
But the good news of the gospel is that God looked down after 4,000 years or whatever it was and began to see man’s plight and said I can fix that. I can take care of this curse that was given in the garden. In fact, he sent Jesus Christ who was said to become a curse for us. There is a passage in Galatians that speaks of this. This is out of the translation called The Message. It says “Christ redeemed us from that self-defeating cursed life by absorbing it completely into himself. Remember the scripture that says cursed is anyone who hangs on a tree? That is what happened when Jesus was nailed to the cross. He became a curse and at the same time dissolved the curse.” Christ took on the curse that was given to us in the garden. He took that on himself. He became a curse for us because he hung on the cross. We know, because of the reality that he did not stay in that grave but he rose on the third day, he opened the doorway to a brand new creation to be able to do a new thing; to begin to restore creation the way it was designed to be from the very beginning. It started with the individuals. It would flow out into the various work environments. The sin that created the curse that flowed into the workplace would not be replaced by the sacrifice that resulted in the grace that would flow out into the workplace. It didn’t happen all at once, but we, as the first fruits of the new creation those who were born again, are able to participate in the redemption not only of lives but of work environments.
We see that early on in the scriptures. We see that in Paul’s letter to Colossians. We see it in a very weird work relationship. We see it in the relationship between slaves and their masters. Colossians speaks of this. It says “Slaves obey your earthly masters in everything you do and not only when their eye is on you and to win their favor but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord.”
As a side note, you have to remember that during that time, the Roman Era or the Hellenistic period or whatever you call it, slavery was very common. A good number of households contained slaves. You would have the mother, the father, you might even have grandparents there, you would have the kids there and then you may have a slave or two or three. As much as we have a problem with slavery now, slavery was very common back then. In fact, statistically, they say that probably over half the population of the Roman Empire were slaves. They might have become slaves because of one country taking over another or because there was an indebtedness to pay off or something like that, but they would become slaves. They weren’t just lower class. There were all classes of slaves from lower class, to middle class, to upper class. There teachers and doctors that were slaves just based on their circumstances. Slavery back then was different than what we think about slavery today. It did not have all the negative stigma attached to it. It was not the ideal situation but it didn’t have all the negative stigma that we would attach to it today. I know some people would say that when Christianity came, maybe Paul should have started an uprising. Maybe he should have started a revolt and get the slaves to just turn on their masters. Really, he couldn’t. If he wanted to he couldn’t because there weren’t enough Christians around at that time. They would be stopped right away. Paul’s approach was not to revolt and create these dangerous situations for themselves or the slaves. The way he was going to get rid of slavery was to begin to work on the hearts of the slaves and their masters. That is why he says “Slaves obey your earthly masters in everything you do.” This is a command. This is what they call an imperative in the Greek grammar. Obey your earthly masters in everything.
As a side note, when he says everything, he is not talking about things that would violate another one of God’s laws. He is not saying if your master says go out and kill this person or whatever that you need to do this. No, he is saying you are to obey everything that falls under the rightful domain of the master. That is what you are supposed to do. And you are supposed to do it with a good attitude. In other words, you are not supposed to do it when the master has his eye on you. You are supposed to do it at all times. You are supposed to live in obedience within that household. You are supposed to do it with the right attitude of the heart. A heart that is not motivated by selfish desires. He says you are supposed to do it out of reverence for the Lord. If you have read this passage before, this is very easy to skip over. Think about this. What Paul is doing here is connecting the act of obedience to man to worship and reverence to God. That is an amazing thing because that connection has never been made in the history up to this point. He is connecting the idea of obedience to your employer to reverence and respect for God. You probably have these slaves saying I can’t do this. My master is a jerk. I don’t want to do this. How can I do this? He says the only way you can accomplish this is begin to act as though you are working not for an earthly boss but a heavenly boss. He goes on to say “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving. What he is saying here is that you no longer work for the man downstairs. You are starting to work for the man upstairs. In other words, what he is saying is by your simple act of obedience, you are restoring what was lost in the garden. You are starting to transform your work environment, coming back under submission to God. The funny thing is that he is doing it by you submitting to man. The curse came through man and the grace is going to come back through man. It is a hard thing for us to go through, but it is the penalty for sin.
