INTRO
• How many of you still remember the playground at your elementary school?
o I am a proud product of Sarah J. Anderson Elementary in Vancouver, WA.
o We had an awesome playground.
o True story:
• Getting tooth stuck in head…
o Once I recovered from that little episode, it was right back out onto the playground.
o What was your favorite game at recess?
• We had a balance beam out on the playground, and at least once a week, we would play games of “chicken”.
• Chicken tested your mind – and your brain!- but most of all, your sense of balance
• Demonstrate…
o As we all get older, we lose our sense of balance, both literally and metaphorically.
ALL THOSE SPINNING PLATES…
• You can try to convince me that you are still the same person physically that you were all those years ago, but why don’t we just avoid going down that road.
• Instead, let’s talk about the metaphorical balancing act we do as grown-ups.
o For most of us, life is a juggling act.
o We run here or there, constantly on the move.
o I’m just as guilty as anyone else when it comes to the balancing act of life.
• During the day, I’m at work.
• In the evenings, its my son’s baseball games, Adventure Camp, and church softball games.
• On Saturdays, its time to get to all of the stuff around the house that needs fixing.
• And on Sunday, its time to preach the Word, shake babies and kiss hands.
• I may have gotten those mixed up.
• At some point, I kiss my kids goodnight, give my wife a firm pat on the back and tell her “good job”, and then steal a few hours of sleep.
• Wash, rinse, repeat.
• The old visual metaphor for this kind of life is the guy spinning plates, running back and forth to keep them spinning so that none of them come crashing down to the ground.
• Does any of this sound familiar or hit home for you?
o What do we do when we feel overwhelmed in life?
• The truth is, the plates will come crashing down at some point, because we generally do a very poor balancing act.
o Here’s what I have learned: there are 24 hours in a day, and we need 26 in order to make life work.
o Of course, that’s our fault.
o Let’s think about God’s design for a single day:
• According to doctors, how much sleep should we get each night in order to be healthy? (8 hours)
• And how many hours does the average fulltime employee work each day? (8 hours)
• So, if you subtract 16 from 24, how many hours does that leave?
o When God put the universe into motion, and set the Earth on its solar journey around the sun, leaving us with a 24 hour daily orbital revolution, He gave us just enough time to perfectly balance work, play and sleep.
o So, what’s the problem?
A GODLY WORK ETHIC
• Over the next seven weeks, I want to explore how we can learn to balance life better by following God’s advice.
• Since we can’t create more hours in the day to accomplish all that we think we need to, instead we need to do a better job of achieving balance each day.
• This morning, I want to tackle the preeminent thing that seems to unbalance our lives: work.
o From my own, basic observation, there seems to be two approaches to our jobs:
• On the one hand, we have a nation of workaholics. People working 60, 70, 80 hours a week out of a driving compulsion to “get ahead.” People who get in to work early, stay late, and bring their work home with them.
• On the other hand, we have a nation that worships pleasure and entertainment. We work our jobs only to get a paycheck. We live from the time we punch out till the time we punch back in again. Work is only an evil necessity that allows us to do the things we really want to do.
o Whether we care to admit it or not, most of us approach our job this way, and our inability to manage work leads to life being thrown off balance.
• Everything in life can be approached from a Godly point of view, including work.
• So, what does a Godly work ethic look like?
o First of all, there is nothing wrong with working.
• I know that seems like a no brainer, but let’s state that as a fact anyway.
• All through out the Bible, we see people with careers.
• Moses and David were shepherds.
• Peter was a fisherman. He had a family to support.
• Paul supported his ministry making tents.
• Even Jesus grew up with a trade.
o On a side note, we always say that Jesus was a carpenter, but the Greek word we translate, tekton, doesn’t specifically mean “woodworker”.
o It simply means “craftsman”.
o And the dominant building material in Israel is not wood – its stone.
o So, in reality, Jesus probably spent more time as a stonemason than he did building bed frames.
• The point here, of course, was that Jesus spent a good amount of his life working.
o At the very beginning of time, God Himself worked.
• That is the word we generally use for the process of creation – His creative work.
o God supports the need for us to work in life.
o Mankind has always lived with the reality that it takes work to survive here on Earth.
• Knowing that work is a necessity of life, how then do we develop an appropriate approach to our careers?
• We begin by addressing the wrong views of work that unbalance life:
o Laziness
• This is one of the most prevalent attitudes in our society.
• Listen, if I was given the choice, I would lie around all day long.
• My wife and I lay in bed at night and wistfully remember the days of yore when we could flop on to the couch and watch Law and Order for seven hours.
• But she and I know that doing that won’t pay the bills or feed the kids anymore.
• Solomon, in all of his wisdom, warns us against the trap of laziness in Proverbs 6:
• You lazy fool, look at an ant.
Watch it closely; let it teach you a thing or two.
Nobody has to tell it what to do.
All summer it stores up food;
at harvest it stockpiles provisions.
So how long are you going to laze around doing nothing?
How long before you get out of bed?
A nap here, a nap there, a day off here, a day off there,
sit back, take it easy—do you know what comes next?
Just this: You can look forward to a dirt-poor life,
poverty your permanent houseguest! Proverbs 6:6-11
• It’s pretty bad in life when an ant shows you up in the work ethic category.
• There has never been an example of procrastination and laziness leading to success in life.
• And you will never be the exception to that rule.
o Working Too Much
• The opposite of the lazy work ethic is the “workaholic”.
• I’ve had the unfortunate pleasure to work for that guy.
• He’s the one who never leaves his office, as far as you know.
• He’s there before everyone else, and still cranking away when the last person leaves.
• As far as we know, the workaholic has no home to go to.
• And here’s what I’ve learned: it’s all spectacle.
• It’s just a show based on insecurity.
• The workaholic mindset says that if I work more than everyone else, I am somehow more valuable than them.
• And that couldn’t be farther from the truth.
• The Bible actually warns against this lifestyle:
Unless the Lord builds a house,
the work of the builders is wasted.
Unless the Lord protects a city,
guarding it with sentries will do no good.
It is useless for you to work so hard
from early morning until late at night,
anxiously working for food to eat;
for God gives rest to his loved ones. Psalm 127:1-2
• For all of the outward appearance of the person working 70 hours each week, the Bible says that it is ultimately useless.
• All of those hours come at a cost that you’ll pay for dearly.
• The workaholic I labored under lost his wife to divorce and his children to bitterness.
• And in the end, it sure wasn’t worth it for him.
Desiring to Get Rich Quick
• Do you know who has successfully made millions of dollars overnight?
• Not you.
• It happens for characters in movies and TV, but those are what we refer to as “fiction”.
• Lets listen to Solomon again:
Those who work their land will have abundant food,
but those who chase fantasies have no sense. Proverbs 12:11
• Getting rich quick didn’t work 3,000 years ago when Solomon wrote that, and it still doesn’t work today.
• A little luck will never beat a lot of work.
Greed
• Even when we work, we never seem to have enough. We can have a wrong attitude towards work by never being satisfied, never being content with what we have.
• This is often the subconscious thinking of the workaholic.
• Too bad it won’t pay off.
Dishonest money dwindles away,
but whoever gathers money little by little makes it grow. Proverbs 13:11
• If you view work as a way to fuel your greed, you will never be satisfied, and your life will suffer because of it.
o Making Excuses Not to Work
• There are some people who always have an excuse why they can’t work.
• Of course, there are those who are truly disabled and incapable of working in life, but there are also those who simply don’t like to work.
• And those people always seem to have a reason to justify that mindset.
There is more hope for fools
than for people who think they are wise.
The lazy person claims, “There’s a lion on the road!
Yes, I’m sure there’s a lion out there!”
As a door swings back and forth on its hinges,
so the lazy person turns over in bed.
Lazy people take food in their hand
but don’t even lift it to their mouth.
Lazy people consider themselves smarter
than seven wise counselors. Proverbs 26:12-16
• So, if these are the attitudes about work that throw our lives out of balance, how should we look at our jobs in a way that maintains balance?
• Work is a physical effort with a spiritual dimension.
o Even though work is physical activity, it has a lot to say about our relationship to God.
o The way we work often reflects the status of our personal integrity, which itself is an indicator of how much God is actively transforming us.
Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men… Colossians 3:23
o The key to applying what Paul says here and grafting work into your spiritual life is answering a basic question: who do you work for?
o There are two mentalities to answering that question:
• Who’s watching me while I work?
• God is watching me while I work.
o Nothing throws our work life out of balance more than when we work for the wrong reasons.
• I’ve had to learn how to apply what Paul wrote in Colossians in my own career.
o Here’s the hardest thing about being a pastor: at any given moment, someone in my church is upset with me.
o Maybe it was something I said, or a decision I made.
o Maybe something changed around here, and I am where the blame stops.
o Maybe people don’t like the way I speak or how I dress.
o By and large, I’ve learned that there is usually someone unhappy with me.
o So, why keep doing this?
• Because at the end of the day, I do this with all of my heart in order to please God, not men and women.
• Human eyes have only a small view of how we work – God has the total picture.
• If I know that God is happy with the effort I put forth into what He’s called me to do, then I rest easy.
• It’s taken me years to get to this point, but thinking this way has helped me balance work with the rest of my life.
o God knows how much integrity we bring to our job, how effective we truly are, and what our ultimate motivations are.
o He knows when we work too much, and when we need to work a little bit more.
o And all of those things are beyond the view of human beings.
• When you stop working for God, then you begin to work for others, and that throws you out of balance.
Bringing God Into Everything That We Do
• Let me give a little spoiler for the rest of this series.
o We are essentially talking about how we juggle the priorities of our lives.
o And I’m going to remind us constantly of something I’ve said before on this stage: God doesn’t belong on our list of priorities.
o You see, once we pencil Him in on our “To Do List”, then He’s no different then the kids karate practice, dance recital or school play.
o He would have to fight for our attention just like our spouses and friends do.
o And God is so much more than any of these things that we will talk about.
o You see, God doesn’t get put aside while we rush around keeping the plates spinning.
o No, He’s along side of us in everything that we do.
o He’s there with us when we’re trying to give time to our most important relationships, or when we’re working at home to make our project deadline, or when we’re at the gym trying to follow our doctor’s instructions.
o We don’t get to leave God at the door while we’re trying to balance life.
o So, He goes with us to work.
o He’s there with us at our jobs, and we reveal Him to those around us through our character.
o When we work hard with integrity, and honor the other parts of our lives that need our time by saying “no”, we allow God to shine through us.
• If work is pulling you out of balance, then its time to step back, take a good hard look at what you’re doing, and start to make some changes.
• Let’s pray.