When we think about this whole slave and master situation, it is easy to say I can’t relate to this because slavery is obviously not around today. The reality is that, although the situation has changed, the core principles that we can glean from this particular passage are still there. In particular, we can be reminded that God has created everything. Everything we see before us, every bit of matter can be traced back to that original day when God said “Let there be light.” Everything can go back to there, which means that everything we see in all of creation has the touch of the divine upon it. In God’s world there is no difference between the sacred and the secular is what I am saying. We know that to be true, but we also know that even though we have the touch of the divine and everything, man has touched it with his sin. We do end up with hostile work environments. We do end up with places where people are treated like dirt and where people are underpaid and where there is discrimination and harassment and that sort of thing. We also know what happened on the cross. We know that Christ came and because of his sacrifice that he did take that curse upon him and because of that the whole negative situation, that curse on the work environment in our lives, began to be dissolved. As we come into an environment and we begin to be the good employees or employers, we begin to slowly take that grace and we become participates in brining God’s grace into the workplace. Do you follow that? I know this is haughty stuff for 9 o’clock in the morning, but it’s true. God is allowing us to participate and bring the grace of God into the workplace and begin to transform the workplace back into the way that God intended it to be before man had sinned. That is an awesome privilege.
As a side note, that doesn’t just relate to those of you who earn a paycheck. We are talking about anybody who does any sort of work with their hands. It could be stay-at-home moms. It could be stay-at-home dads. It could be people that are involved in civic organizations, volunteer organizations. It could be a coach. It could be anybody who is working with kids. They have the ability to take that environment and to transform it by the power of the cross. When we do perform our work with excellence, with integrity, and with honesty, our work does become a form of worship. In fact, one of my favorite passages is Romans 12:1 because I really think it addresses this. Paul is writing and says “Therefore I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God. This is your spiritual act of worship.” That is what it is. He is saying take your whole life, your body and everything, and when you give it up to the Lord that is your ongoing spiritual act of worship. In other words, worship is not just confined to what you do on Sunday morning. It is what you do all the other hours of the week when you are out there in the workplace and homes and that sort of thing.
Now you say Chuck that is nice stuff, but it is a little bit too way up there for me. I need something practical. I need something more down to earth. I am going to work tomorrow and you haven’t been in my environment, and it’s not pretty. I’ll leave you with a few thoughts. First of all, if you are in a situation where you have a boss, whether you like him or not, you are there so you need to obey him or her. You do because it is a command. In other words you have a good attitude because you have to realize that the only reason he or she has authority is because God has placed that person in authority and has given that person a domain to look over. Your job is to go in there and be a good employee and do what the boss says and not only when the boss is looking at you but when the boss is not looking at you. If you are working at McDonald’s or whatever, don’t just clean up when the boss is coming around the corner. Clean up all the time because that becomes your spiritual act of worship. If you are a boss, make sure you are treating employees with respect. In fact, if we had time, we would go on and see in the Colossians passage that he speaks to the masters. He says you need to be nice to your people too. You do it out of reverence for God. It also pertains to how you contribute to the work environment. Work environments can be very negative. Unfortunately, Christians sometimes contribute to the negativity of the work environment. How? When you get engaged in office politics or gossip or back stabbing or whatever it is, you are contributing to that negative environment. You have to stop that and say I am not going to do that. I am different. Why? Because you have a different boss. Not because you are worried about getting written up by the earthly boss but because you have a higher boss that you are going to be reporting to. You have to make sure that you are creating a positive atmosphere and that you are responding correctly in obedience to your earthly boss.
How else can you do that? What are some other practical things? How do you steward the resources of the company? Some of you have access to the checkbooks for a million-dollar company. Some of you have access to the office supply cabinet. Some of you have access to the copy codes or the petty cash or whatever it is. Make sure that you do it with utmost honesty as if it is God’s money because it is God’s money. It’s God’s stuff. Don’t do it because you are worried about what your boss is going to think. Worry about what the man upstairs is going to think because you are being a steward of his stuff. The other thing you want to think about is your quality of work. Everything you do should be done with excellence. I don’t care if you are sweeping the floor or working on a spreadsheet or if you are overseeing a multi-million dollar project. Whatever you do, you give your best. You give that 110% because you are all about serving the man upstairs and not the boss downstairs. You do it with excellence because you are a child of God. You are special. You have significance. Everything you do, you do it with a sense of excellence.
I can hear some of you thinking Chuck that is all well and good but if I do that, I’m not only going to put in 50 hours but I’m going to put in 60 or 70 hours in. If you do that though, then you have a problem. You have something else going on here. What you are doing is you are beginning to violate some other of God’s laws. I said you should obey out of reverence for God. But that doesn’t mean you should disobey another one of his laws. Earlier in this chapter he talks about husbands submitting to your wives and wives submitting to your husbands. Sometimes you have to work less hours out of submission to your spouse. You need to do that. Because what happens if you begin to violate that relationship. When you are trying to be obedient to the earthly master what happens is you violate these other relationships and also you may end up violating the fourth commandment which is the Sabbath. The fourth commandment says “Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy as the Lord your God has commanded you. Six days you should labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.” God worked six days and took a day off. You can do the same thing. When we talk about the Sabbath, we are not just talking about taking off Sunday, although I think it is very important. We are talking about making sure that you include times of rest in your week, times of relationship with God, and times of relationship with your spouse and with your family. Those become as necessary as Sabbath. When you give 10 or 15 hours a day to your employer, you are violating these other commands. If that is happening, you have to start asking yourself some questions. You may actually have to talk to your boss. You actually may have to talk to both bosses. You may have to start with the boss upstairs. You need find some time to sit down with the boss upstairs and say listen I’m trying to do my very best but I still put in all these hours. I don’t know what is going on here. Can you help me out? Can you speak to me? Can you give me a little sense of revelation of what is going on here? You might not like what you hear. God may say, listen, the fact that you are working all these hours you can’t blame it on your boss. Blame it on yourself. Blame it on your need to achieve. Blame it on your need for power, for status, for recognition, for significance. Blame it on the fact that you don’t realize that your significance doesn’t come from your work. It comes from God and you are a child of God. You want to blame the earthly boss but you need to start blaming yourself. You need to start looking at yourself and how you are spending your time at work or why you are at work because in some cases what you are trying to do is avoid spending time at home. You are avoiding other responsibilities. You have to talk to God and let God talk to you about this. He might even say you know what, you waste a lot of time at work. You are on Facebook too much or whatever it is. You have all these inefficiencies and you think you are overworked but why don’t you just work a little smarter. Why don’t you just give that 110% while you are there?
After that discussion with God, you may still come down to well I do all these things and I’m not guilty of any of this stuff, but my boss still expects me to work 10 or 12 hours a day. I don’t know what to do. What he may say is go talk to your boss. That is what some of you have to do. Some of you are so fearful of talking to your boss because they are going to fire you or whatever. But if you are a good employee, they probably won’t. If you go to your employer and you say I am having trouble. I have been working all these hours and it’s really bothering me because I haven’t been able to spend time with my family and I haven’t been able to give time to God and those things are a priority for me too. As an employee you can say I am going to give you 10 hours a day. I am going to give you 50 hours a week and that is it. When I am there, I am going to be the model employee. I am going to give 110%. Everything I give you is going to be done with quality. It is going to be done with excellence. It is going to be done with honesty. You don’t have to worry about me contributing to a negative environment because I’m not going to get involved in it. I’m going to give you more in 10 hours than other people will give you in 15 hours. Go to your boss and tell him or her that. The boss says well, sorry, we work 15 hours a day here. That is just the rule. Then you have to make a decision. Do I stay or do I go? I think in many cases the decision is obvious. You need to go. As I said before, God will not put you in a spot where you cannot honor all of his commands. Do you get that? He will not put you in a position where you are forced to obey your boss and at the same time forced to disobey your spouse or God and the Sabbath. He will not put you in that position. If you desire with all your heart to honor all the commandments of God in your workplace and you, by faith, step away, I guarantee he is going to probably get you a better position. It may not be the highest paying, but he is going to put you in a place where you can honor him in all that you do and everything you do. Really, this boils down to a faith issue. Do you believe God or not? Do you believe he cares for you? Do you believe he wants you in the best spot? Do you believe that he wants you to be able to obey all his commandments anytime anywhere? You may have to make those tough decisions.
In closing, I was thinking about what if, as an usher at General Cinema, instead of disobeying I would have said sure I’ll get a haircut. I’ll get a crew cut if you want. I could be the president of General Cinemas today. Maybe I could. Who knows what would have happened because I probably would have stayed at that job for a while longer. But that is not the point. We don’t obey our earthly employers because we are trying to get an advance. We obey our earthly employers because we are not really working for them. We are working for God upstairs. We understand that everything around us was created by God and we were placed in creation to be stewards, to be caretakers, to work for God. As we work for God, we begin to take that transformation that has happened within us and allow our positive attitude to begin to penetrate and to transform the work environment and all environments around us. When we work with an attitude of excellence, integrity, and honesty, we demonstrate not only that we value work but that we value the one who created the work. We demonstrate that we truly do value worship. Let us pray.
